Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Zoo Station (Achtung Perfection)

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”Time is a train”, and I’m about to get left behind by it and miss my deadline for Achtung Perfection. So many things happening with the family right now that I’m not going to go into here but it’s making it really convinient for me to procrastinate and maybe even give up but tonight I sat down and did some editing. So many vocal takes to sort out! In the end I’m sort of back on track. I need to get some more work into it, record some more guitars and then actually focus on the mix but if I can get two more nights worth of work I will have something decent by the end of the month.

Achtung Perfection

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In the past I’ve considered myself to be a musician. Even further back in time I considered myself a songwriter. The problem is, even back then, I wrote very, very, few songs and now it’s been a decade since I wrote almost anything. I’ve also completely fallen out of actually playing instruments and my singing voice has deteriorated completely due to it not being used. The only recording and mixing I’ve done in a long time has been as part of various short projects at work. I just seem unable to actually create anything for my own sake, whether just for the pleasure of doing it or for the sense of validation when showing it to other people.

This is something I really want to change. I want to be able to write and record things and to play music. I can come up with multiple reasons why I don’t but in the end most of them are probably excuses and the truth is most likely that my problems boils down to striving for perfection. I want the things I create to be perfect and I know that they won’t be. Hence, I don’t finish things because if I don’t finish it, it can’t be criticized by either myself or somebody else and therefore it cannot be deemed as imperfect.

Again, this needs to change. I need to get out of this mindset and realize, truly internalize, that one finished shitty project is a thousand times better than any amount of works in progress that one day, someday, eventually, maybe will become perfect. I need to push myself into something creative and to decide that it needs to be finished, even if the result is not what I initially wanted it to be. These thoughts have probably been swirling in my mind for a long time but they got much more focused a couple of weeks ago when I watched Yahtzee Croshaw’s Dev Diary on YouTube. In it, and in a lot of his other endeavors, he is very clear about the importance of actually creating and finishing creations if you want to be a creative person. It seems so obvious but hearing him hammer it home and following he’s journey to create twelve video games in twelve months, ultimate quality be damned, lit the spark in me to do something similar.

Now, I’m not going to be developing video games. I’m also not going to try to write 100 songs in 100 days or something similar. What I am going to do is actually embark on a project that I’ve been toying with in my head for way too long. Which brings me to the title of this venture, Achtung Perfection.

Achtung as in U2’s 1991 album ”Achtung Baby”, my absolute favorite U2 album, and one of the greatest rock album ever in my opinion. My project, Achtung Perfection, is me making my own versions of all the songs on ”Achtung Baby”, one song every month. For an album with twelve songs, that means a year long project. Some of those songs will probably have an arrangement and a production similar to the original while some might be quite different. Some will borrow ideas from exiting cover versions.

The idea is not to make a perfect version om ”Achtung Baby”. That is something that I can’t do, simply because a perfect version already exists; the actual album itself. The idea is me being aware of, avoiding, (”achtung” in German means ”attention”, ”watch out”, etc.) attempts at perfectionism. I will make one song each month. Each song doesn’t need to be perfect. Each song doesn’t even need to be good, but each song needs to be finished at the end of each month.

Here’s how it’s going to work

At the end of each month for the next year, at the very latest the last day of each month, I will release a finished recording of a song from Achtung Baby, in the order they appear on the album. I am allowed to think about upcoming songs, but I am not allowed to do any recordings for an upcoming months song before that month starts and the previous months song is finished and published. Now, published can be a relative term and the exact definition here might vary. At the very least, I will put up an mp3 file here on my blog. Hopefully I will manage to get any licensing issues solved (I do have an idea for that) and be able to put them up on YouTube and maybe Spotify or Apple Music or something similar without having them taken down for copyrights violations but that is something that I’ll work on during the project and not worry about now.

Also, at around the half point of each month I will publish a blog post or a YouTube video or something reflecting back on last months song and talking a bit about the current months song, This doesn’t have a set release date but the 15th of each month seems like a good target to aim for.

The first month for the project is August 2024, meaning the project has started and I’ve started recording my version of Zoo Station. When I’m writing these words I don’t yet know for certain if they are going to be published as a piece of text or as narration on a video. If it turns out you are getting these words from a video, you will likely hear some drones in the background that is part of my Zoo Station version. For those of you familiar with Nine Inch Nails version of Zoo Station, this might sound similar to that and that is not an accident. I really like Nine Inch Nails’ take of the song and my idea is to fuse that and the original, flying from one version into the other.

When I started writing this text I had recorded the drones and some guitar and bass. Between the first draft of the text and the publishing of it I’ve also recorded vocals. I’m using a combination of my modular synth and a Korg Volca Modular for the drones. They are not the most spectacular or original drones in the world but I think they will get the job done. The guitars are more or less scratch tracks, but I am well aware that I am halfway through the month now so I need to be prepared to make some tough decisions and keep some things that were meant to be re-recorded so that I actually finish on time.

Will it work? Will it be any good? I don’t know at the moment, but both I and the world (ha) will be able to know on August the 31st at the latest.

I’m looking forward to this project, while also being very nervous . What if all twelve songs turn out to be crap? What if this finally reveals my imposter syndrome to be well founded? Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing!

Or maybe I do. Maybe this will be fun and rewarding. Achtung Perfection

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I would love to have an integrated note taking and task management system. I would like to be able to write tasks [ ] like this anywhere in any note and have a single place where I can view all tasks. I also need to be able to use due dates. That last part is where Amplenotes just fell flat. It seemed to be just what I’m looking for but it doesn’t have due dates.

Too bad, it looked so promising.

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Does anybody know how to export my iTunes Music purchases (non-DRM) as .wav or .aac or similar? I want to listen to it outside of the Music App.

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Many years ago now, I set ”The Year of Music” as a Yearly Theme. Though one of the ideas behind a theme is that it shouldn’t really be something that you can fail at I would say that The Year of Music was a huge failure. No new music made, very little music listening. Now, however, the latter part of that is changing.

After many years of indecisiveness I took the plunge and bought into the Sonos ecosystem and I am so glad I did. The idea of being able to fill the house with music, or to have different music playing in different rooms, have been something I’ve wanted for so long. However, even though I’ve considered Sonos – and the Sonos/Ikea products – I’ve always resisted, thinking that there’s got to be a better, less expensive solution that doesn’t lock me into a single company’s line of products. So I’ve kept thinking about it, going more or less deep into various Raspberry Pi-based rabbit holes, never sticking to one idea. In recent years I’ve even considered buying a turntable and getting into vinyl records. I’ve got a MacMini server at home, several speakers – both Bluetooth and wired – and I have some basic programming skills. Surely, I should be able to create the perfect solution. Surely…

Obviously that didn’t happen. Now, in hindsight, I think that is part of why the listening part of Year of Music failed. Friction, even light friction, greatly reduces the chance of something happening. When music listening requires me to connect my phone physically to a speaker, or make an AirPlay connection, and having playback be instantly disrupted whenever a call comes to my phone, making it almost impossible to have a communal experience with my family about selecting the music, and so on, there is great friction making it very unlikely to happen.

So a month or two ago I started seriously looking at Sonos gear. Yes, it cost a lot of money1 but honestly speaking I am in that part of life where I have more money than time so I should at least consider it. Fortunately I spoke to Linn about it. I have a tendency to overthink everything. She is much more spontaneous so she encouraged me to go ahead and buy a speaker or two, or why not even three. Thank you, Linn! :)

Finally, I talked to my old friend Johan who’s been using Sonos for a long time and he’s recommendation was the last push I needed so I bought two (yes, two) Era 100 and one Roam 2. I’m using the Era 100s as a stereo pair in the kitchen/living room and the Roam as a portable speaker, wherever I might need it.

It has worked great, both as an interconnected system with the same music playing in the kitchen as on the backyard patio – or when I’m writing this among the flowers next to the green house of the front side of the house – as well as a system for the kitchen and a separate speaker for separate music somewhere else, for instance when my daughter brings it out to the trampoline in the back garden. The fact that each speaker is ”smart” enough to act as a music player, that no phone or other device is required during playback is such an important feature and makes it miles better then any Bluetooth or AirPlay speaker.

In the end, the friction of listening to music is minimal and the result is that I indeed listen a whole lot more. Sometimes it’s to music that I really like, sometimes to music that someone else in my household really likes, but there is always music in the air.


  1. I try to separate ”expensive” and ”costs a lot of money”. The former is when more money is spent than what is reasonable on something. The latter is for things that have a high price tag but that provides something that lower cost things don’t. 
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Midsummer Night’s Eve, down by the lake

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A lot of people seems to be upset about Apple (or other companies) scraping the internet for their generative ai. I sincerely hope those aren’t the same people who in the past have argued that ”information wants to be free”.

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Äntligen lägger regeringen ett faktiskt liberalt förslag!

Regeringen: Legalisera gårdsförsäljning 2025 – FaluKuriren

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I just started playing my very first ”souls-like” video game and just a minute ago I defeated my first boss in a souls-like. Hooray for me!

The souls-like in question is Another Crabs Treasure on the Switch. I saw the game on one of Second Winds’ streams the other week and I found it to be adorable. As has probably been established before, I game very infrequently but I’m not completely deaf and blind to what goes on in gaming so obviously I had heard about souls-likes but I’d never tried one. I’m also not a very skilled gamer so something being very hard doesn’t seem that enticing to me but again, Another Crabs Treasure just looked adorable. I also figured it would probably be a game that would be available on Switch.

A week or so ago I did check and it was indeed available on the Switch, and to a reasonable price, so I mentally placed in on my ”let’s play these games sometime” list and tonight I ended up feeling like playing some video games so I decided to give it a try.

First impression is that it is indeed adorable. The story seems interesting and I like the main character. The thing I like less is that it seems poorly optimized. Sure, the Switch isn’t a powerhouse but it does handle games that at least appear to be more complex than this one. ”Crabs’ suffer from drops in frame rate quite often which is particularly annoying in an intense battle. A quick google search told the than unfortunately this seems to be a thing. Lots of players seems unhappy with the Switch version of this game.

I don’t have any other system for gaming so I’ll just have to grit my teeth and make do with what I have.

In the end I played up to the first boss tonight and he completely wiped the floor with me, even though I play on the slightly easier setting. The good news is that it didn’t make me want to throw the controller away and do something else. Instead it made me bite down hard, swear a lot, empty my drink and try again and again and again and again and again. After what must have been at least 15 tries I did get the hang of it and I manage to kill the boss so now I am in some weird catharsis state. Part of me wants to keep going but parts of me wants to go to bed while I’m ahead.