Rick's b.log - entry 2025/07/14

Tree work

Tree bits.

So for the moment I'll still get shade from the tree. But really it's too big and unlike an oak or willow you can't lop the top off and have it regrow from a crown. I'll need to get tree guy to come give me a quote - but it's not quite as urgent as it was.

I have stacked the wood by where the old bench used to be. It will rest there a while (a year or two?) for the pine sap to dry out. Then they can come and collect it to burn in their fire.

A little log pile.

Oh well, I guess this might prompt me into doing something with the bits of the old bench. I mean, measure the wood, buy some of the right size, drill holes, paint/varnish it... how hard can it be to resurrect this old bench? I guess I now have a summer project that doesn't involve brambles. ☺

Parts of an iron and wood bench.

I noticed that they had also chopped up the bits of wood lying in the corner of the driveway that used to be the walnut tree, and maybe part of the willow. Well, if they want to come by one day and chuck that into their trailer, I'm okay with it. They get the wood, and I get the crap cleared up - everybody wins.

Hot!

Yesterday, I harvested the shallots and planted melons in their place. I think it's too late for those melons, but they took forever to sprout. Well, we'll see.

Melons hiding behind a wall of corn.

And, honestly, that's about it. I read a lot of random things - very little of which I remember - and... basically wasted two days when the temperature topped thirty.

At work on Friday, a woman asked if I had washed any of the 20 litre sunflower oil containers. I had not, but there were four that had been done by the previous shift. She was ecstatic given that four makes eighty litres, and that's exactly how much pâte a crèpe she wanted to make (slightly runnier pancake mix). Eighty litres. Holy crap. So on Saturday afternoon, she would have been out someplace just north of here where the Tour de France passed through making hundreds upon hundreds of crèpes in the thirty-something heat.
Everybody was like "you should go! you should go!" because there's a caravan parade that comes through a couple of hours before the cyclists that gives out loads of free stuff. Well, that night I slept horribly so I was up feeding kitty at half five, then back to bed. Woke at half nine but didn't feel like doing anything at all until around noon when I roused myself to get up off my arse and go tidy the logs. By then the caravan would have passed and, really, I'm not into cycling. Once upon a time I cycled but that was because I didn't have a car. These days I'm too fat/old/decrepit/lazy (delete as applicable) to bother with cycling. Plus I never found a seat that didn't make my arse feel like it had been kicked.

Today it is much milder. I think about 22°C or 23°C. I swept, walked kitty, sorted out the bin and the recycling, wrote this... it's a public holiday so I couldn't do stuff in the garden with machinery. In fact the farmer only brought in one lot of bales and then we went away - maybe somebody told him to can it?
Unfortunately for the Frenchies, no fireworks this year. Far too dry, far too much of a fire risk...
...which reminds me, I've missed a vide grenier in Rougé (near Châteaubriant). What put it into mind was that when I used to go with mom, there would be bits of firework all over the place where they hold the vide grenier (around a lake) and we'd wonder how they managed to not burn the place down.
The next vide grenier of interest is next Sunday... no, two weeks away (I'd better check this!) is in the other direction going towards Rennes or Vitré. Mick, if you're reading this, that's the one we took you to...bloody hell! Thirteen years ago!

Fruits

So many cherries.

Speaking of which, the sweet almond has, for the first time (that I'm aware of), provided fruit. Well, nuts.

Almonds.

There are also plenty of apples. I think I'm going to have to figure out a way to protect some of them from the wasps in order to know what these apples taste like.

Apples.

In the potager is a greengage tree. This, also, is so laden it is as risk of collapse. I have offered the English couple to come and take what they want. Mom used to make jam, but I'm not a big jam consumer. For me, cherry jam in between two layers of cake, or a big dollop of raspberry jam in semolina and, well, that's about it. I find the idea of spreading jam on bread to be unpleasant. Bread is for butter/cheese/beans, not something that's like 60% sugar.

A laden branch of the greengage.

Wheat harvest

What the hell HP?

I printed nine pages yesterday, a dump of stuff from ChatGPT that I want to go through and make notes and such - which was way harder than it should have been, I had to mess with the document model a lot in order to get the browser to understand that several screenfuls will require more than one page.

My current print history.

So what was the 12 pages printed on Saturday? Nothing was printed on Saturday, too hot to think never mind spit out a 12 page document. The last time I am aware that I printed something was on the 7^th and that correctly shows up on the previous session. So what was the 12 pages on the 12th? Should it be suspicious that it's 12 on 12?
I'll have to keep a close eye on this.

AI music

Here are some of the songs that I have created today. I think I ought to make up videos and drop these on to YouTube. As a free user I am allowed non-commercial use and my channel is not monetised so it doesn't count as commercial.

All of the files below have been given metadata with album art, lyrics, etc etc. Each one has a different album name because my music player (Blackplayer on Android) is awkward when it comes to how it organises album art.

Anyway, pop your headphones on and enjoy the following. Be advised, my preferred genre is symphonic metal/rock with a side order of gothic, so if jazz and swing are more your thing, this will be...different.

UPDATE: Fixed versions of the songs are available here. Read below for info on the songs, then go to this link for good versions of the songs.

Ode to Linguine

Donna only permits one song, otherwise you need to pay money in order to create more songs. So I tried a different app - the Suno AI music generator. It requires a sign up, so I used one of my shadow identities. I think this allows ten song creations per day or something. But note that it's really five as each prompt returns two songs with subtle variations between them (and it's usually the second one that's the best).
Two of the Suno songs claim to have a runtime of 2:18 (Blackplayer) or 4:37 (Firefox) which is incorrect, I think there is something weird with the MP3 encoding.

In the advert for Donna, it claims to be better than Suno. Maybe? It is hard to judge with just one song. Suno permits more to be done without paying cash which for cheapskates like me is clearly an advantage. ☺
Accordingly, the following creations were all made using Suno.

Echoes of the Duck

This actually reminds me more of Visions of Atlantis, but maybe that's just me.

There's an oddity that the song comes to an end at at 3:33, but then comes back for another twenty seconds before cutting out. Is this the musical equivalent of a person with four arms? Given the crash beginning, I can't help but wonder if that bit at the end is actually supposed to be the intro?

Cosmic Symphony

Requiem for a Shadowed Purr

If you have ever lost a furry friend, this one's for you.

Claws of Fire

I did make another song. It was supposed to be an epic song about the Highlands with a singer that has a strong Scottish accent and with bagpipes instead of guitars. Well, it seems as if the AI might only have a few vocal models as it sounded like the Cosmic Symphony singer, and the AI has clearly never heard a bagpipe before (or it couldn't grok having one in metal).

As much as these songs are fun and they'll be amusing to rock out with on the way to/from work, there is something missing. I can't explain it exactly, there's no "soul", it is all a little too precise and mechanical.
This is one of the reasons why I loathe autotune. Not only does it get abused to make bad singers sound passable, it makes singers hit right on the exact desired notes and, well, it's the little imperfections that give a performance life. Not enough imperfections to sound bad, but just enough that it sounds real.
It's a similar thing with instruments. A lot, if not all, string instruments have something called sympathetic resonance, not to mention incidentals like the noise you get from changing hand position on a guitar if your finger slides across the strings. Sometimes this is incompetence, other times it is quite intentional.
And as I'm thinking about it, the sheer number of times you can hear raspy-gaspy noises as the singer is breathing. Some performers are quite noisy, others do a much better job of hiding it, but microphones will pick it up, along with that sort of clicking noise as a mouth opens suddenly.
All of these perfect little imperfections are missing from AI music.

That being said, the new version 4.5 model (for subscribers only; I'm using the older 3.5 model) seems to do better sounding vocals - take a listen to this for example: Early summerの雨音. Still missing the imperfections, but it is getting towards sounding better.
Tip: If you want to grab a copy of that to listen to on your preferred gizmo, swap the part of the URL before the ID string to "https://cdn1.suno.ai/" and bung a ".mp3" on the end.

Licence: All songs are copyright Suno Inc. except the first (Ode to Linguine) which is copyright Donna AI. They may be freely used for personal non-commercial purposes. Refer to the relevant websites for specifics, but note that monetised videos/channels (rightly) count as commercial use. I do not have any rights because I'm using the free tier. If I chose to pay money then I too could be The Velvet Sundown...
The linguine image is my own work. The cat and dragon image was created by CreArt AI art. The other images were snapshotted from the Suno creations as it doesn't save MP3s with metadata.

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Zerosquare, 15th July 2025, 01:01

You should be representing France with one of those songs at the next Eurovision. :)

jgh, 15th July 2025, 17:15

It's no good, we'll have to lose that saxaphone solo!

Austin, 18th July 2025, 00:47

I love greengages! We have prunes jaune, one of the few fruit in our orchard that’s actually edible in August when we’re over. Is is the taste or the texture of the fruit that you’re not keen on? Hard to tell when they’re still small but those apples might be belchards. If so, and if they ripen, they’re quite like “golden delicious”.

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