I just released dgtools, a command line utility to work with the Discogs data dumps. This little endeavor was supposed to be a quick side quest, but it transformed into a rabbit hole.

Discogs is the go-to service for record collectors. They might have one of the biggest databases for physical music releases. On a monthly basis, they release a compressed XML of a subset of their database under a CC0 license. Tools already exist to import them into a PostgreSQL database, but I wanted the flexibility of a custom-built solution. I started building something in a Ruby on Rails app but quickly diverged to Go as I didn't want to pay the ActiveRecord performance cost.

OpenSimplex noise is a gradient noise function designed to avoid patent issues with simplex noise while fixing the directional artifacts in Perlin noise. It uses a different grid structure with stretched hypercubic honeycombs and larger kernel sizes, making it smoother but slower than simplex noise.

Late to the party (as I often can be), I recently discovered Rosa Menkman’s work while at NXT Museum for the “Still Processing” exhibition.

Turns out, Rosa Menkman has quite the background in Glitch Art, having worked on theorizing it and having produced artworks bought in the Stedelijk Museum collection. Usually not a big fan of video essays, I ended up being very interested in two of her productions. The first one about racial and sexist biases in analog and digital image processing. The second one about the changing nature of rainbows due to atmospheric conditions (pollution) or changes in our analog wetware (eyes).

Are you old enough that you spent your time on IRC back in the days? Do you like your chat infrastructure free of billionaire influence? Do you have free time? Are you experiencing nostalgia? If you answered yes to one or more of the questions above, here’s what it takes to connect to the IRC network in 2025.

The IRCv3 protocol update aims to fix the (let’s be honest) awful user experience of IRC. They even have a draft for server-side chat history! Meanwhile, the Open-Source community congregates on libera.chat, and if you're looking for channels on different networks, Netsplit.de is a great resource.

Totally forgot this track. What a synth-dub beauty.