Evangelina Mascardi plays Bach's Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat major BWV 998 on the Baroque lute

 
 
 


passthejoe with the Hugo ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear theme on passthejoe
Recent content in passthejoe with the Hugo ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear theme on passthejoe
Latest posts
When installing ufw closes all the ports
There comes a time in my setup of a Linux/Unix system where I want to tinker with the firewall. And I usually install ufw — the “Uncomplicated Firewall” to do it. It’s not complicated, and I like that. 
 But if you have existing services running on your server or workstation that you installed with a Linux package manager such as apt or dnf/yum, you have to remember to reopen…
GNOME Software was pretty much freezing in Debian 12. Here's how I fixed it
My 2011 iMac 27-inch running Debian 12 (upgraded since 10) was having an issue with GNOME Software. The app would start, but it would “spin” forever, never allowing me to add, remove or update software. 
 A quick search produced this fix , which worked immediately: 
 
 To fix Gnome Software getting stuck with “Software catalog is being loaded” being shown, kill…
After self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, I'm back on a free VPS
My time hosting a web server on a Raspberry Pi in the coat closet has come to an end. I’m not unhappy. I don’t need to be inviting ports 80 and 443 into my home network. It was just an experiment. One that went really well. 
 But I’m OK moving on. 
 When the self-hosting experiment began with my first Raspberry Pi (a Zero W that was not up to the task), I was surprised to…
A tribute to the Chicago Manual of Style (while mostly mentioning the AP Stylebook)
I’m not a Chicago Manual of Style editor, though I could be . 
 Coming up in the world of journalism, the bible is the AP Stylebook , and I probably used it 20 times a day at one point. Eventually you remember what’s in there and can quote passages from memory. This was in the days before the Web took over, and we had reference books, physical clips of old newspapers and a…
Feed
If I knew how to directly add an RSS link to the menu in the Hugo Bear Blog theme, I would do that. 
 Until I figure it out, find the RSS for this site at: 
 https://passthejoe.net/index.xml 

This is a test entry

 Can you see this blog entry? 
 There is a picture of a Raspberry Pi 4 in the case above. 

About
About Steven Rosenberg and the passthejoe blog 
 Note: This about file is too damn large and rambling. I need to move MOST of this to a separate entry or three. 
 I am a journalist, programmer, husband, father and weed-puller. Back in the days before Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, I thought blogging was revolutionary and world-changing. I still do. The ability to write what you want for…
Bear
Bear 
 Website: https://bearblog.dev 
 There is a website obesity crisis. Bloated websites are full of scripts, ads, and trackers slowing your readers down every time they try to read your well-crafted content. 
 Bear is all you need to build a fantastic and optimized site or blog. It works perfectly on any viewing device. All you need to focus on is writing good content. 
 Bear…
Hugo
Hugo 
 Website: https://gohugo.io 
 Written in Go, Hugo is an open-source static site generator available under the Apache Licence 2.0. Hugo supports TOML, YAML, and JSON data file types, Markdown and HTML content files, and uses shortcodes to add rich content. Other notable features are taxonomies, multilingual mode, image processing, custom output formats, HTML/CSS/JS minification, and…
A new Ruby-based static-site generator from Shinobi creator Bradley Taunt
I wasn’t expecting a new static-site generator from Bradley Taunt, who created Shinobi, but I should have expected it because he has written a lot of short blog-generating scripts, as he details in Blogging for 7 years 
 He left Shinobi behind a few years ago. I don’t begrudge him that — it remains good to use and will continue to be so. Shibobi has issues for sure — the biggest…
Hugo in OpenBSD in 2024
Am I playing with lukewarm fire by syncing my Hugo blog files across Linux and OpenBSD systems and attempting to publish from both? 
 Maybe it’s my aging theme, but the Hugo binary in OpenBSD threw a whole bunch of errors when I created the file for this post. 
 If you see this, call the experiment cautiously successful . 

OpenBSD seems to run even better in the 7.5 release
I am not sure if I’m imagining it, but OpenBSD seems to run better on my 2017 HP Envy laptop on the 7.5 release than it did on 7.3 and 7.4. 
 I don’t know if the project made improvements in the way it runs on my Intel Core i7 7th Gen CPU (and the on-chip Intel GPU), but it seems like things are quieter in terms of the CPU load as seen in htop , the frequency with which the fans…
Terminal — the Hugo theme used by this blog — is no longer being maintained
Every time I come back to Hugo as a static-site/blog generator after a long layoff, I look at all the themes available at https://themes.gohugo.io , and since I’m thinking about starting some new sites, I went back to see how my current favorite theme , Terminal (used by this site), was doing. 
 It still looks great but was “retired” by its developer Radosław Kozieł about 7…
Standard Ebooks runs everything on a 2 GB VPS with no database and almost no JavaScript
How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS; or, a paean to the classic web 
 They’re keeping the tech simple. They build ebooks and then distribute them. 
 One single-core server hosts all of their Git repos, builds their ebooks and serves their web site. 
 Alex Cabal says the web site runs on a “classic LAP stack.” It’s missing the…
What's the difference between blogging and a longer social post?
There’s a certain lack of permanence to social media posts – in my mind, anyway. 
 In some cases that’s a feature, but due to the ease of writing in this medium, it’s so easy to just open an app window, write a few lines and hit send. I haven’t published a “real” blog post in months. 
 I’ve written before about how I would create blog posts…
How hard is it to move a Hugo setup from one computer to another?
I’ve done a lot of operating system switching over the past many months and not a whole lot of blogging. My question: Does this thing still work? 
 It’s not a terrible question. I’m maybe four complete OS changes away from the last time I really used this system, and now I’m on immutable/atomic Fedora Silverblue, yet the Hugo binary I stashed with this blog’s…
I love a quiet laptop
I love a quiet computer. That’s one of the great appeals of the Raspberry Pi. No fans, no spinning drives. If only they had enough power to really do desktop things . 
 I’ve never experienced a Pi “bigger” than a Zero W version 1.1, so I don’t have enough information. 
 And like most people who still use “real” computers that aren’t…
Friction in the Hugo composition process — Part 1
I would write more, I say, if it was easier to start, write and publish a blog entry. 
 I have a Bash script that allows me to easily write and publish microblog-style entries. Maybe I should come up with something similar for Hugo. It’s been on my to-do list. 
 I can write tweets quickly. But a Hugo blog entry is a different thing. 
 There’s a bunch of metadata at the top…
You really need to set rsslimit in your Hugo config file
I use Hugo to automatically build two sites that pull XML feeds from the CentOS project whenever there are updates to the Stream 8 and Stream 9 Linux distributions. The entries tend to be long, but they are all text, and the great thing is that the blog tends to run itself. 
 I was having trouble with IFTTT, which I use to post the new entries to Twitter, and I found that the XML out of Hugo…
You need a good wire stripper

 I’ve never had a good wire stripper. Yes I’ve used my teeth, which I don’t recommend. 
 I picked this one up for $7.20 at All Electronics and quickly set the screw for the 22 gauge wire I’m working with. 
 It really works. It can even strip the cloth wire I bought from StewMac. 
 This makes working with wire so much easier. The comments at All Electronics…
Playing the guitar — no pressure
If things don’t get too crazy on any given day, I get back to our garage-turned-office and play the guitar a bit. It could be 15 minutes. Sometimes a half-hour. 
 And I want to get back there. I think I’ve built a habit. Like I said in my last post on this topic , I don’t have a lot of structure or focus. I play what I want. 
 Often that’s working my way through…
Debian 11 on a Mid-2011 Apple iMac 27-inch
An Apple Mid-2011 iMac 27-inch “Core i5” 2.7 fell into my lap some time around 2017, and even though it had a few years of MacOS support ahead, it was slow — never mind the 20 GB of RAM I added when supporting it for an Adobe Creative Cloud workflow. 
 Booting took forever. Updates took forever. Saving an inDesign document took … you guessed it. A lot of spinning beach…
Goodbye CentOS Stream 8. I guess we didn't click.
Writer’s note on March 3, 2024: I think I took this post off my CentOS blog at some point because it might have been too “mean,” or maybe just too “critical.” I felt bad. Being the bull in Red Hat’s CentOS china shop wasn’t a fun role. Since this post was first written, CentOS 9 has been released and feeding into RHEL 9 for some time. I think the way it…
I try to play the guitar every day
I didn’t make a New Year’s resolution. I just wanted to get my hands on the guitar. I didn’t set any goals, though I do have them. I just want to play. 
 I split my time between classical music, jazz standards and improvisation. I want to learn standard tunes — the melody and harmony — and be able to play over them. I work on my classical technique. If I really concentrated,…
Not a review of CentOS Stream 8
I have so many notes. I started running CentOS Stream 8 five months ago, and I wanted to document every win, loss, setback and solution as I tried to make what isn’t really a desktop distribution — Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its clones) — into my laptop operating system. 
 I’m not going to look at my notes. This non-review won’t write itself, and the notes aren’t…
The 2021 Linux laptop rebuild
CentOS Stream 8 — a controversial yet boring Linux — would be my new operating system 
 After holding up due to indecision , I went ahead with the Linux laptop rebuild. 
 I decided to give CentOS Stream 8 a try. It’s a “hot” Linux distro. But for all the wrong reasons. I can say now that it’s technically excellent, with the extremely notable exception of an error in…
Pausing the Linux rebuild
I was all ready to crack open the HP Envy 15 laptop this afternoon, pull the 250 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and replace it with a 1 TB model. While in there, I planned to replace the battery, which has a dead cell. 
 But I decided to press “pause.” 
 I started running Linux on this particular laptop in 2019 (??) with Debian Stable (then Buster), replacing it with Testing (Bullseye) maybe…
Backups in Linux: I keep it simple
The next step in putting a new hard drive into my laptop is to make a full backup of the /home files. I haven’t done a full-image Clonezilla-style backup in a long, long time, and I do recommend it it you have a spare drive and a lot of spare time. 
 Instead I just back up my user files. I have two working Linux computers right now, and if I need to rebuild one, I can do a reinstall and…
Reinstalling a Linux computer system: Step by step
I’m about to put a new hard drive and battery in my main laptop, a 2017 HP Envy 15. 
 Whenever I make a change like this, I like to be ready with backups, Linux install images on USB drives and whatever tools and parts I might need. 
 I’m not as worried about running into problems because I now have a very decent second computer — the 2011 27-inch iMac running Debian Buster —…
The new Debian Bullseye desktop background just moved onto systems

 The new desktop background image for Debian Bullseye/Testing (the future Debian 11) appeared on my system last night in the updates. 
 It’s another in the hundreds (and probably thousands) of steps leading up to Bullseye becoming Debian GNU/Linux’s stable release later this year — sometime around July if the recent pattern holds. 

If you're worried about losing Google Sync in Chromium, you might as well use Chrome
I’m a hypocrite. 
 I use the Chromium browser packaged by the Debian Linux distribution. 
 I also use Google’s sync service for my bookmarks. 
 By using the open-source (yet Google controlled) Chromium instead of the proprietary Chrome (which is based on Chromium), I fool myself into thinking I’m adhering to some kind of software freedom principles. 
 I…
I'm not opposed to nonfree firmware in Debian, but I removed it, and my laptop still runs fine
The debate over whether to include nonfree firmware in the Debian installer has emerged from the depths of the debian-devel mailing list under the title “Making Debian available.” 
 The gist of this extremely long e-mail thread (and Debian is a mailing list culture, despite attempts to pull it into the 21st century is that the Debian Project is hostile to new users because its…
Ruby gems: Using Linux/BSD packages vs. gem install
As a Ruby user and programmer, I thought that Linux distributions and BSD projects offered packaged versions of Ruby gems to add sanity and stability to a computer. 
 The problem is that every distribution and project packages a different subset of all the Ruby gems available. 
 I’ve always tried to use as many “packaged” gems as possible in the systems I run — chiefly…
Why CentOS Stream and the end of CentOS Linux doesn’t really matter
There were clones of — or more accurately downstream projects based on — Red Hat Enterprise Linux before Red Hat bought CentOS in 2014. 
 CentOS started in 2006, and there have been other distributions based on RHEL. (My favorite is still Nux ’s Stella from the CentOS 6 days.) 
 There are many (many!) other Linux distributions and BSD projects that can supply a server or desktop…
CentOS Stream and the end of the CentOS clone: perils, pitfalls, risks and opportunities for Red Hat

 Red Hat unleashed the kraken with its recent announcement that its CentOS 8 clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux would be shut down in 2021 instead of 2029, to be replaced by the newish CentOS Stream 8. 
 What is CentOS Stream? It is a reimagining of CentOS as a continuously delivered yet version-constrained development distribution that tracks ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 yet stays…
How this Debian Stable user ended up with Google Chrome from Google’s repository

 Update: On Jan. 1, 2021, an updated Chromium package moved into the Debian Stable repository. Hopefully it will also become part of the Testing repo and appear in the next Debian release. The original post follows: 
 I guess I knew that the Chromium web browser — the code from the open-source project that is still coded by Google people but isn’t fully Googled — was very out of…
Vim tip: Open the last file you closed with :e#
I can’t believe I didn’t learn this earlier because now I do it all the time: 
 If you close a file, as I often do with :bd , to open the last file you closed, type e# in command mode: 
 :e# 
 The last closed file opens in your current window. 
 This is great for me because in my editing workflow, I have a story budget from one directory in one window, and I work on…
Running four sites on NearlyFreeSpeech.net should cost me $3.92 per month

 NearlyFreeSpeech.net stands out among shared-hosting companies for many reasons, but its cost structure is one of the biggest. 
 NFSN doesn’t charge a flat fee for an “unlimited” number of web sites, or a smaller fee for one or two sites. Instead, NFSN charges for what you use. 
 Before I committed to switching my sites from Hostgator to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, I…
Using rsync to update a Hugo blog
The one disadvantage of a static-site generator like Hugo is that after you create an entry and build your blog locally, you then have to figure out how to update your site on the server. And Hugo seems to change a whole lot of files with every run of the command hugo , even if you are only creating a single entry. 
 There’s a heavy amount of encouragement to use GitHub to manage the…
I got a SinkShroom. Is it worth the money?

 I bought this plastic drain stopper called the SinkShroom from Amazon. I removed the original stopper from our sink long ago and have been using another easily removed plastic sink stopper that was supposed to catch hair but never did. It didn’t work too well at all, but it sells for about $8. 
 The SinkShroom and its bigger cousins the TubShroom and ShowerShroom have a lot of…
Dave Winer is too important to think he's accomplishing nothing
I read Dave Winer’s Scripting.com blog every day. I subscribe via email . Like everything Dave does, it makes me think. 
 Today I wonder if I should set up an email subscription service of some kind for this blog. Email is the new hotness in marketing. Email addresses are like gold. 
 Dave recently wrote about how he feels he’s reaching nobody with his blog, especially as it…
I love these clean electric guitar sounds
Electric guitars weren’t invented to make overdriven sounds, though they do excel at that. 
 Made for electricity — and for the music of the day in the 1950s — the guitars created by Leo Fender’s company are capable of surprisingly sweet sounds that are as much at home in jazz as in country. 
 I am particular struck by these Songbirds Foundation videos of guitarists playing…
Writing in git vs. blogging
Any of us who have been blogging over the past 10 or more years has written hundreds or maybe thousands of posts. 
 I’m pretty sure I have at least a couple thousand. 
 But blog writing and other writing are different. A blog tends to say “this is now, things below this are in the past, things above this will appear in the future.” 
 It’s reverse-chronological.…
C++ in Vim with two lines in .vimrc
With inspiration and code from Ankit , I am using Vim to compile and run C++ programs without leaving the editor. 
 I added these two lines to my .vimrc : 
 nnoremap <F7> :!g++ -o %:r %<Enter>
nnoremap <F8> :!./%:r<Enter>
 
 I hit F7 to compile the program I’m working on. 
 F8 runs that program. 
 This is much simpler than an IDE, and simpler still than Geany,…
Upgrading my now-dying 2012 laptop to Fedora 32 probably won't happen
My 2012 HP Pavilion g6 laptop’s keyboard and touchpad are working intermittently. I’ve already replaced the keyboard twice. They are crazy cheap to buy (and also cheap in quality), but I’m tired of doing it. Not sure what is wrong with the touchpad, but it’s about time to cut my losses. 
 The laptop has run Fedora for a LONG time. It is now on F30. It has gone through…
Installing OpenBSD on a USB flash drive. Do not recommend.
My test laptop – a 2012 HP Pavilion g6 – is dying. The past couple of OpenBSD installs resulted in kernel panics, and now the keyboard and touchpad keep failing. I’ve replaced the keyboard twice, and now it’s mostly the ribbon connector between the keyboard and the motherboard. 
 I have to pop the bottom off the laptop, take out a screw, then pry the keyboard off and…
The problem with Conexant's Flow.exe and Firefox has been fixed in Windows
I’m not sure who fixed it, or when, but somebody resolved the issue involving Firefox in Windows 10 laptops from HP and other manufacturers who use the Conexant audio hardware and software. 
 What happened in my 2017 laptop was that running the Firefox browser would cause a Conexant program called Flow.exe to start using a whole lot of CPU, causing the laptop to run hot – and…
It won't cure coronavirus, but LAUSD sweetens your life with the recipe for its famous coffee cake

 It’s 2020, and coronavirus has shut down most of the country and the world. Los Angeles Unified School District campuses have been closed for weeks. 
 Schools are trying to stay relevant and keep students engaged with online lessons. LAUSD doesn’t want parents to forget about them either. With three robocalls a night, how could we? Nobody does robocalls like the LAUSD. 
…
1888 Torres SE 115: A fine example of the maker who set the standard for the classical guitar

 (Thanks to Guitar Salon International for their entry and this photo of the 1888 Torres SE 115) 
 Between its many hundreds of videos and extremely informative site and blog , Guitar Salon International is doing quite a service for classical guitar players and fans. 
 Hundreds of historic instruments have passed through the doors of this Santa Monica institution, and this is no…