Kirk Hamilton breaks down and analyzes songs with an eye toward both the music theory behind songs but also the larger context of the song. He approaches every song with an infectious joy and love for the music he’s helping us understand. This isn’t a music snob talking about all the things he hates, this is someone sharing all the things he loves.<\/p>\n
The episodes do talk about music theory, but it’s approachable if, like me, you are still learning. Or you can gloss over the theory parts and enjoy Kirk pointing your ears to things you’ve listened to a million times but never heard.<\/p>\n
Song Exploder<\/a> is a big podcast in this genre but Strong Songs is more focused on understanding what a song is doing and why it works than the story behind the song. Strong Songs resonates a lot more with me, Song Exploder leaves me wanting more.<\/p>\n Kirk also used to be a writer for Kotaku<\/a> and occasionally spends an episode on understanding video game music. I loved his explanation of the musical themes in Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom<\/a> and how the music is tied to the story.<\/p>\n Some episodes to check out:<\/p>\n NodeBB v4 launched today with Activitypub support<\/a><\/p>\n I\u2019m not actually very familiar with NodeBB. I\u2019ve used the older web boards like phpBB, as well as newer ones like Vanilla<\/a> and Discourse<\/a>, the latter of which seems to be everywhere.<\/p>\n Federating forums is an exciting area for the Fediverse. Lemmy<\/a> has been moderately successful, but emulates Reddit more than a traditional message board (\u201ctraditional\u201d maybe not a great differentiator, when Reddit turns 20 this year, but you know what I mean).<\/p>\n Facebook Groups helps keep people tethered to Facebook. I have to keep my account active to stay connected with my neighbors and with my kids\u2019 schools. An open web alternative would be a great way to loosen their grip on people.<\/p>\n One tough part of building ActivityPub apps is deciding how much to cater to Mastodon\u2019s implemention vs doing what makes sense at the protocol level. In a way it reminds me of the bad old days of web development, choosing semantic tags vs. ones that actually work in popular browsers.<\/p>\n I\u2019m going to dig into NodeBB\u2019s federation more, NodeBB\u2019s ActivityPub documentation is here<\/a>, but I\u2019m excited to see an existing platform adopt ActivityPub.<\/p>\n","date_published":"2025-01-20T21:01:48-04:00","url":"https:\/\/george.hotell.ing\/2025\/01\/20\/nodebb-v-launched-today-with\/"},{"id":"http:\/\/g13g.micro.blog\/2025\/01\/17\/the-idiot-box-the-annex\/","content_html":" The Idiot Box - The \"Annex Canada\" Stuff Is A Test And You're Failing<\/a><\/p>\n Trump is a threat to our country, certainly, but his real talent is sucking all of the air out of the room with his absurd rambling promises and declarations (aka \u201cflooding the zone\u201d) while the senior leadership of the GOP does the really fucked up stuff. Trump\u2019s wild plans rarely (if ever) come to fruition - but Mitch McConnell\u2019s plans\u2026that\u2019s another question. Mitch\u2019s stuff seems to work out a lot, especially when everyone is freaking out about some moronic Trump shit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Every time you see people dunking on Trump, look at what\u2019s below the fold in the newspaper to see what is getting deflected.<\/p>\n","date_published":"2025-01-17T12:46:57-04:00","url":"https:\/\/george.hotell.ing\/2025\/01\/17\/the-idiot-box-the-annex\/"},{"id":"http:\/\/g13g.micro.blog\/2025\/01\/07\/rss-tricks\/","title":"RSS Tricks","content_html":" Some of my favorite tricks for finding RSS Feeds to follow:<\/p>\n Get the feed for the top posts of the month for a subreddit: This gives you the top posts from the month, so it’s not a firehose of stuff flooding your reader\u2013just about a post a day. The downside is that sometimes you see posts late. This is my number one tip for monitoring noisy subreddits where I don’t want to miss out on the best posts.<\/p>\n You can put any YouTube channel into an RSS reader and should find the feed. This means that you can get the full feed of all the channels you want to follow\u2013no algorithm involved.<\/p>\n Kill The Newsletter<\/a> gives you an email address to use to subscribe to a newsletter. It then creates an RSS feed of emails to that address.<\/p>\n However, in most cases you don’t even need that. Substack and clones have RSS feeds (although they can be disabled by the site owner). Try adding the website of a newsletter to your feed reader and see if it finds a feed.<\/p>\n Most web comics have an RSS feed, often with the comic image embedded in the post. Try adding them to your feed reader.<\/p>\n There’s a big overlap between the type of person who would read a blog post about RSS tricks, and the type of person who knows that Mastodon profiles all have RSS feeds. Twitter and Facebook did too, but corporate social media will always close the doors when they’ve captured enough people. However, you may not have known that you can follow topics in RSS as well. Find the hashtag for your city\/area and follow it to see what’s being talked about in the Fediverse.<\/p>\n You can get an RSS feed of Mastodon posts you’ve bookmarked at https:\/\/bookmark-rss.woodland.cafe\/<\/a>. I use this as a “read it later” service. When I see an interesting link, I bookmark the post, and it shows up later in my RSS feed later.<\/p>\n Literally every podcast is an RSS feed. In fact, if it doesn\u2019t have an RSS feed, I\u2019d argue it\u2019s not a podcast. If you follow a podcast with good show notes, you can read them in your RSS reader.<\/p>\n RSS Bridge<\/a> can scrape a lot of websites and turn them into RSS feeds. Here’s a list of publicly accessible versions<\/a> or you can try the official RSS Bridge hosted version<\/a> (start there)<\/p>\n If you scroll down on that last RSS Bridge link you’ll find “XPathBridge”. This uses a language called XPath to let you select an element from a web page. You’ll then get a new RSS item whenever that part of the web page changes. Here’s a blog post about using it with FreshRSS<\/a> but the same principle applies to RSS Bridge.<\/p>\n You can follow edits on any Wikipedia page to see when it gets changed or updated, the format is What are some other good uses of RSS feeds?<\/p>\n Edit 2025-10-03:<\/p>\n Google News provides RSS feeds for the news sites it follows, many of which don’t offer RSS feeds. The URL format for example.com is I\u2019m trying out Micro.blog<\/a> for blogging. I\u2019ve been looking for a new platform to use, and when I saw Tantek\u2019s post about micro.one offering $1\/month blogging<\/a>, I decided to give it a shot. Plus I have this great new domain that I\u2019ve been wanting to use, since the .ing TLD rolled out a year ago.<\/p>\n My main requirements for a blogging platform are ActivityPub support and not being a hassle, either technically or financially. I want replies on Mastodon to show up as comments on my blog.<\/p>\n I say \u201cagain\u201d because it turns out that I backed the micro.blog Kickstarter<\/a> back in 2017. I remember checking it out but not really \u201cgetting\u201d it. I still don\u2019t know that I do. There\u2019s a feed, and you can add an RSS feed somehow? And I guess this blog is a Hugo behind the scenes? But it still supports ActivityPub? Anyway, we\u2019ll consider this an experiment and see how it goes. I expect Micro.blog to do good things for the open web, so let\u2019s see what happens.<\/p>\n","date_published":"2025-01-07T12:27:05-04:00","url":"https:\/\/george.hotell.ing\/2025\/01\/07\/im-trying-out-microblog-for\/"},{"id":"http:\/\/g13g.micro.blog\/2022\/05\/05\/rss-in\/","title":"RSS in 2022","content_html":"\n My friend Adam<\/a> recently asked me about the RSS feeds I consume, so I thought it was a good time to do the equivalent of a 2022 blogroll post. The orange RSS icons in this post link directly to RSS feeds you can subscribe to.<\/p>\n\n\n If you don't have a way to follow RSS feeds, a site like Feedly<\/a> or Newsblur<\/a> will get you started for free. For my own setup, I self-host FreshRSS<\/a> in a Docker container on my NAS, and then I mostly use NetNewsWire<\/a> to read the feeds from FreshRSS. That way my NAS is always searching for feeds, but I can still read them in a desktop native client.<\/p>\n\n\n The next step is to figure out what to subscribe to. Start with bloggers you follow (Here's mine: Reddit:<\/strong> Every subreddit has an RSS feed, but that can be too much. I like to get the top posts of the last month as a feed. It's roughly 1 post a day, not too much but you get the stuff that bubbles up to the top. An example feed is [www.reddit.com\/r\/](https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/)apple<\/strong>\/top\/.rss?t=month<\/kbd> - replace apple<\/strong> with whatever subreddit you want to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n [Update 2023-08-15: If you are getting rate limited by Reddit, you may need to change your RSS reader to update those feeds less often. In FreshRSS I have the setting \"Do not automatically refresh more often than\" set to \"8 hours\"]<\/p>\n\n\n Other social media<\/strong>: Following people on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc. is a little tougher. I'm self-hosting RSS-Bridge<\/a> on my NAS, which allows me to follow people from closed social networks. It can connect to a ton of sites<\/a>, the only downside is that you have to host it yourself. I also get my Flickr and Pinboard feeds via RSS, if you too are stuck in 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n Blogroll:<\/strong> With that said, here's a few of the general interest feeds that I follow:<\/p>\n\n\n Cultivating a good collection of RSS feeds gives you a more mindful way to consume social media. There's no infinite scroll, no engagement metrics trying to get you to consume more, and it helps decentralize the internet a bit more.<\/p>\n\n\n (BTW you can get that cool pin in the image from Diesel Sweeties<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n","date_published":"2022-05-05T10:20:01-04:00","url":"https:\/\/george.hotell.ing\/2022\/05\/05\/rss-in\/"},{"id":"http:\/\/g13g.micro.blog\/2021\/12\/03\/let-me-tell-you-about\/","title":"Let me tell you about my solar panels","content_html":"\n Just in time for the shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere), my solar panels are live!<\/p>\n\n\n First off, solar panels make financial sense right now. I would see solar panels on people's houses and wonder how much more people are spending just to lower their \"carbon footprint\" (a term made up by fossil fuel marketing to push individual responsibility for a shared problem<\/a>). But it turns out panels are cheap.<\/a> The technology has gotten way better:<\/p>\n\n\n There are also a bunch of incentives. As I am writing this, at the end of 2021, there is a 26% federal solar tax credit. That means that if you pay taxes, you can knock 1\/4 off the cost. It used to be 30%, but that expired in 2019. In 2023, the credit goes to 22%. In 2024, the credit goes to 0%. So don't wait too long.<\/p>\n\n\n When I say that they make financial sense, the payback period is roughly 8-12 years. Assuming no inflation or utility price increases, my system will pay for itself in about 10 years. There will be both inflation and utility price increases, so my break-even will be sooner (about 7 years if prices go up 5%\/year). My system is also warrantied for 25 years at 85% production, and it almost certainly will last much longer than that. Over 25 years, I will save tens of thousands of dollars in electrical costs, and avoid putting about 18,000 lbs CO2 into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n\n\n 20 lbs!<\/a> Isn't science fun? <\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/details>\n\n\n If I decide to sell my house before I've recouped all my expenses, I will probably still come out ahead. In 2015, Lawrence Berkley Laboratory found that solar panels added $4\/watt to a home's value<\/a>, although with the falling cost of solar I don't imagine that number is still accurate. More recently, in 2019 Zillow found that houses with solar panels sell for 4.1% more on average<\/a>. On the flip side, I recently asked an appraiser about it and she said that there are so few houses with solar panels sold that it makes it hard for her to justify raising her estimate.<\/p>\n\n\n Back to incentives, I want to call out a program that is available in Washtenaw County, run by the City of Ann Arbor called Solarize<\/a>. They have a list of solar installers, vetted through the Michigan Saves<\/a> nonprofit green bank, who have agreed to a flat group buy discount program. The idea is that a neighborhood puts together a group buy with one of their installers, and gets a 5% discount if 3 homes purchase, 10% for 7 homes, and 15% for 10 homes. If you live in Washtenaw County, Michigan and want solar panels, definitely check the Solarize page for any current group buys or hop on one of their Power Hour Zooms.<\/p>\n\n\n You can read another take on Solarize over at Damn Arbor.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n Aside from the fact that this makes renewable energy cheaper, it does something that is arguably more important right now: it normalizes solar panels. If you see one solar panel in a neighborhood, that's probably just a crazy tree-hugger with more money than sense. But when you see a bunch of homes with solar panels you start wondering \"do solar panels make sense now?\"<\/p>\n\n\n There was an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast<\/a> that talked about a similar program in Germany:<\/p>\n\n\n So one thing that the German government did that was so clever is they started targeting neighborhoods and incentivizing homeowners to just install, within certain neighborhoods, solar panels on their homes. And this shifted the social norms within those communities and created kind of a social pressure on the neighborhoods to realize that this was actually normal in their community now, and then they voluntarily went and adopted solar panels. And the most remarkable part about this process is that it spilled over from community to community and neighborhood to neighborhood and wound up becoming the dominant social norm throughout Germany, that everyone was sort of expected to have these solar panels on their homes.<\/p>\nDamon Centola on Hidden Brain - The Snowball Effect<\/a><\/cite>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n My friend Lauren and I organized the group for our neighborhood, which involved getting a lot of quotes and meeting with a lot of solar installers. Some were more expensive than others, some pushed batteries more than others, but none were particularly bad. We ran into some challenges but, in the end, our Solarize group resulted in 16 new solar arrays representing 114 kW of power!<\/p>\n\n\n Solarize is great, and I hope that other municipalities adopt similar programs.<\/p>\n\n\n The panels themselves are pretty boring. They are hardy and designed to withstand some pretty powerful weather. The most exciting thing (apart from the sense of smug self-satisfaction that causes people to write overly-long blog posts) is when the snow slides off in a mini avalanche on my deck. No real maintenance required, although you won't want to replace your roof any time soon.<\/p>\n\n\n The install took 3 days due to weather, the slope of my roof, and the size of my system. Once the install was done, the county came out a week later to inspect it. Finally, DTE did their inspection and turned it on two weeks after the county inspection. The install started on October 29 and I got an email from my system to let me know it was live on November 25.<\/p>\n\n\n The system maxes out at about 9 kW. If you're into the details, I have 27 340W Q.PEAK DUO BLK-G6<\/a> panels attached to Enphase IQ7+ Microinverters<\/a> and an Enphase combiner. I can get all sorts of neat graphs in the app, and I'll do a follow-up post once I get everything working in Home Assistant.<\/p>\n\n\n I get my grid electricity from DTE Energy, which defaults to about 50% coal<\/a>. If you also get your power from them, consider enrolling in DTE's MIGreenPower program<\/a>, which (pre-solar) cost me $20\/mo to ensure that my electricity was coming from renewables. I was skeptical of the program\u2014companies are more than happy to monetize guilt\u2014but a friend who is an environmental professional assures me that it actually does force them to use more renewables.<\/p>\n\n\n So how do the solar panels affect my DTE bill? Well, first off, we get both electricity and natural gas from DTE and the natural gas usage is not going to change in the near future (although I would very much like to electrify all the things and get rid of my natural gas furnace, water heater, stove, oven, and dryer).<\/p>\n\n\n For the electric portion, my house uses any solar power first before going to the grid. After that, any excess goes to the grid (as an aside: residential solar is extra effective on high demand days because it goes directly to my neighbor's homes for their use and doesn't suffer ~6.5% transmission loss<\/a>). DTE will credit me for my excess at roughly half the cost it sells the electricity. Those credits then cover the cost of my nighttime and cloudy day usage. They also can be banked for a year so that my August production can offset my January bill.<\/p>\n\n\n This is a pretty recent change. A couple years ago you could get net metering, meaning that you paid for the number of kWh you got from the grid in a month, minus the kWh you produced. If you produced as much as you used, you wouldn't pay for any electric generation. Under the new system, you need to produce about twice your grid consumption to break even.<\/p>\n\n\n On the one hand, DTE needs to pay for the shared infrastructure somehow. I still very much would like the grid to be maintained so I can keep getting power at night and on cloudy days. On the other hand, if you have a natural monopoly<\/a> where you need everyone to chip in to maintain a basic utility, that's a good case for the people owning it and maintaining it with taxes.<\/p>\n\n\n Under the new system, it can make more sense to hoard your clean energy during high demand by filling a battery or wasting the energy running a crypto miner, instead of reducing demand for fossil fuel generated power.<\/p>\n\n\n I did not get a battery. Based on the math above\u2014that I can sell power for roughly half the cost I can buy it\u2014the break-even on the batteries was roughly 10 years. Batteries have a limited number of charge cycles, the lifespan is about 8-12 years. So it did not make financial sense for me to buy a battery that would pay for itself roughly when it died.<\/p>\n\n\n Did you know that when the grid electricity goes out, so does the solar? That surprised me, and a lot of people I've talked to about this, and kind of feels a little unfair. When too many air conditioners take down the grid, you'd think the solar house would be sitting cool. But you can't have the solar panels pushing electricity into \"dead\" wires or you put the technicians at risk. So the rule is that solar panels have to shut down when the grid loses power.<\/p>\n\n\n Unless you have a battery. If you have a battery, you can disconnect from the grid but keep using your battery to power your home.<\/p>\n\n\n So if batteries are roughly break-even where I live, then the real advantage to them is that you can continue to power your home when the grid goes down. I am fortunate in that I don't lose power very often so right now a home battery doesn't make sense. I also know that there is a lot of focus on improving battery technology, so I would not be surprised if the math changes significantly in the next 5 years. Also, if DTE changes their rate structure for the worse, batteries may become more viable.<\/p>\n\n\n As an aside, I love the idea of utility-sized gravity batteries like Project ARES<\/a> and Gravicitry<\/a>. It feels very steampunk to store electricity in a bunch of train cars or a hoisted weight.<\/p>\n\n\n Maybe!<\/p>\n\n\n The finances change a lot depending on where you live. Also, for roof-mounted solar you will want to see how much sunlight your roof gets. You can use Sun Number<\/a> or Google's Project Sunroof<\/a> to estimate:<\/p>\n\n\n If your roof isn't great for solar due to shade or geometry, ground-mounted solar may be an option.<\/p>\n\n\n There are also a bunch of other things you can do instead of adding solar panels. Reducing your energy usage by insulating you house or using lower-power power things (LED bulbs pay for themselves in a year!) will reduce your carbon output.<\/p>\n\n\n Also check with your power company to see if they have a program like MIGreenPower<\/a>, where you can request clean electricity. Yes, it's all fungible, but they really do buy more power from clean sources when you sign up for it.<\/p>\n\n\n Ultimately the climate crisis is being caused by systemic problems. We have made car ownership mandatory for most of America.<\/a> Michigan's Department of Transportation measures its success by how many miles it can get people to drive<\/a>. We can't even let the free market try to solve the problem until we price the cost of carbon into everything. We can't solve systemic problems with individual actions, but at least we can do what we can to try to stave off the worst famines, droughts, wildfires, refugee crises, and wet bulb deaths of the climate crisis<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n","date_published":"2021-12-03T14:51:36-04:00","url":"https:\/\/george.hotell.ing\/2021\/12\/03\/let-me-tell-you-about\/"}]}\n
\n
Reddit<\/h2>\n
https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/\/r\/simpsonsshitposting\/top\/.rss?t=month<\/code> (Replace simpsonsshitposting<\/code> with a subreddit you want to monitor)<\/p>\nYouTube:<\/h2>\n
Email Newsletters<\/h2>\n
Web Comics<\/h2>\n
Mastodon Hashtags<\/h2>\n
https:\/\/mastodon.social\/tags\/movies.rss<\/code> (Replace movies<\/code> with the hashtag you want to follow).<\/p>\nMastodon Bookmarks<\/h2>\n
Podcasts<\/h2>\n
Lots of Websites<\/h2>\n
Any Website<\/h2>\n
Wikipedia<\/h2>\n
https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/w\/index.php?title=Reddit&action=history&feed=rss<\/code><\/p>\nAny News Site<\/h2>\n
https:\/\/news.google.com\/rss\/search?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen&oc=11&q=site%3Aexample.com<\/code> - just change example.com<\/code> at the end (after %3A<\/code>) to the domain of the news site you want to follow.<\/p>\n","date_published":"2025-01-07T22:44:00-04:00","url":"https:\/\/george.hotell.ing\/2025\/01\/07\/rss-tricks\/"},{"id":"http:\/\/g13g.micro.blog\/2025\/01\/07\/im-trying-out-microblog-for\/","title":"A $1 Experiment in Blogging","content_html":"\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/g13gblog.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/47285-rss.webp\")
<\/a>). Also pretty much every newsletter you subscribe to has an RSS feed. Then add in web comics. Those 3 categories make up the bulk of what I read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/a>\n<\/li>\n\n\n<\/a>\n<\/li>\n\n\n<\/a>\n<\/li>\n\n\n<\/a>\n<\/li>\n\n\n<\/a>\n<\/li>\n\n\n<\/a>\n<\/li>\n\n\n<\/a>\n<\/li>\n\n<\/ul>\n\n\n![\"graph](\"https:\/\/kottke.org\/plus\/misc\/images\/solar-power-cost.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\nQuick aside: if a gallon of gasoline weighs 6.3 lbs, how much CO2 do you think it will put in the atmosphere when burned?<\/summary>
Solarize<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n
The Panels<\/h2>\n\n\n
![\"graph](\"https:\/\/g13gblog.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/e56c0-img_b2f18e35f0ef-1.jpeg?w=893&h=1024\")
![\"graphic](\"https:\/\/g13gblog.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/6d938-img_f17df3ff0d41-1.jpg?w=1024&h=663\")
How I Get Billed<\/h2>\n\n\n
Batteries<\/h2>\n\n\n
So\u2026 Should You Get Solar?<\/h2>\n\n\n
![\"Example](\"https:\/\/g13gblog.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/a0ebc-screen-shot-2021-12-03-at-12.17.06-pm-2.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n