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  • Two Wolves in the USA

    (first draft, no chorus, but wanted to get this out there today for obvious reasons.) There’s two wolves / in the USA / one is scared / and the other is brave // one is good / cares about other people / one’s so bad / gotta call it evil // one is kind /…

  • Massively Useful’s first song is up on Bandcamp!

    Instrumental rock guitar: more Delicate Steve than Steve Vai; more looping than songwriting. To be honest, this wasn’t the result of trying to record a song – at first, it was just trying to learn how to use Logic Pro to be able to record a song later. But…this came out. Accidentally? And a random…

  • Fender Mustang GTX Preset for Fleetwood Mac

    This preset takes just a few clicks and twists to build from scratch on any Fender Mustang GTX amp. It delivers a consistent tone that works well at band volume, and it replicates a classic minimalist pedalboard: drive, delay, and reverb. This is the chain: These are the effects I use on different songs for…

  • How to add and maintain references to appendices, including page numbers (without going crazy)

    Say you have a document with a main body and several appendices with supporting information in different sections. You want to make references in the main body to the appendices, including the name of the section and the page number. Like so: The problem: what if you change the name of the appendix section? Or…

  • Malware masquerading as repair tools

    Wow, my hat is off to this crew. (Warning: malware ahead, so I’m not linking to any of the sites or searches referenced.) I’ve been getting this error when trying to accept autoupdate prompts from the WebEx Outlook plugin: After a week of that, I finally got sufficiently annoyed to Google the error, as one…

  • Tesla Model 3: Seattle to Crystal Mountain and back – can it be done without recharging?

    This post answers the question – can you take a Tesla Model 3 on a multi-day ski trip from Seattle to Crystal Mountain and back without recharging? Even when: there are 4 people in the car fully loaded with ski gear and groceries for several days (though all packed inside — no extra drag from…

  • Book recommendation: Storytelling with Data

    I want to recommend a very useful book: Storytelling with Data, by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. It’s available from the Seattle Public Library. (I wish I could credit where I heard about it, all I know is I put it on my ‘to read’ list about 5 months ago.) What I really appreciated about it is…

  • The Lost Macalester I-Fries Recipe, Reconstructed

    Aka Italian Fries, as served at the Grill in Macalester College‘s old Student Union (circa 1990s, before the remodel and adding an extra “e” to create the Grille, which seems WAY too healthy to ever serve such a concoction). I got a tip on ingredients list relayed from a friend of a former Grill student…

  • Finding Free Images for Presentations

    Ready to move beyond bullet points for your presentations? People are visual. If you’re sharing data, try creating a data visualization, instead of a table of numbers. (See Tufte for a start on this.) And if you’re conveying an idea, a single bold image can be more compelling than a slide full of text. (Check…

  • Testing telephone URI links

    Just testing phone links in iOS. Here’s a tel: URL: 1-408-555-5555 And here’s a phone number with no HTML tags: 1-408-555-5555