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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Sat, 31 Dec 2016

JavaScript books for 2017

"Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming" by Marijn Haverbeke

"Learning JavaScript: JavaScript Essentials for Modern Application Development" by Ethan Brown

"Speaking JavaScript: An In-Depth Guide for Programmers" by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

"Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms" by Loiane Groner

"You Don't Know JS" (series) by Kyle Simpson

"Programming JavaScript Applications: Robust Web Architecure With Node, HTML5 and Modern JS Libraries" by Eric Elliott

The guitar is wood and strings and fingers

I found this picture of my 1976 Gibson ES-175 in my 2016 photo folder. I now remember taking it to show my new guitar-playing friend Dave Green what the guitar's pickguard looks like so he could compare it to his Japanese-made ES-175 copy.

Here you see much of the guitar's body. What pegs it as a 1970s Gibson archtop electric? It has chrome pickup covers and a chrome tailpiece (as opposed to nickel, which tends to age, albeit gracefully) and "witch hat" volume and tone knobs. The nickel covers -- made famous on the rare and pricey PAF (Patent Applied For) humbuckers -- tend to age, albeit gracefully. I believe Gibson introduced the "witch hat" knobs in the late 1960s. Earlier Gibson electrics came with "top hat" or speed knobs.

You can't see it here, but the neck is made of three pieces of maple (as opposed to a single piece of mahogany on earlier models) and includes the thickened "volute" near the nut, meant to strengthen the neck at the point where many Gibson's suffer from catastrophic breaks.

All three of those things contribute to neck strength: maple instead of mahogany, laminated instead of one piece, volute instead of no volute. The volute was unpopular and eventually discontinued. It doesn't bother me. I kind of like the "feel" of knowing I'm at the end of the neck.

The bridge on this guitar, for this year of production (1976) is a bit of an anomaly. It's a compensated rosewood bridge, the kind that Gibson had been using for decades on its archtop guitars, both acoustic and electric. I call it an anomaly because one of the changes Gibson made on the 1976 ES-175 is switching from the traditional wooden bridge to a metal Tune-O-Matic like you would find on a Les Paul or ES-335.

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Cut down a #4 coffee filter into a #2

So you have the bigger Melita-style No. 4 paper coffee filters for 8- to 12-cup coffee makers and you need a smaller No. 2 filter for your single-cup pour-over cone filter (or 2-cup coffee maker)?

It happens more often than you think. I'm always running out of No. 2's and always have plenty of No. 4's. Mostly because Costco sells a huge pack of the larger filters.

You can just stuff the bigger paper filter into the smaller pour-over cone filter (I have both plastic and ceramic versions).

Or you can trim about an inch off of the larger filter. Use a scissors and follow the curve. It'll save you a trip to wherever coffee filters are sold and help you plow through your endless supply of No. 4's.

Tue, 27 Dec 2016

Eric Elliott on JavaScript

I am linking to these Eric Elliott articles on JavaScript programming because I don't want to forget about them.

Eric Elliott: 12 Books Every JavaScript Developer Should Read

Eric Elliott: The Software Developer’s Library: A Treasure Trove of Books for People Who Love Code

Eric Elliott: Learn to Code: 13 Tips that Could Save You Years of Effort

Eric Elliott: Native Apps are Doomed

Eric Elliott: Why Native Apps Really are Doomed: Native Apps are Doomed pt 2

Mon, 26 Dec 2016

A Chicago song I actually like

I've never been a big fan of Chicago, the band. I've heard this song before and had no idea it was by them. But I really like "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?"

Thu, 15 Dec 2016

Ode is a strong performer

Ode runs Perl via CGI on the server. That doesn't mean it is slow.

Turns out it is very, very fast.

I can render an index page with previews of every post (all 900+) in about 20 seconds.