Guitarix troubleshooting

For the past few updates of Guitarix, I have been having issues where changing the JACK server latency causes the audio output to go crazy. This seems to stem from changes that the developer has been making to the config files, because the following commands usually get things working again:

mv ~/.config/guitarix ~/.config/guitarix.backup
mkdir ~/.config/guitarix
cp -r ~/.config/guitarix.backup/banks ~/.config/guitarix/banks

These commands backup your amp/effects presets from ~/.config/guitarix/banks (which are the hard part to restore manually), and let the default settings take over the next time the application is launched.

fzl.fish

I’ve been using the following fish alias fzl (“fuzzy list”) to run fzf (“fuzzy find”) in the current directory with a bat preview. It’s just a couple of light tweaks to the examples listed in the fzf README.

~/.config/fish/functions/fzl.fish:

function fzl
    # `bat` is aliased to `batcat` on Debian
    if type -q batcat
        set -f bat_command "batcat"
    else
        set -f bat_command "bat"
    end

    # Set the overall width of the `bat` preview to
    # 50% the width of the current terminal
    set -l bat_width $(math ceil $COLUMNS x 0.5)

    # My preferred `bat` options
    set -f bat_command \
        $bat_command \
        --style numbers \
        --color always \
        --italic-text always \
        --wrap auto \
        --terminal-width $bat_width

    fzf \
        --preview "$bat_command {}" \
        --preview-window right,$bat_width,nowrap
end

Example below.

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Learning Korean idioms with UNIX fortune

fortune is a classic UNIX program that displays random fortunes, pithy quotes, and the like:

$ fortune
If you think last Tuesday was a drag, wait till you see what happens tomorrow!

Today, I repurposed fortune (really fortune-mod) as a language study tool by scraping some Korean idioms from Wikiquote from Wikiquote):

$ fortune korean
“쇠귀에 경 읽기.”
    아무리 좋은 말을 하면서 가르치려고 하여도 그 뜻을 제대로 헤아리지 못하는 사람을 두고 하는 말.

This one says “Chanting sutras into the ears of a cow,“ defined as “A phrase used when someone fails to understand what you are trying to teach them no matter how well you choose your words.”

I set fortune korean (with some gentle text styling) as my fish greeting, so I can learn a new idiom every time I open a terminal—see below.

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Applying the KISS principle to amp modeling

I’ve been playing electric guitar using only computer modeling software (without a physical amplifier) for about five years now. I started out with Garageband and Mainstage, then briefly experimented with Amplifikation Vermilion, and for the last year and half have turned to a free, open-source package called Guitarix and a small collection of impulse response files culled from guitar forums. In my experience, a good impulse response file fed into a basic convolver does a lot more for your sound than trying to optimize the countless parameters on an expensive simulator.

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This year’s reading

A subset of the books I enjoyed this year:

  • Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, a novel about evangelical Christianity and cultural arrogance.
  • 손원평, «아몬드», a novel debating whether or not emotions are a distraction.
  • Walter Isaacson, The Codebreaker, a biography of biochemist Jennifer Doudna.
  • Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project, a biography of behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
  • 황보름, «어서 오세요, 휴남동 서점입니다», a slice-of-life novel about a bookstore owner overcoming the loneliness of urban life.
  • Ayoko Sono, Ningen no Bunzai, a “collection of writings” (according to Wikipedia, and I cannot come up with a better description). I read the Korean translation «약간의 거리를 둔다» by 김욱.
  • 김애란, «달려라, 아비», short stories about the legacy of childhood experience.
  • Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror, essays about identity, authenticity, and social media.

In progress:

  • 김금희, «너무 한낮의 연애», short stories about people at the margins of society.
  • David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.
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