Shallow Thoughts : : Feb

Transposing a Song in Audacity

I've been learning guitar. I've tried several times in the past without much success, concluding that although I love music, making it is just not where my talents lie. But this time I'm following a course (Justin Guitar), doing things more or less in the recommended order rather than jumping around randomly. It's fun, and I'm practicing regularly and feel like I'm making progress.

So far I know about five chords, and surprisingly, there are a lot of good songs you can play with only three to five chords. But if you want to play along with a record, some songs need a capo (one of those little dinguses you can clamp around the guitar's neck) to map the chords to ones that are easy for beginners to play.

I don't have a capo. Justin Guitar has a phone app that supposedly can transpose songs, but I wouldn't know about that, because it doesn't work on my phone, just spins forever any time I try to load a song. But I do have a computer; can't I just take a recording and transpose it?

Yes! It's easy in Audacity.

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towebhost: a Handy Script for Mirroring Multiple Websites

I maintain quite a few small websites. I have several of my own under different domains (shallowsky.com, nmbilltracker.com and so forth), plus a few smaller projects like flask apps running on a different port. In addition, I maintain websites for several organizations on a volunteer basis (because if you join any volunteer organization and they find out you're at all technical, that's the first job they want you to do).

I typically maintain a local copy of each website, so I can try out any change locally first.

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Identifying Trees and Shrubs in Winter: a PEEC Plant Walk

Last week Craig Martin led a tree and shrub identification walk for PEEC around Kinnikinnick (yes, I had to look up the spelling) Park in Los Alamos.

It was a very welcome addition to the summer flower walks that Craig and Chick Keller have led in the past. Nothing wrong with flowers, but I get curious about the non-flowering plants I see around me. I guess I'm not the only one who feels that way, because the walk was very well attended despite the mud and snow.

And it was fabulous. I scribbled notes as I could, but I'm sure they won't make any sense to me a week from now, let alone a year. Hence this writeup.

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