The 2021 book Sellout by Dan Ozzi covers the major label debuts of eleven Punk/Hardcore/Emo bands from the 90s to 00s, how they got there and how it went.

This year felt like a blur; at times there was a hope that things would return to a more 'normal' rhythm, but they haven't really. Music wise I spent a lot of time listening to old favourites and music I already knew, perhaps as a kind of way of feeling more normal? The result of this year's best of newly heard is a collection of music that mostly comes from genres I've not listened to that much in the past, certainly on the electronic side, from long hours of having something on the help me concentrate. As usual the succinct playlist, taking less than one hour of your time, is available on Spotify. So, in no particular order:

Search, and ye shall find? or teach a man to file, and he can find files by himself for a lifetime? Apparently kids these days can’t find anything for themselves in directories anymore, and worse, don’t even know what a directory is, and searching is to blame. But what’s the right answer? It’s both, and it’s always been both, but the two methods of navigating and finding files can appear to have a large overlap, even if, depending on the situation there is a clear advantage to one method. It also takes more mental effort to switch ‘modes’ than it does to stretch your current way of doing things, even if that’s way past the point of it being the best way.

Wait, where is it? Refresh. It was here yesterday. Refresh. I spent all this time moving everything over, and now I can’t Google it? Refresh. That’s not point. Refresh. How am I meant to find anything again? Refresh. If I could remember it, I wouldn’t have to write it down and then search for it. Refresh.

It’d be easy they said, move to a static site generator, up and running in no time at all. Well, “they” might have been right, but “they” hadn’t counted on my inability to leave anything not understood.

"There's no accounting for taste" and "there's no justice" are unrevealing truisms, and something The BellRays almost certainly don't care about, but are probably as close to an explanation for the sad fact that they are not household names, as you're going to get.

Hello, I’m Henry, and I am, or have been, in no particular order, a: parent, data scientist, aircraft designer, guitarist, project manager, mechanical engineer, chorus member, tinkerer, programmer, music fan, executive assistant, traveller, glider pilot, concert promoter, crowd herder and supermarket cashier. All opinions are my own, and not those of any employer or association; past, present or future. My current equipment lives in my Uses page. Get in touch: blog >AT< henryleach >dot< com

So you've written yourself a flash new theme for your Hugo based website. Perhaps you even want to share it on the Official Theme Collection, but what's a simple way of creating a demo site for people to try out, and preferably for free? Luckily it's not too hard, but also not completely obvious.

The EXIFTool is incredibly useful for dealing with tags in image files, but one of those tools that I use only once every six months or so. Then when I try to use it again I’ve forgotten even the simplest commands. There are also a lot of scripting features built into ExifTool (more than most Unix style, do-only-one-thing, tools) meaning you can often achieve what you want without having to wrap it in other commands or a Bash script.

What are the most important files you have? Photos. Photos of loved ones, family, friends, times past and places travelled. So it’s worth making sure they’re safe and easy to search. This is how I exported 15 years worth of photos and their metadata from Apple Photos. If that’s what you want to do, and you’ve managed to wade through the useless search results round the very generic terms “Apple”, “Photos” and “Export”, and found this, then hopefully this will be of some use to you. You probably want to skip straight to the Tools section.