Let's talk about a Christmas Carol and its lessons....

[The systems and experiences that shape people can explain them without excusing them.]

If you refuse to examine how you became who you are, you'll mistake your coping mechanisms for virtues.

Filó Machado: FÉ CEGA / FACA AMOLADA

pure musicianship with mostly guitar, beatboxing, and vocal rhythmics leading to some very happy music; complex harmonies remind me of Toninho Horta and Jacob Collier (especially the changing shirts).

My iOS apps are on the App Store again; if you ever wanted to have sonogrid or the others, now might be a good time to get a copy.

AudioScrub

slow down music, change keys, loop.

essential tool for transcribers, improvisers, music students.

also available with a subset of those features as a PLAY Edition that remote controls Apple's Music app.

sonogrid

"drum machine on steroids".

make simple loops that overlap in complex ways, explore visually and playfully, send midi out if you to connect with other systems.

Quick Record

audio recorder with iCloud sync that can start on launch; select audio quality, add tags.

Ticker

fun scrolly metronome that shows classical music markings.

Carrot Price

"now you know which one is cheaper".

unit cost calculator with my beatboxing sounds.

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I wrote in going fully web about my reasons to take them down and, although I continue to feel similarly, was recently convinced by Heddi to consider restoring them there.

Here's what motivated me:

1. People who previously paid for them could not get a copy for new or other devices. I thought this would be possible even when not officially on the store, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. After contacting those who had issues about this years ago, many quickly replied back with very visible gratitude to have access to AudioScrub again; seems it still fits their needs better than whatever else is available.

yes!!!!! Thank you🎉🎉🎉 Still the best one out there

Thanks so much for communicating this to me. I’ll pass the word on to friends and colleagues who I know will benefit greatly from these 2 apps.
I myself use these apps daily, as it helps the learning music process greatly!

That’s amazing, congratulations! And thank you for letting me know, I really appreciate it.

I will definitely try it today on my iPad. I love your app.

Hello, so great to see your music app again!

i have already bought it !! Thank you very much. A nice Christmas present.

2. I worked hard on these and remain quite proud of them; not sure if it accomplishes much to nuke my history in the way that I did. Even though they were built for another era, everything still works great and I've never stopped using them.

3. It's been quite a puzzle to create income from pure web apps with my ideal structure of no personal data stored or collected, no login or signup to start, ideally open-source. While I figure out how to make that sustainable, it's helpful to have some other income streams.

No plans to update these for the moment, but I think it's a good step to keep it available.

How to free your mind from BIG TECH propaganda

[Techno-optimists promote the idea of progress as a high score that constantly accumulates (often conveniently through their platforms); this masks the way new technologies commodify and become baseline needs, their absence leaving us not simply with 'less', but an incapacity to function in society that expects it everywhere.]

[I appreciate that they shared this in a public space and not via direct message or email because it enables others who might find the information useful to discover it.]

[Direct messages can contribute too, but the risk is higher that no one will see it.]

Destigmatize being dumb

Any system that rewards finding flaws will improve. Apple, Google, etc will pay you a lot of money if you can find a security flaw in any of their systems. The military does this with matters of life & death (if admitting failure is punished, people hide failure). If you find an inefficiency in the economy, you can make a lot of money fixing it (through betting on the stock market, or starting a business).

Mestre Gato Preto: The art of the berimbau

mostly berimbau without singing, solo and with the drum section, great swing

On motherhood

[Just as you find your footing, they start to change. I swear she grows with each blink.]

learning and teaching are two sides of the same coin, so caring or not caring about one implies the same about the other

What does it mean to be seen, all the time, by everyone?

[We are not individuals or ever alone: just the current contact point into a community.]

[Act in ways that would fill the healthiest people you know with pride.]

How to quit Spotify

In 2024, Spotify stopped paying artists for songs that had fewer than 1,000 streams, despite the fact that 81% of musicians on the platform don’t cross that threshold.

pop star Lily Allen says she makes more money selling pics of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify royalties.

LOW BRIDGE ROTATION: The only guide you'll ever need

[When your knees are almost touching the floor, most of your body weight is already on that side to support your backbend.]

[Use a wall to practice lowering into bridge while resting on the edge of your palm.]

technical or nerdy ones mind might enjoy "reading the docs/spec/manual" while everyone else looks for "show me how to be amazing"

[Help them move from "can't do" to "can with effort" to "effortless mastery", ideally skipping the second step.]

[Help them practice toward better outcomes by designing exercises that bring them within a session or two to 95% reliability for a small skill or task.]

[Through perceptual exposure, your brain is learning without telling you what it learned.]

[Good perceptual exposure training needs lots of high quality examples that seem different on the surface but aren't.]

[Ideally, the exercises don't explain but enables the learner's brain to "discover" a pattern.]

[A common theme when newbies get derailed is that they can't express their frustration to the product maker. You can at least acknowledge their experience and encourage them to continue or hint at what could make progress easier; tell them the struggle is normal and that it's part of getting started.]

[The manual's sin is not complexity but making people feel like they're idiots for not understanding.]

[Anticipate the faces they're likely to make and compensate for their inability to show you.]

[Find what needs compensating by looking in the top comments in discussion groups for the tool or its larger more compelling context.]

[Design a performance path with skills that motivate them towards mastery can also magnetize them away from derailers. Use existing paths based on training programs, discussion forums, or definitive guides. If you create a path, order skills from beginner (less time/effort) to expert and group by rank.]

[They need to believe they'll improve, then actually improve, and also realize they've improved.]

[The first thirty minutes is a critical period to support them doing something new or that they didn't know they could do: their first superpower]

[If they're worried about breaking something, they'll hesitate to touch anything. Make recovery easy. Help them feel free to just try things. Consider it a "Wild Experimentation Mode."]

["This product is awesome" really means "I'm awesome".]

[Most focus on product quality before quality of user results.]

[Businesses claim "world-class service" for their customers, but their customers are likely more interested in being a "world-class customer".]

[Make a better master rather than a better tool.]

[The post-UX UX of results begins after the clicking is done. What does it now enable them to do or show or say? How are they more powerful?]

[Substitute "How can we succeed at X?" with "How can our users or their users succeed at X?"]

[Imagine a scenario where your users are out-performing your competitions users in the bigger context.]

[Your price represents not just the product but also the documentation, support, and future roadmap.]

[Sage accounting software sucks, but you buy reliability in knowing it will update for new tax laws, your bookkeeper's likely familiarity with the product, and the support of staff who respond to forty thousand callers a day.]

[Black and Decker introduced their DeWALT drill series by giving away pulled pork sandwiches and holding drill-off competitions at construction sites, and being present at rodeos and NASCAR races where their end users hang out.]

[The goal of having multiple versions at different prices is to be capable of selling to customers with different maximum thresholds. Versions could be created based on features, earlier access, economic demographics (students, hobbyists, professionals), geography, customer industries, platform (Apple users may pay more).]

[An app might be lower-priced in a country whose currency is lower-valued, but localized in their language which renders it useless to those in countries with higher-value currency.]

[A 'jumbo' size with zero sales will increase sales for the 'large'.]

Joshua Maponga: How to Decolonize Africa’s Systems

[Before school, identify problems in your community. Study them in school and find solutions. Develop a proposal and business plan. After graduating, return to your community and solve those problems.]

[We plant coffee, which we can't eat, then export it to earn money that we can use to buy food, rather than simply planting food we can eat.]

[Our language contains the relationship between natural entities and their functions (for example mususu helps the susu); using European names distances us from our intuitive understanding of what's around us.]

[Our government invests in students only to have them leave to colonial economies to enrich their systems.]

Simon Stuij: Alles Raakt Mij

tight drumming, nice contrast between sections

breathe.: London

would love to know the genre that is named for this chord progression.

Why Nobody Can Afford Canada Anymore

[Canada wasn't hit as hard during the 2008 financial crisis but printed money and lowered interest rates anyway. This funneled too much investment into real estate and enabled housing prices to continue inflating for another decade or two.]

How the dark wizards of marketing conjured Black Friday

[AMEX provides marketing templates to promote contactless payments, which results in organizations like Transport for London and others advertising with similar language saying "Contactless is here".]

Arbeit, Lohn, Profit

[Workers have been convinced to put their savings in pension funds that invest in the stock market, which in turn puts more pressure on workers to perform better; this also shifts responsibility for a social system into the private realm.]

[Businesses are fundamentally political communities, no different from any other pooling of resources to achieve a collective goal.]

[A C-level executive who knows the company and its breadth of considerations at any moment is forced to reduce everything to financial language and concepts in a board meeting because the majority in attendance are shareholders. If half of the audience were representing the workers, the executive would need to balance two kinds of considerations, as a politician would.]

Perverse incentive

The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre occurred in 1902, in Hanoi, Vietnam (then known as French Indochina), when, under French colonial rule, the colonial government created a bounty program that paid a reward of 1¢ for each rat killed. To collect the bounty, people would need to provide the severed tail of a rat. Colonial officials, however, began noticing rats in Hanoi with no tails. The Vietnamese rat catchers would capture rats, sever their tails, then release them back into the sewers so that they could produce more rats.

Payment for treatment generates a perverse incentive for unnecessary treatments. In 2015, a Detroit area doctor was sentenced to 45 years of prison for intentionally giving patients unnecessary cancer treatments, for which health insurance paid him at least 17.6 million dollars. Unnecessary treatment may harm in the form of side effects of drugs and surgery, which can then trigger a demand for further treatments themselves.

In 2002, British officials tasked with suppressing opium production in Afghanistan offered poppy farmers $700 an acre in return for destroying their crop. This ignited a poppy-growing frenzy among Afghan farmers, who sought to plant as many poppies as they could in order to collect payouts from the cash-for-poppies program. Some farmers harvested and sold the sap before destroying the plants, receiving significantly more money for the same amount of poppies.

The Tax Reform Act of 1976 provided for loss of tax benefits if owners demolished buildings. This led to an increase in arson attacks in the 1970s as a way of clearing land without financial penalties. The law was later altered to remove this aspect.

[The owner of eyeglass e-commerce store DecorMyEyes found that online complaints put his site at the top of Google searches. He then responded to bad reviews with insults, threats, and other harassment to continue ranking high.]

Funding fire departments by the number of fire calls that are made is intended to reward fire departments that do the most work. However, it may discourage them from fire-prevention activities, leading to an increase in actual fires.