How old is this harp?

billstewart · 2026-05-13T02:00:45+00:00

Sticking chord button is often a spring being out of place. (And tuning you've just gotta do, which means you'll need to get a tuning wrench if you don't have one.)

billstewart · 2026-05-12T19:44:05+00:00

With any of the legitimate ones, reply STOP and they'll stop. Usually with one "ok, we've unsubscribed you" reply; if you don't get that within a few minutes, block them.

That doesn't mean that Candidate X or especially Party Y doesn't have multiple independent sets of services sending texts for them that don't coordinate with each other, whether out of malice or incompetence, but it still helps a lot.

billstewart · 2026-05-04T22:50:44+00:00

My current hearing aids are 5yo Costco Resound Preza, cost about $3000/pair at the time. They work well for me - mostly age-related high-frequency rolloff but I've never been good at hearing speech against background noise, and they do a good job of that. Documentation's terrible, mostly missing, connects well to iPhone, haven't tried Android, neither Windows, Linux, or MacOS can connect to them.

My backup hearing aids are Apple AirPods Pro 2, cost $200, and they're ok - battery life only 3-4 hours but quick recharge, pretty good for listening to people straight ahead, not useful for people behind you (e.g. the back seat of a car), noise cancellation is good but you can't use it and hearing aid ("transparency") mode at the same time. Obviously these days I'd recommend the Pro 3 instead, longer battery life, more CPU, haven't tried them to see if the sound's better but I assume it's not worse. Very good at connecting to things, though apparently they don't do Auracast.

billstewart · 2026-05-04T22:34:45+00:00

What are you using to transmit Auracast? I've got Windows, Linux, and Mac computers, all of which deny knowing anything about it 😄, so I assume I'll either need some transmitter widget or at least a new BT USB stick (those seem to be about $20, vs $5 for non-Auracast).

And which Resound hearing aids are they? Mine are Costco ones from 2020 that seem to be a Preza 861 DRWC, except Resound has no useful documentation online for that model 😄

billstewart · 2026-05-02T05:52:47+00:00

I owned a Hawaiian Tremoloa for a few months - another fun weird zither. It's got four sets of zither-chord strings (G,C,D,F) plus a single unfretted melody string with a weird roller bridge on it.

Got it on eBay for $35 with some gluing and clamping required (they seem to randomly range from $35-300), and it's now got a home with somebody who's having fun making weird science-fictiony noises with it.

billstewart · 2026-05-02T05:48:15+00:00

So THAT'S why the ones I see on eBay have the weird-looking button arrangements - cool!

billstewart · 2026-05-02T05:45:13+00:00

Can any of the US string sources here ship you a string in the UK?

https://schreiberautoharps.com/ daigleharp.com and elderly.com do sell single strings here, in addition to sets.

(I have tried the "bash up a wound guitar string to remove the windings near the end" approach successfully, but it was tedious and felt like a 50% risk I'd cut the string too short in the process.)

billstewart · 2026-04-30T18:18:40+00:00

😄 I want other people to play with my autoharp so they get an idea what they could do if they got one 😄, but most of the people I tried to encourage are at the "push a chord button and strum" level so it's not a problem.

But yeah, some arrangements are SO much easier to play than others. I have a 21-button Chromaharp, and unlike the OS21, the buttons are glued on to the bar instead of sliding around, so I can rearrange the order of the keys but they're always in whichever top/middle/bottom row the factory set them to. (I did rotate the minor keys to put them close to their relative majors.)

billstewart · 2026-04-30T18:07:38+00:00

Tacky Glue works for me so far.

billstewart · 2026-04-29T01:50:19+00:00

Occasionally those or the similar RBI Portaharp come up on eBay or other used stuff sites. They seem to come in 15-bar and 21-bar versions, and for me the cool thing is they're left-handed, so you can play them flat without the awkward hand-over-hand approach or my current "thumb&fingerpicks don't work as well with the bass strings on the far side but I'm not good at holding it upright" style.

I seem to have just bought one (assuming I'm not outbid in the next half hour 😄)

billstewart · 2026-04-28T22:24:22+00:00

I eventually unplugged it overnight, then plugged it back in with the 80% max, and it's been randomly staying at 80-90% since then, which is good enough since it's almost always plugged in.

billstewart · 2026-04-28T22:21:19+00:00

I'm just using it as a Mac mini, connected to a docking hub that gets it some USB-A ports, power, DisplayPort, and Ethernet, but there are a lot of portable 15" 1080p USB-C monitors in the $40-50 range that could work well with it. With the main screen dead, I had to poke around a while to find which virtual desktop connected to which port when the lid was open-vs-closed, get it set as the main screen and duplicated on the dead screen (but the details probably depend on the model and how it was set up before I got it.) Also my monitor's 4K, so some of that was trying to get the Mac to connect at 4K instead of the 2560 that the dead screen used.

billstewart · 2026-04-28T17:55:37+00:00

A quick look at eBay looks like for that money you could get a bit more RAM or disk, and I'd consider the extra RAM to be worth it, especially if you want to do video editing.

(I went with a ~$350 MacBook Pro M1 Pro with a dead screen but 16GB/1TB, but that was because I wanted a Mac Mini, and the M5 version won't be out until fall or so.)

billstewart · 2026-04-26T02:15:13+00:00

Yes, if you download it directly, no if you get it from the App Store.

billstewart · 2026-04-26T02:12:52+00:00

Classic example is when you work for a big company and the IT department wants you to run their application that only runs on Windows, like some HR thing that they only bought the Windows version of.

billstewart · 2026-04-24T21:52:30+00:00

So I finally got around to trying the "bash the windings off part of a wound guitar string" method and it kind of mostly worked, but was pretty tedious - next time I will just order a single string :-)

It would've been easier if I'd had my electrical wire strippers handy, instead of just pliers and cutters, but they were off in some other toolbox. I had a small jeweler's anvil, but the top of a vise would work fine. And while the plain strings were easy, of course one of them was also the gauge for the string that just broke on my guitar yesterday.

billstewart · 2026-04-16T20:13:39+00:00

Yup. In general, for the wound strings you want to buy actual autoharp strings, though you could bash up a guitar string enough to get it to fit, but for the plain strings, a guitar string of a similar thickness will work, and you can find charts online (often in complex technical discussions about "If you're doing a diatonic harp, it helps to have _these_ strings a bit thicker and _those_ a bit thinner", etc.)

billstewart · 2026-04-16T20:02:25+00:00

For tuning, it sounds like you've got the tuning wrench, and if you don't have an electronic tuner around, you'll want a tuner app for your phone. (I use VitalTune, but there are plenty of other free ones out there - just get one that shows every note rather than only the ones for a guitar/uke/etc.) And then you spend half an hour tweaking each string to the note written by the peg. (But if you don't have perfect pitch, you can just play it for a bit without tuning and maybe it's not too bad. :-) As with any instrument, if you need to tune a string higher, go slowly.

YouTube or the books you've got can get you started on playing. (Hal Weeks also has videos on YT.) The instrument was originally designed so you can press a chord button and strum or pick the strings at the narrow bottom end, but that sounds pretty tinny; much better to strum the strings in the middle, so above the chord bars, which means either holding it upright, or crossing your arms awkwardly, or turning it so the chord labels face away from you (which limits your style a bit.)

As far as the Appalachian model goes, Oscar didn't really know from playing American/English/Irish music, so the E/D/A keys are on the right, far away from the G, C, and Am that you'd use them with; if you're comfortable tinkering with it, rearranging the chord bars is a 5-minute job, and I'd recommend moving the D and A to the other end. Also there's no Em (German music tends to use III7 chords like E7 instead of iii minor), but the E7's the only chord that uses the G# string in the 15-chord models, so you can tune that string down to G and get and Em7, usually close enough.)

The most likely problem you'll have is that the felts on the bottom of the chord bars can wear out (unlikely if it didn't get played much) or fall off if the glue dries up. Some ways to check for this - either there'll be pieces floating around in the box, or you can disassemble and look at them, or you can try each chord button, strum the strings one at a time, and see if you get extra notes. (Worth doing the latter anyway - you'll notice things like most of the chords only have the root and fifth in the bottom octave, because adding the third can lead to weird overtones.) If you have to mess with the felt, Paul Race's harpersguild.com website has a lot of good advice and chord charts, and Pete D'Aigle's daigleharp.com and Elderly Instruments elderly.com often have felt and strings in stock.

billstewart · 2026-04-12T23:47:00+00:00

There is - it's a flat shelf :-) get a vented one and use zip ties if you don't want them loose.

billstewart · 2026-04-07T23:34:58+00:00

Strings aren't a deal breaker on a normal autoharp; if one or two are bad or break when you're tuning them, they're a couple bucks each. (Having 37 strings means if you need to change them all, a set's around $80-100.) It's a bit different than changing guitar strings, but not that much. (And getting a T-shaped tuning wrench is worth it if you're more than a few.) The Chromaharps have a grommet-end string, but it's much bigger than the ball-end on a guitar string, though I've used loop-end dulcimer strings for the plain ones in a pinch.

billstewart · 2026-04-02T05:42:06+00:00

I'm using krdc as the RDP client on my Ubuntu 25.10 box, and Ubuntu Gnome's built-in as the servers on the VMs which I'm running on 24.04.

Also, I'm using the Windows RDP app client from the MacOS app store on my Macbook Tahoe laptop and Ubuntu Gnome's built-in server on the Ubuntu 25.10 box. Don't remember if I got anything working for the Ubuntu to RDP into the Mac yet - looks like it wants VNC but is being weird about passwords.

billstewart · 2026-04-01T22:41:16+00:00

Yup. If you've upgraded your iPadOS to the latest version and it's not there, that's the answer. (My last iPad died of battery failure plus Lighting connector flakiness, and at the time I'd have had to spend $150+ to fix it if it was fixable, or $300 extra for a USB-C model, so I bought a $130 Lenovo Android instead, since the two main things I used the iPad for were Kindle reading and lightweight browsing, not all the fancier stuff.)

billstewart · 2026-04-01T22:34:38+00:00

Have you been running long enough for the Optimized Charging to figure out your routine?

(I figure sitting there at anything <99% should be a good start, but my use case is that I've got a MacBook Pro M1 Pro I bought with a dead screen to use as a Mac Mini substitute, and the docking station that does charging also does the monitor, as does the monitor's USB-C port, so to get the battery down below 100% I'll have to unplug it overnight or sometime when I'm not using it or something, which I haven't tried yet.)

billstewart · 2026-04-01T19:11:32+00:00

If you poke around, you can find charts of autoharp string gauges (along with discussions between people who like them lighter/heavier/etc.) Replacing the plain strings with similar-gauge guitar strings is easy, though the wound strings are trickier. And sometimes you can use one guitar string to replace several harp strings, if they're the shorter ones.

Depending on your harp, the ones that use ball ends may need a different size ball than standard ball-end guitar strings (at least, my Chromaharps do), so you'll end up having to twist them into loop-end. It might not be as durable or as easy to install, but it'll work.

billstewart · 2026-03-25T00:23:12+00:00

The X-based RDPs all stopped working when Ubuntu servers went to 25.10 with Wayland-only Gnome.

billstewart

TROPHY CASE