Electric guitars weren’t invented to make overdriven sounds, though they do excel at that. Made for electricity — and for the music of the day in the 1950s — the guitars created by Leo Fender’s company are capable of surprisingly sweet sounds that are as much at home in jazz as in country. I am particular struck by these Songbirds Foundation videos of guitarists playing stellar examples of 1950s Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters through amps that range from vintage Fender to a Dumble.

Any of us who have been blogging over the past 10 or more years has written hundreds or maybe thousands of posts. I’m pretty sure I have at least a couple thousand. But blog writing and other writing are different. A blog tends to say “this is now, things below this are in the past, things above this will appear in the future.” It’s reverse-chronological. That’s not a horrible thing.

With inspiration and code from Ankit, I am using Vim to compile and run C++ programs without leaving the editor. I added these two lines to my .vimrc: nnoremap <F7> :!g++ -o %:r %<Enter> nnoremap <F8> :!./%:r<Enter> I hit F7 to compile the program I’m working on. F8 runs that program. This is much simpler than an IDE, and simpler still than Geany, which is pretty simple already. These lines could be modified to compile and run a Java program, or to just run your code in scripting languages like Ruby, Perl and Python.

My 2012 HP Pavilion g6 laptop’s keyboard and touchpad are working intermittently. I’ve already replaced the keyboard twice. They are crazy cheap to buy (and also cheap in quality), but I’m tired of doing it. Not sure what is wrong with the touchpad, but it’s about time to cut my losses. The laptop has run Fedora for a LONG time. It is now on F30. It has gone through many upgrades between about 2013 and 2019.

My test laptop – a 2012 HP Pavilion g6 – is dying. The past couple of OpenBSD installs resulted in kernel panics, and now the keyboard and touchpad keep failing. I’ve replaced the keyboard twice, and now it’s mostly the ribbon connector between the keyboard and the motherboard. I have to pop the bottom off the laptop, take out a screw, then pry the keyboard off and re-seat the cable. It’s probably the same kind of thing with the touchpad.