Jim Willis

  • Austin

    DSCF0350

    Visited Austin. Learned some tips on smoking brisket from the pit master at Terry Black’s. Saw some great live music. Didn’t take nearly as many good pictures as I would have liked. Still, great trip.

  • Habit and Repetition

    Still coming back to this excellent essay by Meghan O’Gieblyn from Harper’s Magazine:

    Is it possible in our age of advanced technology to recall the spiritual dimension of repetition? Or has it been conclusively subsumed into the deadening drumbeat of modern life?

  • Find and replace local versions of Apple Music files in a playlist

    I have a bunch of playlists that I’ve crafted over the years and when I moved to Apple Music I was disappointed to see my local library copies of those files replaced with Apple Music’s versions. It seemed to be totally arbitrary and, importantly, the play count, rating, etc. was different on my local library copies then it was on the Apple Music versions of those songs.

    UntitledImage

    In the above, I know that I have a copy of Can’t get There from Here in my local library, so not sure why the Apple Music one was substituted in my playlist. Anyway, I want my local version in there so I can track stats, etc.

    I poked around the venerable Doug’s Scripts for a while but couldn’t quite find what I needed so I wrote this script which:

    • Select/start playing a song in the playlist you want to work with
    • Creates a new playlist called “$playlistname Local Files.”
    • Checks each song in the active playlist to see if it’s local or Apple Music
    • If it’s not Apple Music, it just adds it to the Local Files version of the playlist
    • If it is Apple Music, it checks to see if there is a song in your library with the same Artist and Song name
    • It then copies the tracks that result from that search to the Local Files version of the playlist
    • If it can’t find a local copy, it adds the Apple Music version to the “Local Files” copy of the playlist

    The search is really loose so it will find multiple local copies if you have them which is a bit of a pain in the butt. SO you need to go to the new playlist and remove the local versions (live! Remix!, etc.) from the playlist.

    I’ve run this on a few big playlists with ~1000 songs and it runs just fine. It might be helpful for a few folks so I’m putting it up here but that said, I wouldn’t download and run this unless you know what the code is doing.

  • March, 2022 Top Tracks Playlist

    Apple Music Playlist March Top Tracks

    My top tracks for March, 2022. You can listen to this playlist on Apple Music or on Last.fm.

    Last.fm’s is much more comprehensive for some reason. The service has seemed very flakey the past few weeks and I can’t find an alternative method for tracking so have to live with it just being janky I guess.

    I have been really loving the song Doers by Bodega. Definitely one of my favorite tracks for the month.

     

  • Readwise daily email

    I enjoy when my daily email from readwise offers up two seemingly independent quotes/extracts that inform each other simply by their proximity to each other in the email thread. Today’s:

     

    Race After Technology by Benjamin, Ruha

    Hashtags like #CancelRoseanne operate like a virtual public square in which response to racial insults are offered and debated. Memes, too, are an effective tool for dragging racism. (Location 676)

     
    The Convivial Society, No. 5 by theconvivialsociety.substack.com

    Kierkegaard saw that the public sphere was destined to become a detached world in which everyone had an opinion about and commented on all public matters without needing any first-hand experience and without having or wanting any responsibility.” Perhaps that very last line holds an important clue. Perhaps action demands responsibility and that is precisely what we are unwilling to take.

  • FujiFilm X100F Malfunctions & Repair

    Several months ago the EVF/OVF on my X100F stopped working correctly. I sent it in for repair to Fuji.   I should note that printing out the form on FujiFilm Camera Repair page is laughably broken but, anyway.

    After a few weeks I heard back that FujiFilm wanted $650 to repair the viewfinder. 

    I asked them to send it back without repairing it, thinking I would just put that money towards a new X100v instead. Well, supply chain! You can’t get an X100v anywhere right now. SO I decided to make due with the broken X100f and just use the screen instead of the viewfinder. Not optimal but serviceable.

    Until this week.

    All of a sudden all sorts of other things started breaking on the F. Now the camera looses its settings when you swap out the battery. And it it is stuck on AF-C/continual autofocus. Which is so annoying. 

    So, anyway, I’ve sent it back in for a repair estimate, hoping it won’t be much more than the original $650 repair estimate but we’ll see.

    While it’s out for repair I’m using my 6-years-old X-E2s. I have it paired with the 27mm pancake which makes it feel like a really lightweight (and, sort of cheap) X100. This is an older Fuji camera and I’d completely forgotten what amazing photos it takes! This makes me realize that there’s really no reason to rush out and get the X100v when it becomes available again.

    I really like this quote from Ken Rockwell’s review of the X-E2s, it’s still totally true today:

    Real shooters shoot LEICAs because of their simplicity, small size and fantastic optics, and the X-E2s does all this even better. The X-E2s is ergonomically superior to LEICA, its optics are at least as good, all for a fraction of the price with none of the poseur attitude.

    The Fujis just shoot so well for so long (when they’re not broken!). It’s a real incentive to just keep the older gear around, repair it when necessary and only buy the newer models when catastrophe befalls your existing Fuji gear.

  • Green

    First rainy day in a while. Glad because it’s been nice out lately and I’ve been too busy working to enjoy it. Less FOMO on a rainy day.

  • Removing a domain from a letsencrypt cert

    My letsencrypt SSL cert wasn’t renewing. I’d forgotten that I moved my wife’s site to squarespace so that caused the renewal to not find the site on my IP, causing it to fail with something like:

    Attempting to renew cert . . .  produced an unexpected error: Failed authorization procedure.

    I was using the same cert for multiple sites. Note though, you don’t actually remove the superfluous/relocated sites from the cert and then renew, instead you recreate the cert with just the domains you want. Makes sense.

    Anyway, here are some really good instructions and explanation.

    And just in case that site isn’t around, basically you’re running:

    sudo certbot --cert-name jimwillis.org -d jimwillis.org -d www.jimwillis.org

    And then you can run 

    sudo certbot certificates

    To make sure that the domains were removed from the cert. Handily, it also renews the cert when you run that command. 

     

  • #redbanknj #ukraine

  • Thanks, update!

    Morning after update to 15.4, all shortcuts look the same now. Not super useful, Apple:

Current Spins

Top Albums

Check out my album Set It All Down on your favorite streaming service.

Posts Worth Reading:

Free Internet vs Internet of Free Stuff

Letterboxd

Reading Notes

  • Read: Manufactured Anxiety: How Self-Improvement Became a Self Destruct Sequence
    Who profits from our constant state of dissatisfaction? The answer, of course, is painfully obvious. Every industry that sells a solution to a problem you […]
  • Read: My Friends Aren’t Reading
    the shifts have been in place for awhile. A certain kind of book—say those reviewed in the NYRB—will become like opera, or theater, or ballet, […]
  • Read: Pema Chödrön’s Three Methods for Working with Chaos
    • No more struggle: “Whatever arises, train again and again in seeing it for what it is. The innermost essence of mind is without bias. […]
  • Read: The Tech Coup
    . The EU invokes a mechanism called the precautionary principle in cases where an innovation, such as GMOs, has not yet been sufficiently researched for […]
  • Read: Why Not Bluesky
    The real problem, in my mind, isn’t in the nature of this particular Venture-Capital operation. Because the whole raison-d’etre of Venture Capital is to make […]

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