[nmglug] Mtg this week, Apr. 25th, 1730,

[Akkana Peck]

I'll try to make it tomorrow night. My latest project: I've been chatting with some people on mastodon about barn-door trackers (a cheap low-tech way to track the sky with a telescope or camera) and that inspired me to dig mine out of the garage and see if I could fix the problems that plagued it (a slipping motor). I spent some time today getting my rusty arduino development environment working again.

Two other little things I've been working on:
first, a little python script that watches idle time and tells me to take breaks from the computer every half-hour. Some podcast, maybe Freakonomics?, recently challenged people to do that, and the people who took breaks reported they felt a lot better and more energized throughout the day. I have a tendency when I'm working on something to get way too wrapped up in it and stay at the computer longer than is healthy for me.

Second, a guitar flash card program. I've been taking beginner guitar lessons online, and this program quizzes me on the chords and helps me learn. It's really cool what you can do just with the sox command line. For instance, here's a 3-note guitar chord with the command-line:
 play -nq -t alsa synth pl D3 pl A3 pl D4 pl F#4 delay 0 0.06 0.12 0.18 remix - fade 0 1.75 .1 norm -1 vol 0.5

Ted Reichelt writes:
> I am still on a quest to get to a point to become a solely linux user but because of work and other things not quite there yet
> as for the personal side.'
> If I can make use of wine for maybe a couple of programs that are just not available in linux I'll be happy.
> As it is wine has not worked for me. out of the box none of these programs are working with wine.

I haven't had much luck with wine. There's really only one thing I care about that needs Windows: Adobe Digital Editions (for e-borrowing library books or buying e-books). Every now and then I manage to get it working in wine, and it works for a few weeks then stops working and I can never find a solution besides removing every trace of wine and starting over, possibly on a new Linux machine. I even tried buying Crossover, with the same result: ADE worked in Crossover for a few months, then stopped working, and Codeweavers doesn't support that app so there's no recourse. I don't know what it is about wine that makes things stop working after a while.

So instead I keep a Windows VM (using the Windows 10 that came with my current laptop) that runs in QEMU off an external disk, which I fire up once or twice a month.

        ...Akkana