Jim Willis

  • Nginx, WordPress & ActivityPub

    I have been deep in the terminal these past few weeks whenever I get a moment or two of free time. We have had a lot of rain recently, resulting in way more free time than usual. This allowed me to sort out a bunch of issues on my new $5/month linode.

    I didn’t love Ghost too much so went back to WordPress. Since I’d already had Ghost working with Nginx, I figured I’d use it with wordpress as well instead of my usual Apache.

    All went pretty well and smooth once I finally got php to work for me. Yowza. But then I noticed that search wasn’t working on my site. I went crazy for a while trying out different theme, digging into wordpress trying to understand the query loop. Nothing.

    But, In troubleshooting I realized that no URL-passed arguments (e.g. ?s=searchterm) were being handled by php. This was new terrain for me! Once I realized this was the issue though, I knew it must have been related to Nginx. Sure enough adding:

    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;

    to my server config file, voila! That was pretty satisfying.

    Once I had search working, I tried the newly-released ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. A bit of futzing and now my posts can be followed in the fediverse at: sjwillis@www.jimwillis.org from your Mastodon server. Super cool. I’d love to get posts@www.jimwillis.org working so that all posts could be followed but I can’t quite get that dialed in.

    Anyway, rainy days and terminal windows seem to go hand in hand.

    Also, really, really enjoying Terminus on my iPad.

  • 2023 Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival

    The jams at this year’s Del Valley were really excellent. A lot of great players jamming til 1 or 2am. Loved it. The lineup with good too, AJ Lee and Blue Summitwere a highlight, espescialy the two guitarist for the band (Scot Gates and Sully Tuttle).

    Especially cool though was this guy up the hill from us who was using the festival as an opportunity to distribute his record collection to willing recipients. I have been on a real Rounder Records kick this year after doing a deep dive on Rounder 0044. If you have any interest in bluegrass or Tony Rice or some of the best musicians to ever record together on a desert island album, you’ll want to read up on that record.

    Anyway, this cat up the hill had a few older Rounder Records on vinyl. He had a story for each one and gave me the records. The vinyl is in great shape and I’m listening to them this morning. Such great recordings. 

    It also makes me realize that when I decide to finally part with my record collection, I will definitely bring it with me to a bluegrass festival to distribute. I don’t think there’s a more passionate, thoughtful or knowledgable audience of listeners (of all genres of music) than the folks who tend to frequent bluegrass festivals.

  • Fall Maintenance

    Spent some of my vacation time fiddling with the backend tech that I use to organize the digital bits of my life (the foundation of my personal technology stack as it were).

    • Resized my $10/month Linode down to a $5/month instance.
    • Migrated my personal website from WordPress to Ghost because staying on top of the WordPress upgrades was tedious and I wanted to try something different.  In fact, most of this maintenance was precipitated by my son’s WordPress instance getting hacked on my Linode on account of running old wordpress plugins, forcing me to do all sorts of restoration and reconsidering.
    • Moved my bookmark manager (Shaarli) from my old host to my new server.
    • Moved from Apache to Nginx.
    • Got Navidrome up and running on a headless NUC. This, I’ll note got really complicated as I could not for the life of me get my external USB SSD drive to mount in anything but read-only mode which meant I couldn’t add any new FLAC Matrix recordings to it. I finally gave up, reformatted to EXT4 and restored a backup of all my media files to the (now-writeable) USB drive. What a hassle. Everything I remember not liking about futzing with Linux. But now that it’s done, I’ll forget about the frustration until next time.
    • Modified a Python script to apply metadata to Hunter’s Trix FLACs and copy them over to my external drive.  This was a fun programming project. It’s been so long since I focused on solving a problem using Python. I wish I could say the syntax came back to me easily but that’s what google is for. Though it now occurs to me that as I try to add some new features to the the script I may try ChatGPT as a helper. I will clean this script up and share it once I get it dialed in.

  • April, 2022 Top Tracks Playlist

    Really late on this.

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    Here’s a playlist of my top tracks from April, 2022 on Last.FM and on Apple Music.

    Still really enjoying The Cactus Blossoms. Work has been busy and so meeting-filled that I’m barely listening to any music during the day. This has been true for April and May. So, listening habits are changing a bit. Fiddling with my Marvis settings again to surface more new cuts.

  • Non-elitist daily transportation

    From Grant’s (Petersen, of Rivendell) latest post. He’s one of my favorite bike-people:

    We are locked into steel, locked out of suspension and disc brakes, are increasingly suspect of racing’s influence, and we “value,” I guess is the closest word I can think of, bicycles as non-elitist daily transportation, and yet we still make them as beautiful‑by our standards—as we can. Some people see inconsistency there. Expensive, finely crafted bikes for daily use. I can’t help that. There are people out there who are threatened by that. Because, I’ve been scolded and called a hypocrite for it

  • Music from the show High Maintenance

    I’ve watched every season of High Maintenance a few times. We’ve been watching them again lately when we need a short show to watch in the evenings and this time around I’m deeply focussed not the soundtrack for each episode.

    I’ve always been aware of the music in the show (it’s amazing, here’s some background from pitchfork) but this time around, moreso.

    Anyway, here a couple of playlists that capture the show’s soundtrack:

    Spotify – High Maintenance

    Apple Music – High Maintenance

    Also, here’s a good interview with Ben Sinclair about some of his current listens from a few years ago.

  • Huddled with the nihilists

    This great take on Twitter/Musk from Robin Sloan via the always excellent Michael Sacasas:

    The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutrals.

    I keep thinking about all the hand-wringing about Twitter and can’t help but feel like, well, who cares? The twitterverse, I think, to some degree takes itself way too seriously. There is, as Sloan writes, so much more than Twitter. There is so much more to being online than twitter and so much more to the world than being online.

  • Austin

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    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.

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    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.

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: The Imperfectionist: How Not to Freak Out, Part Two
    The antidote to all of this, in the broadest terms, is *more reality*, more immersion in the finite here and now: more writing on paper; […]
  • Read: Recording: After the Election – Four Ways We Can Respond
    “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 […]
  • Read: Mud Boots of Empathy in Spain
    Spain’s unity at this moment is from the bottom up. Or, as Spanish professional soccer player Ferran Torres wrote on social media, “The people are […]
  • Read: Vision Con
    Unable, then, to see the world because I have forgotten the way of being in the world that enables vision in the deepest sense, I […]
  • Read: I Made This
    Suppose Bob writes an email to Sue, who has no existing business relationship with Bob, asking her to draw a picture of a polar bear […]

Saved Links

  • The Markup
    The Gentle January series shares one practical privacy tip a day from a Markup staffer who actually uses the advice in their own life. — Direct link
  • ongoing by Tim Bray · Why Not Bluesky
    "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
  • The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet
    "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
  • Helium Mobile
    Ditch big telco. Rise above with The People's Carrier, a new carrier owned by the people, and earn crypto. — Direct link
  • The 23 Most Dangerous Cars On The Road – iSeeCars.com
    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
  • What Wildly Specific POV Playlists Tell Us About How We Listen Today
    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
  • tree.fm – Tune Into Forests From Around The World
    — Direct link
  • moodeaudio.org
    Audiophile streamer for the wonderful Raspberry Pi family of single board computers and DIY audio community. — Direct link
  • Here’s some cool stuff you can do with Bluesky – The Verge
    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
  • How humans and AI can make music together – The Verge
    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