Just back from the Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival, which was wonderful in all ways. One topic that seemed to come up a lot was subtitling audio. That may seem weird, but it has definitely become a thing. Maybe Radio Atlas is the driving force. They turn audio pieces into videos with words, so that as you listen to the sound you can also read in English what you are hearing in some other language. If you're a little rusty on your Italian dialects, for example, as I definitely am, you can nevertheless enjoy the lovely piece from Jonathan Zenti, which won a previous Hearsay award.

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I like the idea of barter; I just haven't been able to make it work, yet. I say this because 7.5 years ago I dared to dream of a working, small-scale food community. The point is that for many home-made food processes, doing it in bulk is often easier than small quantities, and that means you hav...

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Desktop computer; phone; router; Time Capsule; LEDs; active loudspeakers (x2); audio mixer; external hard drives (x2); fan; desk lamp.

Twelve electrical devices, permanently plugged in just to make my work space work. Two more -- USB charger and audio recorder -- plugged in intermittently, although seldom simultaneously.

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Lucky Peach was a great magazine about food; informative, witty, intelligent and eminently readable when most of the competition was nothing of the sort. But when it died, under slightly mysterious circumstances earlier this year, I didn't think too much about the consequences. I'd never actually been in a position to buy a paper copy, alas, but I very much enjoyed reading it online, which was generally a treat of both words and pictures. ¹ And so I thought, well, that's OK. It'll live forever, digitally.

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The much ballyhooed total eclipse came and it went, more than a third of a world away. I didn't pay it much attention at the time, though I did marvel at some of the photographs of totality, while also staying aware that I had no way of knowing whether they were, in fact, of this totality rather than some previous event. A couple of people I know were there that I know of, and their accounts were terrific in a detached way. I also saved "Annie Dillard's Classic Essay: 'Total Eclipse'", which The Atlantic generously made available "until the end of August". But I didn't read it.

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