Archive for June, 2008
1kg of recycling
Saturday, June 28th, 2008I wish the Toronto Star would stop giving me their Saturday edition. I already get the newspaper, so the Star is recycled unread every week. If it wasn’t 50% car section, I might take a glance.
bbtrackerwpt - create GPX files of named waypoints from bbtracker
Saturday, June 28th, 2008I like bbtracker -it’s a very simple GPS track logger for the Blackberry. It has (at least, at the current version) one problem - you can’t create waypoints in the way that most GPS applications would expect. You can, however, name trackpoints - so I wrote a little perl script to extract all the named trackpoints from an exported GPX files, and save them as waypoints.
Download bbtrackerwpt - converts named trackpoints from bbtracker GPX into waypoints. You’ll need XML::Simple for this to work.
I imagine this script has a limited audience, and quite likely a limited lifetime. The author of bbtracker has said they’d provide waypoint support in the next version. You know me and patience, though …
If I remembered more XSLT, I’d have done this the proper way. As is, I create XML using Perl print statements. I’m probably okay, as the name field is the only piece of free-form text, and I do some rudimentary escaping of characters that XML doesn’t like. The output seems to validate, which is more than the GPX that bbtracker produces does. The length of your GPS track may vary 
tee”oh^oo”oh lo^oo tee
Thursday, June 26th, 2008I’m learning to yodel, from Cathy Fink & Tod Whittemore’s Learn to Yodel. Why not?
husky gets the milk bone
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
at Pages Books on Queen W.
oh, and while you’re at it …
Saturday, June 21st, 2008somebody please buy my Gold Tone Bob Carlin 350 banjo and Peavey SRP-16 Stereo Digital Reverb Pedal.
somebody, please buy my guitar!
Saturday, June 21st, 2008
Black Godin SDxt. Floating tremolo bridge blocked out to make it a hard-tail. Plays very nicely. Cheap! $275, on consignment at Encore Music Exchange - call Dave at 416 691-2686.
dammit
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008The left channel of my Etymotics just gave out.
supplies!
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008Pleasantly surprised that a local store - Scarboro Music, at Vic Park and Kingston has autoharp strings.
It also has a very fine old Dobson banjo for $1500.
not the chocolate truck
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
banjo chord forms
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008I’ve been trying to learn banjo chords for a while, and the books I have keep flopping closed. So I resolved to make a blank chord form that I could fill in, like this:
You might wonder why it goes to the 7th fret. If you’re in Double C tuning, you’ll need that if you’re drawing a tuning chart.
So for G tuning, the F chord would look like:
There are 12 fretboard images to a page - that’s enough for four whole folk songs!
Download: stewart’s banjo fretboard / chord grid [PDF].
mississauga smogrise
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008I love the way the smog rises over Mississauga in the morning.
at Bill Rickard’s
Sunday, June 15th, 2008I went up to Bill Rickard’s yesterday to have Hugh Hunter tweak my banjo. Unfortunately Bill wasn’t there; he father died earlier in the week, and the memorial was later in the day. My condolences to Bill and his family.
Hugh was busily turning a banjo-uke block rim on the lathe when I arrived. After a little setup work (file the second string nut to kill a buzz, reduce the head tension to get the tubaphone sound), I looked around the shop.
Tone Rings and rims - including Bill’s new Dobson tone ring
Hardware - bracket bands, Whyte Ladye parts, etc.
The work in progress rack
Whyte Laydie at rear, Tubaphone up front.
For a banjo and engineering nerd, Bill’s shop is amazing. Get yourself invited up there if you get a chance.
coffee time
Sunday, June 15th, 2008In which Catherine menaces my ca phe sua nong:
like a fibreglass bull on a pickup truck
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
Make Link
Sunday, June 15th, 2008Make Link :: Firefox Add-ons copies the current page as a link. Just like that.
wordpress can’t count: my 2000th blog posting
Sunday, June 15th, 2008I was all exited about my 2000th post, because the dashboard is showing:
So I decided to tabulate my entries by number, and discovered that I really have 2261 (well, 2262 now) blog entries. This is the real story:
The numbering seems to have gone sideways in the last 1000 entries; entry #1000 is, as they say, what it is.
we’re generating
Friday, June 13th, 2008You’ve no idea how happy I am to see several of these little fellers on my SCADA system:
That means we’re up and running. Go Lake Erie!
scenes from midwest banjo camp
Friday, June 13th, 2008
autoharp frenzy
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
I got an autoharp on eBay a couple of weeks back. It was cheap, but fairly beat up. 32 of the 36 1970s-vintage strings were intact, if very tarnished. I spent more on new strings and a tuning wrench at Elderly last weekend. After spending a few evenings cleaning (you don’t want to know what I found in it), replacing strings (fiddly) and tuning (slow), I can now make 1970s sounds. Fun!
(and yes, before you ask, it does appear to have two B♭7 keys.)
