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.

A quick introduction to adjusting the panning of overdubs in Loopy Pro clips, including a link to a miRACK configuration and instructions on how to use it in your own Loopy Pro configurations

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.

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. Scrooby show was lovely on Saturday. Nice to catch up with a few folk I’ve not seen in quite a while and the weather was flat out gorgeous. I took some modelling balloons, planning to do a few balloon animals and hats, had something like a 60% burst rate with the Sempertex 260Ss that were all I could get hold of at short notice.

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.

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.

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 apparently the Greek place isn’t that good. Rustic Pizza is still good though.

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.

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.

Small victory of the week: I’m starting to get on top of the washing

Cool URLs don’t change they say, and that’s true. You’ll always find my upcoming livestreams at https://youtube.com/pierscawley/live, along with maybe one or two of the previous ones to catch up with. What you won’t find is the full three year archive of streams. Here’s why…

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 awful, and I know I’ve got my front page looking better. Isn’t that lovely?

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 might even be reading a version of this via Mastodon rather than directly on the site.

Once I’d added the Mac Mini to the rack, there was a space in the bracket it was mounted on that was designed to hold one or two Raspberry Pis. I had a Pi sitting about, so of course I added it to the rig thinking “I’ll work out what to do with that later.”

It’s proved invaluable…

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 card from Amazon and drafted my Nikon D810 as my webcam and the appearance of my streams improved enormously. This worked fine with my slightly aging PC and Twitch Sings.

I’ll get back to the gory details of my webmention catcher later, but I’ve been doing a bit of site gardening. Hopefully this means that our index page is looking much nicer, and things are a bit more parseable by IndieWeb tools. Also, I hope, I’ve added some gadgetry that means that brid.gy will automatically tweet a link to this page once I’ve posted it.

The beauty of using a static site generator to build your website is supposed to be that it’s all delightfully simple. Simple markdown formatted files go in at one end and a slim, fast and easy to serve website comes out the other end. All that remains is to upload those files to the appropriate directory on your server and all is well.

But never underestimate the ability of a long time Emacs user to complicate things.

Taking one more step on the road to full IndieWeb citizenship or whatever it’s called, Just A Summary now displays webmentions.

In which Piers attempts to explain why he’s not been blogging in years, and makes vague noises about getting back to it again, in the hope that this time his IndieWeb inspired enthusiasm will last longer than a couple of weeks.

If you’re at all like me, you have content on a bunch of different sites (Instagram, Youtube, Flickr, Soundcloud, Bandcamp…) and, especially for multimedia content, it’s great to be able to link to ’live’ versions of that content. Of course, all those sites will let you ‘share’ content and usually have an ’embed’ option that hands you a bunch of HTML that you can paste into your blog entry. But screw that! I’m a programmer for whom laziness is one of the cardinal virtues – if it’s at all possible, I prefer to let the computer do the work for me.

Hugo¹ sort of supports this out of the box with its youtube, instagram, vimeo etc. built in shortcodes. The thing is, they’re not lazy enough – you have to dig into each URL to extract a content ID and pass that in to {{% youtube kb-Aq6S4QZQ %}} or whatever. Which would be kind of fine, if you weren’t used to the way sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so on work. With those sites, you enter a URL and they disappear off behind the scenes and fill in a fancy preview of the page you linked to. Why can’t Hugo do that?