@NovaPrime @popheads And here’s another new interview from Alessia Cara, where she discusses her songwriting process and musical influences: https://youtu.be/c5p68jz7TI8?si=GSzAebCCt8xL8F3s

I’m really looking forward to hearing what she comes up with on this new album.

#music #NewMusic #NewReleases #Songwriter #Songwriters #Songwriting #pop #alternative #brampton #canada #musicians

@NovaPrime @popheads There’s some more details about Alessia Cara’s forthcoming album in an interview she recently did with People Magazine.

It will lean into her '50s and '60s soul influences. Also, a guest appearance from John Mayer on one of the tracks:

"On Friday, July 19, Cara released “Dead Man,” the lead single to her soon-to-come fourth studio album with production from Mike Elizondo. It’s a song she describes as a “jam” with a jazzy touch, an in-your-face horn section and the feeling of “all the music that I loved growing up.” There’s splashes of her favorite material from the ‘50s and ‘60s, a “little bit” of 2000s, and it of course features Cara’s distinct , always-commanding vocals.

…

" The album itself, which Cara has yet to reveal the title of, is set to arrive in the fall. She says it’s not a jazz album by any means, but rather “feels like a collection of all the things that I love." And she loves a lot of music. Over the last few years, she’s tapped into some music from the ‘60s and ‘70s, African funk, bossa nova, and primarily what she described as material created in “eras before my time” — the Lijadu Sisters, Billy Joel and some old Red Hot Chili Peppers records.

"Recorded between late 2021 and the top of 2024, Cara’s new album process started “very slow,” when she was ‘in a little bit of a rut lyrically and conceptually’.

"‘I wrongfully felt like I said everything that I needed to say, and I was just stuck on what to say. I was actually in a good place, and I don’t really tend to write well when I’m in a good place because you don’t really need to vent when you’re happy, I guess. So I was like, ‘What do I do? I’ve never been a writer from this perspective.’ So I had to readjust my mindset and readjust the way that I approached songwriting, which is kind of a fun exercise and a fun challenge because you have to, I don’t know, put yourself in a different position or exercise a different muscle that you don’t typically exercise,’ she says.

…

“During one song in particular that’s yet to be released, Cara features a minute-long John Mayer guitar solo, something she calls ‘one of the coolest things I’ve been able to make happen in my life.’”

https://people.com/alessia-cara-interview-dead-man-single-exclusive-8680099

@naught101 @lost_faith It predates the internet.

Back in 2000, a guy named Robert Putnam wrote a book based on his research into why there has been a breakdown in community in America: http://bowlingalone.com/

(If you ever hear someone use the phrase “social capital”, they’re alluding to his research.)

@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath Here’s an article about a company named RedFlow, that has sold its fourth grid-scale long-duration zinc bromine flow battery to California:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/redflow-tapped-as-preferred-battery-provider-for-a-fourth-major-california-project/

Where’s RedFlow based? Brisbane.

An alternative to bromine flow batteries is grid-scale lithium.

And where is one of the world’s largest lithium minjng regions? Western Australia.

The Coalition’s policy is to ban any further investment in grid-scale batteries from RedFlow or with WA lithium, along with banning further investments in wind and solar.

Instead, it wants to hand roughly half a trillion dollars to largely foreign-owned multinationals to build nuclear power plants in Australia.

Assuming the Coalition can deliver 7 large-scale first-of-its-kind infrastructure projects on time and on budget in Australia, it will take 10 to 15 years to build them. In the meantime, Australia will continue burning coal and natural gas.

And all this for an energy source that costs substantially more per megawatt hour than renewables, coal, or gas.

@sunzu @dvdnet62 Oh come now. If there’s one thing Mozilla doesn’t need anyone’s help with, it’s shooting itself in the foot with its own gun.

Now excuse me, I have some Pocket articles to read on my Firefox OS phone…

@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.

At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.

The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.

For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.

For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.

And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.

(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)

(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)

In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.

@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.

And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)

SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they’re stored in your browser without setting up an account.

@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).

Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)

As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.

@trk @TassieTosser Knox City Council in outer-eastern Melbourne did exactly this: https://www.knox.vic.gov.au/whats-happening/news/keeping-your-cats-safe-and-secured .

The council did it because some of its suburbs (The Basin, Ferntree Gully, Upper Ferntree Gully, parts of Boronia, Lysterfield) border national parks and the Dandenong Ranges.

Younger cats can adapt to living indoors.

But the challenge was with older cats, who are used to roaming around.

The happy medium would be to phase it in over five to 10 years, where any new cats registered or adopted after a particular date have to stay indoors, but older cats can continue to roam.

@geillescas @jajabor @asklemmy That, and also making files/emails/calendar events synced across your computer and your phone.

@denshirenji @asklemmy On photos, does NextCloud Photos or Memories play nice with Digikam or any other desktop photo gallery applications? And what about Immich?

@paulwallbank @franksting @unionagainstdhmo @firstdogonthemoon @stilgherrian @mpesce Crikey/Private Media really could (and probably should) be a much bigger company than it is, just it’s been really horrendously managed.

Hopefully Will Hayward is doing a better job, because many of his predecessors have left a lot to be desired.

For most of its life, Private Media barely turned a profit, and that’s been with Crikey subscriptions and SmartCompany basically carrying the various other websites that have come and gone over the years.

Many talented young journos have worked there, only to move on to the Nine newspapers or the ABC after a year or two.

You had the former CEO who one day was running cables through the ceiling of the old offices next to the Immigration Museum.

You had the other former CEO who loaded the organisation up with sales staff, only for them all to be made redundant within six months.

You had ideas that could have made money (spin out Patrick Stafford’s SmartCompany tech newsletter into its own small business tech publication) knocked back, while vanity projects with no business model (remember Paul Barry’s Power Index?) got the green light.

At one stage, Crikey used a heavily hacked WordPress as its content management system. SmartCompany and LeadingCompany used Joomla!, and StartupSmart used FlexiContent. All self-hosted out of a Port Melbourne data centre.

Despite owning a digital media company, the people in charge at the time didn’t know enough about digital tech to know what a massive resource black hole this was.

(Eric Beecher had to bring in consultants to tell him!)

I could go on…

#Auspol #Media #Politics #Crikey #Politics #Business #Melbourne #Sydney #Fairfax #Economics #Journalism #Vicpol #NSWpol

@franksting @paulwallbank @unionagainstdhmo @firstdogonthemoon @stilgherrian @mpesce Grundle is still around, and still writing for Crikey: https://www.crikey.com.au/author/guy-rundle/

@Dymonika @MossyFeathers I’m guessing you’re overseas?

Super fund, short for superannuation fund.

Basically, in Australia 11% of wages are automatically deposited into a compulsory retirement savings account, known as a superannuation account.

A superannuation fund is a financial institution that manages these accounts.

More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia

@lemmyreader Here’s a starting point for a fediverse StackExchange: Make sure it’s interoperable with Lemmy.

Now, you may not get the full feature set on Lemmy, but you should be able to interact with it from Lemmy as if it’s a group on there.

#StackExchange #Fediverse #Coding

@Dangdoggo @Rentlar Or allow it to be downloaded in a DRM-free file format that can be used with other apps, platforms, or services…

Also , if connecting a server is an absolute necessity and you are not longer going to maintain it, release the server source code as open source.

@AllNewTypeFace Of course there were.

For commuters:

* More densification around existing stations and tram lines instead of suburban sprawl.

* Upgrading buses across Melbourne to a 10-minute minimum frequency and straightening out existing bus routes.

* Rolling out high-capacity signalling and automatic train control across the Melbourne suburban rail network

* Building Metro 2 from Newport to Clifton Hill would double the number of trains that can run on the Hurstbridge and Mernda lines.

* Building the Doncaster Railway.

* Building the Heidelberg to Box Hill section of the SRL first.

* Extending the 48 tram to Doncaster and giving it dedicated lanes for more of its journey.

And then for freight, there’s a bunch of things too:

* Converting more suburban lines to dual gauge.

* Converting more regional Victorian lines to standard gauge

* Electrifying regional rail and freight services

* Building more multimodal facilities near existing rail lines.

@CEOofmyhouse56 🎶🎶 https://youtu.be/d3sRF6IaORQ?si=QaqXP32GGdGwdCDx

@HubertManne @sqgl Yes, the linked article is about the Australian ABC, rather than the American one.

The two entities are not connected. The Australian ABC is a government-owned public broadcaster, while the American one is owned by Disney.

It’s basically claiming a former Murdoch executive, who was appointed to manage the Australian ABC, is still working to promote his former boss’ political and business interests.

@alcoholicorn Yeah, that’s not how it tends to work in Australia.

What happens is a state government puts up a good chunk of time construction costs (as much as half in some cases), plus public land.

In some cases, the freeway already exists, but the state government wants one more lane built, because it thinks that will ease congestion (as happened with sections of the Tullamarine and Monash Freeways in Melbourne).

It gets handed off to Transurban, who builds it under a long-term operating agreement (30 years is common).

In some cases, the agreements have clauses saying railways that compete with the toll road can’t be built.

As the end of the lease approaches, Transurban offers to build one more lane — in exchange for extending the agreement.