Simply Piano is an Editor’s Choice app for learning to play the piano. Backing tracks are heavily used to allow the player to start with very few notes, and progressively add more as they complete more lessons.

First, here’s a little info about my setup. My primary piano is a Casio CDP-220R. It’s a great digital piano with hefty keys, and it’s what I like to sit down to most of the time to play. For this guide, I’m actually hooking up a Yamaha PSR-240 that I got for $30 on Craigslist ($30!). I like this particular setup, because I can easily move it around and run it completely wirelessly. To accomplish that, I use EBL Rechargeable D batteries and an EBL Smart Charger. I’ve been using it wirelessly off and on for OVER A YEAR and have yet to recharge the batteries. Amazing.

Getting Things Set Up

There are two options for sound input in Simply Piano: microphone and MIDI. The microphone is okay to test out the software, but after a number of missed notes or having to turn the volume up higher and higher gets old fast. Getting off the microphone setup is one of the top posts I see in the Simply Piano Community Facebook group. Hardwired MIDI works fairly seamlessly, but you can’t charge the iPad while you’re practicing. Fortunately, you can pick up a wireless bluetooth MIDI adapter (BM-A01) and be up and running wirelessly in just a few minutes!

To connect the wireless MIDI adapter, just plug the BM-A01 MIDI “OUT” connector into the MIDI “OUT” port on your digital piano. In some cases, the IN/OUT is reversed, so you may need to plug “OUT” (BM-A01) into “IN” (piano). You can also plug the BM-A01 MIDI “IN” connector to the MIDI “IN” port on your digital piano, but it’s actually not necessary since we’re only concerned with sending MIDI notes from the piano to the iPad. I prefer to just plug the one adapter in.

There’s one more step to link your digital piano with Simply Piano: Garage Band. This bluetooth device isn’t connected like most bluetooth devices to an iPad. Here are the steps to use the wireless MIDI connector with Simply Piano:

• Open Garage Band on the iPad
• Create a new song, or open an existing song
• Tap the gear icon in the top-right corner
• Tap Advanced
• Tap Bluetooth MIDI Devices
• Tap the BM-A01 device

Once it’s connected, there’s nothing left to do in Garage Band. Now, load up Simply Piano, and it should automatically detect your MIDI keyboard, and you’ll be able to hear notes played through the iPad!

Troubleshooting

If the BM-A01 device is not present or appears disabled, there are three common scenarios.

• Bluetooth MIDI is initialized when the digital piano/keyboard is first turned on. Simply turn off the piano, and turn it on again. No need to reload Garage Band, it refreshes automatically.
• If that didn’t work, you may need to try the alternate port configurations or plugging both IN and OUT in on your keyboard. If they don’t work one way, try the other as well.
• Finally, if that didn’t work, it’s possible your keyboard does not support power over pin 4 on MIDI. This is pretty rare, but it’s possible.

Lastly

You need to go through Garage Band every time you connect the digital piano, but after the first couple of times, it goes so quickly you don’t really think about it.

Feel free to share your setup (or desired setup) or if you have questions about connecting your keyboard/digital piano to Simply Piano.

Happy practicing!

I’ve never, ever made a backup and afterwards thought that was a waste of time. Either they save the day or they do no harm. Whenever I make a significant, radical, or wildly inappropriate mod to one of my Raspberry Pi computers, I’ll typically make a quick backup. Here’s how I do it.

This will be short and to the point, but there are a few important call-outs.

1. Before you commit to a backup strategy, know the restoration plan.
2. If possible, test the restoration plan before backing up something mission critical.
3. Minimize use of the system being backed up during the backup process. If possible, don’t touch it!

This quick backup is not compressed (although that’s easy to do, compressing while backing up is painfully slow in my setup) and it’s pulled over the network to a RAIDed drive connected to a Mac Mini. That drive is backed up to Backblaze, however these are quick backups so they’re really only for fairly temporary use. For production backups, I’d encourage the use of compression.

Lo and behold, the quick backup.

The following command should be run from the destination computer, not from the system you are backing up. Replace x.x.x.x with the IP address of the Raspberry Pi you’d like to back up.

$ ssh [email protected] "sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M" | dd of=~/backup.img

Since compression is not in use, it won’t bog down the Raspberry Pi, but it will use space equivalent to the size of the micro SD card in the Pi.

One adjustment I recommend is to use Pipe Viewer, which will display a handy progress meter during the backup. It’s simple to install (install it to the machine performing the backup, not the one being backed up) and takes the guess work out of the question when is this backup going to finish? If you’re using Pipe viewer, the updated syntax will look like this:

$ ssh [email protected] "sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M" | pv | dd of=~/backup.img

Finally, ensure the backup file was created on the destination and that no errors were displayed during the backup process.

As technology advances, patience diminishes.

I finally started to search for the underlying reason why Windows would churn for 10+ seconds whenever I clicked the Downloads folder. Yeah, there’s a bunch of unused stuff in there I clean out maybe every leap year, but why on Earth would it take SO LONG to display references to files in one particular folder?

The reason is because Windows is trying to do what it thinks is best. My Downloads folder had taken on the identity of a “Pictures” folder, so the optimization settings were set to “Pictures”. Sure, there are a few photos in there, but the majority of files are random setup executables, MSIs, zip archives, PDFs, and extracted folders. My best guess is that the first handful of things that were downloaded were image/photo files of some sort, which determined the folder’s fate as a “Pictures” folder.

Whatever Windows tries to do when a folder is set as optimized for “Pictures” causes it to hang while loading for what seems an eternity. Fortunately, there’s a really simple fix.

I found the fix on a very appropriately named article, How to Fix a Slow-Opening Windows Downloads Folder. You just open up the folder properties and change optimization from Pictures to General items. Ideally Microsoft will either fix the poorly performing algorithm, or have it adjust to folder contents and/or performance. If this has plagued you in the past, at least the fix exists, is quick, and memorable.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is an included feature on Windows 10 that allows you to run a Linux bash terminal. It’s geared towards developers and Microsoft explicitly states it’s not intended to run production workloads, but it’s super easy to install and is accessible and usable by anyone.

Installing the Windows Subsystem for Linux

• Click the Start button and type (then select) Turn Windows Features on or off.
• After the Windows Features window loads, scroll to the bottom and check the box next to Windows Subsystem for Linux.

• Click OK.

The feature will be installed and will require a reboot. After installing the subsystem, you can then install a Linux distribution.

Installing a Linux Distribution

• Click the Start button and type (then select) Microsoft Store.
• Once loaded, search for Linux.
• The results currently have a handy call-out, click Get the apps to select from supported Linux distributions.

Select a distribution and click Get. After installation, you’ll be able to launch it from the store or from the Start menu (e.g. you could just click Start and type Ubuntu to see the launchable app.

Final Thoughts

All in all, this is a quick way to set up a Linux terminal on a computer running Windows 10. It’s sort of like Cygwin, but it feels way more native. One of the most interesting things to me is how little system resources seem to be taken up running the Linux subsystem. That, and loading up an Ubuntu bash terminal on Windows is just as fast as loading up a bash terminal on a Mac.

A couple notes:

1. Local system files are located at /mnt/c (type cd /mnt/c in the bash terminal).
2. Linux IDEs (KDE/Gnome/etc.) are not supported.

Read more about Windows Subsystem for Linux at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/faq