Many musicians rely on basic tools in everyday life, including a tuner, a metronome, and a keyboard. I support the kids in a marching band, and I see that they rely on numerous poorly developed apps that differ between iOS and Android devices. Many of them also include ads, and some even play video ads in the middle of a tuning session. I wanted to see if I could develop some web-based apps to solve the problem. ...
During a Christmas dinner, someone commented that many texts are too long these days and that it would be nice to have shorter versions available. One could think of large language models (LLMs) as a good solution for this. However, a better conceptual starting point may be the the concept of stretchtext, coined by Ted Nelson back in the 1960s. I wrote about application writing as stretchtext here on this blog back in 2011. Then, I used the example of having to write both a 5-page and a 15-page application for the ERC Starting Grant. Now, I am curious about how we could use the stretchtext concept to improve contemporary reading and learning. ...
I have generally been very happy about moving my blog to Hugo, except that I have struggled with getting it properly indexed with Google, Bing, etc. One of the benefits of using standard WordPress is that it comes with a lot of automatic functions for such things. In theory, that should also happen with Hugo. However, for some reason, my blog did not work. After various trials and errors, I think I am getting on the right track. However, one things was missing: content in the meta description part of the blog. I have added a generic meta description for the whole blog, but all SEO (Search Engine Optimization) pages say that you need hand-crafted 155-long descriptions for a page. I can do that moving forward, but not with the 1500+ previous blog posts. ...
I am still in the process of transitioning my blog from WordPress to Hugo. The content has been moved, but I see that WordPress has created quite a mess of files. Here’s a simple way to identify and remove unused images using a few command-line tools. 1. Find All Used Images in Your Content First, extract all image references from your Markdown files. This command searches for Markdown image links and outputs a sorted, unique list: ...
I have been doing quite a lot of manuscript editing recently and realize that many people—including academics—don’t understand the differences between the symbols hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash. So here is a quick explanation: hyphen (-): is used to join words (“music-related motion”). You type this character with the Minus key on the keyboard, so it is the easiest one to use. en-dash (–): is used to explain relationships between two concepts (“action–sound couplings”) or in number series (0–100). I haven’t found a way to type this on Ubuntu, but on Windows, you can use the Alt key and press the ASCII code 0150. On Mac, you get it by pressing the Option key together with the Minus key. In Markdown and HTML code, it can be written with the command –. In LaTeX, it is written --. em-dash (—): is used to break up a sentence—like this one—and can be used instead of commas (,). On Ubuntu, it can be typed with the Alt gr key together with the Minus key. On Windows, you can use the Alt key and press the ASCII code 0151. Mac is the most logical, using the Option and Shift keys together with Minus. In Markdown and HTML code, it can be written as —. In LaTeX, it is written ---. Looking around, I see that it is actually even more complex than this. On a How-To Geek page I learned that the minus sign used in mathematics (−7) is not a hyphen but has its own ASCII code and HTML representation: −. I also learned that from a typographical perspective, there are also “non-breaking hyphens” (‑), “figure dash” (‒), and “horizontal bar” (―). ...
I had to set up some tables for our wiki, and came across a HTML-to-wiki converter which seems to work well. This makes it possible to create more complex tables in a WYSIWYG HTML editor (e.g. Dreamweaver) and then convert them to wiki markup afterwards.