Restaurant Review: Slice
The last time I was in New York Which may well turn out to be my Last Time in New York, for both environmental and political reasons.
Just a Summary
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Talking to the Wayback Machine
Way back in 2016, I migrated this site from its Publify Publify is the Rails based blogging engine that started out as Typo, which I ended up maintaining for a while before handing it off to Frédéric de Villamil , who is still on the current maintenance team. Go him!
Making use of Webmentions
When last we left off we had worked out how to grab all the mentions of this site that Webmentions.io knew about and now we want to write that out to the data/ directory in a format that’s easy to deal with in Hugo.
Fetching webmentions again. With Emacs this time!
You might have noticed, if you’re a regular visitor that webmentions have started showing up on the site again. I turned them off a while ago, I turned off the home server that was handling the web hook calls from Webmention.io, planning to quickly move it and spin it up again. Ask me how that’s going.
Fiddling with structural templates in Org-mode
I’ve been dealing with some enduring niggles in my literate Emacs configuration, and have just landed Commit dbc316b , and I thought I’d write about it here because it’s an example of what keeps me on Emacs more than thirty five years after I first started using it.
A Guest's Guide to Zoom Song Swaps
This is intended as a quick guide for anyone who comes on as a Friday night Song Swap guest, but anyone who’s thinking of using Zoom (or doing their own streams) to share music with folk might find it useful, so I’m making it public.
Panning Overdubs in Loopy Pro
It’s common practice in music production that, when you’re layering your vocals with harmonies or doubles, you pan everything but the lead vocal around the stereo field. That gives a sense of physical separation between the voices and it feels more realistic – or artificial, if that’s what you’re going for.
Week ending 2023-09-24
I’m not quite sure where the time went these last couple of weeks, but here we are at another Sunday. We’ve spent quite a bit of the time watching a new family of kittens that have taken to playing on the flat roof of our garage. They’re almost obscenely cute scraps of black and white fur and just delightful to watch.
Week ending 2023-09-03
Another quiet week. Streamed tired on Friday night, so quite a bit of pilot error with the looper, but folk still seemed to enjoy it.
Week ending 2023-08-27
A bit of a mixed week, mood wise. Capped by a great day’s singing and chatting in Peterborough yesterday. It’s great to get out of the house sometimes. Gill coped really well by herself too – I’m a full time carer, but it’s definitely good to know that I can have the odd day off without it completely buggering things up.
Week ending 2023-08-20
A quiet week. Had to cancel Friday night’s singing session with Emily – initially because Emily’s still recovering from COVID, but on the night itself, my diabetes meds decided to give me hellacious indigestion. Ozempic/semaglutide might well do wonders for my HBA1c readings, but it can’t half mess with my guts as well.
Week ending 2023-08-13
Oops, missed a week; seems I didn’t have anything interesting to say, or I was too busy doing stuff to write about it. Probably the former. Not a bad week, this week. My step daughter and her family called in on their way back from holiday on Friday night and we spent a pleasant evening with them and a few Cawleys who were knocking about, sat outside the Wool Market. Mostly good food, but…
Week ending 2023-07-30
Three weeks on the trot. Definitely calling that a win. Also, Good Omens 2 is a delight. Still enough of Terry’s character hanging around it, and the new writers help it not feel too Neil-y.
Week ending 2023-07-23
Small victory of the week: Actually got off my arse and did something about selling off my old Magic the Gathering cards. For my next trick, I hope to do the same with my collection of [mostly card] magic books.
Week ending 2023-07-16
Small victory of the week: I’m starting to get on top of the washing
Impermanence matters
Back when lockdown started, for all we were both classed as ‘critically vulnerable’, we did pretty well. We had each other for company, the house is paid for, we have some private outdoor space, Doncaster Market remained open and I’d got a 25kg bag of flour. Life was… tolerable.
More Mastodon fiddling
There’s a certain frustrating joy in fiddling with the details of a thing so as to improve the formatting of the new thing you’ve just added to your site, and discovering that a side effect of the change is that a couple of niggles that you’d not quite got to the bottom of on the site itself are fixed in passing. I think I’ve got the crossposting to Mastodon looking less…
Migrating to Mastodon
Twitter, eh? Elon bloody Musk! In the happier timeline, Elton John bought Twitter and it became even more fabulous with every passing day. In the far more depressing timeline we find ourselves living in, Elon seems to be determined to tank the company and fuck the community. So I’ve buggered off to Mastodon. At the time of writing, you’ll find me at @pdcawley@mendeddrum.org and, you…
General purpose computing is the best!
Sometimes folk ask why there’s a Raspberry Pi in the rack case that holds my streaming rig and I admit that the primary reason is that I had one kicking about the place, and the rack unit that holds my M1 Mac Mini is designed to hold a couple of Pis in the space that isn’t holding the Mac, so I might as well attach it. I had the feeling it would come in handy.
Evolving my streaming setup
Back when I first started streaming on the internet, I used a Logitech webcam and some lights I had picked up for doing product photography and such for the Loafery and some audio gear I had because, well, recording stuff is just fascinating. It was okay, but even with decent lighting and audio, the webcam was frustrating to control (basically, there was no control), so I picked up a cheap capture…