That Was The Week That Was - 16th February 2025

For many years now the music I play in the studio is routed through a Raspberry Pi running a thing called Mopidy – a music server written in Python which in turn is connected to my Pioneer SX590 amplifier. My computers see it as an Airplay speaker and so I can route any audio through it. It works great and I love that the Raspberry Pi just sits there doing its thing. I built the system, I know how it works and I can fix it if it ever goes wrong. I own it.

So I'm a big fan of the Raspberry Pi and the freedom it allows you to create things like this. Recently I've been enjoying interactions on Bluesky, reminding me of when Twitter was great, before it turned into a right-wing hate network owned by a crazy oligarch. Whilst Bluesky started as a project within Twitter by Jack Dorsey, it's now fully independent, built on top of the AT Protocol. It's a decentralised social network, and most importantly you can choose where to store your data, including self-hosting via a PDS (Personal Data Store). That got me intrigued to use another Raspberry Pi to set-up my own PDS for true data portability.

After much searching I found this great tutorial on how to do that and within a short time I had my own PDS up and running. I then had a look at some of the hardware things I've got laying around and found a Hyperpixel 4.0 square screen which I could then plug-in to have a real-time display of the logs as people interact with the PDS. So now this thing sits above my desk, my little server, holding my data, free from the interference and whims of lunatic billionaires and their algorithms.

You can follow me on Bluesky here.

On the Monday I took myself off to the cinema to see The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a 2024 political film set in Tehran written, co-produced and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof. The director was sentenced to eight years in prison by the Iranian government but managed to to flee to Germany. Later in 2024 it would win the Cannes Special Jury Prize. Whilst the film is fiction, it features real often shocking footage of the 2023-2024 protests in Iran. This is film-making at its best.

The second film I saw this week was via the BFI subscription service called Take Shelter – a Michael Shannon film from 2011. It's a really powerful look at one man's seeming paranoia, fuelled by dreams of an apocalyptic storm. Is he suffering from a growing mental illness or is there some truth in his visions? A film that is more prescient now than ever.