Recently updated blogs

Continuing the tradition I started earlier this year with the Oscars, here’s my pre-ceremony Emmy winner predictions, along with my personal favorites across the categories. We’ll also be doing a live chat backchannel in Stream Team if you care to watch along with us! UPDATE: Now marked with a for ones I predicted right, and a for ones where my pick won Best Drama Series MY PREDICTION: Shogun (FX) MY …

Overview If you’re new to the Fret Science Patreon, looking for an older lesson, or just trying to get a sense of what kind of content is here, this index is a great place to start. These are the main sections: YouTube videos with downloads Inside the solo How to improvise Backing tracks Chord tone soloing visualizations Scales and arpeggios Essential tools Administrative topics Contents are updated weekly. YouTube videos …

In my first post in this series I was just getting comfortable with Hyprland and setting up my new Linux box the way I wanted it. In this part, I will talk about switching to Aylur’s GTK Shell (ags for short) as my status bar and panel provider, and sorting out how to play music files locally. Aylur’s GTK Shell Statusbar using ags on Hyprland. I was using Waybar for …

Billy Bitzer and Griffith, 1914 One hundred and ten years ago this month, Grace Kingsley had lots of news about an up-and-coming filmmaker. On the ninth, she reported that David Griffith had taken his company up to Bear Valley shoot more scenes for The Clansman.” She also mentioned that when Dave learned it was actress Jennie Lee’s 65th birthday, he stopped work and formed a line for the cast and …

Heron as Anglo-Saxon style warrior, a paean to a vintage alarm clock, a march, a terrible pun on an old car. All four first appeared on Black Bough Poetry's TopTweetTuesday.

Extraordinary SoCal heat and wildfire surge in first half of September Well, the early September heatwave sure turned out to be a remarkable one–particularly across Southern California (where a number of locations came close to or even tied all-time record highs) and the Pacific Northwest (where a number of locations recorded the hottest temperatures on […] The post Early-season low pressure system to bring brief shift to much cooler & …

Another group of smirking techbros have decided that rich people shouldn't have to follow the same rules as the poors. There's an app for that. LineLeap, backed by Y Combinator, lets people pay to skip lines at bars. LineLeap makes money by charging Ticketmaster-style convenience fees for certain passes. The company also imposes fees for "newfound revenue" on venues -- that is, revenue that the venues weren't generating beforehand, such …

Laravel has recently been shipped with a new helper called defer() which can be used to defer the execution of a callback until after a successful response has been sent. This way you can offload time-consuming work (such as calling an external API) to a callback and return a response to the user as soon as possible. Here’s what it looks like. Route::get('/defer', function () { defer(function () { // …

The PS5 Pro was announced last week, and it was a controversial launch in many ways. I had said a few days before, when the teaser dropped, that it would wind up being a boring and confusing presso. Because they usually are when they're hyper technical with Cerny involved. Great if you're deep diving as a nerd, but otherwise a bit of faff for the sake of it.And certainly that …

Pretty, aren't they?I-cords are useful and attractive, but they can only really be knit in one color, and can be rather stiff. Today's method of making cords with a crochet hook can be made in different colors--very pretty! This cord is based on a crocheted chain stitch, but two strands (or more) are used. Like the chain stitch cord on which it is based, this is very strong--much stronger

You didn't see this coming.Amongst all the clearing up and out came this form the kits box. It's been there for a while and it was intended to use the the body for a Ted Polet type conversion to 009. This didn't happen and I didn't even try running it. It was absolutely filthy and appeared to be electrically dead. The body came off and I dumped it in a …

Buster Keaton – “The Great Stoneface” – the child vaudeville performer who famously never smiled on stage, the silent comedy star who promoted his deadpan persona on film. Yet working with friend and mentor Roscoe Arbuckle, Buster started his film career in 1917 with a very different vibe, laughing and smiling with joy and glee. Studying his Arbuckle films closely – spoiler ahead – I was stunned to discover Buster …

THE EDITORS OF Not Just Bits of Paper, a compendium of writing on the original anarcho-punk wave which offers a participant’s eye view of events, has been republished in an updated edition to mark the tenth anniversary of its release. The original edition of Not Just Bits of Paper was published back in 2014. The 2024 edition is printed in full-colour, and has been extended to include an additional thirty-seven …

This topic hasn't been revisited since 2014, and it's definitely time for another look. Rather than link back to that earlier post, I'll simply repeat, modify and update it here.Guaraldi fans are lucky; all of the albums under his own name have remained in print and been readily available since their initial release, with new ones arriving rapidly these days. But what about material that saw limited commercial release, or …

It staggers me to realise that, after penning this blog for almost 17 years now, I have only featured A. A. Allen’s incredible output once, seven years ago when I posted Crying Demons (now updated), a staple of pretty much every ‘worst records’ list compiled. Crying Demons is a classic noted, on the reverse of one of Allen’s many releases, as ‘one of the most amazing recordings of demons speaking …