Just another Weird site…
So I was planning on this to be a post about some big changes… but much like the rest of the country I find my self in a Covid-19 cloud so instead I present the following things…
After all of these years I still mostly pick the titles of the entries from whatever music is playing in the background… and well tonight that is Queens of the Stone Age “Auto Pilot”
Some things never change….
I was going to write something, but then a shiny internet object dashed in front of me… and now I can’t remember what I was going to write on. I think it was a treatus on world peace and building a space economy… or it might have been about my personal office setup, which seems to be the main topic of this thing over the last couple of years.
Fun times.
Huh would you look at that it’s been 6 months since I posted anything… I’m sure the person who still reads this is shocked. That person would also be the kind of person who names their fantasy football team something “shocking” and use an ephemeral third state of electricity as their online tag.
Yes if you are reading this… you are that person.
Anyway…. since the last post in June, I fixed the monitor situation on the Windows machine… by replacing the windows machine with a new PC. It’s nice to have a gaming PC again. Also widescreen monitors… WHO KNEW?
Anyway happy 19th birthday to the blog that started because I didn’t want to do COBOL homework in the year 2000 (If you don’t have Conan O’Brien and Andy Richter singing ‘In the yeeaaaarrr 22220000000‘ in your head… you are reading it wrong).
So yeah I guess happy holidays, new year, and all that jazz.
I’ve been with out my 2016 MBP for about 48 hours now, I had to take it in for repair on Saturday for a swollen main battery in the chassis. The repair is a mail out repair, and since I have perfectly good computer sitting next to my Mac, I thought no big deal I’ll just use the Win10 machine for a while. I’m fluent in Windows and use Windows primarily for my day job but going back to Windows at home after 12 years of Mac at home has me noticing lots of little things.
First you don’t realize how attached to iMessage you are until you don’t have it on your main computer, having to look at your phone for a conversation rather then it being just another chat app is remarkable when you no longer have it after having it for so many years. Yes WhatsApp, GChat (until it’s sun setted next year), and Skype all provide a desktop client…. But none work quite as seamlessly between devices or the OS as iMessage does.
On my Mac I have a little automation script set up to monitor my “~\Downloads” folder and it moves files based upon file type… PDF to a folder on my OneDrive, JPG to a dedicated folder away from the desktop for memes from social media, and larger media files (over 2MB) to a network share attached to a 12TB DAS. The file automation has been built into MacOS for as long as I’ve used it (since 2007) and it’s been one of those things that has always just made life a little bit easier. Windows does not have a built-in equivalent; you can download the equivalent service but there is no native equivalent baked into the OS. Which really gets to the larger issue of there is no Windows equivalent of Automator for taking care of bunches of little tasks that we all do during our day and never thing twice about. Also, for the record yes, I still download media… I’m internet ancient, and sometimes I like to miserly with my bandwidth. I still act like I have a 56k connection when I’m paying for gigabit on one line and unlimited data on my cell phone.
Finally, I don’t think I would have noticed this if I hadn’t been working on a presentation for a conference. There is no recent documents in the “Start Menu” like there was in Windows 7/8/8.1 I literally just noticed this yesterday. In MacOS it’s still up in the apple menu where it’s been for almost 20 years. It’s not a big deal, 99% of the time I open recent files via the app I’m using them in anyway. Sometimes it’s things like the recent documents that are force of habit that you don’t notice until it’s in your face.
It’s not all weird on Windows, the Office365 experience is markedly better then on MacOS IMO (and vastly superior to iOS). Which should surprise no one as Office has always been a flagship for Windows capabilities. I didn’t appreciate how good it was until working on my conference slide deck and writing this post (which I’m writing a draft of in Word, because I like my software to work against me actively). Little things like word definitions and thesaurus suggestions when I click on words is nice, and the kind of thing I would expect from a modern fully featured office suite on a modern platform.
Most of the mechanical differences I’ve observed between Windows and MacOS are more directly related to the hardware I’m running each OS on…. The Mac is using new NVME SSD and USB 3.1 across the board, while the Windows machine is using a mix of older NAND SSD and spinning disk. The Windows machine still runs fine from a CPU perspective for web browsing and office work so no real difference in the experience. The biggest differentiator has to be the monitors! The LG 5k is a great monitor that I don’t appreciate enough… I’m really missing it using 2 Samsung 1080p monitors right now… they are getting the job done, but damn I need to do something about this monitor situation on my Windows machine.
So those are my differences I found it a bit odd and thought I would document them here since you know I’m writing on here so much…. Why doesn’t a sarcasm font exist yet?
Turns out I’m still not good about posting…
So uh yeah… pictures are not fixed after all… but the HTTPS is working….
Also a comment on bluehost and their default install of wordpress…. There is so much junk that is pre-installed on this site I don’t know what can and can not be turned off…. so far I have most all of it turned off except for the things I know I need.
I mainly moved because of the cheaper hosting and “free” HTTPS (as opposed to what I would have paid for the equivalent length of hosting and an additional fee at GoDaddy).
It’s all good… says the one guy who still keeps a personal blog in 2019…
Ok pictures are resolved… ish….
Still working on the in consistent HTTPS
You may notice a few things are different now… like the pad lock in the address bar… and the distinct lack of pictures….
In the process of moving… godaddy –> bluehost… still trying to figure pieces parts out… like where the pictures went.
It’s been a more involved process then I anticipated, but I will write more.
Until then enjoy a picture of a recent Arizona sunset
I could be best described as a “systems guy” I design and build systems to interact and work with other systems. Most of the times the systems are pre-built and I have to just do the interconnecting, other times it’s much more complicated. At home I’ve carried over this philosophy for the most part, I’m so deep into the Apple ecosystem it’s not even funny. You know what stuff truly just works though, so if it works for me then I’m good with it. I have philosophical reasons for not being all in on Google and Microsoft is firmly in the services side outside of Surface and Xbox.
I still maintain presences in Google and Microsoft domains, if you had to ask me which one was primary I would say Microsoft as I actually pay for their services. I have Google because it’s basically a utility for the internet at this point in North America.
With all that being written, I have made some decidedly interesting choices over the years in terms of where to put my ecosystem dollars. On the digital media front I’m iTunes almost 100% except for books, I’m all in on Amazon Kindle for books. In home audio I’ve gone a decidedly “Switzerland” route mainly because there was no Apple entry till late last year, and when it comes to audio I don’t want an assistant I want good sounding music. So SONOS is my platform of choice for the home audio side of things. And honestly their stuff works quite nicely across all mediums and and it sounds really good. Once you buy one, you won’t be able to stop.
So the one place where I’ve looked and haven’t really made a commitment is home automation. Part of it is out of lack of wanting yet more devices on my WiFi, but at the same time the overall ecosystems are becoming robust enough to warrant consideration. When you look at the major ecosystems out in the wild there are three that stand out… Apple HomeKit, Google Weave, and Nest. Nest already has a beach head in my home with a thermostat and a couple of smoke detectors, which other then helping the thermostat figure out when I’m home aren’t much worth the price of admission. Looking at the history I tend to go with ecosystems where there is a solid marriage between hardware and software.
Ecosystems are great until you don’t have any body supporting you or the company discontinues it. At least with hardware there is a chance that your stuff gets sucked up by someone else, but eventually everything dies.
The sunset tonight was a little darker down here, but a little brighter up there. Two best souls were re-united today.
Hug your grandparents folks, you never know when the last time will be.
This is what my weekends have come to now that football is almost over and the Cardinals are on the off season….
OK so here is the scenario, on December 22nd 2017 I was curious about some network traffic that had been reported on my router as coming from my laptop. I couldn’t find anything or remember installing anything that would have caused the traffic so I was a touch concerned. I installed a application called “little snitch” or something to that effect and my Mac summarily refused to boot.
Well shit…
Some googling later I found that I could disable the KEXT file (Mac equivalent to a driver) and I would be good to go. I was less then thrilled with this revelation as I was getting ready to take a road trip to visit family. OK I’ll just restore to the last good backup this morning from Time Machine, it will take a hour tops.
I kicked off the Time Machine recovery from the rescue console, finished packing and did some other stuff. When I came back to collect my laptop it said “16 hours remaining”. Needless to say I didn’t hang around, I took off and let the Mac do it’s thing. I long ago figured out that I could survive a couple of days on a iPad and hijack my mom’s Mac if I really needed a laptop.
I come home a few days later, my Mac is restored and waiting for me to log in. I log in, everything is where it’s supposed to be the most dramatic thing I have to do is sign into Office365 for home and school again. Up until this point I had been running Time Machine strictly off a network share on my home server I keep in a closet. So yeah… that’s great for seamless backups but it’s not what I would describe as “quick”. I ended up partitioning the external disk I use on my Mac and have a partition dedicated to Time Machine, that took care of the speed and backup problem.
This also pretty much asserted once again that between Office365 and iCloud my personal files were safe and I could get to them. This also once again proved that I really didn’t need to be paying for offsite backup as the most I would have to do is download Office and VMWare again and I would be back in business.
Then I had a thought….
Crypto viruses are a thing…. would a crypto virus also lock down my cloud information. I’m sure someone out there has already researched this and has a answer, and a quick googling says yes a crypto virus will also crypto your connected cloud services. So this brought me back to well I guess I need a segregated offsite backup… I don’t need to do the whole system as I can restore that easy enough, but I do need to have a portioned setup for personal files. Crashplan fills that niche quite nicely….
So there you have it…. backup strategies circa 2018 for one random dude who is already missing football.
