Me, after discovering a podcast devoted to comparing the mono and stereo mixes of 1960s albums.

One week in. Using it for 1hr every week day, distance about 50cm. I think it is helping, mood and energy definitely improved. While I’m relieved that it’s working, I’m also slightly disappointed in my animal brain for being fooled by this simple trick. It’s not the sun, you fool, it’s just a lamp!

Cats: mammals, or glitchy AI hallucinations? I imagine this is kind of like what happens inside the chrysalis during metamorphosis.

Spinning my imperial-era Roses discs in memory of Mani. I bought the debut from Woolies when I was 15, and learnt to play She Bangs The Drums on the bass, badly. One for the spotters, this is the first UK CD of the debut, with a white rear inlay and no barcode. A lucky £1 car boot find! #cdFriday

I remember the SVGA mode of the original Gabriel Knight game doing this. Backgrounds were crudely upscaled from the VGA 320x200, but any item you could interact with was rendered natively at 640x480, and utterly failed to blend in as intended. This included a book on the first screen of the game.

Me turning my new SAD lamp on for the first time. Hopefully I will soon be a new kind of man.

This mural has gone up in Kingston, ostensibly for Christmas but AI has ensured it's actually to celebrate the return of our dark lord Cthulhu

There’s a BBC Sub-Editor going to bed happy tonight. Sometimes the stars just align.

We scold children who ring doorbells and run away, but it’s actually valuable vocational training for a future job as an Evri driver.

Freshly arrived from eBay, a frankly terrifying amount of Big Star’s Third. I basically bought this for the third disc, which is the urtext for final masters of this endlessly resequenced argument of an album. Now to spend a few weeks trying out different track listings! #cdFriday

Coco luxuriating on the same rug that she tries to scratch to ribbons whenever we’re not looking. No jury would convict.

Watching a DVD on my laptop like it’s 2004. Or possibly 1874.

A fixture of my childhood! Designed by Kit Williams of Masquerade fame - the fish blows bubbles every half hour. This tiny card doesn’t do justice to how massive it is, particularly when you are small.

Something about the gloomy skies put me in the mood for Wheels of Fire this morning. This is the old WG Polydor disc, processed in Audacity to remove the awful CSG encoding and align the channels. The difference is incredible, especially on headphones. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haeco-CSG #cdFriday

Someone is a bit dozy after her annual vaccine jabs.

Fascinated by streaming old PC soundtracks using then-top-of-the-range hardware that was either too expensive or obscure to own back in the day. Adlib Gold, Gravis Ultrasound, Roland MT-32/CM-32L/SC-88. The future was already there, just not evenly distributed. Cryo's Dune on Adlib Gold, anyone?

The Consumer Products Safety Commission recommends testing your smoke and CO alarms monthly, and changing their batteries every year. Be safe everyone!

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works and select all that include images of motorcycles.

New jeans ritual. Reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson twenty years ago made me properly understand that *I* own my clothes, and I can just remove any branding or labels that bother me. I do stop short of sanding down the rivets, though!

happy halloween i am ready to confuse some trick-or-treaters

A few spun today. Tim Hardin in the afternoon - this cheap ‘94 set gets you Tim Hardin 1, 2 & 4, plus some bits, all well mastered. For a rainy Halloween evening, Climate of Hunter by Scott Walker. A big Hardin fan who borrowed his album naming scheme, and covered a few of his tracks. #cdFriday

Well I, 👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻 met a traveller, From an antique land, Who said, in the desert Vast trunkless legs do staaaaaand! The plaque says Ozyman-ian-ian-dias Out in the lonely sands. “Oh look”, 👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻 “on my works, Ye mighty and despair” While his shattered visage, Up at the Sky does staaaaare…

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

Two new pickups for #cdFriday. I have a nice routine when working in the office of hitting up Oxfam Books for some randomised post-lunch listening. Very surprised to find some Deerhoof! Getz/Gilberto is the old WG CD, nice warm analogue sound.

I saw Cate Le Bon play live in York on Tuesday, and picked up her latest album from the merch table. It’s cracker, and the live show was nothing short of incredible. A real culmination of everything she’s been doing from Reward onwards. Are there any other seven album runs this good? #cdFriday

The awfulness of the name astounds me. I get the whole Smith & Jones association, but it’s so awkward - not just the repeated phoneme between “G” and “Jones”, but “Joneses” is so much more of a hobbity mouthful than “Smiths”. Even Tee-Gee-Jay is awkward to say. In its own way, it’s a masterclass.

With the nights drawing in, I’ve started playing Lemmings again, this time Oh No, More Lemmings. Just cleared Tame difficulty (the first 20 levels), which was an utter waste of time. All trivial with no threats or falls, and with 20 of every skill. Mostly just bashing, didn’t lose a single Lem.

Weird, my whole life I’ve used the term “spong” for any kitchen tool of unidentifiable purpose. I had no idea it was an actual kitchen tool brand. I wonder if I subconsciously magpied it from somewhere?

The return of the silver disc Throwing darts in streamers’ eyes 1984(?) WG RCA CD. The masters for this series have murky origins, but the end result sounds great. One of the later STS deluxe sets actually included a digital clone of this disc alongside various flavours of remaster. #cdFriday

"IT ABSOLUTELY WILL STOP!!!"

My AirPods have a Conversation Awareness mode, where they duck your music for 10s or so when you say something. This is useful, but I just found out that if you sing along with your music it goes quiet on you, like a punishment for your lapse of headphone etiquette. I felt like I’d been shamed.

Imgur being blocked in the UK is a disaster for the usability of the web. The few surviving forums that exist outside the walled gardens of social networking rely on tools like these. This will just accelerate the death of the open web and give US tech giants even more control over our lives.

Physical Media Collector Pumped For Downfall Of Humanity https://theonion.com/physical-media-collector-pumped-for-downfall-of-humanity/

I found a £12 L.L.Bean chamois shirt on Vinted after reading about them online. They seem to be staples in the US, but obscure here. Anyway, it’s been two weeks and I now basically live in this thing. Cosy without being heavy, works open over a jumper or closed over a t-shirt. Love it.

The hygiene rating Was concerning. Even worse? The menu’s kerning.

Too hot for streaming, it’s Jens Lekman’s first three albums. His DIY approach meant his early music was full of magpied samples, all uncleared. The first album has survived, but with the wonderful Maple Leaves removed. The other two had to be re-recorded. Swedish releases shown here! #cdFriday

ASDA was named after it's founders: Agnetha, Senny, Djörn & Anni-Frid

Still in love with TOSLINK. Just replaced my aged Asus Xonar U3 with this neat doohickey, the coincidentally named Douk U2. This is the newer model with the XU316 chip, and does CD quality PCM from my computers to stereo without any drivers needed. Japanese jazz from YouTube is back on the menu!

York University! I used to live in the building on the right. They’ve taken the (leaky) roof off the bridge now, and those willow saplings are huge trees, but otherwise it’s much the same.

Mr. Dont Walk Man has arrived at the Cleveland Gaming Classic.

Now spinning, probably the only Kraftwerk album where I strongly prefer the German language version. Schaufensterpuppen has so much more punch. Come to think of it, my German Duolingo lessons are currently all about train travel, which has probably been a subliminal influence here! #cdFriday

Lettuce, bureaucracy, pejorative, and the name Neil.

Took the day off. Got caught in a downpour while in town, and was forced, *forced* you understand, to take shelter in Earworm Records. While I was there, I picked up these three for a tenner. Very chuffed with the Kenny Burrell. #cdFriday #jazzsky

Last Saturday’s car boot haul, some happy hunting. £14 all in. The copy of Off The Wall is an early JP-for-EUR disc, with the original LP mixes and pre-emphasis. It also (contrary to the first photo) has the booklet cut and stapled so MJ is correctly oriented for the gatefold image. #cdFriday

Medical diagnosis

“Ford,” he said, “You’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.”

Down a Flaming Lips hole this week. This is the 5.1 DVD-A release of The Soft Bulletin, but crucially it also includes a standard redbook disc with all the original mixes of this much abused album, the only digital source that I’m aware of. All the right tracks, just in the wrong order. #cdFriday