So recently I have had a ton of what look like spam users join the site. In the next few days I am going to purge all users that have not commented here in the past. If you have commented before, I will leave you on. Otherwise comment to this post today or prepare to be purged.
You have been warned.
This will be written in several parts throughout the day
March 6, 2010 – 11:53am
I am trying to prepare to bottle some beer that has been neglected in the primary fermenter for about 3 months. No visible or olfactory signs of spoilage, so I am moving forward with it. My wife is working at a craft show today, so I am taking care of the kids. Luckily the weather is nice and the kids are playing outside. But before I start on the bottling, I have to make them lunch.
March 6, 2010 – 2:00pm
Lunch went well. The kids ate outside – first picnic of the season. I am moving along on the bottling, but it will end up being an all day affair apparently. I had to dump 2 gallons of my “Abbey Experiment No. 2″ into water jugs so I had enough Belgian bottles for this batch. I’ve learned my lesson not using Belgian bottles on a highly carbonated Belgian beer – broken glass and dripping beer ensue.
March 6, 2010 – 3:45pm
I still have an hour and a half until the bottles are ready. I am starting the process now, though – sanitizing the bottling bucket, starting the yeast (I’m adding champagne yeast to this one at bottling time – It’s at 11% ABV and I want to make sure it carbonates), and cooking the priming sugar.
I listened to a really interesting piece of music posted to Facebook by Steve Layton today. Something to do with an “Improv Friday” project. I’ll have to look into it, seems pretty interesting. I also listened to my 5th in-progress Untitled Piano piece on the good sampler today (the Libretto timidity sampler is either not set up right or not really up to snuff – long piano decays never completely die out, which is really noticeable on this piece). I think I should be close to finishing it up soon. I would also like to start writing out some of the piano music from the play I wrote for in 2005 – “Square One” – and flesh out some ideas there. Hopefully by this time next year I’ll have a full album’s worth of solo piano music.
I’ve also been thinking about my journals today. I am keeping my beer bottling notes in my beer journal – a black graph paper blank book from Barnes and Noble. I have a blue one just like it that I have been keeping as a music journal since 2002. It’s not quite filled out. Since I have been keeping notes on the Libretto, though, I have not used it much. The funny thing is that the Libretto and these blank book journals are almost exactly the same size. Maybe that’s why I like the Libretto so much.
March 6, 2010 – 9:15pm
Kids are in bed, beer is bottled, wife is back home. All seems to be right with the world. Time to get some work done on the piano piece, if I don’t fall asleep first.
Written at 6:15pm on Wednesday, March 3, 2010
I’m writing this on my Libretto, sitting at the Peculiar Pub on Bleecker Street in Manhattan. I’m waiting for Jason Schoch to meet me here. We’re having dinner here then heading to the Player’s Theatre on MacDougal to see Marylin Nonken play Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories. This is the second performance we’ve seen of Feldman’s solo piano works. The last was several years ago when we saw “For Bunita Marcus” and “Piano” performed. I am excited about this performance, though, because I have actually studied the score of “Triadic Memories” – not to mention the fact that my current in-progress piano pieces are directly influenced by this piece.
It’s interesting being back here in Greenwich Village, sitting at a bar writing. I spent a lot of time in my 20s doing the same thing, except I was writing in a paper journal then, and I’m writing on this tiny computer now. The funny thing is that this computer (the Toshiba Libretto 100ct) was made at about the same time that I moved to New York and started writing at bars in the Village and Lower East Side.
In order to make it here tonight, I took NJ Transit from my home in Hazlet to work in Edison ( by the Metropark station), and after work took the train into the city. NJ Public Transportation is completely geared to getting people in and out of New York City, so in order to get from Hazlet to Edison I had to go 15 miles out of my way to Newark. Whatever. While I was on the train, though, I realized how much I miss public transportation. I used to read books on the subway to and from work when I lived in Brooklyn, and I would go through a book in a month or two. Now I never read. But on my way to work today, I started reading Charles Stross’ “Accelerando” on the Libretto (I found an electronic copy online), and it is really great. I’ve been meaning to read a Stross book for a while – I am a huge fan of his blog – but I haven’t gotten started on anything yet. I borrowed “Halting State” (another Stross book) from Erik G. a while ago, but I never cracked it open, so I returned it.
Well, Jason’s here, so time to eat!
My wife Laura is out with the girls tonight. I was extremely lucky that my youngest went to sleep in his own bed. He usually ends up sleeping in our playroom. I am hoping this is the beginning of a trend and he will soon sleep in the kids’ room every night.
I have been playing on my Libretto tonight, as one would expect. I am currently reading Introduction to Linux – A Hands on Guide while creating .wav files of my Untitled Piano pieces. That takes some time on the Libretto’s 166MHz processor. If I knew how to play midi files directly using Timidity on the command line, I would be much happier. Perhaps one day I’ll figure it out.
Holy crap – Julian, my 3 year old, just fell out of bed. Somehow he managed to fall back asleep up in the kids’ room and not demand to go down to the play room. There is hope for us yet!
I am taking a break tonight from my recent pop-centered listening phase, and I have put on Morton Feldman’s “Piano and String Quartet”. This is the piece I listened to with Jason Schoch when I first moved to Brooklyn in 1999 that made me decide to learn to write music. Beautiful, still, enchanting…slow and quiet, tense and reserved. At once relaxed and nervous.
I am sad that I have not yet had a six hour block to listen to Feldman’s String Quartet 2 in its entirety. I am lucky to have at least seen some performances of Feldman’s music, even if my wife was not entirely drawn in to the music. Hopefully I will be able to see more performances in the coming years.
In case you were wondering about my pop-centered listening phase, I am currently attempting to listen to my entire music library (or at least one song per artist) to create a playlist that will fit on my 160GB iPod. With a library of 500+GB, this is something of a challenge. I am listening in alphabetical order, and I am half way through the Cs – I just passed Charlemagne Palestine, and was stuck there for a while. But the pop artists I have listened to are drawing my attention, I guess because I usually pay so little attention to them. The ones that have made it to my highly selective frequent listening playlist are Amiee Mann, Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Butthole Surfers, Bells Of, and Servotron (listed in my collection strangely as ‘Avenue’, hence why I have already hit it on my listening project).
Well, my last wav file has been generated, so I am going to go listen to the pieces so far. Hopefully I will pick up the pace and write more than 30 minutes of music this year.
I got this little Toshiba Libretto for myself for Christmas as a tinkering project, as I’ve mentioned previously. I like to tinker with computers, and I wanted a machine that I could use to experiment with a full installation of Linux. I also wanted to restrict myself to a command line interface only to internalize the use on the console.
With all this in mind, I bought my Libretto 100ct on ebay and proceeded to install Linux. I tried a number of different things, and referred to a bunch of different websites before I got things working. I am not going to go into all of the things I tried that failed. But once I got things working, I started over again to fix a few mistakes and documented the process.
The one applications that I was not able to accurately document was ‘wppost’. wppost is a perl application for posting to WordPress blogs from the command line. Technically, I have gotten this to work (I am posting this from wppost now), but I have not accurately captured the steps to get it working. It is, in my experience, a total pain to install.
I am planning to go into some of my other software installations at a later time, but for now I wanted to at least outline the process I went through to get Debian GNU/Linux on my Libretto. There are a lot of other ways to do this, but I used what I had available. The Libretto has a lot of limitations – no bootable floppy, no CD-ROM, no USB. I ended up having to take the hard drive out and putting it into another computer to get the initial files on the machine. Currently, my only way to get files on or off is through the internet. I bought a Netgear MA401 PCMCIA wireless card to go with it, and this worked without issue luckily.
Here is the quick list of what I did to install Debian GNU/Linux on the Libretto:
Partition Start End Size Size FS Device Type Cylinder Cylinder (MB apx) (MB actual) ID ==================================================================================================== /dev/hda1 Primary 1 254 2088 2089.23 83 /dev/hda2 Primary 255 508 2088 2089.23 83 /dev/hda5 Logical 509 1014 4160 4162.00 83 /dev/hda6 Logical 1015 1030 132 131.61 a0 /dev/hda7 Logical 1031 1536 4160 4162.00 83 /dev/hda8 Logical 1537 2416 7235 7238.25 83 /dev/hda4 Primary 2417 2432 132 131.61 82
I marked the hda1 partition as the bootable partition. The “MB apx” column is what I entered in cfdisk as the partition sizes – the actual size is listed next to it. ID is what I used as the filesystem type in cfdisk for each of the partitions. The hda6 partition is my best guess at getting the Libretto Hibernate stuff to work. Philip Nienhuis has a nice analysis of the partitioning requirements for Libretto Hibernation that helped out quite a bit. Apparently the Libretto writes the contents of RAM to this portion of HD when it hibernates. I have been using the hibernation recently and haven’t seen any data loss issues, but I can’t be certain it’s right. However, I do know that hibernation is working. I will detail libretto hibernation in a later post.
Then I added the following lines to /boot/grub/menu.lst:
title New Install root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/newinstall/vmlinuz vga=808 initrd /boot/newinstall/initrd.gz
This will allow you to boot the Debian installer from an iso image on the Libretto.
/dev/hda1 / /dev/hda2 /var /dev/hda4 none /dev/hda5 /usr /dev/hda7 /home
Once the partitions are set, the installer will begin installing the base system
At this point, you should be prompted to restart the machine. Once you restart, Debian GNU/Linux should be completely installed on the Libretto. I will follow up with another post on how I configured Debian to make the most from my command line only environment. I would also like to put together a third post on the weird Libretto hibernation feature – I have not seen any article that really details how to get this working. I have it working now and it really is a great feature, so I’ll share my own experiences with it.
written 1:00pm February 4, 2010
Writing on the Libretto again at lunch time. I have just about finished my first post on installing Linux on the Libretto. I should have it posted here in the next day or so. It’s looking like a 3 part series at this point:
I can’t believe that I haven’t found any detailed documentation on the Libretto’s hibernation feature and the BIOS settings. I am trying to figure it out as I go, but I still have some unanswered questions. Maybe I should find a Libretto mailing list or something.
Enough about my computer…
On Monday I took the family out to dinner at a hibachi restaurant. Everything was going great until the cook lit the grill on fire. Julian, my 3 year old son, completely freaked out. “I wanna get outta here!” was all he said. I had to sit with him in the car and eat my hibachi at home from a takeout container. Could have been worse, I guess. At least no one got hurt.
I am pretty sure my wife doesn’t read this, so I’ll say right now I have a little surprise for Valentines day. We’re having friends over that weekend, but I have a little plan for the days leading up to it. Just in case she does read this, I won’t tell what it is. Hopefully she’ll like it.
It has been almost a year since I have started on my Untitled Piano pieces. Have I mentioned that? I am about half as far along as I had hoped I would be. Maybe that means I will finish in 2011. Or maybe it will go on forever, I don’t know. I think I need to work on something else for a while, though. I need to do some improvisational recording to break things up a bit. I have been writing but not playing for too long now I think. It will probably take me a while to get my guitar chops back up to speed – my callouses are all but gone now.
Back to work now…
As you can see, I am changing the format of the dates on my journal entries. I am going to try to write here more often – now that I am able to post to WordPress from the command line, it frees me up to write my journal entries in text files and upload later. However, since my journal entries are all stored as text files on my Libretto (and checked into Subversion), I need them to conform to the way I like to keep dates in filenames.
I want to keep this short. The main reason I am writing here today is to wish my wife Laura a happy birthday. Happy Birthday, sweetie! I know I already wrote this on Facebook, but who can have too many birthday wishes? Nobody, that’s who!
I am writing this on my Toshiba Libretto in Vim (the One True Text Editor). I am working on my detailed installation notes, and will post them in the next week or so. I might post some pictures, too, but I’ll have to move over to the Mac for that. No USB means no camera downloads to the Libretto.
I have also been working on the fifth piece in my series of untitled piano works. I have been writing it in Lilypond (like all the other untitled pieces) on the Libretto, and works pretty well. I haven’t figured out a way to play midi files directly on the Debian Linux command line, though, so I have been going through the lengthy process of converting them to WAV files using Timidity. Not too bad, though.
Now I am going to experiment with the Libretto’s hibernation feature. Hopefully it won’t erase any data – wish me luck!!
Short note – I reinstalled the Debian OS on my Libretto to 1. Partition the hard drive so I can use the Libretto Hibernation Mode, and 2. to document the process to post here. The documentation went prett well, but the hibernation still does not work. The command “apm -s” gives me a scary “insert a disk” image – not sure what really happened there. It took me FOREVER to figure out how to get this command line blog posting program to work. I documented what I did, but I have a feeling I could get it to work much more easily next time. Problem is, I would have to reinstall again to test it out, unless I can figure out how to undo all the perl scripts I installed.
This is my second post from my Toshiba Libretto 100ct. I am feeling pretty empowered by this little thing, if only because I got it to work with a decent Linux distro (Debian). I have gotten it to be a functional little machine despite its 64MB of RAM. I am now able to do the following:
I’m a little concerned that I didn’t fully document the process I used to get this machine up and running with Debian GNU/Linux while I was in the process, so it might be a little hard to get all the details right from memory. One day I might redo the whole thing just to get the steps correct. Plus, I love installing operating systems. It’s like a new beginning.
When I re-install, I might right down the steps I took to get the latest stable Debian GNU/Linux system working on the Toshiba. It definitely involves removing the hard drive and using another machine, which was a lot of fun for me. I love taking machines apart.
In other news…
There have been other things going on, of course. I have continued to work on my Untitled Piano pieces, but at a slower pace than I expected. I am planning to be my son’s cub scout den leader next year – that should be a lot of fun. I am still trying to figure out how to build a home theater PC – the combo boxee/dvr system does not seem to be ready for me yet. My wife has been making a lot of really cool hats lately – you might be able to see them soon at Andromeda’s Attic, but we’ll see. She might just keep them.
That’s all for now. I might post again in another six months. Or maybe more often, now that I can do it from the Libretto…
So for Christmas, I got a little computer from 1998 – a Toshiba Libretto 100ct. My son called it my future computer from the past. It’s about the size of a VHS cassette, and from the same era. I was able to load Debian GNU/Linux on it, which was a fun tinkering exercise. Later I’ll write up my experience getting it to work – it was pretty interesting.
More command line madness: I did not load a graphical user interface on the computer, so I have to do everything on the command line. I am posting this using a command called ‘wppost’ that was a bit involved to compile, but seems to work now.
Now it’s time to test some html formatting:
Bold Text, and then italicized text and underlined text.
More to come on this stuff…