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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.

Wed, 21 Nov 2018

David Rawlings and Gillian Welch: 'Airplane' and 'The Trip'

David Rawlings in general, and this video in particular came to my attention because he plays acoustic archtop guitars and at some point in the past couple of years switched from an 1930s Epiphone to this very significant 1959 D'Angelico Excel. It's rare to see these played without pickups, and I wish guitarists did it more.

This video has Rawlings on the Epiphone Olympic. Still sounds great:

If you want to hear someone talk extensively about how acoustic archtop guitars sound, especially in a swing jazz context, Jonathan Stout's videos can provide a lot of insight.

Posted: Nov 21, 2018 11:29am UTC

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Category: /music/

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Sun, 18 Nov 2018

A local web-based program might not be such a bad idea

I just wanted to make a simple GUI program. You know, one that lives on your computer hard drive and creates, modifies and saves files, then uses that data to do things. Oh, and I wanted it to be cross-platform, meaning it would work on Windows, MacOS and Linux with little or no modification.

Sounds easy, right?

Previously: Everything doesn't have to be a web program

Well, despite the fact that local GUI programs aren't exactly dead — web browsers are GUI programs, for Christ's sake, the average coder is less and less interested in writing programs that run on desktop and laptop computers and almost exclusively interested in creating web apps that run in a browser and that maybe, possibly get magically turned into mobile phone apps through some voodoo with React Native or a similar and massive hunk of code.

"But I don't want to worry about security and establishing a account system for my app, which really should just run as a local program on a local PC," I said.

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Posted: Nov 18, 2018 3:20pm UTC

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Category: /programming/

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