This is my work PC running Firefly Client, serving my music from home. Who needs to install and manage local music libraries now?
Blog
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oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about
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bo the spider
We have quite the colony of largish, leggy spiders in our basement. They pretty much keep to themselves, as they have plenty of work thinning the woodlouse herds.
I was improvising a barre-chord hambone beat on the tele, when I noticed one of the spiders walking towards me. I stopped; it stopped. I started again; so did it. I switched to the 12-string acoustic and started bashing out the same rhythm; spider was like “meh” and stayed put.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a spider with the soul the late Mr Diddley in our basement …
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default means default, microsoft
When I’ve specified the default e-mail signature, I shouldn’t have to click on another drop-down called default to make it appear in my Outlook message:
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am I good, or what?
Presenting the Stewart C. Russell not-patent pick holder:
Yes, it’s just a plastic eraser with knife cuts in it cable-tied to the guitar stand. It works, and both items were in my kitchen drawer. Now I’ll always be able to take my pick …
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the joy of craigslist
- 2 hours
- 23km driven
- $3 parking
- $8 sandwich dinner
- $3 coffee
… all wasted waiting for a silly wee lassie who’d agreed to meet to sell an autoharp, then sold it out from under me.
Real smooth move, Stefanie.
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Recipe: Hurled Eggs
From Phil Austen’s The Big Jewel:
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HURLED EGGS
Submitted by: Tandom Koolzip of Peeorhea, Indianolapolis
“This is a recipe that was tossed to me by someone claiming to be my grandmother.”
Preparation time: Instantaneous
INGREDIENTS:
Eggs
Someone to throw eggs atThat’s all she wrote. In old-fashioned script.
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the dire effects of Whiskey Before Breakfast
This is allegedly what happens when the battery runs out on your Zoom H2 while recording: whiskey before breakfast. This is Nichol playing his Collings during a lesson.
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Four items I really liked that Tim Hortons discontinued
- Beef stew in a bread bowl
- Tuna sandwiches
- Chicken fajita
- Slow-roast beef sandwich.
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Modifying the Reagan Banjo Capo
I use a Reagan banjo capo on my nylon-strung Harmony banjo. It’s a little chunk of brass with a saw-cut to take the string, a thumb-screw to keep it tight, and some felt stuck on the bottom to protect the fretboard.
As supplied, the string slot was too narrow to take nylon strings, and too low to effectively fret the string. What I did was:
- Open out the slot with the patient application of fine sandpaper. This took a long time, and kept gouging up the edge of the sandpaper sheet.
- Replace the felt with a thicker piece of neoprene cut from an old mouse mat.
The capo still bobs about, but stays on the neck where it should. I still haven’t solved the problem of where to store it, though.
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Made in India … by Gits
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combines the snark with the useful
Down for everyone or just me? helps you tell if a site’s working, or if it’s just your router. I could’ve used this earlier in the week, as I frantically fiddled with my router until I noticed the crew working on the pole line …
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one Pete Seeger, there’s only one Pete Seeger
Oh my, Pete Seeger, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Guy Davis were great last night at Hugh’s Room. Everyone was belting out the songs, and having a great old time.
(thanks to Kathy Reid-Naiman for the photo.)
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1kg of recycling
I 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.
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bbtrackerwpt – create GPX files of named waypoints from bbtracker
I 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
printstatements. 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
I’m learning to yodel, from Cathy Fink & Tod Whittemore’s Learn to Yodel. Why not?
