The Streets By Wendell Sweet One evening, I found myself back at the scene of the car accident—the snow-covered road where my life nearly ended. The scars on my body served as tangible reminders of that brutal night; the emotional scars were far deeper. The silence was deafening, broken only by the occasional rustle of the wind. The cold night air, the harsh sounds of snow crunching under my boots; it all was reminiscent of the night that would nearly cost my life. Standing there, I felt a wave of sadness, a flicker of the old fear, but it quickly subsided. The trauma was still there, woven into the fabric of my being, but it no longer controlled me. I had faced it, processed it, and emerged stronger.#True #NonFiction #Crime #Memoir #Kindle #KU Kindle:
The air in the Manhattan garage was thick with the scent of old oil, ozone, and the faint, metallic tang of desperation. Ben Larkin stood before it, the yellow Ford Torino, a magnificent, sun-bleached beast of a car, gleaming under the harsh fluorescent lights. It was a monument to a past he desperately wanted to bury, a gleaming, chrome-laden symbol of a life that had once promised freedom and now felt like a cage. He ran a gloved hand over the impossibly smooth, polished paintwork, the coolness of the metal a stark contrast to the heat that simmered beneath his skin. This was it. The last job. His final chance to break free, to outrun the shadows that had clung to him like cheap cologne for years.
by Paul Block (Author) Format: Kindle, Paperback, Audio
On October 14th, 2029, the sky tore open.
Not with fire. Not with thunder. With silence.
For 11 minutes and 47 seconds, every satellite in orbit blinked. Every power grid on Earth spiked, held, and then collapsed into something new. Scientists would later call it a “magnetospheric inversion cascade.” The rest of us called it The Surge. #Dystopian #Apocalyptic #PostApocalyptic #Horror #Epic Epic, Horror, Dystopian, Apocalyptic
The Surge: Spark
by Paul Block (Author) Format: Kindle Edition Book 01
On October 14th, 2029, the sky tore open.
Not with fire. Not with thunder. With silence.
For 11 minutes and 47 seconds, every satellite in orbit blinked. Every power grid on Earth spiked, held, and then collapsed into something new. Scientists would later call it a “magnetospheric inversion cascade.” The rest of us called it The Surge. #Dystopian #Apocalyptic #PostApocalyptic #Horror #Epic Epic, Horror, Dystopian, Apocalyptic
The Surge: Uprising
by Paul Block (Author) Format: Kindle Edition Book 02
On October 14th, 2029, the sky tore open.
Not with fire. Not with thunder. With silence.
For 11 minutes and 47 seconds, every satellite in orbit blinked. Every power grid on Earth spiked, held, and then collapsed into something new. Scientists would later call it a “magnetospheric inversion cascade.” The rest of us called it The Surge. #Dystopian #Apocalyptic #PostApocalyptic #Horror #Epic Epic, Horror, Dystopian, Apocalyptic
The Surge: Purge
by Paul Block (Author) Format: Kindle Edition Book 03
On October 14th, 2029, the sky tore open.
Not with fire. Not with thunder. With silence.
For 11 minutes and 47 seconds, every satellite in orbit blinked. Every power grid on Earth spiked, held, and then collapsed into something new. Scientists would later call it a “magnetospheric inversion cascade.” The rest of us called it The Surge. #Dystopian #Apocalyptic #PostApocalyptic #Horror #Epic Epic, Horror, Dystopian, Apocalyptic
Boldt Castle, located on Heart Island in the Thousand Islands region of New York State, is a majestic castle with a romantic and tragic history. The castle was built by George Boldt, a millionaire hotel magnate, as a tribute to his beloved wife, Louise.
History of Boldt Castle
In 1900, George Boldt began constructing the castle as a grand gesture of love for his wife. The castle’s design was inspired by European castles, specifically those along the Rhine River in Germany. Boldt hired the renowned architectural firm G.W. & W.D. Hewitt to design the castle, which would feature 120 rooms, including a grand staircase, beautiful stained glass, and intricate woodwork ¹ ².
The construction of Boldt Castle was a massive undertaking, involving over 300 workers, including stonemasons, carpenters, and artists. The castle’s design was meant to be a testament to Boldt’s love for his wife, with many features incorporating hearts, including the island’s shape, which was blasted to resemble a heart.
The Tragic Story Behind the Unfinished Castle
Tragically, Louise Boldt passed away suddenly in January 1904, just months before the castle’s planned completion. George Boldt was devastated by her death and immediately stopped all construction on the castle. He never returned to Heart Island, leaving the castle abandoned for over 70 years. The castle and its surrounding structures were left to the mercy of the wind, rain, ice, snow, and vandals, causing significant damage.
Restoration and Current State
In 1977, the Thousand Islands Bridge Authority acquired Heart Island and the nearby yacht house for $1, with the agreement that all revenue generated from the castle’s operation would be directed towards restoration. Since then, over $50 million has been spent on restoring and rehabilitating the castle and its surrounding structures. Today, visitors can explore the castle’s grand halls, lush gardens, and hidden nooks, each filled with the echoes of a love story that transcends time ² ¹.
Exploring Boldt Castle
Visitors can access the castle by ferry or tour boat from Alexandria Bay, New York, Clayton, New York, Gananoque, Ontario, Rockport, Ontario, and Ivy Lea, Ontario. The castle is open seasonally from mid-May to mid-October, and guided tours are available. Some of the highlights of the castle include ¹ ³ ²:
The Main Castle: A six-story structure with over 120 rooms, featuring grand staircases, beautiful stained glass, and intricate woodwork.
The Power House: A picturesque building that once housed the castle’s power generators, now featuring exhibits on the history of the castle and its restoration.
The Alster Tower: A whimsical structure designed for entertainment, featuring a bowling alley, billiards room, and stage for performances.
The Gardens and Scenic Views: Beautifully manicured gardens and scenic views of the St. Lawrence River, perfect for relaxation and photography.
The George C. Boldt Yacht House: A historic yacht house located on nearby Wellesley Island, featuring a collection of antique and wooden boats.
Tips for Visiting
Visitors should plan their visit according to the castle’s operating hours and ferry schedules.
The castle is a popular tourist destination, so expect crowds during peak season.
Audio guides and self-guided tours are available, allowing visitors to explore the castle at their own pace.
Don’t miss the stunning views from the castle’s balcony and the beautiful gardens surrounding the castle.
In conclusion, Boldt Castle is a must-visit destination for anyone interested in history, architecture, and romance. Its tragic love story and stunning architecture make it a unique and unforgettable experience. With its beautiful gardens, historic structures, and picturesque surroundings, Boldt Castle is a true gem of the Thousand Islands region .
Earth’s Survivors box set contains the entire Earth’s Survivors series in one volume. Book One: Earth’s Survivors Apocalypse follows survivors of a worldwide catastrophe. A meteorite that was supposed to miss the earth hits and becomes the cap to a series of events that destroy the world as we know it. Hopes, dreams, tomorrows: All buried in a desperate struggle to survive. Small group’s band together for safety, leaving the ravaged cities behind in search of a new future… 10 books. #Dystopian #Survival #Drama #Thriller #ApocalypticFiction #PostApocalypse #KU
The world, as Alex Chen knew it, had fractured beyond repair. The year was a ghost, a relic of a time when governments held sway and infrastructure meant more than shattered concrete and rusted rebar. America was no longer a nation, but a patchwork quilt of territories, each a desperate scramble for survival. In this mosaic of decay, the East Coast Police Department, or ECPD, stood as a thin, fraying shield. Their jurisdiction, a meager few hundred miles of crumbling asphalt and scattered, desperate outposts, felt less like a territory and more like a last stand. #Dystopian #ApocalypticFiction #PostApocalyptic #Survival #ECPD #Series #Dystopian
Summers in Upstate New York are beautiful. After the hard winters and sub-zero cold the warm temperatures are like Heaven on Earth. The river and the railroad tracks bisected the city and any given day would find myself and my friends somewhere along one or the other.
The True: True stories from a small town are true stories from that place. From my childhood up through my adulthood. Some heartfelt, some heart rending, some the horrible truth of the life I lived at that time… #NonFiction #Crime #Drama #Thriller #KU #True
By Dell Sweet In the small city of Glennville people tend to stay to themselves. Neighbors matter. The streets, even in the poorest of neighborhoods are safe for children to travel on their own. But the city has its secrets, and those secrets have their dangers. Under the city, a series of caves cut from the limestone by the Black River attract visitors, children, some have entered and never come out; maybe lost, maybe part of Glennville’s secrets. Something else lives in the cold, dark caves. Something some have suspected but refused to believe. After all, things in Glennville are rational, safe…
Glennville is a series of books that play out in the City of Glennville or that are somehow connected to the city of Glennville, Dell Sweet #Dystopian #Horror #Series #KU #Kindle #Drama #Thriller
Fourteen million dollars in a burned suitcase. Severed body parts of a dead man in a duffel bag. Two hired killers. A drug dealer. Two organized crime kingpins; all chasing two white trash kids from New York down to the deep south as they head for what they think will be safety in Mexico. Put the story together and you have one hell of a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde. Adult content. Sex and violence. FIVE-STAR READERS FAVORITE CHOICE AWARD REVIEW –
snd-ls is a distribution of Bill Schottstaedt’s sound editor SND. Its target are people that don’t know scheme very well, and don’t want to spend too much time configuring Snd.
Swami is an advanced instrument editor for MIDI music composition and a software synthesizer frontend.
Control Applications
Aj-snapshot is a small program that can be used to make snapshots of the connections made between JACK and/or ALSA clients. It is also capable of running in the background, restoring connections while clients and ports appear.
ALSA Patch Bay is a graphical patch bay for the ALSA sequencer API and the JACK audio API. It can use FLTK or GTKmm for the interface and take advantage LASH session management.
gjacktransport is a standalone application that provides access to the JACK transport mechanism via a dynamic graphical slider.
DSSI is an API for audio processing plugins, particularly useful for software synthesis plugins with user interfaces.
freqtweak a frequency domain FX box. This is one of the coolest FX boxes you may ever use.
Guitarix is a simple Linux amplifier with one input and two outputs.
IEM Plug-in Suite is a set of VST-plugins (with a DAW independent standalone-mode) for Ambisonics sound field encoding, analysis, processing and decoding.
Giada is a free, minimal, hardcore audio tool for djs and live performers.
Loopcenter is an easy-to-use live looper with functionality similar to the Boss LoopStation pedal. You can record and overdub at user-set tempos and meters.
SooperLooper a live looping sampler capable of immediate loop recording, overdubbing, multiplying, reversing and more.
Media Players
AlsaPlayer a “new type of pcm player”. Can play mp3s, oggs, cds, among other audio file formats. Thanks go to Andy Lo-A-Foe for releasing the first application with support for Jack!
Aqualung It plays audio files from your filesystem and has the feature of inserting no gaps between adjacent tracks
Data Jockey is a digital disc jockey tool which leverages audio meta-data (both computed and manually added by the user) in order to allow for new approaches in content selection and juxtaposition.
kluppe a gtk-based loop player for files and live-input.
MadJack is an MPEG Audio Deck with an OSC based control interface.
MOC Music On Console is a console audio player for LINUX/UNIX, designed to be powerful and easy to use.
VLC is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
Baudline is a time-frequency browser designed for scientific visualization of the spectral domain.
Brianalyze is a pretty simple JACK-connected spectrum analyzer
BRP-PACU is a dual channel FFT based acoustic analysis tool to help engineers configure professional sound systems by using the transfer function.
Ebumeter provides level metering according to the EBU R-128 recommendation. The current release implements all features required by the EBU document except the oversampled peak level monitoring. This will be added in a future release.
Jaaa an audio signal generator and spectrum analyser.
JACK demolition a very simple jack client that connects to every input port and squirts undesirable numbers (denomals, HUGE, NaN, Inf etc.) to it.
Jack Meter is a basic console based DPM (Digital Peak Meter).
japa is a ‘perceptual’ or ‘psychoacoustic’ audio spectrum analyser.
meterbridge a nice VU-style meter to watch signal levels on arbitrary JACK ports.
Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files.
Tap Reverb Editor an interactive tool for room acoustics simulation.
Mixers
jack_mixer is a GTK+JACK audio mixer app with a look similar to its hardware counterpart. It has lots of useful features, apart from being able to mix multiple JACKaudio streams.
JackMiniMix is a simple mixer with an OSC based control interface.
LinuxBand is a GUI front-end for MMA (Musical MIDI Accompaniment). Type in the chords, choose the groove and LinuxBand will play a musical accompaniment for you.
LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio®, which allow you to produce music with your computer.
MusE a MIDI/Audio sequencer with recording and editing capabilities.
OpenOctaveMidi is a linux-based classic midi/audio sequencer with a look and feel, users will find in commercial equivalents.
Qtractor is an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ around the Qt4 toolkit.
quincer is a sequencer for composed music with text-editable input.
Renoise is a contemporary digital audio workstation (DAW) based upon the heritage and development of tracker software. Its primary use is the composition of music using sound samples, soft synths, and effects plug-ins. It is also able to interface with MIDI equipment.
Rosegarden a sophisticated MIDI (and audio) sequencer and notation editor
The Non DAW is a powerful, reliable and fast modular Digital Audio Workstation system.
The Non Sequencer is a powerful real-time, pattern-based MIDI sequencer for Linux.
Traverso is a GPL licensed, cross platform multitrack audio recording and editing suite, with an innovative and easy to master User Interface. It’s suited for both the professional and home user, who needs a robust and solid DAW.
Bitwig Studio Bitwig Studio is dynamic software for creation and performance of your musical ideas on stage or in the studio.
Zrythm a digital audio workstation designed to be featureful and easy to use.
Music Notation Editors
Denemo is a music notation editor that lets you rapidly enter notation for typesetting via the LilyPond music engraver. You can compose, transcribe, arrange, listen to the music and much more.
MuseScore lets you notate and compose music easily with your keyboard, your mouse, or a MIDI keyboard.
jackspa is a small utility which will host a LADSPA plugin, providing JACK ports for its audio inputs and outputs.
jost is a host for native linux vst plugins (jack / alsa_seq).
ng-jackspa is a set of simple user interfaces that host a LADSPA plugin, providing JACK ports for its audio inputs and outputs, and dynamic setting of its control inputs. Additionally, the plugin controls can be exported to or controlled by control voltages on standard JACK audio ports.
Soundtank a midi controlled host for softsynths made out of LADSPA plugins.
Synthpod is a lightweight non-linear plugin container.
Clam is a multiplatform software framework for research and application development for the Audio and Music domains.
FAUST is a compiled language for real-time audio signal processing.
GTKIOStream provides allows easy use of JACK within GTK apps and has many other tools for DSP, Audio Masking, FFTs and plotting data.
jackcpp is a C++ class wrapping most of the jack client functionality, a “blocking” interface for jack and a template class wrapping the jack ring buffer.
libjackasyn is a library that allows to access the jack audio server in asynchronous mode.
libjackmm is a C++ interface to the jack audio connection kit.
Praxis Live is an hybrid visual live programming for creatives, for programmers, for students, for tinkerers.
Pure Data is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing.
Qjack allows you to connect Jack to QT very easily.
RtAudio is a set of C++ classes that provide a common API (Application Programming Interface) for realtime audio input/output.
Wine an application that lets you run and recompile Windows applications under Linux.
admin-srb Administration and radioautomation of public radiostations
ARAS is an open source radio automation system, it has been designed to be highly configurable and easy to manage. It uses JACK through GStreamer library, in both playback and recording.
Internet DJ Console is an Internet radio app for making a live radio show or podcast.
Rivendell an audio automation system aimed at professional radio broadcasters.
Simple Recorders
jack_capture is a small program to capture whatever sound is going out to your speakers into a file.
JACK Timemachine an application that constantly records signals coming in on its inputs, waiting for you to press record. When you do it writes the last ten seconds to disk and keeps recording.
meterec is a console based multi-track monitoring and recording tool. Focus on your instrument, not on the software!
QARecord a simple but multithreaded stereo recording tool.
QJackRcd is a simple stereo recorder for Jack with few features as silence processing for automatic pause, file splitting, background file post-processing.
Sound Generators
AlsaModularSynth a realtime modular synthesizer and effect processor. You will need version 1.5.3c or above.
ClockLoop a very simple JACK application for playing back audio loops.
CodeSounding is a java sonification library: the sound produced running a .class (or .jar) is a function of how was structured its source code before compilation. You can therefore produce computer-generated music.
Csound5 is a sound and music synthesis system, providing facilities for composition and performance over a wide range of platforms.
din is a software musical instrument and audio synthesizer.
energyXT2 is a complete music studio. Commercial product with a free demo available.
fastbreeder is an experimental genetic programming synthesiser.
FluidSynth a real-time software synthesizer based on the Soundfont2 specifications.
gAlan a modular synthesiser, drum-machine, sequencer and effects-unit. Version 0.3.0-test1 or above.
Midi Player Pro is the software you need to be able to play any kind of music in seconds with your fingertips. It uses libumidi20, which also uses Jack.
Mx44 is a polyphonic multichannel midi realtime software synthesizer.
Pianoteq is a high-class virtual piano software offering superb dynamics, natural resonances and unique physical parameters. This is a commercial product.
QMIDICurves lets you change the velocity response of any MIDI device (like a MIDI keyboard for instance).
reMID uses the reSID emulation library to provide a virtual SID based synthesizer, controllable in real-time via MIDI. SID was the sound chip used in the Commodore 64 computer.
rtsynth a reliable, if plain, multi-oscillator synthesizer
Sampson is a small, lightweight, no-frills software sampler focusing on drums and percussion.
Simple Sysexxer is a small tool to load, send, receive, save and request sysex data. It can be used to do backups of the memory contents of MIDI devices like synthesizers, MIDI controllers or effects processors.
slat allows you to use your mouse to adjust pitch and volume by waving the pointer over the interface.
SoundPatty is an efficient and fast sound (i.e. record) recognition software.
Synthclone is a Qt-based application that can “clone” your MIDI-capable instruments. It does this by sending out MIDI data that instructs an instrument to emit sounds for a series of notes, velocities, controls, and aftertouch values. It then saves this data as a sample-based instrument that can be loaded by sampler software.
Video Applications
KSubtile is a KDE program which provides an easy to use interface to edit subtitles in the SRT format. It supports moving, stretching and individual editing of subtitles in a file. To help you synchronize with a particular movie we provide GUI con
LiVES is a Video Editing System. It is designed to be simple to use, yet powerful. It is small in size, yet it has many advanced features.
Shotcut is a free and open-source cross-platform video editing application for FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Windows.
VideoJack a tool that reads video and audio signals from its jack inputs.
xjadeo is a very simple video player that is synchronized to jack transport.
Open Movie Editor is designed to be a simple tool, that provides basic movie making capabilities.
VOIP
Asterisk is the world’s leading open source telephony engine and tool kit. Offering flexibility unheard of in the world of proprietary communications, Asterisk empowers developers and integrators to create advanced communication solutions…for free.
I Hear U is a Voice over IP (VoIP) application that creates an audio stream between two computers easily and with the minimal network traffic.
VST
fst is a program by which uses Wine, Jack and Steinberg’s VST Audio Plug-Ins SDK to enable the use of many VST audio plugins under Gnu/Linux.
