The friendly Javascript for Cats tutorial recommends the Underscore.js library, which does look pretty useful.

I use Disqus a lot. For work. I mod HUNDREDS of comments a day on a few dozen sites, and the Disqus Admin interface had been making that task very difficult in recent months.

But sometime during the past week, Disqus updated its Admin interface on the web, and it is much easier to moderate the comments.

Things were broken and now they are fixed. Thanks, Disqus.

My experience, anyway, is that heavily used laptops like mine don't last anywhere forever.

My Lenovo G555 lasted a little more than two years before it died.

And now I've had this HP Pavilion G6 2210-us for three years and six months. I'm on my third battery (luckily they're cheap), and now I'm about to replace the entire keyboard (also cheap).

I bumped up the RAM to the maximum of 8 GB a while ago. No regrets there.

The HP has had one catastrophic drop onto concrete that didn't affect it at all -- except for some nasty abrasions on the plastic case.

The drive it came with was an ample 640 GB in size. I sort of want to rebuild it as a Linux-only computer with a 1 TB drive. I generally have 100 GB of free space, and I'd have even more if I could kill out the Windows 8 instllation that I could never successfully upgrade to 8.1 and hence never even try to get Windows 10. If I don't go SSD (and I can't see doing that on this old laptop), the 1 TB would give me a lot of breathing room.

So the batteries last about a year, and the keyboard lasts 3 years. I'll replace the keyboard and hope the rest of the thing doesn't go south.

Would a more expensive laptop -- this one sold for around -- last longer? I don't think so, but you never know.

While my last key replacement was rocky yet ultimately successful, the results aren't what I'd hoped. And now the space bar is going wonky.

My "new" N key works, but it doesn't have the clicky/bouncy feel of the other keys. I'm not sure if it's the rubber cup or the hingy mechanism, but it is what it is. And it's not great.

I tried new rubber cups that I got from ReplacementLaptopKeys.com, and that didn't help.

The space bar is just generally loose and mushy, and it doesn't work on the ends all that well.

This time I'm just buying a whole new keyboard. What I didn't know is that they're cheap. For this laptop anyway.

I'm not sure if this is the case for all laptop brands, or just HP, but the market is awash with OEM replacement keyboards, and I just bought one for on eBay. Sure I'll have to take the whole damn laptop apart, but it should really have a new lease on life.

One of the things that would get me using (and learning) more JavaScript would be the ability to take care of all the administrative things I do in (mostly) Bash, (occasionally) Ruby and (very occasionally) Perl using JavaScript via Node on the command line.

I have played a bit with creating and writing files in that environment, and I found the following posts to help in that effort:

• 2ality: Write your shell scripts in JavaScript, via Node.js (from 2011 but probably still relevant)

• Via Shell scripting with Node.js on StackOverflow: I can't wrap my head around it just yet, but some suggest that Grunt can help in this effort

• Also via Shell scripting with Node.js on StackOverflow: Commander.js - node.js command-line interfaces made easy

• Dreamsys Software's JavaScript Shell Scripting Tutorial

• Atlassian Developers: Building command line tools with Node.js

• Trausti Kristjansson: Shell scripts in Javascript (Includes Replicating sed with Javascript and node.js – a Javascript shell script template, and Processing large files)

• George Ornbo: Command Line Utilities with Node.js

• Glynn Phillips: Command-line utilities with Node.js

• Loyola Marymount University: Command Line JavaScript. Also worth checking out are the university's textbook, Programming with JavaScript: Algorithms and Applications for Desktop and Mobile Browsers, though it's hella expensive. On the department's main page, there are links near the bottom to more JavaScript resources.

I started this laptop on Fedora 18 before a fairly quick upgrade to F19. I've kept it going all the way through Fedora 24.

So far that's six "major" upgrades. And it still works fine. Not that it shouldn't, but I don't remember things ever going this smoothly for this long.

You can learn a lot about archtop guitars by going through the "sold" archive at Archtop.com. You can see descriptions and photos of hundreds of actual instruments. It's a valuable historical and educational resource that is really helping me learn about Gibson archtop guitars. What's missing? The prices. For that you need to look at the current inventory list.

What makes these Archtop.com lists so valuable is that there are so many examples of real guitars that have sold. The measurements show how the various models changed from the 1920s and '30s to the present day. They could turn the archive into a book, and I'd buy it.

There's been a squeak in the plumbing. For about a year. When you turn the water on, "squeak." When you turn it off, "squeak."

The picture gives it away. It was the Zurn pressure-reducing valve. We have super-high water pressure, and we probably need two pressure-reducing valves in series but make due with one.

Anyhow, the squeak has been a mystery. Ilene thought it was the pressure-reducing valve all along. I agreed that we probably needed either a new one, or a rebuild on the old one (there's a kit for that).

But I wasn't sure. The sound was super loud in the shower wall.

I ventured into the spider- (and web-) filled crawlspace under the house to check the pipes while the teenager turned the water on and off. I was looking for things that moved. Things that moved enough to squeak.

I found nothing.

Read the rest of this post

My latest GNOME 3 experiment lasted about a week.

And I fully recognize that I pretty much wrote this same post last month.

I'm back again. GNOME wasn't really offering me anything I don't get in Xfce, and when I had to dip into my Citrix apps yesterday, GNOME was giving me trouble.

Between Xfce's Whisker menu, Catfish file finder and the fact that I can run the Nautilus or Dolphin file managers whenever I feel the need (which won't be very often), the comfort, consistency, performance and usability of Xfce drew me back.

Just like the last time.

I didn't feel more productive in GNOME. At times I felt less productive. So why keep going with it?

After saying in a recent post how GNOME 3 wasn't working for me, here I am. Back in GNOME 3.

My use cases are changing, and GNOME 3 has its charms.

Briefly (and not all particularly relevant):

• I will no longer need Citrix in a few months (or so I'm told)
• Nautilus is nice
• I'm considering a "clean" installation of Fedora Workstation (still love Fedora)
• Shutter has improved my screenshot situation
• GNOME 3 looks so nice
• GNOME 3 seems stable
• I now watch video on my TV with a Roku (though GNOME 3 works fine when I have the laptop plugged in via HDMI), meaning my laptop "experience" is more production and development and less video entertainment

I have way too many desktop environments on this laptop. Recently I tried LXQT, which is a nightmare (on my Fedora 24 machine, anyway), LXDE (meh) and KDE/Plasma 5 (I liked it better than I thought I would, but not enough to move to it).

Might as well try GNOME 3 again.

As I say above, I'm contemplating a fresh Fedora installation, and that would be Fedora Workstation from the get-go. If i did that, maybe GNOME Screenshot would work as advertised ...