News from Great Castle Wilson

Author: adminmcq

  • LotD — one page dungeon

    A very cool small dungeon generator from watabou:
        One Page dungeon

  • Commenting

    I have set the blog to require registration before you can comment. Apologies. It’s an experiment to see if this will help me manage the egregious amounts of spam I’m getting (even with akismet’s help). If it doesn’t help I’ll turn it off again, but to give you some context, in 12 hours I received 17 pages of spam!

  • https

    I decided I wanted to be able to log in and post from outside my home network, and using vanilla http to do that while running on unencrypted wifi at the coffee shop was just asking for trouble.

    Thankfully, Let’s Encrypt has made setting up https on your site both easy and, more importantly, free!

    The “wonders” of how my old install of WP was set up has meant that older posts may still have bogus links in them, but on the front page (and going forward) at least, you now see:


    Woot!

  • GCW gets a new home

    After many years of running Great Castle Wilson on some flavour of Mac, I’ve finally decided to give it dedicated hardware of its own. In part, this is because I enjoy proving to myself that I can still set up and configure a webserver and all the other required accoutrements — yes, I’m weird like that — but mostly it’s because I’m fairly confident that macOS Catalina is going to break my current configuration anyway, so it seemed like a good time to make a change.

    For those who aren’t aware, Catalina is the first version of macOS that only supports 64-bit applications. There are some fairly significant changes under the covers, and the odds are low that my personal mix of random open source software and existing Mac tech is going to continue to work.

    So without further ado, here is the brand new GCW:

    Yep, it’s a Pi 🙂

    Specifically:

    So far the setup process has been relatively painless, but I did learn that WordPress does *not* like it when its API URL points at a different instance of WordPress than the one that’s making the request — that took a couple of hours to debug. 🙂

    Anyway, if you can read this, then we’re live. The site seems quite responsive and the only posts that aren’t displaying properly are ones where some of the original content they linked to no longer exists

    Welcome!

    Some history…

    I don’t post to NfGCW very often any more, but I love the fact that there’s years of history from our family here. I’ve blogged about many topics over the years, including the site itself. Here are some previous posts about the hardware GCW ran on.

  • Watch Bands

    So I just bought a watch band for my Apple Watch. I can’t believe that a strap made out of nylon with plastic hardware is worth $70. And that’s only a fraction of what you’d have to pay for an Apple branded one. It’s just silly.

  • My dad

    I don’t have a lot to say here…

    He was a tough old guy, and he had a good run, longer than he expected. He was up in the middle of the night, playing with his computer and he just tipped his head back, fell asleep and… stopped. Given all the health issues he had, I expected he was going to be in the hospital with tubes sticking into him for months, so he got the best outcome he could have.

    I’m going to miss him.

  • OMG! Chromebooks are useful!@

    As of this weekend, I’m the proud owner of a new ASUS Chromebook Flip C213

    ASUS Chromebook Flip C213

    For around 450 $CAN, you get a laptop with

    • The “flip” form factor (i.e. keyboard folds under screen so you can use it like a tablet)
    • A touchscreen (as well as a trackpad)
    • 12 hour battery life
    • 2 USB-C ports as well as two as two regular USB3 ports

    Obviously, there are limitations, like unexciting screen resolution and limited storage, but I can honestly say that this machine is as responsive as my MBP, for all of the basic tasks I do day to day, and now that ChromeOS can run Android apps as well, I’ve been able to find all the missing features I need (like 1Password support) too.

    Let me be clear: This machine is *fun* to use. And that’s even before you factor in the linux app support that is incoming — I’ve already heard of at least one person who has gotten Scrivener for Windows running on WINE. 😉

  • Divertimento Spring 2018 Concert

    [man, I really have to blog more often]

    The Divertimento Orchestra in cooperation with the Embassy of the Czech Republic, is proud to present a program of Czech music, this Thursday and Friday (April 20 & 21, 2018) starting at 8PM. The concert venue is:

    Woodroffe United Church,
    207 Woodroffe Ave.

    The program is going to be great:

    Smetana — The Moldau
    This piece, originally titled “Vltava”, is a beautiful tone painting that charts the course of the Vltava river. It has a very busy and difficult cello part.
    Dvořák — Slavonic Dances, Op. 46
    These dances are wonderful, exuberant splashes of music. They contain numerous parts that are extremely difficult to play.
    Dvořák — Symphony No. 9 “from the New World”
    I love this symphony. The oboe part at the start of the second movement is definitely on my “goosebumps” list.

    Tickets prices are…

    Adults: $20
    Students/Seniors: $10
    Children 13 and under: FREE

    Please come listen to some wonderful music, including my minor contributions from the back of the cello section.

  • Divertimento Spring Concert

    It’s that time again! I’m very pleased to say that I will be playing in the Spring Concert of the Divertimento Orchestra, April 28th and 29th, 2017. We’re playing three pieces:

    Halifax Harbour by Elizabeth Raum
    As part of the Canada 150 celebration, we will be playing this fun piece (with a great cello part 😉 ) by Canadian composer Elizabeth Raum. Shhhh! Rumour has it that depending on the night, you might see her in the audience.
    Tres Danzas Españolas by Enrique Granados
    Enrique Granados was born the 27th of July 1867, 150 years ago. The three pieces that we’ll be playing are orchestral arrangements (by J. Lamote de Grignon) of three of the “12 Danzas Españolas” a piano work published in 1890. There’s a strong Spanish feel and some great solo playing (not by me <g>).
    Symphony No. 3 in Eb, Op. 97 “Rhenish” by Robert Schumann
    This Schumann Symphony is big, deep music, with complexities that you probably don’t hear on the first listen through. It really wasn’t until I’d played the cello part in context that I felt like I understood it. Very cool!

    All and all, it should be an excellent show. And given my recent health issues, I’m particularly glad that I’ll be able to participate. By all means, come and give us a listen.

    Here’s the poster for the show. Feel free to print this out and post it wherever people might see it. We love playing for a full house!

  • Never use iTunes to hold your own music.

    (This is an old post from July 25, 2016, recovered via the Wayback Machine…)

    For pity’s sake:

    This is ridiculous. I’ve been trying to use iTunes to make my music (that is, the music I created) available on all my devices for *years*. No matter how many times I’ve tried it, and how many times I think it might, just *might* have worked this time, I always end up with the bullshit you see above: multiple copies, some local, some in the cloud, some that claim they’re in the cloud but you can’t download them, you name it.

    It’s impossible to tell what is causing the failures or how you could fix them. You can’t even just go look at what is in the cloud, except through the lens of how it has been sync’ed to one of your iTunes libraries and that seems to *never* be correct.

    Somebody, please tell me about alternatives that work.