Posts

Are you traveling a lot? Do you like to carry your computer around the house with you? If so, maybe you need a MacBook. But for most people, the perfect Mac is the Mac Mini with an i3 processor and 256GB of SSD. Why? Because you can expand the system memory on your Mac relatively cheaply to 32GB and you can attach terabytes of SSD for about $130/TB. MacOS will load as much as it can into RAM and you’ve got 32GB of RAM, your processor will be flying along and outperform much more expensive processors if they only have the standard 8GB of RAM. ...

As the kids are getting older, 2 out of the 3 have switched to MacBooks from Chromebooks. That makes 4 out of the 5 of us pretty firmly in the Apple eco system. And after switching from Picassa to iPhoto to Aperture to Google Photos to (Apple) Photos, I’ve decided that’s going to be my last switch. I’m going to keep my personal photo archive backed up to iCloud. A few years ago, iCloud was not as stable as it is now. But it now seems as stable as its major competitors Dropbox and Google Drive and we’re already using it to back up our various Macs, iPhones, and iPads. ...

Filters in Gmail are incredibly useful but about 50% of the time the default is to see something like this: This is an example of what programmers call a “write only” command. Why? Because a few months or weeks from now - or even tomorrow - you’ll have no idea what this corresponds to. You’re much better off putting in “From: somecompany.com” or “Subject: [list prefix]” in your filters so that you can remember what they mean.

One of the first things that I do on a Macintosh is to create a new user (say “admin”), give it administrative privileges, and then reboot. I log in as admin and lower my own privileges to an ordinary user. Why? Because there were a series of exploits relying on quietly doing things requiring administrator access. You’d download a game and never notice during the install process that it was accessing things it wasn’t supposed to. Things like your passwords stored in your browser, access to your camera, etc. ...

This year we had the worst forest fires that I can remember. Things were bad 3 years ago, when teenagers playing with fireworks set off a forest fire 40 miles from Portland. Soccer games and other sports were cancelled because of the extremely poor air quality. But this was worse. The farm where my grandfather and father lived was classified as category 3, meaning that everyone was to evacuate immediately, for several days. The house where my parents-in-law was classified as category 2, meaning that they were to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The smoke and the worry was causing so much stress that they moved to stay with a grandchild. ...

Making CSS Custom Font works with IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari has a clear explanation of how to use custom fonts on your site.

Really bad performance on my MacBook has been driving me up the wall the past few days. Closing all un-needed programs didn’t help. I ran several Mac utilities on my system, rebooted and so on and so forth. Still no good. There’s 8GB of RAM in my (latest model - fall 2010) white MacBook and that really sped things up when it replaced the stock 2GB. It was very frustrating. ...

Because Blogofile(at least the 0.7.1 version I’m using) regenerates every file and directory every time it makes it hard to update just the changed files on Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage System) can scale incredibly high So I wrote a shell script that updates only the changed files and also pings GooglePing so that Google and other services come along and read your update. Over time, the difference between what the old page 2 on S3 has and what it should be will build. There’s a simple answer, which is to just upload all of the page files. ...

In Switched from WordPress to Blogofile there are two good things about using Blogofile: flat files are almost impossible to hack Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage System) can scale incredibly high There’s some downsides: blogofile build seems to copy or regenerate every single file it’s not totally happy being on S3 - it doesn’t make index.html files for the archive and category directories. there’s no easy way to post-via-email or send a link to start a post Right now I’m writing this with vi and that’s far less comfortable than WordPress’s editor which I really liked. But I’m sure I’ll find TextWrangler or something as suitable for writing blog posts.

I really like WordPress for the huge number of themes and utilities that it has. What I don’t like, though, is the need for constant vigilance to make sure that your blog hasn’t been hacked. When I started the conversion, I found two blog posts that had been secretly altered so that they had links to spam sites. I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful that only two had been altered or disappointed that my blog mattered so little that that’s all they did. ...