Author: Mark Alexander

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#truth

As I’ve said before, I lay blame firmly at the feel of AOL. That should’ve been all the warning we needed.

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I want him gone. I want him locked up in miserable conditions for the rest of his pathetic life. I want his social media network taken down and I want each and everyone of his supporters to wake up and see how they’ve been swindled. I want to wake up one days and see the headline, “Trump Dies In Prison.”

If that makes me a horrible person, so be it.

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Sonoma Update

It’s been a few days since the last update, and most everything seems to be working fine. At least I’ve had no major issues like I did with the first and second betas. Apple itself must believe this release is stable enough to the general public testers, and I would have to agree.

There are still a few applications that won’t work, oftentimes admitting up front that they aren’t ready for this version of macOS, but they aren’t anything I use on a daily—or even regular—basis.

Carbon Copy Cloner balks that it wasn’t been tested with Sonoma, but still appears to run properly and I have full backups every morning like I always did before. Specialized utilities like OnyX flat out refuse to run, but even some of my more temperamental programs (VueScan and Celestia immediately come to mind) are behaving under Beta 3, whereas they were giving me grief under Beta 2.

Do you like that wallpaper? It comes from something called MyWallpaper, a very reasonably priced app that really lets you add a little wow to your desktop with hundreds of different animated backgrounds. The developer also offers a purely static wallpaper app with all the same images available for free.

 

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Be Careful Out There Kids

Concrete, Full Sun
Concrete, Shade
Fabric Lounge Chair Cushion, Full Sun
Blue Plastic Recycling Bin, Full Sun
Black Trash Bin, Full Sun
Bare Dirt, Full Sun

Yes, it’s hot. Current air temp is 117 at this location (confirmed by metal objects that have been in shade since dawn) and it’s not even near the hottest part of the day yet.

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Something Not Horrible For a Change

From Mock Paper Scissors:

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)

This picture is from the James Webb Space Telescope and it depicts the birth of stars:

The first anniversary image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it’s never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you’d never know it from Webb’s chaotic close-up. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future planetary systems.

I know everything is terrible and we’re all doomed, and the Republican Treachery (is that redundant?) or Stupidity (definitely redundant) will never end and we’re totally eff’ed in the dark, but this picture smacked my gob, and gave me just a tingle of the original Star Trek 1960s optimism. Y’all Qaeda and their theocrat supporters all say we are fallen angels and that Gawd hates us sinners and blah-blah-blah, but I prefer to think that Sir Terry’s Risen Apes theory is better.