scruss

the wind that shakes the barley

Mary Z. Cox alerted me to one of her videos which has both clawhammer banjo and wind turbines:

02008-09-11

my film debut

Skizz Cyzyk is interviewing me today for his Fred Lane / Raudelunas documentary.

02008-09-07

in future, all contracts are to be written in 10pt Action Jackson

(Action Jackson Font | dafont.com)

02008-09-05

back from the west

Yeah, the obligatory photo album:

02008-09-03

no, he doesn’t like him either

Not long ago, Kenny G put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old Louis Armstrong record, the track “What a Wonderful World”. With this single move, Kenny G became one of the few people on earth I can say that I really can’t use at all – as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music.

â€”Â Pat Metheny on Kenny G.

02008-09-03

ffms2m3u.sh – create playlist for all files on a Firefly Media Server

ffms2m3u – create playlist for all files on a Firefly Media Server.

If you run Firefly Media Server, you can run this script to create an M3U of all the tracks on your server. You can play this in most audio players; VLC likes it, as does iTunes (though big playlists take an age to load). Rhythmbox and the default Ubuntu Movie Player won’t touch my playlist of over 17,000 tracks.

To configure the script you need to edit three lines:

# where the Firefly database lives DATABASE="/usr/var/cache/mt-daapd/songs3.db" # server domain name or IP address SERVER="server.example.com" # Port to talk to server - don't leave blank PORT="3689"
If you’re running Ubuntu, you’ll probably only need to change the SERVER line. It spits the M3U playlist, ordered by album, to stdout. Note that in the default Ubuntu install, regular users can’t read the database file.

If you’re running this from a cron job, it’s probably a good idea to fill in the real paths for sqlite3 and awk.

02008-09-02

me, the fried tie dye

I had to pass unnoticed in Eugene, so I bought a tie-dye shirt from Maggie’s Farm. I like it.

02008-09-02

it was a Kalle Lasn quotation

A beeping truck, backing up in the alley, jolts you out of a scary dreamâ€”a mad midnight chase through a supermarket, ending with a savage beating at the hands of the Keebler elves …

â€” from Culture Jamming.

02008-09-01

iffy photo, great evening

$Dan Jones and Dave Snider at Sam Bond\'s$

Dan Jones and Dave Snider playing an impromptu set at Sam Bonds Garage (Brian Patrick is out of shot).

02008-08-30

in Eugene less than 12 hours, already addicted to Yumm! sauce

We met up with Dan and Tracy last night. Dan fixed us an epic chicken salad, with the local delicacy of Yumm! sauce. Yumm! sauce is somewhere between almond butter, hummus and mayo, except not quite any of them. It’s good; we had the chipotle.

A purported recipe for Yumm! Sauce must be tried.

(Dan was disappointed that I hadn’t mentioned that dog treats were sampled after the meal: they were.)

02008-08-29

on missing the boat

Nothing quite like missing the Tsawwassen ferry by one minute.

(And this post was photographed and sent entirely on blackberry. The geotag I cheated and used my Garmin. I had time to kill …)

02008-08-27

hooray for heather’s

We arrived in Vancouver yesterday, and in the hotel hit a snag: the combination lock of my case wouldn’t open. I don’t remember setting one, so the prospect of going through 000 .. 999 to get at my clothes would be tiresome.

Thank goodness for Heather’s Luggage Repair. They reset the combination, and showed me the annoying little feature of combination locks that can cause this to happen.

02008-08-21