RSS
Why "vin-dit"?
Contact me: jholland at vin-dit dot org.
Some fun videos here:
Videos
My little app, possibly fun for music buffs who use Apple Music: (best to click this link on an iPhone, where it can run) : https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whatsplaying/id6448736200
2024-2025 archives
Posts from November 2024
Posts from December 2024
Posts from January 2025
Posts from February 2025
Posts from March 2025
Posts from April 2025
Posts from May 2025
Posts from June 2025
Posts from July 2025
Posts from August 2025
Posts from September 2025
Posts from October 2025
Posts from November 2025
Posts from December 2025
Posts from January 2026
Posts from February 2026
Posts from March 2026
Posts from April 2026
Posts from May 2026
Posts from June 2026
Posts from July 2026
August 20 ** 2 I created galleries of some images. The galleries' html files are generated by a shell script, kind of a hackish arrangement. The point is, the galleries are of
photos I took in 1984 at the Papua New Guinea Highlands Sing-Sing Show in Goroka, PNG. The thing I liked most about that day was the Amyours band, documented here:amyours.html. The pictures there, I had printed by 1986, and scanned those prints myself. I've had these slides since then. I got them digitized recently; I'm not crazy about the quality of the digitizing but it is what it is. The pictures themselves and the gallery HTML are also not that great. I've long meant to do something with these, though, and this is the state of it. I've been messing with the shell script and CSS for too long. Maybe I'll work on it more sometime later, for now, here it is. goroka1.html
An example:
August 20 I have a couple Linux installs and an OpenBSD install at home, and I've cobbled together a way of backing them up which can be run with one command, using ssh keys, sudo rights, and stuff..That command is on the OpenBSD Thinkpad. I kicked it off earlier and got distracted and shut the lid of the laptop. When I went to open it a half hour later, I realized I had caused the laptop to suspend while the backup script was running, with it's ssh connections and processes running etc. It just resumed like it had never been interrupted; the tmux session, the script, the ssh, the partly completed "borg[backup]" process over a network connection.....really nice that that all "just worked". I had been thinking about all this stuff; OpenBSD in some ways is pretty old school, for instance, the filesystems and how there are a lot of them mounted in the UNIX way. Once in a mailing list or something I was lamenting the lack of more modern filesystem stuff (like ZFS, or Btrfs, or whatever) and someone was making the case that the robustness of those things is an illusion, and that the UFS-ish filesystems of OpenBSD are in fact better. My own direct experience is that a crash and subsequent fsck session sure looks worse than a crash with a journaling or copy-on-write filesystem. This person was kind of playing trump cards of knowledge of technical esoterica....Anyway, it was really nice that opening the laptop up just resumed my "backup all my UNIX-like machines" process.
August 17 ** 2 Recreated my .mozilla folder on Openbsd by moving the old one, then syncing firefox which got almost everything back. This was my last step in fixing zoom, I had created a new OS user and run the zoom from there and it worked, so the problem seems to have been in .mozilla.
August 17 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/24/how-far-will-the-trump-administration-go-to-deport-mahmoud-khalil This is a really good new piece about Mahmoud Khalil and his legal situation. You'll have to deal with the New Yorker to read it, paywall etc. I don't want to "liberate" it; I think they deserve their compensation for it, however flawed the world of "intellectual property" may be.
August 16 FOSS giveth, and taketh away. Trying to update my jitsi install, I broke it and haven't been able to fix it. I may let it go. I like the idea of an open source alternative to Zoom; the Novalug people said it doesn't really work that well, though. It consisted of four docker containers talking to each other on the network and a mix of volatile and permanent storage, linked to places on the hosting machine (my PC). In related news, Zoom in the browser on the OpenBSD laptop had no sound from other people, which happened at an inopportune time. Can't fix that either (yet).
August 14 I went down a programming rabbit hole yesterday, kind of obsessively working on something. Kind of like how Steven Levy described "hackers" long ago. Not in any sense of illegal or immoral, just obsessive. Maybe something will come of it that I will publish, but for now you'll have to just wonder what that could be!
August 07 croydon.html Some info about and pdf's of writings and drawings by Stan Croydon, father of my friend Elizabeth.
August 06 Cannonball.pdf This is a transcription I did in high school that was pretty difficult for me, I think I worked on it off and on for about two years! It was the cause of the demise of the Wollensak reel-to-reel I'd had for years from Dad. It's the alto sax solo from this recording: StraightNoChaser.mp3. I set out to transcribe at least the non-piano solos of this, but the Coltrane one was just too much. I think I thought piano would be really hard compared to "monophonic" instruments. This Cannonball solo seemed really weird when I figured out (hopefully) the notes, in terms of how they relate to blues changes. It sounds really good but it's made of strange notes! The Miles and Paul Chambers solos, I still have, I did not transpose them though. I think I was listening to tiny fragments of this at half-speed. It was a lot of work for me. Possibly a sign that I was not headed for the toppermost of the poppermost of the jazz world....🙄
August 05 MyFunnyValentineHancock64Changes.pdf It occurred to me to do this - I scanned in this transcription and added the standard chord changes in red, for comparison. This is an object of personal significance to me, I obtained Xeroxes of same transcriptions by Bill Dobbins of Eastman in 1976, that were faded and which I penciled in; I became obsessed with this recording of the 1964 concert by the Miles Davis Quintet it is from. I was looking at it the other day and I find it pretty difficult to look at these notes and also keep the song they're playing on in mind. It's actually not that long a solo, a chorus and a half; they really play fast and loose with the chords. I know that Miles recorded the song with his earlier quintet and followed somewhat different changes, I haven't tried to sort that out. And here's an .mp3 for those that need it, though you should get this recording legally and in the best quality you can. MyFunnyValentine.mp3.
August 04 Even if it's fake, think about this video AIvid.mp4 and this cartoon (I stole the image and made it, I can't find the original):
August 01 ** 2 Swapped in the FreeBSD SSD and got back to the problem of updating it to the new release. There are some tricks to doing that and I hadn't gotten it to work. With some "googling" (actually kagi-ing) I eventually got it right. I used to be such a FreeBSD fanboy; my recent experimentation with it was encouraging until I couldn't update it. I think they're a little light on documentation, perhaps. BSD with ZFS that can run Linux binaries is kind of cool. It doesn't hibernate or suspend, though. I also updated the Lets Encrypt certs in the OpenBSD SSD before swapping it out. I like that these things work, a variety of usable OS's is a good thing. I saw a post by someone somewhere that they had stepped up the maintenance of OpenBSD httpd and relayd, which had apparently fallen off. I mainly want to read mail and "browse", that covers a lot of my computing. The rest of it is pretty tied to the Apple "ecosystem" and is thus not very available on non-Apple devices. I do like the idea of trying to have "software freedom". The smartphones are the real problem now, I think, and I don't see much of a solution to it.
August 01 Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!