Spent my lunch hour researching ABLE accounts with ChatGPT4. Overall positive experience (I sanity-checked the results). Some interesting findings:
The average annual maintenance fee for ABLE accounts, considering a range of states, is approximately $42.67. This is based on the fees of several states, which generally range from $35 to $60.
NJ’s program offers ZERO tax incentives for NJ residents.
Virginia’s ABLEnow has no opening fee and waives the monthly fee if you maintain a $10k balance.
Accessing funds is an important feature, Virginia’s ABLEnow program has a debit card as well as no monthly fees.
The ABLEnow program offers several investment options for account holders:
Aggressive Growth Portfolio: This portfolio invests entirely in the Vanguard LifeStrategy Growth Fund. It primarily allocates its assets to common stocks (about 80%) and bonds (about 20%), making it suitable for account holders with a higher risk tolerance.
Moderate Growth Portfolio: This portfolio is invested in the Vanguard LifeStrategy Moderate Growth Fund. The allocation here is approximately 60% in common stocks and 40% in bonds, offering a balance between growth and income.
Conservative Income Portfolio: This portfolio focuses on the Vanguard LifeStrategy Income Fund. It is more conservative, with about 80% of its assets in bonds and 20% in common stocks, catering to those who prefer lower risk.
Money Market Portfolio: This option invests in the Fidelity Investments Money Market Government Portfolio. It’s a very low-risk option, with at least 99.5% of the fund’s total assets in cash, U.S. Government securities, and fully collateralized repurchase agreements.
I’m regularly struggling to get my iPad recognized by my Mac for Handoff and Keyboard/Mouse sharing. I like to be able to use a single keyboard and mouse to dive my computer and my iPad, located next to my Mac monitor.
Even after making sure that they’re on the same network and signed in with the same iCloud account, the Mac will often not “find” my iPad. Here’s a solution I’ve stumbled upon to get it to work.
iPad: Open up Settings on the iPad and turnoff Handoff (under General->Airplay & Handoff).
Mac: Open Settings->Displays. Click “Advanced…” and uncheck “allow your pointer and keyboard to move between any nearby Mac or iPad.” Click “Done” (important!)
iPad: turn Handoff back on. Make sure to toggle “Cursor and Keyboard” On.
Mac: Click “Advanced…” again. Toggle “Allow your pointer …” back on. I keep the other two options (Push and automatically reconnect) enabled as well.
On the Mac you should now be able to find you iPad under the dropdown with the + symbol and select “Link keyboard and mouse to” your iPad.
Good luck getting them arranged in any kind of convenient way though! I still can’t get that to work as expected consistently.
In addition to catching Lucas Nelson + POTR at the Ryman, we saw a bunch of other great music, here’s a run down. This doesn’t include any details about the killer guitar shops we checked out, I’ll try to write some of those notes up.
My nephew and I landed in Nashville, dropped our bags at the hotel and took an Uber downtown to see what’s what. We lucked out getting picked up by an Uber driver who was a flatpicker/bluegrasser and he dropped a lot of local knowledge on us, all of which turned out to be spot-on.
The best intel he gave us was about Robert’s Western World. Robert’s seems to be Broadway’s last true showcase for great country players.
Our first taste of this was when we walked in to Robert’s and heard a pedal steel player playing with the Paul Kramer band. Super high level of musicianship from everyone on stage.
Kelley’s Heroes/Luke McQueary
The real mindblower came the next night at Robert’s when we encountered Kelley’s Heroes. We didn’t know it at the time but the name stems from the players having all come out of Don Kelley’s band. Kelley’s band was a Nashville institution that churned out a string of amazing guitar players including folks like Brent Mason and Daniel Donato.
Luke McQueary was the guitarist we saw with Kelley’s Heroes at Robert’s. Luke was Don’s last guitar player (this video is Luke talking a lot about what he learned from Don and it is all gold if you’re a guitar player). We all recognized that we were seeing something really extraordinary in how this cat was playing his tele. Thumbpick + great blues chops + killer Tele tone. So great watching this guy play. Every note was compelling, we will all be keeping our eyes on this guy, he’s something for sure. Check him out doing Ghost Riders in the Sky to get a flavor for his sound.
Don is a fascinating guy who shaped so much of the telecaster sound that is currently associated with country/americana, this long video interview is totally worth checking out. If you’re so inclined, every player that’s come through Don Kelley’s band is worth checking out here are a few:
Guthrie Trapp (I took some online lessons with Guthrie. Great player.)
Brent Mason
David Byrd
Paul Cook
Sid Hudson
Johnny Hiland
Daniel Donato
JD Simo
Stuie French and Rory Hoffman
Wendy Newcomer’s band brought a slightly more chill vibe to the Robert’s daytime stage. The band had Stuie French on Telecaster and Rory Hoffman on everything. First, Stuie. Man, this guy was coaxing the most pedal-steel sounds out of his telecaster, working the chord voicing to mimic 6th chords and the volume swells, dude knew where it was at. We knew Stuie was a monster but it wasn’t until we got home that we realized he’d played with a whole bunch of great players like Tommy Emmanuel .
We also straight away took notice of Rory Hoffman. It was clear that Rory is blind and we were just totally blown away by his playing on accordion and singing and then when he laid a guitar across his lap he just lit us up with his chops. Here’s a video of Rory backing up Sierra Ferrell.
First off, the Ryman. Whoa. What a venue. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a comparable space for hearing live music. Not just how my history is there but the sound quality was astounding.
We lucked into Nelson playing at the Ryman while we were in town. He had an opener, Meg McCree. She had some novel chord progressions in her songs but none of her songs are stuck in my head.
Nelson, on the other hand, does have a gift for the ear-worm. I was immediately excited for the band to go one when I saw the stack of Magnatone amps behind his humbuckered Tele. To me that combo is a bit like putting a lift and 4-wheel drive on a sports car, but it works. All that tube distortion with a humbucker pickup is like the opposite end of the spectrum from how I typically imagine or use a tele, but he worked that sound so well. Partly it was the venue but the guitar tone was exceptional even if his chops were a bit on the safe side.
His bass player, Corey McCorkmick stole the show though. Dude brought such energy and pocket and good vibes to the stage, you almost couldn’t wait to see what his next move was or what bass he’d pick up next from his collection of crazy axes.
Nelson rotated between his tele, a 335 and a very interesting Les Paul Jr. The magnatone’s gave all a very similar sound but Nelson clearly had a differently level of dexterity on each axe and really was able to stretch out a bit more on the Les Paul.
It’s not just the history and sound of the Ryman that made the show super but the audience was also a major factor. Similar to the audience at bluegrass shows that are knowledgeable, know the history, know how to listen, etc. the audience at the Ryman seemed more sophisticated than most. At one point, Nelson led the crowd in a sing a long to Roger Miller’s King of the Road and most of the audience know most of the words which was pretty cool.
As for ear worms, Forget about Georgia was memorable, for sure, especially the piano intro. Piano sounded amazing in the Ryman. The low end was SOOO powerful but still almost clear.
He then brought out Meg McCree and two other female vocalist to assist on Find Yourself which really got the crowd up. The whole special guest thing was weird in part because a couple of blocks away the CMA’s were being held and you get the sense that anyone who’s anyone was there, not at the Ryman.
The band did a few encores stretching out the energy level by playing a couple of slow/acoustic pieces between he encores.
Here are some of the Albums I’m currently checking out. Most of the New Releases have been added to my “New Releases to Check Out” playlist through the Music Harbor application as noted in my On Listening post.
Blues From the Rainforest by Merl Saunders – found this CD when going through an old stack, so ripped it. Forgot how cool Jerry’s tone was on the first track. Rest is a little woo woo.
Clinch Mountain Country [Disc 1] by Ralph Stanley & Friends
Clinch Mountain Country [Disc 2] by Ralph Stanley
Garcia Grisman (Alternate Version) by Jerry Garcia & David Grisman* – New Release –The version of Russian Lullaby on this (one of JG’s favorite tunes to play) features much more interesting playing by both than on the original release.
More Than A Whisper: Celebrating The Music Of Nanci Griffith by Various Artists* – New Release –Molly Tuttle and Billy Strings sound fantastic though the entire album is really beautiful.
Let’s start by agreeing that there is so much great music out there—old and new—that it’s not possible to listen to all of it. Today, discovering new music now can feel like drinking from an algorithm-fueled firehose, but I can remember before the internet came around where all we had were music magazines, really good DJs (I was so lucky to grow up with WHTG) and our friend’s older siblings to help us discover new music.
The room where it happens.
Fast forward to the algorithms. For several years, I was drinking through Spotify’s Discovery playlist. It seemed to have an uncanny ability to surface new artists that interested me. My music library exploded, though I admittedly purchased very few new albums (CDs or downloads) as a result of those discoveries. In hindsight, I don’t feel much of a connection to many of the new artists I learned of through Spotify’s Discovery feature.
In recent years, I’ve been relying on several non-algorithmic sources for new music. Here are a few of the ways I’ve been finding new stuff to listen to, post-algorithm. Some of these are pretty genre-specific so they may not be generalizable.
Live Shows
The stage shows and program guides of the several bluegrass festivals I attended every year. A large part of the new music in my library that I’ve purchased is there because I’ve seen the artists first hand and experienced varying degrees of having my mind blown. The connection I feel to these artists is pretty damn strong, mostly because bluegrass festival performances can be really intimate and the artists are so approachable. Some examples here would be: Molly Tuttle, Bryan Sutton and, most recently AJ Lee & Blue Summit (w/ Molly’s brother on guitar).
Print
This is admittedly a bit old school, but after festivals, another rich source of new listening for me has been No Depression magazine. Margo Price would be a good example of someone I might not have been aware of were it not for No Depression.
Radio
I’m lucky to have a good public radio station (WBJB) local to me with some excellent DJs. I also use an app called Triode to listen to a few radio stations online: WFMU, WAMU’s bluegrass station and The Current from Minnesota Public Radio have all turned me on to interesting new artists. (Also, The Bakersfield Beat channel on SiriusXM can be pure gold when it comes to surfacing older country artists not on my radar.) There’s something to be said about the idea of radio’s “heavy rotation.” The music I discovered through the algorithms was almost always appealing on the first listen. Some cuts though, they require that a DJ force down your ears a few times before you realize, oh, this is killer. I get it. Those multiple listens make me feel a bit more connected than the dopamine-targeted algorithm.
LastFM
This is probably the closest I come to using an algorithm to find new music. I have an iOS shortcut that makes me a playlist of songs that my two “closest” LastFM neighbors have had in heavy rotation in their listening. This feels a little algorithmic but the fact that my LastFM neighbors are hopefully picking these songs themselves, then, well that’s pretty good with me.
Other musicians
In addition to all of the above, I’m fortunate to have a rich circle of other musicians that I play with on a regular basis. We are always turning each other on to new stuff. I don’t think I would be nearly as deep in to the Stanley Brothers if it weren’t for a couple of mandolin players I’m lucky enough to play with.
This is not to say I don’t use technology to help here. In addition to Triode (though one could just use a web browser to stream), two other applications factor heavily in to my discovery:
Marvis. This app just provides an overlay to my Apple Music library but allows me to view artists, albums and songs in a way that’s almost impossible with Apple Music alone. When I open Marvis, it always presents me with a live Grateful Dead show that I either haven’t listened to or haven’t listened to in a long time. Then it surfaces albums and artists that I’ve been ignoring, etc. The whole “repeated listening/heavy rotation” is facilitated by Marvis. If you’re on iOS, buy the app, visit the Marvis subreddit and enjoy your library in a whole new way.
Music Harbor.This sleeper app also factors heavily in to my listening. The app combs your library and your last.fm history for artists you listen to and then tracks new releases. This sounds trivial, but between how granularly the app can be configured and how easy it is to add new releases to a playlist (e.g New Releases to Check Out) this has been a great resource for me.
How I’m listening.
All that being said, over the past year I’ve started self-hosting a Lossless music streaming server called Navidrome that allows me to AirPlay my library throughout the house. This has totally changed how I’m listening to my library. I’ve been re-ripping any CDs that I had not originally ripped in a Lossless format, making sure my cover art is good, etc. I have about 100 of my most-listened to CDs in my Navidrome library. This music feels like my music in a way that the music in my Apple Library just doesn’t. The covers are all familiar to me—they’re the covers of the CDs that have followed me from city to city, apartments to home, etc.
Finally, I have a large collection of Hunter’s Trix Matrix recordings (this is some nerdy deadhead stuff, so if you don’t know, don’t worry!) on the Navidrome server. Being able to stream FLAC on my home network was the initial reason why I started running Navidrome to begin with. Over the past year, I have been honing a Python script to help me manage downloading, applying metadata and covers, etc. to the matrix recordings. It’s difficult to not become obsessive about live Dead shows so I make sure to keep the shows I have in some kind of rotation before downloading more shows.
So that’s the current state of discovery and listening as we get ready to turn the corner into 2024. I love this stuff would love to hear from other folks about how they’re doing the same.
After doing an export of my Netflix viewing history, I wanted to import it into Letterboxd. The date format in the Netflix export doesn’t work with Letterboxd, which wants the data as ‘YYYY-MM-DD’ so I wrote up a little python script to do the date conversion because knowing when I watched something is pretty useful.
I had about 1,100 entries in my Netflix history file, Letterboxd identified 432 movies. It did not recognize any of the TV/serial programs (e.g I Think You Should Leave, etc.) Not sure why. May dig into that a bit later.
Open the Profile & Parental Controlssettings for the profile you want to see.
Open Viewing activity.
If you see a limited list, use the Show More button.
To download a list into a spreadsheet, select Download all at the bottom of the page. The downloaded file can be opened using any spreadsheet software that supports the CSV file format.
import pandas as pd
from datetime import datetime
import sys
if len(sys.argv) < 2:
print("Usage: python script.py input_file.csv")
sys.exit(1)
input_file = sys.argv[1]
output_file = 'letterbox.csv'
# Read the CSV file
df = pd.read_csv(input_file)
# Assuming the date column is named 'Date'. Change this to your actual column name
date_column = 'Date'
if date_column not in df.columns:
print(f"The specified date column '{date_column}' does not exist in the input file.")
sys.exit(1)
# Convert the date format
df[date_column] = pd.to_datetime(df[date_column], format='%m/%d/%y').dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
# Write the updated data to a new CSV file
df.to_csv(output_file, index=False)
print(f"Date conversion complete. Output written to {output_file}")
Enjoyed the sci-if/crime drama/mystery combo here. Terrific job weaving the various timelines together. Compelling and engaging enough that we watched all 8 episodes over 4 nights and couldn’t wait to see how it ended. Every night we turned to each other to say how much we hoped the ending would hold together and it did, sort of.
Without giving any spoilers, the slightly dissapointing element here was the “bootstrapping” paradox. Meaning, when did the loop with Elias/Harker first start. I understand that asking where the loop begins is like asking: what came first, the chicken or the egg? But still, the fact that it wasn’t addressed at all felt slightly unresolved.
The sub-plot of persecuted or shunned people as sources of loving-kindness in the world provided good symmetry across the time periods.
Following several weeks of digital housekeeping, I’m determined to do a better job about being consistent about where I’m storing links, online articles, resources and various “read later” type stuff.
My tools of choice are Readwise Reader and Shaarli. I’ve been pretty lax about what goes where so I spent some time thinking about how I should be leveraging these two tools.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Shaarli:
Description – The personal, minimalist, super fast, database-free, bookmarking service. Do you want to share the links you discover? Shaarli is a minimalist link sharing service that you can install on your own server. It is designed to be personal (single-user), fast and handy.
Strengths:
Preservation of the original source.
Archiving capability with tools like the Wayback Machine.
Easy to surface old links.
Quick bookmarking for future reference.
Weaknesses:
Less interactive than Reader.
No native feature for highlighting or making notes.
Reader:
Description: Readwise Reader is the first read-it-later app built specifically for power readers. If you’ve ever used Instapaper or Pocket, Reader is like those except it’s built for 2023 and brings all your reading into one place including: web articles, email newsletters, RSS feeds, Twitter threads, PDFs, EPUBs and more.
Strengths:
Active engagement with content through reading, highlighting, and making notes.
Email feature to reinforce and recall highlighted content.
Distraction-free reading experience.
Weaknesses:
Doesn’t preserve the original source, only a text extract.
Harder to surface old articles compared to highlights and notes.
Decision Flow:
Is the content something you want to actively engage with now or in the near future?
Yes: Go to Reader.
No: Go to Shaarli.
Do you want to be reminded of the content through highlights and notes?
Yes: Store, read and highlight in Reader.
No: If it’s just a reference or something to check out later, store in Shaarli.
Is preserving the original source important?
Yes: Store in Shaarli.
No or it’s not a priority: Consider Reader.
Does the content align with your personal taxonomy?
If it’s a deeper, personal topic: Consider Reader.
If it’s a quick reference or informational topic: Consider Shaarli.
Use Cases based on my own Personal Taxonomy
Taxonomy
Reader
Shaarli
Areas
👨👩👧👦 Family
Deep engagement topics like family events, memories.
Quick references related to family events or gatherings.
🏡 Home
Home maintenance tips, furniture wishlists.
Mortgage documents, home insurance, renovation ideas.
🏦 Finance & Records
Budgeting insights, financial goals.
Bank statements, investment records, tax documents.
🏋️ Health & Fitness
Workout routines, diet plans, health articles.
Medical reports, fitness program videos, gym memberships.
🎵 Music
Song recommendations, concert experiences.
Music files, concert tickets, album releases.
🧠 Personal Development
In-depth articles, book summaries, learning goals.
This export/import process requires bouncing back and forth between the Desktop and iOS versions of Day One as the import/export feature set is very different for each version and you’ll need to leverage both feature sets.
From Desktop Mac:
1.) Open up your Sql client of choice and connect to your WordPress database.
2.) Run this SQL query:
SELECT DATE_FORMAT(post_date, '%Y-%m-%dT%TZ') as 'date', post_content as 'text' FROM wp_9872342423posts where (post_content != '' or post_content is not null);
3.) Open file in a text editor and massage the resulting date to meet the Day One spec (here’s the Day One sample data):
SQL Result: 2023-09-24T13:49:47Z, Day One: 2016-07-23T22:06:56.000Z,
This date formatting could probably be done in SQL but I got impatient with the syntax.
I did a search and replace ‘Z,’ for ‘.000Z,’
Optionally get rid of html comments, regex for comments is: <!–(.*?)–>
4.) Save this resulting file with a .csv extension somewhere accessible in iCloud
From iPad: 5.) Open iOS version of Day One 6.) Import CSV file (you can’t do this on Desktop version)
Day One will automatically create a new Journal for this import. This behavior is unique to the iOS version! This will just be a temporary journal as you’re going to export, massage and re-import on your Mac.
There may be a bunch of ugly HTML in your entries that you will want to convert to Markdown. The tool that I use for this conversion is Pandoc and as far as I can tell, it is only available from the command line on my Mac so I:
7.) Export a plain text file from Day One on iOS 8.) Save this to iCloud so you can access it from your Desktop
From Desktop:
9.) Fire up a terminal and use Pandoc to fix the html->markdown
cat wp_jw_journal.txt |pandoc -f html -t markdown -o journal.md
My resulting file had a lot of escaped single-ticks so I…
10.) Open up the file in a text editor and replaced the \’ with ‘ in this resulting file.
Also, the Day One export does some line breaking that you may or may not want to correct.
11.) Give the resulting file a .txt ending
THIS IS SO Important: if you don’t want these imported entries to be mixed in with your primary journal, create a NEW JOURNAL and then move it to the top of the journal entries list in the Desktop version settings. Unlike the iOS version of day one, the desktop will not create a new journal for you! Ask me how I know!!
12.) Import the resulting file into the Desktop version of Day One
“Under the worst conditions, what’s the most important thing to have?” He replied: “Friends.” Source: Recording: After the Election – Four Ways We Can Respond […]
"to be clear, I’m a fan of the Bluesky leadership and engineering team. With the VC money as fuel, I expect their next 12 months or so to be golden, with lots of groovy features and mind-blowing growth. But that’s not what I’ll be watching. I’ll be looking for ecosystem growth in directions that enable survival independent of the company. In the way that email is independent of any technology provider or network operator." — Direct link
"I have been impressed with the tools that the open source development community is building to bridge the gap between the AT protocol and ActivityPub, and I’m hopeful that some mixture of Bluesky and Mastodon will eventually serve most of my needs as a social media user and, hopefully, as someone who co-owns a website" — Direct link
Two Teslas, the Model Y and Model S, make the most dangerous cars list despite Tesla’s advanced driver-assist technology Tesla also has the highest fatal accident rate by brand, followed by Kia, Buick, Dodge, and Hyundai — Direct link
Whether you’re looking to escape into a cottage-core wonderland, enact fiery revenge on a deadbeat ex, or cosplay as a bigtime magazine editor, there’s a POV playlist for you. — Direct link
Bluesky offers a lot of unique features like algorithmic feeds and custom moderation that can make for a rich, in-control experience for users. — Direct link
Stanford professor and Smule co-founder Ge Wang explains how computers can make music, and the future of creativity in an AI world, on The Vergecast. #music #ai — Direct link
