It’s January 5th. Good morning.

For a while I was making montages using ImageMagick’s actual montage command.

For example:

montage 1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg 4.jpg 5.jpg 6.jpg 7.jpg 8.jpg 9.jpg 10.jpg 11.jpg 12.jpg 13.jpg 14.jpg 15.jpg 16.jpg -tile 4x4 -geometry 800x800+0+0 -background black montage.jpg

Recently I have wanted want to customize the appearance of these so I tend to write one-off scripts. I’d put them online but they really are super specific to my own uses and I like to tweak the final size so the result is somewhat messy PHP.

Yesterday I started my new annual (Spotify) playlist. The criteria for inclusion on my annual playlist is if I hear it or I like it I add it. And I keep to it all year. And once the year ends, that closes it out. I don’t mind carrying over songs year to year. Where do I hear new music? It might be on Radio Garden. It might be music in a film – Bring the Lucie from Children of Men and Benson, Arizona from Dark Star stand out there. Or it might be from a YouTube video. Or someone mentions in conversation or social media an artist or genre. I will then go looking for that and try songs related. Same album, same year, whatever. There are times I add something and it doesn’t stay on the list. The list has to be something I want to listen to again. One year I added Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” to a playlist once and it got irritating on repeated listening. So I dropped it. Regardless, as Frank Zappa said: “Music is the best.”

I first included the word “pho” in an annual playlist in 2016 and I have been doing that since then. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY I DID THAT. NO RECOLLECTION. Whimsy, maybe.

Yesterday, after 4 days I made a cover image for this year’s playlist:

Of course Hong Kong Phooey’s copyright belongs to Hanna Barbera. Also Scatman Crothers has always been a favorite of mine.

This year’s playlist is called “2024 Pho Phooey”:

And now, a list of my playlists since 2016, in reverse order. Just the ones with “pho” in their name.

• 2023 fee fie phō fun
• 2022 phō deux too
• 2021 faux pho foe
• 2020 me-pho-me
• 2019 phø phø fo no fanana bana bo no
• 2018 phō kay peoples
• 2017 pho is new again🍜
• 2016 pho ‘realidad

Yesterday and this morning I made updates to the Headers from the past to make them a bit more modern and scale slightly better. I’m mostly pleased. It’s a great use for Codepen to work on these one-offs. It’s fun to minimize the HTML markup. I’ve been mulling a mechanism to embed them in blog posts. But it seems unnecessary since I can link to them.

It’s a bit colder today I think.

Soon I’ll go the beach. Perhaps after some nutrition.

Onward.