I'm actually doing it. I'm writing a blog-posting program that will take an http link, extract the remote page's title and create a social-media-style blog post (title, body text and link) that can be easily uploaded to my flat-file blogging system's server.

The idea is to make it as easy to post a "social"-style update to my own blog as it is to post to Twitter (or Facebook or Google+).

(I use IFTTT -- and formerly dlvr.it -- to post these social entries on Twitter, but I could see this program taking over that task as well.)

Back to my application. I could have gone several different ways from a conceptual standpoint.

• I could have done this idea as a web app, but in order to get the files to upload to the blog, I'd either have to write a server component on that side, or create a backend service -- with some measure of security -- to handle the upload (I'm using FTP, but it doesn't have to be that).

• I thought about a desktop GUI. I want this to be a true cross-platform app. I seriously considered using the now-ancient Tk framework with Ruby. I less-seriously considered Java FX, though I did successfully hack together code to upload via FTP using Java. (At least it was a worthwhile programming exercise.) I could have gone with QT. Maybe I could have done the whole thing with QML.

I'm not ruling out any of these GUI solutions, but I needed to start coding, and the easiest, quickest thing for me to do (or so I thought) is a menu-driven console app. I could have gone with Java, JavaScript, Ruby, even Perl. I did tests of various components in three of those languages.

I'm writing the app for the console with an eye toward re-using the code in a future GUI app, and for that reason maybe I should have used JavaScript.

But I really wanted to use Ruby. I'm trying to grasp object-orientated programming, and there is a whole lot of web-based help for Ruby programmers that often acknowledges that there are beginners out there who need a helping hand.

And I really would love to eventually port this code to Tk, or even as a Sinatra or Rails app. I should want to do it in JavaScript. But Ruby is so friendly, and it's made for use in the console.

So I'm writing it in Ruby. And I have some 190 lines of code that do the following:

• Display a menu of tasks and wait for input
• When a URL is entered, grab the HTML title
• Create a simple document with a title and text derived from the remote HTML title
• Add a Markdown-formatted link back to the original HTML page
• Save all as a text file with an auto-generated file name incorporating the current date and text derived from the title
• Allow user to enter different text for the title or body
• Let user choose not to include the source site's URL
• Save all to a text file
• Upload to website via FTP and "tell" blog to index the new entry

I have all of these features working, and while the app is very far from perfect, it is functional. The code isn't ready for public consumption -- it needs lots of cleanup before I publish it, and it's really meant more for Ode users and blogs that work in a similar way (files are uploaded to a server, from which the blog software renders them for the reader) than it is for flat-file systems such as Hugo, where a dedicated program builds the blog locally and sends files on their way, but the concepts and code used in this app can certainly be modified for that workflow -- and I'm not at all above doing that in the future.

Aside from adding more features, primarily the ability to edit elements instead of re-typing them (maybe by invoking the vi editor), I want to make the code more modular. Right how it's a huge procedural hack, and modularity (and object orientation) will make it cleaner and more flexible. That's the idea anyway.

Before that I need to clean up the configuration, which is all over the place.

Still, I wanted to make an app, I used the skills I had (and Googled and read plenty), and now I have something that works, however ugly it may look on the back end.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux - which is no longer being referred to officially as "Bash on Windows" - has grown up.

You no longer need to put your Windows 10 system into Developer Mode to use the WSL.

And now there are three different WSLs: Ubuntu, openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Fedora is supposed to be on the way, but I haven't heard anything about progress toward that happening in a long time.

According to Microsoft, you can copy your current Ubuntu files to /mnt/c/tmp/WSL-backup, or a similar directory, and then use lxrun /install from the Windows command line to remove the old WSL. Then you can install a new WSL and move your files back after that.

Fellow Redditors suggested that I create a tar archive of my files, stow it anywhere, and then unpack it in my new /home directory when I remove the old WSL and install the new one via the Windows Store.

The only thing keeping me from doing it is what always keeps me from switching Linux distros: The need to re-install all of my packages.

The other thing keeping me from making this move is that my laptop hasn't yet received the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. To successfully install the new WSL, your Windows build needs to be 16215.0 or higher. According to my About Windows 10 page, I'm on 15063.674. So not only can I wait, unless I opt to get the updates early (and I'm sure there is a way to do this), I must wait. And honestly, that doesn't bother me one bit.

Update: (July 4, 2018): Here is my Independence Day update to these instructions. The "original" instructions should work fine, but the "new" ones are better:

The original instructions

Originally I created the tar archive of my home directory in my home directory:

$ tar -zcvf steven.tar.gz /home/steven
$ cp steven.tar.gz /mnt/c/Users/steve/OneDrive/Documents/linux_backup/

And to open it up when your new WSL is set up, go to your home directory:

$ tar -zxvf /path/to/steven.tar.gz

Then you'll have a home directory within your home directory (i.e. for me /home/steven/steven, and you can copy what you want from one to the other). It's better not to overwrite everything in your "new" Linux /home directory because it might handle things in your dot files differently, and I can see conflicts arising from npm modules, ruby gems and whatever else you happened to install in the course of working in your Windows box's Linux side.

I'm not sure how much of a problem it is, but creating the tar archive while in your home directory causes tar to throw the following error:

tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
... (lots of output)
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

There are explanations of what this error message means on the Internet, but they didn't really help me understand it.

So I did things a different way. If you just want to know how to make the backup and restore it, start here:

The new instructions

First, on the Windows side, create a directory in which to hold this backup. I created one called linux_backup in my OneDrive Documents directory.

Then go into your WSL, which will put you in your home directory on the Linux side (which for me is /home/steven).

From there, to avoid the error message I go up one directory and do the tar operation from there. I use pwd a couple of times to confirm where I am in the filesystem, and I use chown to make sure the restored archive belongs to my Linux user and group.

Note: in all of these instructions, things after a $ are things you type at the command line. Lines that don't begin with a $ represent output in the terminal (and you don't have to type them).

Here is what my terminal session looks like:

$ pwd
/home/steven
$ cd ..
$ pwd
/home
$ sudo tar -zcvf steven.tar.gz steven
$ ls
steven steven.tar.gz
$ chown steven:steven steven.tar.gz
$ sudo cp steven.tar.gz /mnt/c/Users/steve/OneDrive/Documents/linux_backup/

Now you have your tar archive on the Windows side.

After you set up your "new" WSL, you can copy the tar archive from the Windows side into your new Linux /home directory. As before, I use a couple of pwd command to confirm where I am in the Linux filesystem. (And remember, use YOUR home directory and Windows path to your tar archive, not mine):

$ pwd
/home/steven
$ sudo cp /mnt/c/Users/steve/OneDrive/Documents/linux_backup/steven.tar.gz steven.tar.gz
$ sudo chown steven:steven steven.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf steven.tar.gz
$ ls
steven
$ cd steven
$ pwd
/home/steven/steven

Now you have your "new" home directory at /home/steven, and your "old" files at /home/steven/steven. Copy what you want from old to new, and you should be ready to go.

Once you confirm that all your files are in there, you can blow away the old WSL and use your new one. And you should still have a copy of the tar archive on your Windows filesystem if anything goes wrong.

Before going forward, it's a good idea to read up on how to make a tar.gz archive.

My question (and maybe yours): Why do this from the Ubuntu/WSL shell when you could just copy/paste from the Windows file manager, or why not just copy the files via the Ubuntu shell to the Windows portion of the disk?

Answer (and I did test this): In both cases, even when using Bash to do the recursive cp of all the files, you lose your Linux file permissions. In my case, all of my rw-r--r-- files turned into rwxrwxrwx, which is NOT what you (or I) want.

Update on 4/23/18: This entry was written last October but not published until now. It kind of got lost, and I just found and finished it. Though the new WSL is out, and you can now install Debian (which I would) or SUSE (probably not), I'm leaning toward sticking with Ubuntu because it's working so well, though I'm a longtime Debian fan and user (though not so much lately).

Whatever I do, I probably need to move to the "new" WSL, though I haven't done it yet. Everything is working, so it's hard to muster the motivation to mess with what until now has been a successful installation of Ubuntu in Windows 10.

Update on 7/4/18: The new instructions for making an archive of the /home directory are more detailed and a little more roundabout. But they should work, and tar won't throw any errors.

Also, I still haven't moved to a new WSL. The current Ubuntu WSL is still on 16.04 LTS, and that's the same version as my "old" WSL. When the Ubuntu WSL moves to 18.04 LTS, then it'll be time to make the change.

I received an email recently from Ewa Dudzic of BSD Magazine asking to interview me. I demurred because I'm barely using Linux right now, let alone a BSD. My "intense" BSD period was around 2008-09 when I had a laptop that wouldn't boot from CD, and OpenBSD's floppy image (you heard right) allowed me to get it up and running.

I blogged a lot about it. I had a lot of fun with OpenBSD, and I tried a couple of others with endings both catastrophic (FreeBSD, where updates puzzled me and broke the system) and anticlimactic (DragonFlyBSD, where too many applications didn't work).

I've done a few sporadic OpenBSD tests since then, but circumstances at both my work (needing Citrix) and personally (not so interested in operating systems or free software as a movement, seeing overall interest in free software wane considerably since Windows 7 came out, and my growing interest in programming) led me to the point where I was running Fedora on my "old" laptop and Windows 10 with the Windows Subsystem for Linux on my "new" laptop.

I'm still very much involved in programming, using Ruby, Java, the Bash shell and a little bit of Perl.

And in my day job, I can mostly leave my Citrix-delivered system behind in favor of a whole lot of WordPress.

And -- yes there is another and -- these days I mostly use an old Roku (with USB input) for video, so my laptops don't double as entertainment machines.

Could I set up my old laptop as a development machine using OpenBSD?

The one difference in favor of this is the JDK being available as a package. Installing the Java Development Kit back in 2009 was far from easy. I can't remember if I was even able to do it.

Adding Ruby and Node seem easy. Will Ruby gems and npm packages work? That's something I'll have to investigate as I go.

Whenever I look at the OpenBSD website, documentation and, more importantly, extensive list of available packages, I get hopeful about the system working for me.

I'm not afraid of a little maintenance, and the new syspatch utility promises to make updating the base system quicker and easier than ever before. Being OK with the same non-base packages for six months is potentially unsettling, but for a sane system that just works (just works is very, very important to me these days), I could be OK with it. What I don't want is problem after problem after problem with basic functionality (display, WiFi, sound, CPU heat, suspend/resume). I'm cautiously ... cautious.

I have learned that there are OpenBSD communities on Reddit and Facebook and probably in other places (obviously including openbsd.misc).

I've already started collecting links (mined from Reddit) to help me get an OpenBSD system installed and configured:

• Getting an OpenBSD image onto a USB stick using Windows
• Switching to OpenBSD
• Installing OpenBSD 6.1 on your laptop is really hard (not)
• OpenBSD and the modern laptop

Since my old laptop (HP Pavilion g6 from 2010) has easily swappable drives, I can put test OSes on their own drive and not worry about partitioning or blowing out a production system.

I just got an OpenBSD 6.1 image on a USB drive using Win32 Disk Imager in Windows 10, and I'm ready to do the installation.

So am I a good candidate for a BSD-focused interview? I'm not an OS developer, or a serious sysadmin. (I do play at being a sysadmin, don't get me wrong. I run a CentOS system on the live Web, though I do have help when the going gets tough.)

I'm just a user, but I have blogged plenty about what I do with the software I use, and that's not as common as you'd think (and seeming to be out there alone did push me away from my steadfast commitment to open-source operating systems). So the answer is "maybe," and maybe in the days ahead I'll have something to say about OpenBSD in the late 2010s.

Updates (newest first):

• I have done two OpenBSD 6.1 installations on my HP Pavilion g6. The internal Atheros WiFi doesn't work, so I'm using the wired network and an old Realtek-based USB WiFi stick. I blew up the first installation, and now I'm working on the second. I still can't believe that it's so easy to get the JDK installed and running (add the package, add the path to the JDK binaries -- /usr/local/jre-1.8.0/bin -- to your path in .profile ... and that's it).

From The Meteor Chef:

• Building a Twitter clone with Meteor: Part One

• Building a Twitter clone with Meteor: Part Two

• Building a Twitter clone with Meteor: Part Three

I want to create a program that helps me quickly write up a blog post -- especially a "social" blog post based on a link -- and upload that post as a file to a flat-file-driven blogging system.

In case it isn't obvious, I'm not a professional developer. The whole "hey, let's learn to code just because" thing doesn't work so well for me. Tutorials aren't my thing. I need a project. Then I'm compelled to learn what I need to make that project happen, at least in some fashion. The first thing to do is come up with something doable and not so difficult that I can't even get close.

Hence my idea: a flat-file blog posting machine. It's not too complicated. It would be geared mostly for "social" posts, which I stash in a dedicated category directory-driven category on my blog and let IFTTT (and formerly dlvr.it scrape and then send to Twitter. Why do I do this? Because I feel better about "giving" Twitter my free content to promote their business when I have that same content on my website that is wholly owned and operated by me and not them.

Back to the program: I want to be able to enter a URL from a post/story/page that interests me into a box and then have that box generate a title, post body, file name and actual file with the ability to make changes in any of these fields -- all with as little required input from me as a "regular" Twitter post. The program would then upload the file it creates to my web server, also taking care of whatever back-end housekeeping is needed to make that post appear on the blog. And if I could figure out the Twitter API, I could also trigger the social post itself and eliminate the need for IFTTT or dlvr.it.

Read the rest of this post

My workplace used to have a box for recycled household batteries, and that was a very useful perk. It's not up there with free air-conditioning and coffee but useful nonetheless.

Now that box is gone forever, and my dead-battery stash, consisting of a bunch of plastic bags in my car, was starting to build.

And it's surprisingly hard to find a place that will take them. EVERYBODY uses batteries. And you're not supposed to throw them out in the regular trash, so this seems like a huge problem.

One place that definitely takes used batteries -- and not just the rechargeable kind that are suprisingly easy to unload -- is the city of Los Angeles at its LA City SAFE Centers, which are only open on weekends.

According to some web sites, IKEA Burbank accepts batteries for recycling, but I see no mention of it on their web site.

I did figure it out. I stopped at Best Buy. They take used batteries, rechargeable and the other kind. I was at the Woodland Hills location on Victory Boulevard near Owensmouth Avenue, and I unloaded all the battery-filled plastic bags in my car.

Thanks, Best Buy.

I have been doing what some people call "wet shaving" -- with a double-sided safety razor instead of the usual cartridge-based razors -- for well over a year. Believe it or not, I was inspired to start wet-shaving by The Dick Turpin Road Show, an ostensibly Linux-focused (and now regrettably silent) podcast that was mostly two British guys sitting around talking. Even when presenter Pete was wet-shaving his head and bleeding like crazy as a result, I still wanted to do it.

I use these Personna double-edged razor blades in the Target-sold Van der Hagen safety razor my girls got me for Father's Day probably two years ago. Amazon sells them in a box of 100. They are currently going for $12.30 a box. That is very cheap, and if I wanted to use each blade only once, it would be a bargain. I rarely go more than three shaves on a blade -- why do that when they're so cheap.

When the blades are done, I drop them in this Feather Blade Disposal Case:

These are the guitar strings I'm using right now.

On the Gibson ES-175 electric archtop, I'm moving away from flatwounds for the first time. At least three players I admire, Pat Metheny, Joshua Breakstone and Bruce Forman (all links go to their string choices), are using roundwounds on their archtop guitars.

You do get some finger squeaks, but the sound of the lower four wound strings is much clearer. I guess you can say it's more defined -- less "smoky" maybe. Whatever you call it. The guitar is sounding better. (in case you were wondering, my flatwounds of choice were D'Addario Chromes -- the .013 set, and I usually replaced the higher two strings -- the .013 and .017 -- with an .014 and .018).

I'm using the .013 set of Ernie Ball Nickel Wound strings -- the pack with the eagle on it. I'm also sticking with the .013 and .017 in the set instead of opting for the slightly heavier replacement strings:

On my Fender guitar, a 1979 Lead I (though for some reason the serial number says it's a 1981), I actually used D'Addario Chromes flatwounds -- the .012 set -- for a long time. Way back in the past, I used .010 and .011 roundwound sets: Ernie Ball Slinkys, GHS Nickel Rockers (before I knew there was a difference between pure nickel and nickel-plated steel).

The .012 flatwounds were definitely too big for the nut on the lower couple of strings, though the extra tension didn't affect the neck at all. That 1970s Fender neck is a single piece of maple with no added fretboard and a skunk stripe behind it to cover the truss rod, and it's super strong. I have never needed to adjust the truss rod.

I wanted something slightly lighter. Strings that would fit in the nut slots without any filing, and a clearer, less-boomy, more defined low end.

I picked up a set of Ernie Ball Power Slinky strings, which start with a .011 high E and tend to run slightly lighter in the lower strings than the usual .011 set.

The strings have been great. Returning to roundwounds on both my Gibson and Fender is like I'm playing two new guitars. You can change your sound so much just by changing strings and picks -- two of the cheapest things in the guitar world.

Slinkys are nickel-plated steel, and I do have a set of this same gauge made with pure nickel windings called Slinky Classics. Pure nickel is supposed to be more subtle than nickel-plated steel. Maybe they'll sound better. But I like this current Ernie Ball Slinky set so much, I don't want to make the change.

I don't need a .052 or .054 for the low E (like Ernie Ball's Skinny Top Heavy Bottom and Beefy Slinkys), and this set is balanced very well for what I want.

Here's what the Ernie Ball set looks like:

My Yamaha flattop guitar -- it's probably 5 years old at this point -- has a solid top and is a "solid" guitar all around. It's put together very well and is pretty tough.

The guitar shipped with Yamaha's own custom-gauged set of .012s -- roughly equivalent to light-gauge strings. I think the strings were phosphor bronze, which tend to have a longer life.

I probably should have stuck with .012s when I changed the strings, but I decided to go up to a medium-gauge set that begins with a .013. I went for Ernie Ball Earthwood 80/20 bronze strings.

They sound amazing, and they're cheap enough that I don't mind changing them sooner.

This was my first time changing flattop strings. I've changed strings on electric and classical guitars hundreds of times -- I even do the thing where you tie the nylon strings to the bridge.

But bridge pins? I was a bridge pin virgin. I had the bridge-pin puller on the end of my string winder. One of the pins popped out with such force that it hit the ceiling. After that I made sure to block the path with my hand. I did have one of the pins edge out a bit after I tightened the string up. But I got it done.

I'm not a fan of bridge pins. It's just the tension of the pin and the angle of the string tension holding everything together. I'd prefer an archtop tailpiece. That I can deal with.

I also had to crank the truss rod quite a few turns after I replaced the .012s with .013s. I started with quarter turns, but I had to keep cranking and cranking, loosening the strings in between adjustments. I thing I have it right now. I got tired of cranking after awhile. It plays well and sounds great.

Here is my Ernie Ball Earthwood set:

So, what did I play today? I have been working on "How High the Moon," but today I worked on the chords for "Waltz for Debby." I'm very, very slow. That's what I'll say about it.S

I got a bottle of Dunlop Ultraglide 65 String Cleaner and Conditioner and tried it today on my flattop strings, which happen to be an 80/20 bronze set from the Ernie Ball Earthwood line. The strings are not the most resistant to dirt and corrosion, and they are nowhere near so far gone that they need changing but weren't exactly out-of-the-package new.

The Dunlop 65 appears to be a very lemony oil, and it easily went on the strings with the spongy applicator, after which I wiped off the excess

The strings were cleaner, and a lot smoother. I definitely recommend this stuff. Clean strings aren't the worst thing, and this stuff makes it easy.

Back in the day I used to use rubbing alcohol to clean my strings. That can be drying, to say the least, if you get any on the wood of the neck, and it certainly doesn't make the strings feel smooth. This stuff from Dunlop is a lot better.

A bottle costs somewhere between $5 and $7 -- about the price of a set of strings. It's worth it.

I manage a CentOS 6 server, and I have a request to replace PHP 5 with PHP 7.

Here is a solid and mercifully brief tutorial on how to do it.