On my TiVo is Soundbreaking, a documentary about recorded music that was shown on PBS in 2016. The producers of the series put out this nice tribute to George Martin upon his passing that year.
Category: Tech
Trouble in Blogland
It was exactly three years ago that I finally whacked down the technical moles that were crippling my WordPress installation. In the aftermath of my struggles, I was left with some residual problems on older posts that I occasionally fix on an as-needed basis.
Now there’s a different sort of WordPress trouble. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg isn’t happy with WP Engine, a large hosting service that caters to business customers, rather than hobby bloggers like myself.
His complaint is that WP Engine, which is owned by a private equity firm, takes advantage of the free resources available from WordPress.org, without contributing very much of anything in return. This goes against the idea of being an Open Source software participant.
Mullenweg cut off WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, and WP Engine sued in response. A judge has decided that Mullenweg must restore full access to WP Engine.
Mullenweg’s hosting service is WordPress.com, so I can understand why he isn’t pleased with a competitor that wants the freebies without playing by the rules. I am neither on WP Engine nor WordPress.com. I’m on the third leading service specializing in WordPress, which is also owned by a private equity firm. Here’s hoping all is well between the respective parties.
Follow-up: It’s getting extra nasty!
“It’s hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this.” – Matt Mullenweg
https://www.404media.co/wordpress-wp-engine-preliminary-injunction/
Valve Jobs
Two household water emergencies in the same week. A new record!
On Sunday it was the shower shutoff valve. Now it’s the pressure release valve on the furnace, doing what it’s supposed to do.
That plastic pan had just started to overflow when I caught it. A technician from the oil company should be here sometime this evening. The pan dates back to when I did my own oil and filter changes, starting with my first car, a 1965 Chevelle.
Googling Minds Want to Know
Traffic here is picking up a bit, with phones being used 2-to-1 over any other devices. What’s bringing more clicks than usual to Prattling Before the Pratfall? CLICK HERE to find out.
1-Track Tape
Techmoan discusses a piece of audio equipment that I used to know very well in my radio days. A Spotmaster broadcast tape cartridge deck.
The sample he has could record as well as play tapes. Those were used in the production studio at the station where I worked and I had one in my little news room.
I produced a countless number of carts for news broadcasts. Those were either taken from phone calls recorded on reel tape and edited onto cart, or dubbed from cassette recordings I made in the field.
In the broadcast studio there were Spotmaster decks that only played tapes. Those didn’t have a VU meter. Another difference was they had a large, square play button that lit up when the tape was running. Much better for working live on air.
The Click-Clack of Flyin’ Fingers
PART I
I took a touch-typing class in the 10th grade. The class was primarily intended for girls who wanted to develop clerical skills. The girls weren’t subtle in letting me know I wasn’t welcome, but I didn’t mind. Because knowing my way around a QUERTY [Correction: QWERTY] keyboard is a valuable skill that I’m taking advantage of at this very moment.
During college I typed the requisite number of papers on my Smith-Corona, that I occasionally lent out other students, free of charge. Later, working as a radio news guy, I banged out a lot of copy. All of it was done on a specialized typewriter at the station that had only upper-case letters, just as the AP teletype printed everything in all-caps. Pressing down those keys required a lot of force, but adjusting to the lack of a shift key didn’t take long; in fact, locking the shift key on the Smith-Corona became something of a habit for me.
I used a computer teletype keyboard in a college math class, but what I consider to be my first exposure to computer terminal keyboards was at the newspaper where I worked after leaving radio. (That was also when I first saw a markup language and how it formatted text.) The keys had a very different feel from the clunky typewriter at the station. I was amused by the system being from Harris, the parent company of Gates, that made the transmitter and mixing console at the radio station.
PART II
Many gamers and professional writers prefer spring-action mechanical computer keyboards over membrane keyboards. I have a rugged and relatively heavy mechanical keyboard that came with a desktop PC I bought over 25 years ago, from a long-defunct clone maker. Although the clicking is relatively noisy, the keys have a long travel distance with good tactile feedback. The keyboard was in daily use for almost ten years, until I bought a desktop PC that had plenty of USB ports but lacked PS/2 connectors. The last time I had need for that particular keyboard was to label slots in the Sony 300-disc CD carousel. I’m contemplating making some changes to the selections loaded in the player, so I’ll soon be pulling out ol’ reliable again.
It took a while for me to get accustomed to the lighter touch required for membrane keyboards. Especially on laptop computers, where accidentally activating the touchpad can be a major annoyance. (The touchpad on my Lenovo Yoga laptop is awful. I will never buy another Lenovo product again, based solely on this one deficiency.)
My Smith-Corona is long gone, replaced with an Epson dot-matrix printer that is itself no longer with me. But now, as with the resurgence in turntables and records, typewriters are making something of a comeback.
As mentioned in that video, Tom Hanks is a typewriter fan with a sizeable collection. This is the typed letter that Tom sent to Debbie Daughtry, who left WFMU and set out on her own to start Boss Radio 66. So now I send money to both stations.
