Get your holler on!

TablEdit is a program for creating, editing, printing and listening to tablature and sheet music (standard notation) for guitar and other fretted, stringed instruments, including mandolin and bass. This is a very useful tool for those who are trying to learn a new instrumental tune.  Multiple instrument tracks can also be created; for instance, the user could toggle between tablature for guitar, mandolin, all within the same song file.

TEFview is a free TablEdit file viewer. Files that were created with TablEdit can be viewed/listened to using TEFview. Unfortunately, they only offer a Windows and Mac version of the software.

With past versions of Ubuntu, I have been able to run the TEFviewer under wine, but I had to also install Timidity and and make some custom configurations. Now, with the latest version of Wine and Ubuntu, you can easily intall TEFview.

Download TEFview from http://www.tabledit.com/tefview/.  I installed this on my CrunchBang system which made the process slightly more complicated, but not too bad.  I chose to install Wine-Doors, which I have had good luck with in the past when running under Ubuntu.  When you install Wine-Doors, you are also installing the standard Wine package. Wine is in the Ubuntu repositories and is as easy to install as typing “sudo apt-get install wine” into your terminal emulator.  If you wish to instead install Wine-Doors, download the appropriate file from here: http://wddb.wine-doors.org/downloads.  For Ubuntu, dowload the .deb version.  Navigate to the file in your file manager, right-click on it and select “Open with gdebi package manager”.  Follow the installation procedure.  Once finished, you’ll find a menu launcher under Applications > Wine > Wine-Doors.  Launch Wine-Doors and specify that you do have a valid Windows license; once the setup has completed, a window will open that contains various software that can be installed.  Select File > Install From CD, and then browse to the directory where you saved the TefView software, then select the tefv.exe file and click Run.  Follow the installation wizard.

Here is the TefView in action.

My Thinkpad T30 is probably the machine that I use the most, and it is running Crunchbang Linux.  Screen resolution is only 1024×768.  This screenshot shows one of my recent OpenBox themes; I call it Sage.  I’ll be posting this one along with a handful of other themes on box-look.org sometime soon.  The conky file that I am using is a modified version of Hanna’s.  The black diamond-plate graphic I believe was originally created by Zwopper, although his version had a white #! located in the center of the graphic, which I removed — it’s not that I don’t want to plug my favorite OS, but I was going for simplicity here.

Running MoC audio player and htop.

Here are a couple of new dark wallpaper images.  Both are 1680×1050.

• diamondplate-windmachines.png
• black-diamond.png

Recently, there has been a little bit of a buzz out there surrounding the MoC (music on console) audio player. My ramblings here don’t really bring anything new to the table, but I thought that I’d share my ~/.moc/themes/config file with you and share with you how I launch the application.  This is by far my favorite and most frequently used audio player on any of my machines.  MoC is located in the Ubuntu repositories and can be installed easily by typing the following into your terminal emulator:

$ sudo apt-get install moc

Note: everywhere you see “~/path/to/your/music” in this post or in the config file, please change this to the path to your own music directory.

I choose to use Terminator as my main terminal emulator, and that’s where I execute the MoC player from.  In my ~/.moc/themes/config file, I’ve made a couple of comments regarding how to launch MoC.  You can add an alias to your ~/.bashrc file so that MoC knows to look for your specified theme file when you launch it from the console, or you can directly reference your theme config file from your menu launcher.

# ~/.bashrc alias to launch MoC command line music player using desired theme and to launch in main music menu
# alias mocp='mocp -m ~/path/to/your/music -T config'

# Gnome Panel launcher:
# terminator -x mocp -m ~/path/to/your/music -T config

You’ll notice that I’m calling on “mocp” rather than “moc”.  This is because “mocp” is the actual player application that you need to use — Music On Console Player.

On my Ubuntu machine, I’ve created a custom launcher on the Gnome panel that executes the second command that you see listed above, and when executed, MoCP launches and it uses my specified theme.  I use Ubuntu at work, but most all of my other machines are running either Crunchbang Linux (uses the OpenBox window manager), or a custom Debian build with the PekWM window manager.

OpenBox: To launch MoCp from the ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml file, I use the following:

<item label="MoC Media Player">
 <action name="Execute">
 <execute>terminator -x mocp -m ~/path/to/your/music -T config</execute>
 </action>
</item>

PekWM: To launch MoCp from the ~/.pekwm/menu file, I have specified the following:

Entry = "- MoCp Music Player" { Actions = "terminator -x mocp -m ~/path/to/your/music -T config" }

The ~/.moc/themes/config file will control the colors that appear in your MoC player; mine is located here.  I can’t take credit for writing this whole config file as I know that it originally came from elsewhere, but I unfortunately cannot recall who the original author was.  As I have noted in the config file, you will find a good tutorial on configuring MoCp located here.

Recently, I came across some really nice Filters and Scripts for The Gimp.  If you are not familiar with The Gimp (The GNU Image Manipulation Program), it’s high quality open source photo/image editing and manipulation software.

Check out these Gimp filters:
http://www.gimphelp.org/script24.shtml
http://gimpfx-foundry.sourceforge.net/

Here is a Cottonwood Grove image that I decided to use as my test image for experimenting with some of these Gimp filters.  Interesting results!  You can really see the effects a lot more clearly if you click on each image to view a larger version.

Cartoon Filter

Cartoon Quick

Pastel

Line Art

Line Art B&W

Synthetic Edges

Toned Line Art

Slide

Fort Collins sure has some great music flowing through its veins!  It surely is a mecca for Bluegrass music, and Old Time music is starting to become more prevalent too!  Check out a couple of local bands:

The Horsetooth Mountain Rangers

• http://horsetoothmtnrangers.com
• http://www.reverbnation.com/horsetoothmountainrangers
• http://twitter.com/horsetoothmtnrg

Cottonwood Grove, a Fort Collins Old Time Stringband

• http://cottonwoodgrove.wordpress.com/
• http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cottonwood-Grove/163213323517
• http://www.reverbnation.com/cottonwoodgrove
• http://twitter.com/cottonwoodgrove

I am disappointed that the previously supported Atheros wireless card (AR5212) is no longer being supported in Ubuntu’s 9.10 (Karmic Koala).  Ubuntu’s support for most hardware has generally been great over the years, and if something did not work correctly, it was likely that one could expect to see a fix to the problem at some point down the road.  However, it seems unusual to me that support would end for hardware that is still reasonably new.  I know that technology is moving along quickly and all, but sheesh!

I tried this set of solutions as well as this solution, all with no success.  It’s apparent that other Atheros cards as well as Broadcom cards are experiencing difficulties, but some folks have had success at fixing the problem; those same fixes have not worked for me.

Ubuntu 8.10 was the version that I had been previously running on the X60; after my recent experience with 9.10, I decided to downgrade to 9.04 and had the same wireless issue!!!  Arrggg!!!  Come on Ubuntu!  Atheros chipsets are not uncommon, and the AR5212 is not really that old!  My laptop is far from being ancient and the hardware that had been previously supported should STILL be supported, shouldn’t it?  It’s not like this machine is five years old or more.  Come on!  What gives?

If anyone has suggestions, I’d love to hear them (thanks in advance). In the mean time, I’ll continue to try to find a solution on the 9.10 platform.

Don’t miss the inauguration party for Obama in Fort Collins on Tuesday night.  It’s happening at Avogadro’s Number (http://www.avogadros.com/Inauguration.html) in Fort Collins, CO!  It’ll be a pot luc party with three bands providing entertainment.

The Poudre River Irregulars 5:00 – 7:00
Inaugural Speech 7:00 – 7:30
The Montgomery Jazz Group 7:30 – 9:30
The Horsetooth Mountain Rangers 9:30 – 11:00

Don’t miss it!

Looking for a fun way to bring in the new year?

Join us at the New Year’s Eve Pot Luck Party tonight at Avogadro’s Number!  The Horsetooth Mountain Rangers will be playing from 7:00 – 8:30.  Bring a dish to share, bring your instrument, bring a friend, and come shake your booty!
http://www.avogadros.com

Hope to see you there!
Have a Happy New Year!!!

The Horsetooth Mountain Rangers have become the regular Wednesday night house band down at Avogadro’s Number in Fort Collins, CO.  We usually play from 7:00 – 8:30 p.m., and the long-standing Avo’s Bluegrass jam begins after that.  Amy Finders was there last night to take our photograph; she has recently become the webmaster for the Colorado Bluegrass Music Society’s website and wanted to update our band info and photo.  She was kind enough to stand in as the designated photographer on this one.  Click images to enlarge.

I decided to create an old-timey looking version of the image (below):

The Wednesday night jam at Avo’s is a lot of fun. It’s mostly Bluegrass, but there is sometimes an Old Time jam that plays back in the stairwell (that’s where the good acoustics are!). So come on down and join in the fun!