I've been meaning to make this switch for awhile, and today I switched things around in my BlogPoster script so that the social-media-style entries I generate with it are now going directly to my Updates site.

So the message you currently see at the top of this site is not entirely accurate anymore. I will keep it there for now while the changes to the script are still young, but from here forward, My shortish entries that are generally mirrored on Twitter will not appear here, even temporarily.

When I change the message above, I will probably put some kind of link or navigation that allows readers to toggle between the main blog and the updates site.

I have been working on a new version of the BlogPoster script, but it's been slow going, so I might try to separate the configuration information and put it in a separate file so I can publish the current script, more or less, on GitHub. That's the main problem -- I'm developing using a version of the live script that I am actually using, so it's hard to avoid committing logins and passwords to git. Once I have them separated out, I can create a sample configuration file and let the script create the "live" version of same on the first run.

It's funny. Now that I have the program that I intended to write (with the exception being that it's a command-line utility and not a GUI application ... yet), I spend a lot more time using it than I do hacking on it. I need to tip things in the other direction.

One of the reasons I decided to do much of my daily computing with the Windows 10 operating system that came with my other newer HP laptop is the constant trickle of issues that I'm tired of dealing with in Linux.

I'm running a newly installed Fedora 28 on this 2012-made (and 2013-bought) HP Pavilion g6 -- meaning there has been ample time for all hardware incompatibilities to be resolved. But when returning from suspend/resume, everything works except for the wired networking. WiFi is fine, as is the display, sound, keyboard and mouse.

But wired networking won't work until I reboot.

For the record, the WiFi card is a Qualcomm Atheros AR9485, and the wired Ethernet card is a Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL810xE PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller, both according to lspci.

The "culprit" in this case is the r8169 module, and I tried this 2013-era fix: Fix Network after Resume from suspend in Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

This ancient fix did not work.

While there's a detective/hobbyist aspect to solving these problems in Linux, I'd rather that things just worked. I saw a Fedora bug report on this issue from 2016, and it's fairly obvious that this regression hasn't been resolved. There's even a 2018 update that points this out.

The good part of this bug is that it only affects my Realtek wired interface. The Atheros WiFi interface works fine after suspend/resume, and since I use WiFi most of the time, this issue shouldn't keep me from getting things done. It's still a pain.

Before my Fedora 27-to-28 upgrade failed in a spectacular enough fashion that I had to figure out how to reinstall the operating system while keeping my user files (spoiler alert: I was successful in doing it), I had a system that had been though maybe 10 successful upgrades and had collected plenty of cruft along the way.

This particular laptop, now a 5-year-old HP Pavilion g6, made it through the transitions from yum to dnf and X11 to Wayland and from the time the Catalyst/AMD driver worked to when it didn't (and I didn't need it).

For the F28 upgrade to go wrong was very much out of character for my experience with Fedora, which I began using with F13 (quickly upgraded to F14) on my previous laptop, a 2010-era Lenovo G555, before an upgrade-gone-bad sent me to Debian for the rest of its life. That cheap Lenovo died a quick death in 2013, going to sleep one minute, not waking up, ever again, the next.

There were and are many reasons to run Fedora. But for me, the constant flow of new Linux kernels meant my at-the-time new hardware would be supported much more quickly than in distros that kept the same kernel for the life of the release. And to get that constant newness, all I had to do was make sure the system was updated. That was my No. 1.

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John Coltrane's rendition of "My Favorite Things" from the 1961 album of the same name) is pretty much a gateway into Coltrane.

This isn't that version. Instead, here is the 1966 version from "Live at the Village Vanguard Again!", with a much different band in an equally different era for Coltrane. Basically, free jazz entered, and he embraced it.

Though I love the "classic" Coltrane quartet, this is a great band, and I'm really listening to Alice Coltrane's piano -- I like her approach to the tune. Aside from John Coltrane himself, bassist Jimmy Garrison is the only other holdover from that classic quartet, and the lines he plays are also very different from those of bassist Steve Davis on the recording made five years before. You can tell that Garrison had played the tune live with Coltrane probably hundreds of times.

I'm still absorbing this version, but it's notable that the band plays a full 3 minutes before John Coltrane plays the tune's melody.

For comparison's sake, here's the "classic" rendition of "My Favorite Things" from 1961:

As I'm reading through Evan Klitzke's excellent blog, I came across Esc is Ctrl-[.

One of Vim's quirks is that it's a modal editor, and you switch from edit mode (where you're typing things) to command mode by hitting the esc key, which on most keyboards is the upper-leftmost key on the keyboard.

Lots of Vim/vi users map esc to a ctrl key, but Evan says that ctrl-[ is a default equivalent of esc.

He's right. Try it.

I'm not sure if ctrl-[ will replace esc in my future, but it very well might.

If you think of using your keyboard like a that of a musician -- and when text editing, I think this is a very valid comparison -- think of how you type.

I do touch type -- I learned it on manual typewriters at U.S. Grant High School in the San Fernando Valley back in the day. I can't remember if I took one semester or two, but it was enough to give me a lifelong ability that I use every day-- and heavily.

But when it comes to things like esc keys or ctrl sequences, pre-computer touch-typing doesn't really help.

So here's the deal: I use my left-hand ring finger (or 3rd finger in guitar-fingering parlance) to hit the esc (as well as the backtick key below it. I can generally find esc fairly well, though I have to look much of the time to get the backtick.

But ctrl-[ is a little harder to type. I use the left-ctrl with my left pinky finger (aka 4th finger), and it looks like I'll have to hit the [ with my right pinky finger (or maybe 3rd finger). That's a funky stretch for my right hand. I may be able to get used to it, but the question is whether it's easier or faster than stabbing for esc with my left hand's 3rd finger.

In any case, having an esc alternative in Vim without any configuration is a nice feature.

My Fedora 27 system died a less-than-noble death at the hands of a Fedora 28 upgrade.

Maybe my error was upgrading too early (it was about a week after the release), or maybe it was because my system was too old. I probably started this installation on Fedora 17 or 18. That's a lot of upgrades, and one was bound to go south. This was that one.

So I reinstalled Fedora 28 from the ISO via USB, keeping my same partitions. (Note to Fedora developers: This should be easier to do. I had to bluff my way through it.)

Now that I have a new Fedora, I'm trying to keep it simple.

Instead of a bunch of desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE), I'm sticking with the stock GNOME.

I'm only slowly adding the things that died with F27. I just added the RPM Fusion repositories, and before that I installed the Ruby programming language and all the packages I needed to install the gems I need. I have everything

I don't even have Google Chrome. Don't need it. Firefox has made a lot of progress in the past year, and who doesn't need less spying?

Normally I'm an Xfce user, but I can get around (and get along) with GNOME 3.

Nautilus -- or Files as it's now called -- is appreciably fast, especially compared to the Windows file manager (where the lag is not a deal breaker but is noticeable).

I'm enjoying using gEdit (aka Text Editor). I'm not saying I won't add Geany at some point, but for now this works. I added the gedit-plugins so I could get the built-in-terminal, though Menu - Tools - External Tools - Open Terminal Here is probably more useful.

Since I had to reinstall Fedora 28 (though I got to keep my files), I'm still setting things up.

Among those things I'm still setting up is Dropbox. Since the Dropbox service itself is not free software, you won't find a Dropbox package in the main Fedora repository.

You can get an RPM package directly from Fedora, but I don't recommend it. Why? Because I just installed it, and dnf was having issues with the Dropbox repo.

So I removed that package, removed the repo from /etc/yum.repos.d, and added the RPM Fusion repositories with the links on the configuration page. Make sure you get both the free and nonfree repos.

Then install Dropbox from the command line:

$ sudo dnf install dropbox

Note on RPM Fusion: You can certainly run Fedora without RPM Fusion, but I wouldn't.

Dropbox update: The Nautilus integration with Dropbox -- at least when it comes to those little icons that tell you if a particular folder or file is synced, syncing or not synced -- is broken. I can't tell if it's me, Dropbox, or GNOME Files that is messing up. I tried completely deleting my Dropbox dot files/folders, and that didn't make a difference, except for a long operation to re-sync everything.

The only reason I'm revisiting this topic is that a failed Fedora 27-to-28 upgrade forced me to reinstall Fedora 28, and I just had to get Ruby and a few gems installed and working.

It wasn't easy, and it makes me want to recommend Ubuntu and Debian over Fedora because I strongly suspect that those distros make it easier.

My first recommendation for Linux in general is to use the Ruby that your distro ships with. I know there are ways to get exactly the Ruby you want, and there are developers who need to do that, but I'm not in that particular boat, so I use what the distro ships.

In keeping with the distro-approved Ruby, I also try to use the local Linux package manager to install as many gems as are available. Linux package management makes everything easier and less prone to breakage, so I try to use it wherever possible.

I needed the nokogiri gem, and that was available as a package.

Not so for the twitter gem. I needed to use gem install, and right away I ran into a problem. Before I could install (and build) the gem, I needed to install a few things in Fedora. Luckily I found this web page that told me exactly what to do:

$ sudo dnf install ruby-devel
$ sudo dnf group install "C Development Tools and Libraries"
$ sudo dnf install redhat-rpm-config

Only then could I use gem install to get the twitter gem:

$ gem install twitter

I'm pretty sure that both Debian and Ubuntu package the twitter gem, making all of this unnecessary.

Here are three excellent podcasts (each with a transcript) about Clojure from the CaSE (Conversations about Software Engineering) Podcast, all with Joy Clark as host:

• Clojure with Alex Miller (Aug. 3, 2017)
• ClojureScript with David Nolen (Nov. 9, 2017)
• Problem Solving and Clojure 1.9 with Rich Hickey (May 3, 2018)