edjw

The Open Knowledge Foundation is an organisation that has been going since 2004. <https://okfn.org/en/>

This is different to the Open Knowledge Format announced by Google in June 2026.

You’re probably right that some people who participate in music that has high status in society (that you might call “serious musicians”) would sometimes look down on Sacred Harp and shapenote notation. Also agree that snobbery isn’t good.

I’ve sung a lot of Sacred Harp and people with a background in this high status music just blend in with everyone else really.

There aren't any accompanying instruments but singers do play other instruments in the rest of their life.

In Sacred Harp, before a song is sung, somebody sings out the notes of the opening chord of the song using a combination of ear/feel/memory/practice/experience. The same song can be keyed a bit higher or lower depending on things like: energy of the singers, time of day, whether the last song was quite high or low, how easy the highest or lowest written notes are for the singers in the room. It is a skill! But most keyers will usually pitch songs written in F major at roughly the same pitch and will pitch songs written in D major differently to F major.

You can hear it on any recording but around 0:15 here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8bKu52cv6o

I've sung a lot of Sacred Harp and Christian Harmony that use four-shape and seven-shape shapenote notation respectively. I've never sung roundnote notation so a bit hard for me to compare but I know lots of people who've done a lot of both.

A couple of things you gain with shapenote notation…

You don't have to learn key signatures to sing from shapenote notation. So it's less work to pick it up.

Sightsinging is easier with shapenote notation. After a while, you internalise the intervals between the shapes – you just know what a fa up to a sol feels and sounds like.

The YouTube channel [1] of the Sacred Harp Museum [2] also has lots of good audio and video recordings

1: https://www.youtube.com/@sacredharpmuseum8890/videos

2: https://originalsacredharp.com/museum

FaSoLaMix is a paid iOS app that lets you listen to a small selection of well-recorded songs where you can listen to the individual parts but sung by real people. Might be interesting to people on here.

From the FaSoLaMix site [1]:

> "FaSoLaMix" is an iOS app designed to teach Sacred Harp singing to newer singers. When someone wants to learn to sing, our instinct is usually to recommend that the inquirer go to a good singing and sit next to a strong singer. But not everyone lives near many all-day singings. Our intent is to give the listener the virtual experience of sitting next to a couple of strong singers in whichever section suits their voice. The app features high-quality recordings of many Sacred Harp songs where the mix of the four parts can be controlled manually. For example, a singer wanting to learn the treble line of a particular song could leave the treble track at full volume, mute the other three parts, and sing along with the solo treble part for practice. While the most obvious benefit will be to new singers, longtime singers will also find it useful and fun. For example, experienced singers may wish to mute one part and fill in that missing part with their own voice.

[1]: https://fasolamix.com

This article is from 2016

If you're into this, you can sing it in places all round the world. It's a very welcoming community of people

Couple of links to get going…

US: https://home.olemiss.edu/~mudws/regular.html

UK and Europe: https://sacredharp.uk

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Harp

The Build and Distribute parts of the docs are the things I clicked on first. How can I get Tauri mobile apps in Apple and Google app stores? But they're both 'stubs' with no content yet.

https://beta.tauri.app/guides/build https://beta.tauri.app/guides/distribute

Thanks! It’s kind of hard to understand what you mean without screenshots. Also there are so many variations that I’m not sure which rules you’re playing with. My dad is the only person who’s played it apart from me and so far if he finds something he thinks is a counting error it’s actually been counting right and it was a UX thing about the rule-writing

I've been playing around with making a version of tic-tac-toe that's interesting to grown-ups. Experimenting with rules a lot as you'll see. (I think 1357 is probably the best but not sure.)

https://5-by-5.edjohnsonwilliams.co.uk

https://github.com/edjw/5_by_5_tictactoe

Looks very interesting. How well does this handle different accents? Say an Australian child moved to the US, would this work?

I made this tool a few years ago to find the closest colour from the Tailwind colour palette from any given colour

https://find-nearest-tailwind-colour.netlify.app

I've visited Metafilter every so often which might be what your're looking for https://www.metafilter.com

I’m not sure when this was published. But Johnson has been a well-known politician in the UK for at least 10 years. I’m not sure he’s ever really been thought of as forward-thinking. Maybe, if you’re being charitable, he’s moved the UK centre-right a bit greener.

I just checked and nobody did. I didn't really promote it. Might have helped if I had said what I might do with the money to improve it?

Similar idea I made a few years ago. A text editor with no editing allowed and lets you export to Word/MD/HTML for later editing

https://first-draft.netlify.app

I find that the dialog pops up without focussed when I launch Bitwarden, but does have focus when I launch 1Password. It is confusing

> How can I uninstall the Bitcoin and Lightning node?

> Currently, Umbrel installs a Bitcoin and Lightning node by default and it is not possible to remove it. Over the coming weeks, we’ll migrate the Bitcoin and Lightning node to the Umbrel App Store and your Umbrel would then start from a clean slate.

From the FAQs on their website.

Your company keeps some things on GitHub but not everyone in the company wants to learn git, the command line, the concepts around git.

This is campaigning. You show decision-makers why they should make the decision you want them to and sometimes that includes playing into the decision-maker’s self-interest.

body { font-size: 18px; } would help with squinting as well

It’d probably be helpful to say on the homepage that no data leaves the user’s computer. As it is, it feels very risky to use the site

Long stretches of the A1 in Northumberland is a single lane each way.

The flavour is the same

Magic Wormhole

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest

Unfortunately, Mozilla are planning to leave DoH off by default for Firefox users in the UK. Almost certainly to avoid criticism from politicians and children’s charities about how DoH would interfere with the UK’s network level website blocking of ‘adult’ websites.

Do you pay your interns?

Absolutely. One of the big issues with GDPR is going to be how to practically use the right to port your data. Export functionality is one thing. It's the import bit that's often not there or isn't practical. Some standards would help.