Cheapo Mando

I really admire the music of David Grisman, Bill Monroe, The Jazz Mandolin Project, etc. and I’m fan of the subtle sound of the mandloin. So I bought myself a cheapo instrument and I’m learning to play. It’s uphill work with me having no musical experience except as a listener. My fingers don’t want to move that way. But slowly I’m getting something that sounds like it might grow up to be music one day.

If anyone can point me to resources (web sites, books, tapes) that are helpful for a beginner, I’d be grateful.

Mozilla Firebird becomes 'official' on OS X

The first “official” builds of Mozilla Firebird for Mac OS X have appeared on Mozilla.org’s site. I’m taking down my experimental build because it’s no longer necessary. Mac Firebird needs some love to come up to the level of quality that we expect from a Mozilla product. So I encourage you to download an official build and file bugs in Bugzilla. In answer to some folks questions, yes I will eventually rewrite the the Pinstripe theme to work on the Mozilla app suite and Mozilla Firebird.

Smoothscroll not so smooth on OS X

You might notice that scrolling with the mouse wheel or space bar is a bit more jerky than you are used to in Mozilla Firebird. This is because of a feature called Smoothscroll which seems to have problems on OS X. To turn it off, type ‘about: config’ in your URL bar, scroll down to ‘general.smoothScroll’, double-click it and set the value to false.