We had another fun concert — the music was hard, but the result was rewarding. We had a great turnout on Saturday.
Now we’ve got to start practicing for the next show. Here’s what we’ll be playing:
Dvorak, The Wild Dove tone poem Op. 110 — I hadn’t heard this one before. It looks mostly ok for the cellos, but definitely has some fast bits.
Chaminade, Concertino for flute and orchestra — This looks particularly challenging for the first flute.
Brahms, Symphony no. 4 — I have played this one with Divertimento before. I remember having to take many shortcuts last time; we’ll see if I can do any better this time around. 🙂
It’s less than two weeks until the next Divertimento Orchestra concert. The program this time is incredible; it’s literally some of the hardest music we’ve ever played. Definitely worth seeing.
So I’m mostly done with the updates to GCW and related sites.
The basic structure is:
A DokuWiki instance at the root, mostly so I have a way to post links to content that I want to make visible publicly.
A WordPress instance (i.e. what you are currently reading) to hold the long running “News from Great Castle Wilson” (since 2005(!)) content.
A NextCloud instance, mostly being used as an internet accessible file server.
I’m sure there lot’s of rough edges still, and one glaring omission that is I have a *very* crappy backup strategy running. Nothing close to the elegant solution I had for my old site. Now if I could only remember how that worked…
Er… yes, I’m reworking the underlying structure of GCW again.
This is my most drastic update yet, and things are currently in a complete shambles. I’ll be switching the public face back to the old site when I’m not working it.
Lots of old content is currently not available on the new site, so if there’s something you need, let me know and I’ll get it for you.
Yes, I’m typing this using it, although i expect the post will be short. 😉
it’s got a RPi with 4 Gig of RAM, but it runs off of an SD card, so it’s a bit slower than I’m used to. It also normally runs off batteries, but it doesn’t include the 18650s it needs in the package, so I’ll have to go get some today.
Overall, I really like it. The only thing I’ll say is *man* is that text small for my old eyes!
I was out for my usual Saturday morning e-bike ride, when I decided out of the blue to stop for a coffee at the Second Cup on Merivale Road. As I was parking my bike, I was approached by a couple of gents who wanted to talk about the brand and my experiences.
After chatting with them a bit it turns out they were members of the Electric Vehicle Council of Ottawa (EVCO), which is a group of electric vehicle enthusiasts which meets regularly at various coffee shops around Ottawa.
Today, they were checking out an electric Fiat 500 that one of the members had brought up from Montreal. As a past Abarth owner, I was very interested. It’s a nice looking mini car, which would be fine for zipping around the city, although I did wonder about range limitations versus driving from Montreal. Hm…
Regardless, it’s always nice to see more people who understand the value of electric vehicles.
The phone that I’m always carrying around anyway, plus a really compact — say about 2 stacked credit cards in size when folded up — iPhone stand, plus a Logitech Keys-to-go.
The Keys-to-go is surprisingly reasonable to type on. I’m able to touch type at full speed.
Notes:
Apologies for the potato quality photo. Since I was taking a picture of my phone, I had to use the webcam on my laptop to take the picture. 🙂
Yes, I know the picture doesn’t show me blogging. I used the WordPress iPhone app to write this post, but the post wasn’t written when I took the picture, so…
I had pre-ordered a RPi 5 a couple of months ago, but really had no idea when it was going to show up, so it was a pleasant surprise when I got the email from PiShop earlier this week to say that it had arrived. A quick trip over to their warehouse on Colonnade Roadet voilà .
As you can see from the above picture, I also got the stock active cooler, but that was it. It’s actually mounted to the bottom panel of an old RPi 4 case I had lying around, just to keep it elevated off of the desk. Hopefully that will help to keep it cool, and reduce the chances of damage to the board.
Speaking of cooling, like many other RPi enthusiasts, I was surprised by how hot the wee beastie gets. I haven’t done a lot of testing yet, but just based on the CPU temp plugin in the taskbar, idle temp is around 38° C. As soon as you start doing anything (like typing a blog post) it rapidly goes up to around 48°C. Somewhere around this temperature the fan on the heat sink will spin up, but because it’s variable speed, even with it running there is next to no sound. The only time I’ve heard the fan spin at full speed is during boot up, and even then it’s still quite quiet — i.e. it’s not the screaming monster you might expect a fan that tiny to be. Regardless, the heat sink fins do get hot enough that you probably don’t want to touch them while it’s running.
I have been holding off upgrading my webserver Pi to the latest debian bookworm based OS, since there was no (official) upgrade path from the previous version and it’s a pain to move all of the hosted sites over to a new install. Now that I have a Pi 5 too, I think it may be time. The combination of more performant hardware and the move from PHP7 to PHP8 in bookworm should provide a significant boost. Note: I really don’t *need* to do this, the current sites load just fine, but a few pages (like the NextCloud dashboard) aren’t quite where I’d like them.
Anyway, I’ll post again once I have moved the server over to the new hardware. For now, I can say I’m very happy with it. If you’re looking for a super cheap, small form factor desktop, the RPi 5 will definitely work for you. It’s still not a speed demon, but it will play 1080p/60fps video without dropping a lot of frames, and feels quite snappy to use (running off an SSD). Peace!
