Author Archives: dimi

About dimi

Blogger, traveler, techie, hippie, human.

We bought another boat

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I just noticed the last post on this blog was announcing the buying of our Van de Stadt 34 sailboat Hoerikwaggo. Since we have sailed said boat on quite few day sails on said boat and figured out what exactly we want form a live aboard / full time, long distance cruiser. So we bought another boat: a Morgan 31 named Tropical Dawn. For photos and videos check out our Tropical Dawn Instagram account. We will try keep you updated both here and on our social media such as the Tropical Dawn Twitter account and our Tropical Dawn Facebook page.

House(boat) goals

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Super inspiring! Especially because it is self built and 100% off grid, taking care of fresh water, electricity, waste water, heating, everything. Not sure if I would be able to build one myself, but definitely a dream/goal for the future.

Wouldn’t really be an option here in Cape Town as this wouldn’t be safe on the ocean, but in Knysna, in the Garden Route, about five hours driving from Cape Town, there is a lagoon. It connects to the ocean but is sheltered and quite close to the town center. I could totally see us (my wife and I) retire there on a house float like this.

Netlabels and Open Content

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Another one I found going trough 15-year-old e-mails: Netlabels and Open Content (PDF). You might think netlabels aren’t relevant anymore now that streaming services have become ubiquitous, but I would argue that they are even more relevant. In a landscape dominated by a few massive, global players, small and independent online record labels are independent distribution channels. Back in 2005 when this was written, the writer positioned Netlabels versus P2P-networks. Peer to peer not just as a technology, but as a philosophical or political statement really got me excited back then.

#P2P #netlabels #paper

Lobit music

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I was going through some old e-mails (like from 2006) and found this list of lo-bit labels I shared with a friend back then. I was pleasantly surprised that some of them are still online:

I tried finding the Wikipedia entry on it, but it looks like there isn’t any, but there is a Wikiola entry on low bit.
Basically lobit is defined as music encoded with extremely low bitrate MP3 (like 20kbps, where regular high-quality MP3s are upwards of 192kbps), which not only results in super small files but noticeable audio artifacts.

The above labels’ names refer to this: Floppy Swop contains releases that are small enough to fit on an oldskool floppy disk, so 1.44MB or smaller. That includes artwork, so this is also encoded in super low-resolution gif for instance. The 20kbps label brings out MP3s encoded in that bitrate.

All of the music is available free for download, so check it out. And let me know in the comments if you know any other cool lobit labels or artists.

#lobit #netlabels #music #free #download