<![CDATA[I miss my bar]]>Well, lots of us do, what with the ongoing Panasonic. But also, I recently encountered a very clever website called I Miss My Bar, which is a very simple idea, cleanly executed: several toggleable and volume-adjustable channels of distinct sorts of bar-sounds ambience (conversations, the clink of glasses, street noises outside, rain on the windows) plus an embedded Spotify playlist of the sort of music a bar might be playing. You toggle the different sounds on or off, and adjust their relative volumes, to get a mix that approximates the background noise of your own favorite local spot, and it’s really surprisingly soothing.
It got me thinking, somehow, about Bernband and about Shamus Young’s Pixel City, and about the good old days of fanciful WinAmp audio visualizers like MilkDrop. I have an HDMI cable running from my desktop to the office TV, which I usually use to watch games on WNBA League Pass, but I can also put a browser window pointed to I Miss My Bar over on the TV and have its ambient audio piped through the attached Sonos; but then the screen itself is just showing the static web page.
It would be nice to have a more appropriate, and more dynamic, visual on the TV to go with those sounds.
More on that later, maybe.
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