Who didn't have one of these in their car at some point? I know I certainly did.
No Lies Detected
I'm Such a Geek
Lately my friend Cindy has been having ongoing issues with the Mac Mini she purchased while Ben and I were in Denver. It's worked fine until right before the world locked down when it started slowing down to the point that it was nearly unusable. At the time, I backed up her data, wiped the drive, and reinstalled everything. That seemed to help, but a year ago it began taking upwards of five minutes to come online. She wasn't using it that much. Her husband had a new iMac for the family business, and she decided to just get a new iPad at the time.
Last week she called me because she wanted to upload the remaining data off the thing so it would be accessible on her iPad. Problem was, the Mac wasn't responding at all. She was able to get logged in, but then it locked up. I had her power cycle the machine and it then came back up with a totally black screen.
It sounded like something had died; I was hoping it was just the drive and I could pull it, slave it to my Mac and retrieve her data. The machine itself wasn't that important to her; she had planned on giving it to her nephew once all her stuff had been removed.
When things first started slowing down initially I suggested pulling the mechanical hard drive and slapping in a solid state drive. To be honest, I was hoping that she didn't want to do that because after watching videos on what was involved on getting the drive out of the Mini, I was intimidated as fuck. I'm a desktop PC hardware guy; I can pull one of those apart and put it back together in my sleep. But in the Apple world, I was sweating bullets just replacing the hard drive on my very first MacBook Pro.
Yet here we were. I knew I had to face my fears in order to get that drive out to troubleshoot further as it was coming up with a black screen when hooked up here as well.
Facing My Fears
Disassembling the Mini really wasn't that difficult. My anxiety level was high, but mitigated somewhat by knowing that if I did screw something up, it was not that big a deal since if she couldn't give the machine to her nephew as originally intended, it would go to the recycler.
Once I had the drive out, I connected it via a USB adapter to my Mac. It wasn't even recognized.
I wanted Cindy to be able to still give the machine to her nephew, so I'd ordered a 256GB SSD a couple days prior to put in the machine. The worst part of the reassembly was reattaching the power supply cabling to the system board, but once everything was back together, I hooked it up to the television in our living room (the most accessible thing with a HDMI port because hooking it to my monitor would involve lots of cabling stuff I didn't want to deal with). I powered it up and…flashing folder icon with a question mark.
Success! The power supply and system boards were both good. It was the drive itself that was causing the problem.
From there I was able to do an internet recovery to reload the OS. It even loaded Monterey, which was kind of a surprise.
Now that I've done the drive swap, I feel much more confident that I can do it again if the need ever arises.
Now the Bad News
Since the old drive wasn't being recognized at all with my Mac, I tried slaving it to my work laptop running Windows. I could hear the platters spinning and the heads moving, so I knew there wasn't anything physically wrong with the drive, and sure enough when I went into Disk Management on my Windows laptop, it showed up, along with it's various partitions.
I fired up the Disk Utility on my Mac and reattached it there. After several minutes, it showed up, so I attempted to run First Aid. After churning for several minutes it told me I needed to boot into Recovery Mode and run the repair there. I rebooted into Recovery Mode and fired up Disk Utility again. At this point it wasn't seeing the drive at all, so I called it a night and went to bed.
This morning it had appeared so I ran First Aid. I was not happy.
And of course, she had no backups. And I know her husband has no backup plan in place for his iMac, so we're going to have a little talk today.
If The Last Two Years Have Taught Me Anything…
And you thought Internet Explorer was bad…
Vintage Audio Pr0n
Everyone's heard of Marantz, Pioneer, Kenwood, Sansui, Sony, Technics, and Yamaha from the heyday of vintage audio, but I've always loved the look of Akai and thought their stuff was overlooked and underrated in the audio community.
I wanted that cassette deck in the worst way, but of course, it was way out of my budget.
Yup.
Everyone Remembers Their First
Mine was a chocolate brown color. As much as my sister and I pleaded, my parents steadfastly resisted getting those "newfangled" push-button phones, so the moment I moved out and into my first place, getting my own was a no-brainer. I don't remember exactly when I got rid of it other than it was many years after I moved to San Francisco…
I Am An Old Geek
I found this via a link at Mostly Words and found it fascinating. Anything BBS-related brings me back to the Wild West, pre-AOHell days of the internet…
The author of the above post has provided an update.
Ain't That The Truth?
Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different." ~ C.S. Lewis
In 1969 could anyone have even imagined that 50 years later we'd all be carrying computers in our pockets that were hundreds of times more powerful than what put men on the moon? Or that we hadn't been back to the moon since 1972?
"You've Got Mail!"
Everyone Remembers Their First
Browsers
I really want to like Safari. I really do. Being native to the Mac, it's obviously the best choice since it's so integrated into the O/S, but I just can't.
While it has features I love (automatically offering to enter those two-factor authentication numbers), there are so many little glitchy things that drive me crazy. For instance, all of a sudden it decided it wasn't going to play the video part of videos. It plays the sound, but all I see is a black square. The Safari Technology Preview version fixed that, it has its own set of issues. It seems like Apple fixes one thing and two others break. And then there's the whole other issue with any of the Apple-approved (because you can now only get extensions through the App Store) adblocker extensions in Safari. They all suck. GIVE ME uBLOCK ORIGIN!
I was a Chrome user for years, but I hated the way it sucked up memory and brought my Mac to its knees (and not in a good way, you pervs). I've tried the Brave Browser, Firefox, and even Opera. Each one has at least one issue that renders them unusable for me.
I'm currently on the new Microsoft Edge. I hate to admit it, but of everything I've used, it—shockingly, since it is a Microsoft product—is working the best. It's built on Chrome, but doesn't seem to suck memory the way Chrome does. And while it doesn't have that nifty TFA feature built into Safari, it at least plays videos properly. All the Chrome extensions that I want to use work (including uBlock Origin!), so it looks like it might be my de facto choice until Apple gets their shit together.
I'm not holding my breath on that one.
There is Only ZUUL
Too Dependent
Our power went out yesterday afternoon. It's happened 3 or 4 times since we moved into this townhouse, and it usually comes back up within a minute or so.
It was no different yesterday. The power went out and came back on before I could even turn around to shut anything off. Everything started back up except the internet. Our Orbi cable modem/router was blinking and showing a solid purple glow. We powered it off a couple times, disconnected everything, and powered it back up with no success.
Great, I thought. It's fried.
Ben—bless his heart—called Cox (aka a trip to the Ninth Level of Hell). They could see the modem, and in fact, successfully sent reset commands. Each time it got to the point right before the final connect and the blinking would never stop. If left in that state, eventually it would start glowing purple, indicating—according to the folks at Netgear—indicated there was a problem connecting to the cable company. Well duh.
Cox was of no help. The girl, while sympathetic, had run through her troubleshooting scripts and suggested that we "go buy a $30 modem to verify that it's not your hardware."
Where, exactly, does one locate a THIRTY DOLLAR modem/router?
Ben ended up and Best Buy and came home with the cheapest modem/router he could find—at $145. "At least," he said, "we have 30 days to return it if it doesn't work either."
We hooked everything up and once again, Cox was unable to initialize the device. Well, that was a relief. Our nearly new Orbi wasn't at fault.
They agreed to send out a technician—if we signed up for the monthly maintenance plan first. (The representative basically refused to roll a truck without that service plan being in place.)
Needless to say our collective blood pressures were going through the roof.
Initially they'd scheduled a visit for tomorrow afternoon. Then the rep said that time slot had disappeared when she went to reserve it. So it was pushed out to Tuesday. She assured us we were on the calendar.
Our connectivity wasn't completely cut off. Cox has a hotspot network in place that customers can tap into (this is how I'm posting today). It's slow, but at least it works. We also have hotspots on our phones, but neither of those options are viable solutions for using Apple TV.
We left the new modem connected overnight since that was the one now on our account, and I figured if it decided to sort itself out overnight we'd go ahead and swap the Orbi back in and call The Ninth Circle of Hell again to get that put back on the account.
Unfortunately it still wasn't working, and in fact, when Ben went online to look at our account, there was no record of our scheduled Tuesday visit, prompting yet another call to Cox. We now have a service call scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.
I was already scheduled to work from home tomorrow, and I can tether my work laptop to my personal hotspot, so I'm not going to have to go into the office—not that I can because of the service appointment. The connection is slow as fuck, so how it all plays out tomorrow is going to be interesting to say the least.
This episode has pointed out how dependent we've become upon our wireless connection. Our smart plugs, thermostat, and garage door opener are now offline. Everything still works, but everything needs to be done manually again.
I'm getting really tired of all this bullshit.
Fuck. Just fuck.
Time to Go Back to Safari
This Explains So Much
I Can't Tell You How Many Times…
Relatable
An Update on My Adobe Bridge Rant
So it looks like I may have found a replacement for Adobe Bridge.
It's called XnView.
It's available for both Mac and Windows, but frankly if you're on Windows you should be using ThumbsPlus.
It's been a little bit of a learning curve, but XnView's functionality is very similar to that of Bridge—but the difference is this application actually works. Thumbnails (with name, size, and create date displayed below each one, a requirement for me) generate near-instantaneously no matter how many files are in a folder.
I remember trying XnView several years ago, but like all the others I'd auditioned, it seemed there was always one thing that didn't work the way I needed it to. With XnView, it was drag-and-drop. You couldn't drag files from one folder to another. Seriously?
Well that's been fixed in this latest version.
The interface took a lot of tweaking to get it looking the way I wanted (and to be honest it's still not 100% there, but I can work with it), but so far my only gripe has been that there doesn't seem to be any way of increasing the size of the font in the folders pane. I can live with that; the mere fact that I don't have to wait hours for thumbnails to generate before I can do anything with the files has me sold.
And the icing on this cake? It's free (although you're more than welcome to make a donation, which I did).
A Steaming Pile
But unfortunately, it's a necessary part of my workflow. Since I moved to Mac from Windows a dozen years ago, I have continually mourned the loss of Thumbs Plus, an image cataloging/manipulation program that IMHO is second to none.
Adobe Bridge is the only thing on a Mac that even remotely comes close to the functionality of Thumbs Plus. I can display images with title, size, date, and a host of other data all displayed under each thumbnail image—something that none of Bridge's Mac competitors seem to be able to do. It also does this without requiring that you create a catalog file like Apple's own Photos or the several third-party applications I've tried over the years. The biggest problem I run into when trying to change to a new application is that while Bridge will do X, Y, and Z, the alternatives do X and Y, but not Z. Or Z and Y, but not X.
It's frustrating as hell.
I've used Bridge long enough now that I can generally beat it back into submission when it misbehaves, but since getting the M1 MBP, it takes forever to generate thumbnails and searching for solutions online has been fruitless.
Bridge has always been a steaming pile of crap, but the last few iterations have been among the worst I've encountered. I can live with it just spontaneously shutting down, or randomly rearranging the workspace, but waiting minutes to generate thumbnails—even in the same folder…one I was just working in a few minutes prior—is just unacceptable.
Windows 11
Not enough to get me to switch back from Apple, but I have to admit it's damn pretty.
It Shouldn't Be This Hard
Technology sucks sometimes. It really does.
We've had an Apple TV for a few years now. Since cutting the cord it's been reliable and we've had absolutely no problems with it.
Even before the fire, we'd always left music playing for the dogs when we left the house. It calmed them a bit and ended a lot of the barking that used to occur in our absence. Before we cut the cord, it was easy as it came through the cable box and there was direct RCA connection between the box and my receiver. When Apple TV arrived, it presented more of a challenge, as the Apple TV had no separate audio output jacks. We solved the problem by inserting a HDMI audio splitter between the Apple TV and the television. It worked well. We could still leave the house with the music playing while the television was turned off.
After the fire, we replaced our aging Vizio with a shiny new 65-inch 4K Samsung. We'd salvaged the Apple TV, and didn't feel any immediate need to replace it because the picture quality was still amazingly good.
When Apple announced a new Apple 4K TV a few months ago, we decided it was time to upgrade and get the full potential out of our new Samsung. The strange thing was, initially it refused to send a 4K signal to the television. I traced the problem to the audio splitter box. It wasn't 4K compatible. I ordered a new one that was and when it arrived I swapped it out with the old one. Viola! 4K image acquired. (And yes, we did see a notable improvement in picture quality.)
The trouble was—and I didn't notice it until many days later—music (via Spotify) would no longer play through to the receiver when the television was turned off. I played around with the three splitters I had in my possession (including one from the old house) and came to the unfortunate realization that we could now have music from Apple TV when the television was off or 4K resolution when it was on—but not both.
This was unacceptable. I know there are probably other [expensive] solutions out there, but what we decided upon today was picking up the cheapest iPod touch we could get, and use that as our Spotify source when we leave the house and/or don't want the television on.
It's not the most elegant solution, but after looking at separate streaming units to connect to the receiver, I think it's the best one right now. I have 14 days to return the iPod, so if any of you have suggestions for some other way to do this, leave a comment.
Workspace Illumination
I saw this task lamp on Instagram a few weeks ago. Against my better judgment—based on my previous experience ordering things from Instagram ads–I bought one. to my utter surprised, it actually arrived, isn't a piece of crap, and actually works the way it was advertised. It's USB powered, and actually can plug into a spare USB port on the back of your monitor.
I had good lighting in my room already, but there are times I don't want the room illumination on but still need a bit of extra light.
I can definitely recommend this.
Fuckin' Siri…
Fool Me Once, Shame On You. Fool Me Twice…
I have a real problem with Instagram ads.
When they first appeared in my timeline they weren't all that offensive. In fact, I ordered a phone case through one of them.
Said phone case never shipped, and the only way I was able to get my money back was through my credit card company.
Since then I've been very gun shy about buying anything via Instagram, but last fall I bought a T-shirt that actually shipped:
Maybe things were looking up. Still, that memory of the phone case stayed with me, and it was only reluctantly I ordered this ODBII reader about a month ago though an ad on Instagram. I'd had a reader a couple years ago but it's long since been displaced, and the ad showed some amazing software for my phone that looked really useful in monitoring what was going on in Anderson.
The first red flag was notification that it was shipping directly from China, but I'd ordered other things (admittedly through Amazon) that shipped from China and never had a problem. After a small delay, it finally arrived last week. It was as described in the Instagram ad except for one glaring omission: you need to jailbreak your phone to install the native software.
WTF?
First of all, I'm not going to jailbreak my phone, and even if I was willing to do that, I'm not going to jailbreak it and install an unknown piece of software from China. I'm an I.T. professional. Call me…cautious.
I wrote the company asking for a refund—knowing damn well I'd never hear back from them or end up with some lame excuses and this would probably be another credit card company refund. Additionally I starting going through my feed labeling every damn ad with "scam or misleading." I'd had enough.
Surprisingly, I received an email from the company this evening. They included a different QR code from the one printed on the box to obtain the software. The QR code took me to a web page with links (all to legitimate App Store offerings) for a dozen or more different apps that work with the hardware I purchased.
I haven't had time to check it out, and I'm not going to stop flagging the flood of advertising spam in my Instagram feed, but this may yet work out and I won't have to get my credit card company involved at all.
Cord Cutting
We did it. For months Ben has been advocating telling Cox to take a hike. It wasn't that the service was unreliable or the choices in programming unacceptable; it was just too damned expensive. Even with our Premium package, we were paying over $200 a month for cable and internet service. I was reluctant to leave cable because—let's face it—I'm an old fart and not as welcoming of change as I once was. Also, when we checked into this a few months ago, several of the channels we (okay, I) watched were on channels that the various streaming services did not provide at the time. Service A provided w, x, and y, but not z. Service B provided z, but not w or y. Service C provided x, y, and z, but not w. You get the idea. By the time you added up all the services we'd have to subscribe to, the difference in cost over what we were paying for cable was negligible.
All that changed two days ago. We got an Apple TV. I know, I know…one more cog in the ecosystem for me to eventually rant about. But lo and behold, the device was surprisingly useful beyond just providing a big screen experience of For All Mankind. It serves as a hub for our smart switches and outlets, as well as allowing me to cast my music library to the living room stereo as well as display my Mac's laptop screen on the television when I want to. (Admittedly done rarely, but when needed it was a hassle to hook up.)
We're now subscribers to Hulu and Philo. Those, coupled with Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube (which we were already subscribing to) provide everything we were getting through Cox—at slightly more than half the cost. Even when we add HBO and Showtime back in the mix (when the series we were watching there return next year) we're still coming out way ahead.
So, as usual, I'm late to the party, but glad I finally arrived.
(The only thing I'm struggling with is the stupid Apple remote. Maybe it's just a learning curve, I find none of that Apple intuitiveness about it, and I've wanted to hurl it across the room on several occasions.)
I'm Really Starting to HATE Technology.
Just sayin'.
We Were Lied To
Computer technology will make our lives easier. Social Media will bring us together.
In reality, computers have complicated our lives in ways unimaginable, and nowhere is that more obvious when you're called upon to troubleshoot issues with friends and family. Phone trees. Password resets. Hacking. Phishing. Goddamned fucking printers. Bluetooth headphones. Wireless. Routers. Hot spots. Is the convenience of being able to turn off your porch light from the comfort of your bed really worth the aggravation that invariably accompanies setting up/maintaining the devices needed for that to work? And then there's the computers themselves. Our entire lives (mine included) are now wrapped up in these slabs of glass and aluminum and silicon and when they don't work like their creators promised us they would, our collective blood pressure goes through the roof.
Let's not overlook the currently beyond-toxic hellstew of Social Media. Instead of bringing people together, platforms like Twitter have done nothing but divide us. There's no common ground and if left unabated, it's not going to be long before any sort of civil public discourse will seem as quaint as the horse and buggy. Everything is now my way or the highway, and those unfortunate folks who in the past would've been seen standing on a street corner screaming at buildings or medicated and receiving treatment for their mental illness are now given free reign to spew their crazy across the internet. It may be hyperbolic to say that Social Media will destroy civilization, but in its current incarnation, it's doing precious little to foster it.
Organizing
As I've written before, I confess I'm more than just a bit of a digital hoarder.
I have a 500 GB drive in my laptop. 500 GB should be more than enough for anyone these days—unless you're editing feature-length CGI motion pictures. If you are doing that sort of work, you shouldn't be doing it on a laptop (despite what Apple would have you believe).
Just sayin'.
Whenever I get a new laptop (or am forced to transfer my data off and back on during a repair), I don't actually go through stuff before that happens; much like when you physically move and just toss stuff in another box that should be thrown out.
Because of that, I have documents and data from twenty years ago. Records of things I don't own, don't care about, and don't need. I noticed the other day I had "only" 80 GB free on my drive.
It was time to do some housecleaning.
I know I didn't want to just get rid of everything. It had to be curated and moved to an external drive. Trouble was, I already had an "Archive" drive that was full of crap already. My folder structure had also changed considerably since I set up that archive drive so it wouldn't just be a matter of dragging folders. No, this was going to require getting down and dirty and pretty much going through everything.
I finished the project up last night. I had removed nearly 200 GB from the main drive and completely reorganized the folders on the archive drive and eliminating duplcates on the archive.
The only problem was this morning I realized that at some point I had deleted a folder completely that I wanted to keep. (I'm not surprised. I was working on this until nearly 2 am.) Of course, in my anal-retentiveness I had long since emptied the trash on not only the main drive but also the old archive drive and the new archive. This morning (before I realized what was missing) I overwrote my existing Carbon Copy clone of the main drive.
D'oh!
No problem, I thought. My backup routine includes not only a Carbon Copy clone, but also a regular backup to a Time Machine on our home network. I fired up time machine and…discovered that my Pictures folder HAD NOT BACKED UP SINCE APRIL.
Everything else was there. Pictures was not.
What the fuck, Apple? I mean seriously. WHAT THE FUCK.
"It just works." My ass it does.
I checked Time Machine settings, and Pictures was not, in any way, excluded from the backup routine.
(If you use Time Machine I would seriously consider taking a moment to verify that none of your top-level folders are missing from your backups.)
Since I obviously can't rely on Time Machine any more, I should probably get another Carbon Copy clone drive going and alternate them on a daily basis.
Now the missing folder wasn't anything that I'd go into a suicidal funk over if I couldn't get back; it was just several years of screenshots off the television…but I wanted them back.
I sighed, took a deep breath, and restored most recent "TV Screencaps" folder that the Time Machine had. It obviously didn't contain everything, but it was better than what had transferred from the original archive drive.
I located a file restore utility called Magoshare on the interwebs this afternoon. Almost every application I ran across that claimed to be able to restore deleted files would list them, but if you actually wanted to restore thm, you'd have to cough up anywhere between 70 and 100 bucks. Not in my budget at the moment. Magoshare on the other hand, would let you restore up to 500 MB for free, and I couldn't imagine that I had anywhere near that much still missing. I haven't done anything to my original external archive drive, so I knew the data was still there; it just wasn't indexed. Magoshare has been humming away for the last six hours locating every erased file on the drive. It still hasn't found the folder in question, but I'm not surprised. The progress bar is about a third of the way across (currently having found 400,000 files) and it's telling me it's going to be another four hours before it's finished scanning.
Tomorrow morning, if the missing folder or its contents aren't found, I'm going to take it as a sign from on high to simply move on…
UPDATE:
It's time to move on.
Want To Feel Old?
What was the first CD you ever purchased? Mine was Ammonia Avenue. (At least I think it was. At this point I'm trusting my memory of these sort of things less and less.)
From Behind the Grooves:
On this day in music history: March 2, 1983 – The Compact Disc makes its debut in the US. Research and development of the technology begins in 1974 when engineers from Philips Electronics of The Netherlands begin developing an optical audio disc designed to have superior audio quality and durability to the vinyl record. Two years later in 1976, Sony Electronics of Japan create their own prototype digital audio disc, with a 16 bit sampling rate of 44,056 hz per second. Philips and Sony Electronics begin working together in 1979 to design a new digital audio disc in a joint venture. The discs are five inches in diameter, are made of polycarbonite plastic and aluminum, and are etched with a binary code that when read by a laser turns the information back into an analog signal. The discs maintain the 16 bit sampling rate increased to 44,100 hz with a maximum running time of seventy four minutes. The first titles released by Polygram and CBS are a combination of classical and pop music titles. The format revolutionizes the music industry, surpassing sales of vinyl records and cassettes by 1985. Reaching its peak in sales during the mid 90's, CD experiences the beginning of a decade long decline with the introduction of the MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) digital format, which allows greater compression of digital audio files. This technology gives rise to illegal file shares services like Napster, Limewire and various others, allowing people to share and trade unauthorized downloads of digitized music for free. This opens a literal "pandora's box", leading the devaluation of music, and the eventual downfall of the Compact Disc format, taking with it numerous music retailers, and the virtual shrinking of the music industry itself. Though still a viable audio format, currently the CD represents only about 24% of US music market in terms of physical media sales.