Well this is nice. If you’re a Chromecast owner check the offers page of the Home app. The offers are different in every region but I got 90 days of Google Play Music free, and this works even if you had 90 days free before!
Forever McDonalds
Google Photos created an animation from a number of photos I made outside the McDonalds in Douglas last year around this time of the year.
3 months free Backblaze again
A long time ago in 2013 Backblaze had a “sign up and get an extra three months free” offer and they’re back at it again.
For the next 32 days. click on this Backblaze signup link, you’ll get started on a free trial for a month to test it out, but if you decide to pay you’ll get an extra three months.
I love the Backblaze service. It’s a cloud backup service where you can backup your files. I won’t go on and on about it. I did that in my 2013 post, but if it’s any indication of how good they are, I’m still a customer all these years later with over 2TB of data backed up there now.
The signup link is an affiliate link of course (I get three months free as well if someone signs up) but if you don’t want to use it and don’t want that extra three months sign up through this link instead.
And to think, I used to rely on backing up my photos to CD..
The Leak
I’ll come back for you!!!
Under Pressure Studio Take
A version of Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure you might not have heard before.
You can hear some talking in the background. From the title I thought this was made during the recording of the song but comments on this video and another video say it’s from radio interviews. Anyone know?
Here’s a great article on the making of the song.
Though the band sounds lighthearted enough in the studio sessions, the songwriting, May remembers, was fraught with tension. “It was very hard,” he said in 2008, “because you already had four precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us.” Bowie, says May, “took over the song lyrically” and insisted on presiding over the final mix session, which “didn’t go well,” according to Queen engineer Reinhold Mack. For his part, May has said he would “love to sit down quietly on my own and re-mix it.”
Howto disable syntax highlighting in Vimdiff
X > Y >> Z
Where X is the population of developers who read this blog, Y is those that use Vim and Z is those that use vimdiff regularly. I guess this post will only be useful to a tiny minority of my readers, but to them it might be the best thing they’ve read all year. (Well, it is 2016, right? It’s been a weird year.)
Vimdiff allows you to open two files in Vim and side by side compare them, pushing changes from one file to another. I’ve been using it as long as I’ve been working on b2/WordPress and even before then too. It’s supremely useful.
Over the years I’ve used many different terminals, with various settings and colour configurations. My vim settings change over time too as I move from one machine to another. Sometimes the colours look ok in Vimdiff, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the colours are ok for one file type while conflicting in others.
The problem is that Vimdiff has it’s own colours it uses to show what parts of the files are different or missing. Those colours can sometimes hide actual text in the files. I find myself highlighting those lines with SHIFT-V to see the text.
I could pick a different colour scheme but then there’s no guarantee that a different part of text will be hidden by Vimdiff’s colour scheme. The easiest way to fix this is by disabling syntax highlighting completely when in Vimdiff and you do it like this. Open up your ~/.vimrc and add these lines:
if &diff syntax off endif
With that in there Vimdiff goes from looking like this to the simplified appearance below.
Ironically, the theme I’m currently using in Vim in the screenshots above isn’t that problematic, but here are two screenshots that show the problem from another machine. In the second screenshot I have highlighted (with SHIFT-V) the line with the function name in the left side. As you can see, the text “function” is still invisible in the right side of the screenshot.
If you don’t want to edit your .vimrc for whatever reason you can also manually do :set syntax=off from within the editor but you’ll have to do that for each of your files.
All the code above is GPLed WordPress code. Thanks to user hildred on Stackexchange for that one. Hopefully someone else will find this useful.
Somebody to Love
As a joke a few days ago I shared an awful cover of a Queen song on Facebook, so in apology I give you Marc Martel singing the beautiful Queen song, “Somebody to Love”.
And as a bonus here’s an amazing rendition of Nessun Dorma. Wow, just wow.
All this found at the same time I find out that Freddie Mercury’s mother, Jer Bulsara has died at the age of 94. RIP.
It's with great sadness that we have to tell you, that freddies wonderful Mother Jer has passed away at the age of 94.
— Queen Fan Club (@OIQFC) November 17, 2016
