Divertimento Fall Concert

November 8 & 9, 2019
That’s this Friday and Saturday!

Program:

  • Jacques Offenbach  — Orpheus in the Underworld Overture
  • Johannes Brahms — Variations on a theme by Haydn
  • Camille Saint-Saëns — Bacchanale from Samson and Delilah
  • Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov — Caucasian Sketches, Op. 42 “Iveria”
  • Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov — Caucasian Sketches, Op. 10

Venue:

Woodroffe United Church
207 Woodroffe Ave.
Ottawa,
Ontario

Concert starts at 8pm. Tickets available at the door.

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.

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, … Continue reading “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 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 … Continue reading “OMG! Chromebooks are useful!@”

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

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. 😉