Randomness at BlackbirdRecordings

Author: cvzero89

  • The scammy text

    A few days ago my wife received this text:

    La entrega se ha suspendido porque su pedido no tiene numero de casa. Revise y complete los datos de su domicilio lo antes posible. https:..//ln[dot]run/b5PUN

    If you’re not fluent in Spanish, don’t worry, it is a text saying that there was an attempt to deliver a package but the address is incomplete and offers a URL to input your information.

    That links redirected to: https:…//seurede[dot]help/es

    Of course, it looks shady as hell but you have to admit that once you open it it does look genuine (if you ignore the obvious layout issues):

    At the start it asks for a phone number, no matter what you enter you have a package on route, very convenient. And after clicking a few buttons they would ask you to pay $0.99 to reprogram your delivery.

    From their URL I figured out their hosting, turingidc[dot]com which is also a very shady page. I’ve tried contacting them but the contact form is broken. This is why I tried a different approach.

    Honestly, I had been waiting for an opportunity like this one, the whole page felt vibed-coded so I knew that I would be able to send fake info, just for the fun. Inspecting the requests I saw this:

    A POST request to an endpoint that includes a token.

    The token was regenerated on each visit but it really never expired or made any checks from where the request was coming. There was also a few other POST requests to localhost:{randomPort}, yes, this definitely looked like amateur work.

    Since it was a Friday and I was doing nothing I wrote a few lines in Python and decided to feed their database a bit, 10K requests later with random jitter and what I thought was some believable numbers I gave up because even people with nothing to do like me get bored.

    The site is still online. Did I make a difference? Probably not. It was still fun.

  • WordPress and WebP

    I must say, I am a bit annoyed.

    It is almost 2026, the support for uploading WebP is in wp-core since 5.8 was released, that is July 2021 and a lot of important features were never included, such as image conversion and fallback for old browsers.

    I had been using WebP Express to fill this void and ran into this today: https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/23f7e550-80b9-4099-9915-9f4c96c5e89e/

    That’s a serious vulnerability to have for 15+ days. So…I just removed that package from my list and will go back to converting the files before uploading or…I don’t know.

    Lucklily I am using a pretty secure hosting :happy-emoji-just-imagine-the-emoji-OK?: and the checks after fixing the issue is easy.

    Rant over.

    (EDIT: Fixed in 0.25.14)

  • Todo cambia…

    Recuerdo el 26 de Octubre de 2024, pasó un año en un abrir y cerrar de ojos, y tantas cosas que cambiaron…

    Y así como todo cambia que yo cambie no es extraño

    Escucho en mi alma a Mercedes Sosa cantando mientras escribo esto. Los tambores con su ritmo que se asemeja a un latido me arrullan y hacen sentir nostálgico, contemplo lo que ha sido un tiempo de muertes y renaceres.

    Y es que hace un año estaba en Los Ángeles, parece otra vida pero era el destino que durante años tuve en mente, pensaba que lo necesitaba para salir adelante…y, de cierta manera, fue cierto.

    Conocía por primera vez a muchos de mis compañeros de trabajo, algunos de ellos me saludaron con estusiasmo pero en general todo se sintió extraño. En sí el lugar no estaba mal, de hecho, aunque no es mi tipo de ciudad, volvería otra vez.

    Hollywood sign view from the Griffith Observatory

    Santa Monica Pier

    Hoy estoy en otra etapa de mi vida, ese viaje fue necesario para reafirmar mi deseo de cambio. El Sábado 26 de Octubre de 2024 estuve en un leve accidente de tráfico en LA, pero fue la muerte irrevocable de mi deseo de continuar allí. Desde ese momento, lentamente pero seguro, renací desde las cenizas.

    El 7 de Abril de 2025 marcó un inicio. Cambié de trabajo, suena a poco pero realmente me marcó.

    Me siento más tranquilo, menos seguro de lo que hago pero eso es lo mismo que me hace vivir más, sentir más. Y eso se traslada al día a día, a veces camino por la calle y me detengo a pensar en cómo me está gustando mi vida. Otros días estoy agobiado, pero creo que existe una salida.

    Mi nueva vida trajo dos más. Soy tan felíz y estoy tan asustado al mismo tiempo.

    Gael y Luca

    Hace unos años mi posición era radical, yo no serviría para ser padre, ahora no es que esté seguro de poder ser un buen padre, solamente estoy dispuesto a intentarlo, a dar todo de mi por las personas que aún no conozco pero que ya amo.

    Un año después me veo y no me reconozco. Sí, soy el mismo, también soy alguien más. Voy enfrentándome a más muertes del ego que llevan a una reconstrucción y a un nuevo yo, poco a poco.

    Probablemente sigo siendo el mismo pesimista (o realista) cínico de siempre, sin embargo, hay algo que se siente diferente y me he sentido diferente por algún tiempo.

    Me voy enfrentando a la vida, a ver cómo crecen, soñar en lo que podrían ser y en lo que podríamos vivir. Todo cambia…

    Para mis pequeños, mi mejor cambio, mi mejor vida.

  • Restic orchestrator

    A while ago, I think 2021-2022, I started my self-hosting journey. I got a passable CPU, a mobo with enough I/O, got myself a couple of HDDs and I was off to the races!

    One of the goals was to have a place to create a backup of my laptop and important files. At the time I was running MacOS on a Asus UX430, Time Machine and an external hard drive might have done the trick, but I felt it was a bit clunky system, I needed MacOS to get to my files and it was (from my point of view) not configurable enough.

    After a good amount of watching YouTube videos, Reddit and random Googleing I got a sense about proper backup strategies, all of that 3-2-1-backup jazz and the best practices for encryption, I got to Restic.

    However, one of the main problems that I encounter was to take the backup from my laptop and store it in multiple places with restic. I know, it could have been as simple as getting a bash script and adding all of the commands there, but still, configuring each restic repo took me a while, after all I wanted to create a backup of my music and documents folder to a local SFTP repo on my server and a S3 bucket.

    That means 4 different commands to tailor and maintain (I thought that I might want to have separate policies for each folder and destination)

    This is were my restic repo comes into play.

    The logic is simple. With a single YAML config file you specify everything about the restic command and you can add as many locations as you need. Sample config here.

    restic-cli

    Makes it easy enough to fire all snapshots, forget, restore, choose a mount or pass an unlock command to my repos.

    And now the ‘orchestrator’ part…this came much later and started as a small issue. Happens that before my laptop was both for work and personal, nowadays I have two. I used to trigger the snapshots using the good old cron.

    Before, I would set up a backup at, let’s say, 9AM on Wednesday and 3PM on Saturdays, there was a big chance that I’d be working at that time, so, I’d get my snapshot. Now, that meant that if my personal laptop was not on at that time I could spend the whole month without a backup. That’s not ideal, right?

    Instead, I set up a small uvicorn server that will listen to when a device is “registered”, if it is a new device it will ask the device to take a snapshot using restic, or if it is a device it knows it will check when was the last backup and decide what needs to be done. A client runs on all of my computers, it will check periodically with the server. After a month and a half I’ve had no issues, and I get a nice status page of the last known backup:

    Maybe there’s a better way, I am not in any way an experienced developer but these projects are actually fun.

  • My guitar gear

    I remember when I started playing guitar, that was 200x… wait, was it 1999? 🙁 :old-man-yelling-at-cloud:…(nevermind the year, that’s not important)…I had no idea what pedals or had any interest in them, mastering a barred chord was actually the goal and the dream.

    A few years later, my brother got a Zoom 505II (At this point I actually went into a 15 minutes sidequest to try to find one to buy) and that was THE pedal to have and love, it had it all. It is a multi-effect with a great range:

    Zoom 505 II

    “…the 505 II incorporates a varied palette of 33 effects. Up to nine effects (including ZNR and amp simulator) can be combined in a patch. The memory of the unit holds 36 rewritable patches, providing the holds-barred performance”

    If you’re 15 and just discovered what an electric guitar and distortion can sound like, yeah, this was heaven. To be honest, more than 20 years after, I do not even remember how it sounds, but it might have marked me more than what I remember.

    In April 2020 (The dark times [COVID]) I decided to get a pedal that had been in my head for the past few months, it was around 450€, but who cares? We were all going to die anyway. That’s how I ended up with the Empress Zoia, very similar to the Zoom 505 II if you think about it.

    It’s this rectangle that can do basically anything. Do you remember the ‘You wouldn’t steal a car’ commercials? Well, this let’s you “download” pedals/effects created by others. If downloading a pedal is a crime then … you can’t prove that I’ve done it!

    Pretty, isn’t it?

    It has a firmware that can be updated, modular construction of patches and collaboration. This is a programmer’s dream…Although, I must recognize that I usually do not create my own patches, I mostly have modified other’s to my needs.

    In the patch storage you can find recreations of existing pedals and unique creations. The Zoia shines when we are talking about creating textures, it is one of the reasons I wanted it, that’s my go-to type of composition.

    It can process audio and also be used as a synth and be controlled with external MIDI and/or send MIDI to a different device. It’s really a Swiss army knife.

    Apart from the Zoia, I had no other remarkable pedal, maybe the Big Muff Pi but honestly I had never liked how it sounded on my recordings. I was actually missing a bit part of every guitarist sound, a great tube amp.

    Problem: I live in a small apartment. My neighbors would hate me if I cranked a tube amp.

    Solution: The Simplifier X

    This thing is powerful. It can take a weak line signal and transform it simulating a Marshall, AC Vox or Fender amp. Is it the same as a tube amp? Not sure if I would call it the same but it is possible that most people would not be able to tell the difference, it is that good.

    Yeah, of course it is not a Kemper, it is not a Quad Cortex either, but it costs 1/3 of the price, so definitely not a bad deal.

    If I had to go to war with a Zoia and the Simplifier X, I’d be happy. Or at least, I’d have a great sound.

  • Platform.sh/Upsun meetup!

    Let’s start with the soundtrack:

    If this was still new to me
    I wouldn’t understand
    Impossible Germany
    Unlikely Japan
    But this is what love is for
    To be out of place
    Gorgeous and alone
    Face to face

    I got obsessed with this song during a previous time travelling Germany when looking at the country side from a train and hearing this incredibly underrated solo made me fell in love. Now, it’s a must to play it. Typically understood as a heartbreak song, this was not the situation for my week.

    I landed in Munich Monday morning. Ahead there was a week of talking to people. Me? A dangerously introvert guy that spends his days talking to a cat (so far, he does not replies).
    I must confess I was not sure if it was a good idea.

    Have you ever felt somebody is incredibly happy to see you? I’ve been lucky to get that a few times in my life, I also felt it this Monday. I joined the company 2 months and 13 days ago, working remotely has always been challenging because your team is people that the most you can get to know is at meetings and in Slack. Yes, you can tell a lot with just that, but you cannot compare what it feels to spend 5 minutes in a random conversation over a beer (Or your beverage of choice).

    We discussed:

    • Music
    • Movies
    • Food
    • Travelling
    • Sports
    • Why Windows sucks
    • Are we going to be sued by the Beatles?
    • Gardening (Yes, gardening)
    • Ah, yes…we also worked

    Hey there, Upsun!

    It’s hard to say why people connect. After 36 years on this earth it still comes as a mystery, you could be talking about nothing and yet, it is a very deep connection.

    There’s still so much that is unknown to me about this new gig, however, it is clear that the people around me is incredible. What else could you ask for?

    Downtown Munich

    Karlzpark

    Munich

    I also got a bit of time to sight see part of the city. Too little time, so I guess I’ll have to come back. Possible Germany?

  • Best DAW?

    Back when I was studying music I almost never used a DAW. Most of my time was spent editing sheets in Finale or handwriting music.

    For a few projects I had to use Digital Performer (which at the time was..bad, not the re-vamped version there is now) and had a few courses for which I used Pro Tools.

    When I started recording my own music, whether it was with VSTs or using real instruments, I looked at Pro Tools again and quickly went away from it. The interface was dated, the resource management was just awful and it is too damn expensive. I am not saying it is not good, probably I was the one that could not make it work and not that it has no value.

    Then I gave the chance to Logic. First thing that I noticed is that using the same machine I could create projects that were larger to anything I had achieved with Pro Tools. Automations and managing plugins is fairly simple and straightforward (hey, just what I need for my small attention span). The UI is easy to follow, like everything Apple does.

    The only thing I can see missing is a bit of ‘Project version control’, maybe it is just the coder in my that would like to save automations, takes, etc, and switch between version from a single click. I know folders/stacks exists but I don’t think it takes care of everything.

    Music for film has always been my dream.

    From what I have been told Cubase is a mix of Pro Tools and Logic and Finale/Sibelius. Could something be so awesome and true? There must be a catch.

    A few of the features that caught my eye were mostly related to how Cubase manages beats (beat estimation? beatguesstimation? guessbeatation? All pending ™) which is very useful when working with hits/actions for a video/film and how you can also reference the sheet effectively, not like the sloppy the Logic editor.

    So, is Cubase the answer to all of my problems? The Pro 14 version is 579€, far from the cheap 230€ for Logic. Since I am not really working in music production I cannot justify spending that much money in software given that I already have a good working solution. But, yeah, I can complain and dream…

  • I will never forget her

    It has been a month. On April 2nd, we lost our 12 year old cat Abril.

    The last picture I took…

    In June 2013 I started dating my wife and on my first time at her place I heard those little paws coming down on the stairs, Abril had come down to greet me, according to Laura, she had never done that with anybody else. She was the type of cat that had trust issues, a lot of personality wrapped around a coat of gray, white and brown-ish hair.

    Some things….
    …never change.

    She picked me and to this day I cannot believe my luck. For 11 years I had the company of a beautiful soul, she would know when I was feeling down and lifted me up every time.

    It’s hard to say goodbye, it will never be enough time. But I am happy that I got the chance to be part of her life for however short it might have been.

  • Barcelona, 6 years in:

    what a crazy time it has been…

    I have been here for, what it feels, a long time and I absolutely love it. However, it is still far away from where I grew up, very different and even though it has become my home, I can still feel like an outsider sometimes.

    Sant Antoni
    Barcelona

    Still, I have learned that you have to take whatever good is thrown to you. Although I still do not speak Catalàn (I understand a bit and I am starting Duolingo!), I do feel part of the culture.

    At the start of the year I had a visit from a cousin that had never been in Catalunya. On her last day we went out and because it was the season we had calçots, saw a sardana (and danced poorly) and saw castellers.

    So, yeah, this is home…

  • Hello world?

    Yeah, this is the standard first post. I’ve just changed it a bit.

    A while ago (In a galaxy far, far away [I mean a previous job]) I was tasked to create a training that would allow people to analyze a slow loading page. I added this little Easter egg on the code:

    $ curl -X POST -d '{"hello":"world"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" https://node.newnotthatgooddomain.com/api|jq

{
  "message": "it's a me, mario",
  "imageUrl": "https://node.newnotthatgooddomain.com/files/mario.jpg"
}

    A cURL to one of my dummy sites APIs would return a picture of Mario that was then displayed. The trick was that this API was hard-coded to wait 5 seconds before returning the image.

    What this necessary? Hell no, but it was fun. I also got to try coding a bit in Node, although I did use ChatGPT a bit to have a working boilerplate and correct syntax here and there. Here’s the image:

    Now, why am I telling you this? I think I just wanted to waste your time. Sorry.