Trope Trainer is a software package for working with Hebrew cantillation (trope). You can use it to view, listen to, or print the weekly Torah reading (or parts thereof), weekday readings, holiday readings, etc. As the "trainer" in the name implies, one of its purposes is to teach the cantillation system -- or, I should say, systems, because there are regional and other variations.

I didn't use it for that because I already know (my community's) cantillation system; while occasional curiosity might lead me to ask it "hey, how does the Lithuanian tradition chant this?", in practice I haven't. No, what I use Trope Trainer for is to print legible copies with the vowel markers and trope markers. These are useful for practicing and, when I know in advance so I can print it, for checking the reader during the service, because the scroll used for readings does not have vowels and trope marks. (There is always somebody following along during a Torah reading to correct the reader in case of mistakes.)

Back in August, somebody in my minyan asked me to be his checker the following Shabbat, so I launched the program to print a copy. But the program was stuck at "checking for updates", a state that had previously passed so quickly that I wasn't used to seeing it. If I cancelled, the program crashed. Repeatedly. A little digging revealed the probable cause: the company went out of business and their domain isn't there any more. Presumably the software is checking a now-dead URL and the programmers didn't handle failures. (There are other reasons the service might not be available, so this isn't just "didn't consider the company might die".)

I asked on Judaism Codidact about alternatives and people made some useful suggestions, but cutting/pasting text from elsewhere into Google Docs, while it works, is inelegant and also produced some formatting glitches.

My too-clever hind-brain said to me: hey, if the software is trying to reach a particular URL, you could intercept it (edit the hosts file) and then try to figure out what to send back (though you would have to learn how to write a web service, but hey, that seems doable?). This is the point where people who know more than I do say things like "Wireshark", which I installed but couldn't figure out how to use to identify what it was trying to contact. I asked for clues on Power Users, where someone helpfully asked what the program does if it's not connected to the Internet. Bingo -- the programmers didn't anticipate "our site is down" but did anticipate "not connected", presumably because some in the observant world do avoid the Internet.

But this required pulling the network cable, because apparently there's no way on a Mac to say "yes I know you have an Ethernet cable right there, but please humor me and ignore it". I don't want to pull the cable every time I need Trope Trainer; that's too coarse a solution. This is a job for a firewall, but the firewall built into Mac OS only intercepts inbound traffic (or responses to it). I needed to block initiation of outbound traffic from one specific application. Power Users led me to Lulu, which does the job nicely -- and seems useful anyway as an additional layer of defense against malware that phones home (which is most of it, right?). Also, I don't mind having to authorize Java updates and stuff like that.

I didn't want to rely on a hobbled Trope Trainer forever, so I started working my way through the weekly portions, saving PDFs. In the future I can print from those, after all, and can let the software die.

And then I moved to a new machine that can't run the software, which dealt the final blow to Trope Trainer. But going through all this did lead me to that useful firewall, so I don't mind.

I've written lots of stuff in a variety of places online -- (LJ to) Dreamwidth and Medium and SE and one-offs in handwritten HTML and (heaven help us) Twitter and probably some others. Some of it was transient, but some of it is stuff I'd like to keep available and together.

I have a domain and the hosting company offers what I gather are standard tools, of which Wordpress is the one that keeps coming up in searches about setting up simple web sites.

My domain isn't empty, but there's not a lot there. I have things with published URLs that need to not get disrupted, but I'd otherwise like to have a web site with some of the basics ("about" page, contact form) and, mainly, this collection of things I've written. I'm going to have to curate the things I've written anyway (I kind of gave up on the idea of bulk-importing 20 years' worth of Livejournal/Dreamwidth), so I don't mind if I have to post things one at a time. I'm going to be rereading them one at a time to decide their fates, after all.

I'd like it if whatever receives my words of (cough) wisdom spoke both HTML and Markdown. I will, of course, want to be able to tag those posts.

I need it to have a time-based archive (by month or whatever). I'd like tags to work as tags and not just visual labels -- that is, you should be able to click on a tag to see other things with that tag. I think all this is "blog 101" and tools generally do that stuff.

I need to be able to easily back up the content.

I don't know what other questions I should be asking myself.

I've read some of the "getting started with Wordpress" stuff on their site, but before I go much farther: will that meet my needs? (I can't tell about input formats and backups, in particular.) What else should I be looking at? What decisions should I be making before I install anything? What's the easiest path that would probably work for my (I think) modest needs?

Update: Thank you to the several people who pointed out that what I need (and the name for it) is static site generator. Further pointers still welcome.

I've been spending some of my free time working with two open-source projects that are building new, community-driven Q&A platforms. (Yes, two. We're cooperating, including on common interfaces, but have some different goals. We didn't know about each other right off.) I don't have useful programming skills to contribute, but I'm helping with other aspects, including functional design, some feature design, and general cat-herding (on the larger one). Also, one of them asked me to serve as doc lead. :-)

Codidact is a platform for networks of sites on specific topics, much like Stack Exchange is a network of sites. Lots of (current and former) moderators and users from Stack Exchange are involved. (No I did not start this project; I was recruited after it had started.) We're talking about better management of comments/discussion/feedback, and about answer scoring that takes controversy into account, and tying user privileges not to a single "reputation" number but to related activity on the site. We're also talking about allowing more per-site customization, the trick there being to support customization while preserving the sense of an overall network. We have a wiki, a draft functional spec, a front-end design framework, and a forum where we're hashing out a lot of the details. I hope we'll see a database schema soon.

As you can infer from all that, we don't have running code yet. However, we have one community that has been pretty much destroyed on its previous platform, and the Codidact team lead had previously built a prototype Q&A platform, so Writing has a temporary site now, as a stopgap and to keep the community together, while waiting for Codidact to be ready. (Site introduction.)

The team building the Codidact platform will also run an instance (a network of sites). Others are free to take the software and run their own instances if they want to follow different policies or prefer to have full control.

TopAnswers is being built by a few people from the DBA site on SE. They are being much more agile than Codidact is; they have a running site already, which gets improvements on a near-daily basis. Chat is tightly integrated; they actually built chat first so they'd have a place to coordinate building Q&A. They have an interesting voting model where people who've gained more stars (reputation-equivalent) can cast multiple votes on a post, essentially giving experts (to the extent that stars = expertise) optional weighted votes. They also integrate both meta posts and blog posts into a site's main question list instead of isolating those types of content elsewhere. I find this idea intriguing and am advocating it for Codidact too. (The link I provided is to the network-wide meta site. If you choose "Databases" from the selector at the top, you'll see what a "regular" site would look like.)

TopAnswers has a blog post laying out its high-level goals. I wrote some stuff too, from a "consumer's" perspective.

When some sort of incorporation is needed, both projects are planning on going the non-profit route (a la WikiMedia), so that the communities, not profit-seeking, remain central. Right now I think both are running on donated hosting.

Both approaches look interesting to me, and I can see some communities preferring one over the other. I'll be interested in seeing how things work out -- what ends up getting implemented on each, what lessons both positive and negative we learn from past experience, what changes stick, and where individual communities end up being active.

Because of corporate changes (spun off from one company and merged with another), we have to remove our last dependencies on the old company's IT infrastructure. In this last round, they move our email and our (Windows) login accounts to a new domain. My migration was today.

They've sent lots of email about this over the last few months, but they left out some important details. A coworker who's been through it alerted us that they would be uninstalling and reinstalling Office, for no particularly good reason that I can see. (I mean, there's a good reason if you were on the wrong version or something, but I moved from 2013 to 2013.) The only hint they gave was telling us that we'd need to update our email signatures. Yeah, a bit more than that... maybe most people don't customize Outlook much, but I have to for accessibility. So a couple weeks ago, after finding no way to export all my client settings, I walked through all the configuration panels taking screenshots. Today I reapplied them all -- and there's a critical thing that's still broken and I haven't found a solution. I started customizing the web interface instead to see if that can meet my needs, but am feeling the lack of keyboard shortcuts. Maybe that's userscriptable. Dammit, Outlook is a PITA sometimes but it was working and now it's not.

They also created new user profiles for us. They said they would move "your files" over, but coworkers warned that this was incomplete. My browsers are very important to me, so I did my best to save bookmarks (easy), tabs (reduces to bookmarks), and session state. Chrome came through just fine. I was quite surprised, when launching Firefox post-migration, to be staring at the default configuration -- it didn't occur to me that I might lose about:config settings, add-ons, and other UI customizations. Frantic, I dug around in Users/me/AppData, found a Mozilla directory under Local, and copied the profiles therein. No effect. Eventually I went to Google to find out how to put things back the way they were (and sighing deeply about the customizations that don't sync, which I'd have to reconstruct), when I found something that pointed out how to ask Firefox where it's reading profile data from. Aha! Under AppData there is also a directory named "Roaming" (WTF is that?), and it was under there. Once I copied that directory I had my old browser state back. Whew! (Also backed that up for safekeeping.)

The actual migration process (not counting email, which they moved overnight) took about six hours. A chunk of that time was spent blocked and waiting on hold with IT. (An hour on hold the first time, 1:15 the second. Sheesh.) Because I knew the hold times would be long, as soon as I smelled a potential problem the first time I placed the call while I continued to work on it. Alas, the second blockage was a surprise error from their tool. By the way, they helpfully offered links to the FAQ and "contact support", both dead. At least they also displayed a phone number (which I'd secured in advance so I didn't need, but some would).

They moved most Windows settings over; for example, my large fonts, desktop icons, custom colors, and classic taskbar styling were intact. But, I discovered, they didn't move environment variables -- and I have no idea how to get those, since I can no longer log in with the old profile. I discovered this when Emacs didn't read my configuration -- it depends on HOME. So I reset that one, but I wonder what else I've lost.

Tomorrow I get to find out what else broke. I know the main doc tool will need intervention; the domain change confuses the license. I haven't tried git yet.

My laptop is getting on in years. On the one hand, this would have been a good time to replace it, given that there's going to be a lot of disruption anyway. On the other hand, it would come with Windows 10, which hasn't been making friends on my team. Also, I brought in a Windows 10 tablet to use during the migration, and yesterday when I was testing some stuff it announced that it couldn't start and I would have to reinstall the OS (!). I hadn't done much on it so I didn't lose a lot (had to reinstall the VPN and the browsers), but...really? In all my years of computer use, I've never once gone from "works fine" to "start over" in a span of hours. I wonder if I accidentally picked up that virus latest OS update, the one that was damaging data because it didn't check to see if there's enough disk space before starting. Every time that tablet asks me if I want to install updates I say no, but maybe something slipped through?

Hello, save-me-from-trying-to-read-small-signs-in-traffic device, I really appreciate you. You have made a difference in helping me get around in unfamiliar locations. But there are a few things I'd like you to know.

1 - When you tell me to "stay left to stay left", I don't know what you're trying to communicate. "Take that not-very-obvious left-side ramp" would have been wonderful.

1a - It might have been more visible if it hadn't been raining heavily. I wonder how far we are from navigation apps responding to poor conditions by being more verbose?

2 - The desktop interface has a way to reroute, by dragging part of the path to another place on the map, but I could not figure out how to do that on my phone.

3 - But ok, the desktop interface has a "send to my phone" link. So I reasonably expected you to be pre-loaded with the route I'd carefully constructed.

4 - Instead, I got a list of directions that I guess I'm supposed to read while driving (nope!), but no "start" button to get the audio instructions that are the whole point of using the app.

5 - Playing "outsmart the app" by choosing destinations to force a particular route is not fun.

My group moved to a new office location last week. Today was my first time driving there from home. I helped with the move on Thursday, so I'd already driven home from there once and decided that the "best" path, while best in travel time, is not best for me, because of poor visibility in places. So I am very interested in finding an alternate route home. I found one via the desktop app but, well, getting my phone to implement it wasn't so straightforward. But tomorrow is another day.

My Mac has been bugging me to let it install some updates for several days now (requiring a reboot), so since I was going out for the afternoon anyway, I let it do so.

I completely forgot that this would cause Firefox to update to version 57. Oops. (At work I both turned off automatic updates and did some prep work to update to add-ons that will continue to work in 57. I hadn't gotten around to updating add-ons at home, and I forgot that I hadn't turned off browser auto-updates.)

I've lost my Stylish CSS overrides. Some I shared between home and work (or between Firefox and Chrome at home), so those ones I have, but some sites I only visit at home so I didn't have those at work. I found some stuff about how to find them on a Windows machine, but the filenames mentioned there don't exist on my Mac.

For the most part I'm going to just live without them and migrate more of my browsing activity to Chrome. The main reason I limit Chrome is that the tabs display is totally unreadable if you have too many tabs, unlike Firefox which sets a minimum size and gives you scrolling and a drop-down menu to see all of them. I just found a Chrome extension that provides that drop-down menu, so I can at least find stuff, though I haven't yet found a way to get Chrome to stop trying to show all of them anyway.

I also found these instructions for doing some of the things that Classic Theme Restorer did.

I've updated my earlier post about Firefox 57 with other workarounds I've found. For userscripts, I installed TamperMonkey, which I'm already familiar with from Chrome. For both scripts and CSS, I decided that at home I'll just do all my Stack Exchange stuff in Chrome -- I mostly was anyway, and now that it'd be actual work to get those scripts and styles back, time to just commit to it. Firefox is now almost exclusively for blog-reading (mainly Dreamwidth and those few people still on LJ), and everything else I do in Chrome. (That's at home; at work I do a lot more in Firefox.) I tend to have a lot of DW tabs open, so keeping that activity in the browser that handles tabs better makes sense.

My (Android) phone alerts me when traffic is bad near me. This can be handy at the end of the day because I work downtown. Except... it's telling me about traffic on roads I don't use to get home. Sure, there's spillover so it's not unhelpful, but it'd be great if I could tell it -- maybe by gesturing on a map -- what paths I care about, so it could tell me about those ones.

Does anybody reading this know of an app that does that, or a way to get Google Maps to do it? It needs to be fire and forget; I don't want to have to open the map app to look for red lines on it.

It feels like all the information is already there, if only my phone were making use of it.

(This would also let me know before I leave in the morning if traffic is still bad at the other end. At that time I don't really need extra information about traffic near my house; I need it 3-5 miles away.)