gooseyard

I had one arrive yesterday and hooked it up today, was worried I'd foul things up somehow since I'd never replaced the Gateway before (my USG was 6 or 7 years old I think) but I just removed the old one, plugged in the new one, adopted it, and off we went. My cable modem seemed to need a reboot but that was it.

I had never enabled the traffic inspection stuff on the USG, so it was neat to finally get a look at that stuff after having it inactive for years. I'd been thinking about getting one of the UDM things but since the USG was working well I figured I'd wait until something like this came along. So far, so good!

I'll plug https://tmate.io/ as well, its incredibly handy

its sort of weird to think that the notion that portability with respect to cgroups is now primarily about whether your version of the linux kernel supports the revision of cgroups that you're concerned about, rather than that you have a kernel that understands cgroups.

im a little older than the author. I also play a musical instrument that I guess you would say is physically demanding, and I have a hobby that is sort of hard on the hands. On the forums I inevitably follow about those activities, there is a sort of background of paranoia about how if you don't do everything perfectly all the time, your hands will be ruined, you will never have seen it coming, and you should base all your decision-making regarding practice time around avoiding catastrophic injury.

I'm sure there are some other people who share my interests who have been the victims of misfortune when it comes to RSI injuries, but I think for the bulk of us who do anything repetitive, it's not incredibly difficult to avoid these issues if you just pay attention to what you feel.

For example, on Friday I noticed that, after pretty much a solid week of intense editing of code (I wrote a large thing and then realized I had gotten it all wrong and needed to move a lot of stuff into different files), I kept noticing that my elbows were killing me because they were grinding into the armrests of my chair. It didn't dawn on me until the end of the week that the reason I don't usually have that elbow discomfort is that years ago I took the armrests off my chair, or as the case with my current chair, I folded them backward and out of the way. I had put them down to clean them or something and forgot about it.

If I mind myself, I'll notice the stuff that makes me uncomfortable. If I try doing whatever that is less and I feel better, then I've learned something. If I stop doing the thing that I've learned makes me uncomfortable, that's great. If I did it too long and I need to visit a doctor or a therapist to help me undo the damage, that's great too.

So long story short, pay attention to how you feel, recognize that however you feel is probably a result of the choices you've made, intentionally or not, and treat your body as a machine that needs maintenance and either find a good technician or learn to do it yourself when it makes sense.

I'm a heavy Reaper user since I love the experience of editing with it, but when I'm fooling around writing songs, I use Garage Band specifically because it has so many great instruments and sounds, and also because I find I interact with it much differently than with Reaper or Pro Tools because of the simplified interface and I don't get sucked into fiddling with the details of what I'm making.

Before Garage Band, I used Tracktion (I think its now called Tracktion Waveform Free) in the same manner. It's been ages since I used it but if you're a Windows or Ubuntu user I think it'd be worth checking out.

competitive de-planing would be an amazing sport

I recently read Peter Turchin's "End Times" (the title is sorta clickbaity I think, as it's not a doomsday book), and in it, he describes a model of societal instability which features "popular immiseration" as a factor. Essentially he claims that the percentage of a population who respond negatively to the question "are you happy?" is correlated with the degree of instability of the social order.

Obviously, the idea of unhappiness is pretty broad, like from "my 401k is doing badly" to "I am unlikely to survive the day", but I suspect that it's true that if a certain threshold of the population answers yes to this question, that you can expect that a pretty large percentage of the respondents are probably in a pretty bad place, and if you have nothing left to lose, finding some way to soothe the pain of the end is at least understandable even if it's what nobody would prefer.

I am nothing even approaching a serious student of these issues, but I do fear that the lack of opportunities for Americans today to find a path to fulfillment with dignity means that many of us will wind up in situations where we are basically riding out the days until our death, and even though so many of the people consigned to this fate are not what we would consider ideal, I think we should judge ourselves as a society by how we address their issues.

Anyhow, Turchin himself comments on this matter in https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societa... , it's an interesting read.

I bought one of the Alesis kits (the Nitro Mesh kit I believe its called) this Christmas (guess why) since some of my drum friends (I'm a bassist) had positive things to say about them. They've been a riot so far, the hardware quality is plenty good for a bunch of hacks banging around on them, lots of good samples in the controller. I have played some of the really cheap Simmons branded ones, which were also a lot of fun but these are more fun for not much more money.

Are you disappointed by the experience of having read it?

a big part of my jazz education was transcribing solos and then comparing them to other students transcriptions of the same piece with an instructor. it's an interesting process because there is almost always variation in the way players notate sections when the time or the harmony gets tricky.

my observation is that transcriptions of recorded music are a lot like text that tries to convey the sound of the spoken word, for example when an author intentionally spells (misspells) words phonetically to capture a speaker's accent or manner of speaking. It's an approximation that tries to split the difference between accuracy and scrutability; you want to try to capture the essence of the sound but if nobody can make sense of the words on the page then it doesn't work. So in the case of Master of Puppets, you have a sound on the record which doesn't really correspond to anything, Metallica weren't writing scores, and so if you create a transcription you have to use context and your judgement with the notation. But really the main goal is not to produce notation which is scrupulous in its accuracy but rather to have something that won't be a pain in the ass for sight readers, and if you've ever worked with something like The Real Book, its very subjective and it takes a lot of experience to know what makes some notation better than others.

Dan Worrall made a fantastic video which touches on Nyquist. His youtube channel is a tremendous resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jCwIsT0X8M

I really enjoy his channel- another good one is the Pine Hollow Auto Diagnostics channel, which has dozens of really involved parasitic draw diagnoses, have learned a great deal from that one.

After reading the comments in recent thread on the NPR Vocal Chain, I thought this article I wrote for some colleagues might be interesting to users who are interested in doing some basic vocal processing for video conferencing or telephony.

I know of at least one serious security incident (maybe this is mentioned in the talk but I didn't hear it) in which data was exfiltrated from the victim's network by patiently making successive dns queries, which were of course unfiltered as they were considered innocuous, for long hostnames in which segments of the data were encoded. It was not an easy thing to patch.

He attempts to separate hapless fools from their money by making films that advance his demonstrably false claims.

hah I was going to say the same thing- it's also maddening when a package's autoconf accepts --disable-shared --enable-static and then fails to pass --static to pkg-config.

If you, or some of the software that you deal with, work in a terminal, you'll have some value of $TERM set. If you use a terminal emulator which isn't one of the classic hits (eg xterm or rxvt), or if you use a terminal mux like screen or tmux, you'll want to have an entry in your terminfo database which describes the terminal accurately, so that simple things like backspace and delete work correctly, or snazzy stuff like 256 color support. So having some kind of general understanding of what terminal capabilities are, how they're expressed in termcap and terminfo, is helpful. In particular, I think having an understanding of the kinds of things that can go wrong in a terminal, for example if you've ever ran cat with a binary file to stdout, is very helpful. It's not the sort of topic you need to spend a lot of time studying, but if you're a UNIX user, I think its a good idea to consider it part of the canon.

oh weird, I first heard about a story like this in https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/, I think perhaps they're both about the same lab.

O'Reilly's "Termcap and Terminfo" book was very helpful in filling in some of the random holes in my understanding of the tty and it's history.

at the end 1999, my employer hosted what I guess was half NYE Party and half Incident Response. We were optimistic that we wouldn't have issues but figured it'd be wise to have a sufficient crew of designated drivers, so to speak.

Our monitoring system included a mercator projection on some big screens, with colored that showed where our gear was and whose color indicated whether it was down, being hammered, etc.

We had no equipment in UTC+14, so there was an hour of waiting between that zone reaching y2k and when we'd maybe see some action. The control room was mobbed since we also had some televisions running cable news there and everyone wanted to see it.

Despite the anxiety, the gear was looking fine everywhere, until about 5 minutes before midnight in UTC+13, when our locations in New Zealand started to turn red. A hush fell over the room as the operators attempted to open connections to those boxes. The connection attempts appeared to hang, and the party got somber. But after the eternity of a few seconds, we were in. The machines were alive but being hammered; the alerts just indicated the excessive traffic caused by mass numbers of users refreshing NZ based websites as the date change approached, to see whether they'd fallen off the net or not. Breathing resumed.

After 15 minutes or so had passed, the traffic fell off, and by the time y2k reached us in UTC+5 we'd been in full festive mode for hours. I still can't look at New Zealand on a map without seeing it covered in angry red circles, though.

Yep! yeah man playing jazz is I think the ultimate challenge for a musician. I made the mistake of trying to lean on fake books for a long time, I think because I didn't believe that it was realistic to memorize enough of the tunes for it to make a difference. Eventually I wound up with a teacher who insisted I do exactly that. I think it should have been obvious to me, but as I'm sure you know, once you have memorized maybe a hundred tunes or so, you develop this mental model that the bulk of all standards fall into on the basis of form, changes, feel etc. Then, even when its an unusual tune, maybe you have to struggle through the first A and B, some kind soul might take pity on you and shout out the changes, and that little bit of extra information is enough combined with all that other stuff you know to get you through the tune.

I guess all that memorization is like the conditioning and training that an athlete might do to prepare for an event, and then at the event you're mostly responding conditions.

I play a lot of sub gigs, often on short notice, usually I get a set list in advance, but often I don't. I've been doing that for, maybe 25-30 years. In the event I get a set list, I've found that what works best for me is to start listening to them about 24-48 hours in advance, and not to play through them more than maybe 2-4 times. Obviously, this is popular short form music, and so I'm mostly getting a picture in my head of the form and the sound of the changes in my ear.

The gigs where I get no set list are interesting- after playing for a long time, I just know a lot of songs, or have heard a popular song enough that I know the form and the changes already, and if I can hear the changes in my head, playing them is not a problem. The really interesting bit though is if its a song I've never heard at all. Then, its a game of asking a few questions (what's the key, what's the feel), maybe someone will say it starts on scale degree IV, so you know there's going to be an intro and into the first verse, and you know thats scale degree I probably. Then, you just have to kind of guess your way through the first verse, but you're memorizing the verse at the same time, and usually the second one there's no guessing. And so on. There's also a great deal of watching peoples hands and bodies because there are tells when something is about to happen, and you just get a sense of what they mean.

So there's obviously rote knowledge of music, but there's also this subtext of guessing and watching and listening and mimicry that are a huge part of what is actually going on. The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about that aspect of making live music.

After a series of bad experiences with Poetry, I switched the packages I maintain to PDM. Although I have hit a few minor snags, the maintainer and other users in the project's github discussions have never failed to help with a fix, workaround, or advice. It's pleasant to use, and I think the only feature I cared about which was in Poetry but not PDM (a publish-to-pypi command), has proven easier to do with the Twine tool anyway.

My situation is I think unusual, in that I need to use a private pypi repo which requires mTLS for both fetching and publishing. Had it not been for that I suspect I'd still be using Poetry, but given the experiences I've had with PDM I wouldn't switch back even if the situation with my repo changed.

right? like what was the point of beefing up this workstation if I'm just gonna run Nano?

I've spent the last year or so comparing these packages. Initially, I liked poetry, but I began to run into issues related to client cert auth with private repositories. I and several other users who encountered these problems submitted pull requests to address them, but found that it was nearly impossible to get any of them reviewed, much less merged.

Out of frustration, I decided to try pdm instead, and although pdm doesn't handle pushing to pypi repositories, Twine works fine for it, and I have had a pain-free experience using pdm for dependency management.

I like the idea of poetry, but it's unusable if I can't get bugs fixed, and I gave up after nearly a year of trying.

It's interesting to think about what Miles Davis would have thought about Chet Baker. On the one hand, Miles was light years ahead of Chet in his intellectual understanding of harmony, but Miles clearly understood the impact of direct, sparse soloing, and I think he probably appreciated what Chet was doing enough to tolerate him if not accept him. There were definitely some Kenny G's in that era who would have gotten the same response from Miles as Kenny G did from Pat Metheny, but I feel like Chet is one of those players who was far from the hippest but was formidable in his taste and that's why people are still transcribing him today.

There is nothing random in that solo, he never even really plays anything that a typical jazz player would consider outside playing.

I first learned about him when I moved to DC and discovered Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide (https://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/) which had my family and I traveling all over the DC metro area trying some of the cool picks from the list. I am amazed that he has time to keep it up given all the other stuff he's up to, but I think that sort of sums up his nature :)

I did it a while back to see if I would notice anything different. I moved to vim a few years ago on a whim after using emacs for decades, so I am far from a vim power user, but with the modest configuration I use, I couldn't tell any difference, so I figured I would keep using it until I ran into a situation where neovim failed in some way that vim didn't. So far (maybe 6 months?) I haven't run into any issues, and I don't think I've added any plugins to my setup that would only work with neovim. This is all to say, it's probably a fairly easy experiment to switch with a fairly low risk of issues if you switch back.

I'm probably a bad neovim reviewer though since I'm not really keen to try the LSP stuff. I wind up working in a lot of different languages and inevitably I feel like getting accustomed to completion working well in language A only to have it fail with B is more annoying than having no completion at all. I'm curious whether I'll wind up using anything which is only possible in neovim.

The venerable joe editor (https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io) is apparently very comfortable for Wordstar users. I used it for a few years in college before I could afford enough RAM to run emacs and although I never actually used Wordstar myself and cant compare it that way, I really liked using joe and can still remember a lot of the keybindings 20+ years later.