Tech Archives - Page 3 of 9

Day 5 – Foods for thoughts

Not sure what to talk about today but it’s 10:44 PM and I haven’t written a daily post. So bear with me while I ranble for 500 words or so.

Today was supposed to be a day for working on my blog, figuring out how to advertise and sell my skills, and getting started trying to make a little freelance income. The hard part is that, in my head, I have two skills and one of them is hard to sell on a piecemeal, client-by-client basis, and the other one is widely known as not a good way to make money these days.

The first one is computer hardware and software troubleshooting, diagnosing, building, and maintaining, also known as Help Desk. I have done this in the context of businesses and agencies for decades where it makes sense. Staff a phone and inbox with techs, tell the employees or customers where to call, and let them meet in the middle to hash things out. Working in those jobs, I often get approached by other employees who eventual say “Hey, it’s not a work computer but I’ve been having trouble; could I ask you to take a look?” On that basis it always seems like there are people out there that want or need help and can pay. But it’s few and far between, and there’s a difference between troubleshooting a computer bought by a business and configured in a standard way, and troubleshooting a computer that someone bought for home use without knowing much about computers, software, or standards. No offense, y’all but the things a lot of people install or allow to be installed on their home computers can be downright frightening.

So my instinct when offering computer support is to try to narrow things down a bit to just recommending computer builds, adding or removing hardware or specific software, things like that. And it just doesn’t seem to be worth it to be a freelance “computer tech.” I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong? How do JayzTwoCents, Linus Tech Tips, and Gamers Nexus do it? Hmmm, guess they’ve built a video empire, not just selling their time and experience taking on one problem at a time. Food for thought.

And of course the other skill I have is copywriting. I can write clean straightforward friendly stories, I rarely make grammatical and spelling errors, and I have done this for my entire life. My insecurity here is that I don’t have a degree, and I don’t have a lot of bylines outside of my own blog. I can write but, as I mentioned a few days ago, I don’t seem to be able to market or generate traffic. Yet. It’s a skill I think I can learn, but there’s that little nay-saying voice in the back of my head that says nay. That is the skill I’m working on building, though. I’m taking some online classes in marketing and writing catchy ads and it’s given me a lot of food for thought on this topic, as well.

It’s all a learning process. And at least it is costing me nothing to try right now. I’m already paying for this blog space. Stay tuned.

Two Decades Already?

meta, Tech

Insert “is this thing on?” joke here.

Twenty years ago today, I registered this domain. I don’t remember the details all that clearly, but what I can remember is that I wanted to own my own domain without really knowing what I was going to do with it.

Up to that point I kept a blog of sorts that was part of my IO.com account, so it had some dumb long URL like http://io.com/users/~lunarobverse — that’s a dead link, so even if your browser makes it a link, it’s not going anywhere, sorry. I’m not even sure if IO.com is still a thing. It was an early internet service provider that grew from a BBS started by Steve Jackson Games after their offices got raided by the Secret Service. Listen, it was a whole thing back in the 80s and 90s, kids, I’m really going off on a tangent here. IO stood for Illuminati Online, which was named after their card game about secret societies that control the world. It was Boomer cynicism and it seemed fun at the time until the Feds are beating down the door and confiscating all your laser printers.

So I wanted a simpler internet address to share my weird personal oversharing. I wanted Moon.com but the publishers of that same name had had that locked up for a long time already, so the shortest variant of my own name I could buy was bamoon.com. At the time, I had to buy it directly from ICANN and it cost US$35 a year. Since I was newly flush from my first real job in a long time, I also purchased brian-moon.com. I had vague ideas about putting something professional at the hyphenated URL, but that’s never really happened, not in twenty years. All it’s ever really done is redirect to the shorter address.

For good measure, I also purchased my online handle, lunarobverse.com, which these days is my custom Tumblr domain. I’ve recently created an LLC of that name as a way to consolidate my freelance income under one business, I’m conflicted about whether I should keep using that URL for Tumblr or convert it into a business site. Honestly, I have no idea what I should be doing with any of this. I don’t have a head for capitalism or marketing. You’d think, after decades of being online, that I would have even the vaguest sense of what my brand is. I don’t. I really really don’t.

bamoon.com hasn’t been Lunar Obverse since the beginning. I didn’t even set up a blog and post under this domain until November 2003, as you can see by perusing my archives, and even those first posts were re-posts of things I’d written previously. But from that first post on, I’ve only ever added to my archives. WordPress tells me that I have 2,565 published posts (including this one) and another 108 unpublished drafts, unfinished thoughts that will likely never see the light of day. The heyday of my posting was in the mid- to late-00’s, mainly during the second Bush administration, because liberals (I identified as a liberal back then; I’ve moved more and more left over the years) were documenting how bad the GOP was back then. But also there was an explosion of blogging, political and personal, and I wanted to participate.

Lunar Obverse, though, never really hit that growth spurt that gave my writing a huge audience. At the most, I think I was averaging around 200 unique visits a day. That seemed like a nice number, easily manageable. 200 people would fill an auditorium, and it’s a number of people that I could feel comfortable addressing. But I never kept up the pace, and stopped writing so much, and digital cobwebs and virtual dust began to settle around here.

The blog has run on Blogger, and now on WordPress, and briefly on a bespoke system created by a friend I’ve lost track of (hi Caleb, if you’re still out there, I see your Instagram posts and it looks like you’re doing great), but the backend stuff has never been the reason I care about writing. The reason I stopped writing is personal and sad, but I still want to write. I have things I want to say, and here’s a place I can say them without having to go through anyone else. That’s the power of the internet, after all.

There have been years, here and there, where it’s been iffy whether I could scrape together the US$105 I needed to keep the domains. I remember having to borrow money from friends a couple of times. But I’ve managed to hold on to them, even if I haven’t done much with them. I’d like to change that. My plan is to go through all the old posts, and resurface the best ones, and start adding new ones. Best by my own measure, primarily; if I look at the analytics for this domain even the highest-traffic posts get only tens of hits every month. There are posts here I’m still proud of, though, and maybe they might mean something to someone else out there.

I had a coworker a couple of years back remark that my domain, being so short, might be worth a lot of money. The best I can tell is that I could sell it for a couple thousand bucks. That’s not worth it to toss away all these posts and give up the one thing I’ve owned for longer than I’ve ever owned anything. Nah, I’m gonna keep this, spruce it up a little, do some pruning and promotion, and get it back up and running.

So, if you’re reading this, thank you, and welcome. Maybe welcome back? There may be some life left here after all.

Learning to Be Bored Again

Tech

Discovered this article, and it made me want to… write about it:

Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain – by Kevin Roose.

I, like the author, don’t want to give up my phone entirely; I just want to use my phone but get back all the habits I had before I got one, like reading books, watching movies, and talking to my friends without interrupting myself by poking at the digital tit (that’s a bad metaphor, I know, don’t @ me).

This quote, in particular, stands out to me: “If I was going to repair my brain, I needed to practice doing nothing.” And that cuts right to the core: if I feel even a momentary, tiny amount of boredom, I reach for the phone, because it offers so many distractions from boredom.

But when I used to get bored, that’s when I would think about my life, my friends, story ideas, or just whatever was going on around me. So I guess my next step is to start identifying those urges to relieve boredom and see if I can deprioritize the phone and try something else instead.

I’ve done this before, or at least taken a step or two in this direction when I would practice reading with no internet time; an internet-free zone, if you will. I kept it up for a while but then the excuses for not doing it piled up to the point where I was back on my bullshit.

Like any habit or any skill, it’ll take time to get better at it. The first step is noticing, and then putting it into practice. Here I go again.

A Simple Trick: Disabling a Specific Key

Tech

Most of the time, I learn something new because I have a problem to solve. I’ll tolerate some annoyances as long as they’re minor but if they go on for a while or start becoming worse, I go looking for a solution.

I’ve been playing Fallout 4 a bit lately. I know I’m not the most dextrous gamer around. I am, however, far more comfortable with mouse and keyboard than I am with any controller. So when I get into a combat situation and I start flailing around on the keyboard trying to shoot the super mutants, I have found myself hitting the Windows key, which pauses the game and drops me back to the desktop.

Supermutants are simple. Here, Strong tells us its entire character arc. — Super mutants are simple. Here, Strong tells us its entire character arc.

The first few times I just groaned, alt-tabbed back to the game, hit ESC and carried on. But it kept happening. I knew there must be a way to just turn off the Windows key entirely, at least while I was playing. Trouble is, I use that key regularly when I’m not playing. What about a more elegant solution?

Enter AutoHotkey (AHK). It’s a scripting program that runs in the background, waits for keyboard input, and then uses that to trigger actions. I use it as a text expander already: when I type “sphn”, for instance, AHK will expand that to my phone number. Super handy!

And as it turns out, there’s a way to get to have specific key combinations tied to specific programs. So I could have it just ignore the Windows key, but only when Fallout 4 had the focus.

I went looking, and found that I only had to add the following lines to an AHK script I’m already using:

#IfWinActive, ahk_class Fallout4
~LWin Up:: return

The first line tells AHK to only run the next line if the window that’s named “Fallout4” is the active window. And the next line is what I want to happen: do nothing at all when the Windows key is released.

Now, no matter what flailing I do when feral ghouls attack, I won’t take myself out of the game by tapping the wrong key, letting me stay in the moment. Much better!

There’s probably plenty more uses for this trick, like re-mapping all the controls (or just the annoying ones) in a stubborn program. Thankfully, AHK is well-documented. For now, though, I’m happy I went looking for the answer to this question.

Feature Request for Mac OS X: replacing synonyms

Tech

I’m a writer and I’ve got a pretty big vocabulary, if I do say so myself, but I do find myself searching for the right word sometimes. I like using Mac OS X’s built-in dictionary and thesaurus for that. It’s handy, especially in 10.11 El Capitan. Just highlight a word, right-click (yes, you can do that on Mac OS X, you’ve been able to for years) and choose “Look up [word]”, and you get a nice popup that includes synonyms.

The feature has been around since at least 2006. But as handy as it is, it seems like a no-brainer to me to be able to double-click on one of the suggestions and have it replace the highlighted word. Despite me trying this almost every time, it doesn’t actually work that way. So I’m filing Radar #25533454 for it. Just for good measure, I also sent Apple a more generic Feature Request via their Feedback page.

Sync is not a backup

Portfolio, Tech

This morning, my friends Ken and Tracy woke me up with a bunch of texts, which were a follow up to a small bit of drama we had been discussing the night before: namely, why Ken’s first date had seemingly ghosted.

The reason she hadn’t replied to any texts, confirming or declining the location and time of their first meeting? She had lost her iPhone, and along with it, three years worth of pictures and other data, because she had never backed up any of that. Understandably, she was more concerned with the pictures.

Having been roused from sleep, I was feeling a bit lecture-y so, while I was sympathetic to Ken’s dating woes, I also took the time to make a mini lecture about backing stuff up, and making sure that the backups are working, and I prefaced it all with the simple phrase:

iCloud sync is not a backup

Just having iCloud Drive available does not actually mean your stuff is being backed up. iCloud Drive, baked into the OS for the past year, is additional space that an iPhone, iPad or Mac can use to store copies of documents, settings, and photos, that then get pushed out to all the other devices using that same Apple ID. It’s a way to sync that information between devices.

“But wait,” Ken asked. “What about iCloud Backup?”

iCloud Backup is a separate service, and I believe the default setting is On, and yes, it makes use of the extra storage you purchase for iCloud Drive. Apple still has some work to do to explain the difference, but let me take a stab at it.

iCloud Backup is only saving the current state of your iOS device (on the Mac, the only Apple-provided option for backup is Time Machine, which has its own set of pros and cons.) This is a backup that is only of use in two circumstances: first, if you lose your device, you can restore it using the most recent iCloud Backup–whenever that may have been; and second, you can use it when upgrading phones, to move your settings from one to the other. Handy!

I don’t consider it a full backup, though, because there are too many circumstances where you don’t want the current state of your data! What if you delete a picture, and don’t realize you need it for a while? What if you make an edit to something and want to go back to the previous version? If you’re just relying on iCloud Backup, you’re shit out of luck.

And even then, I’ve seen iCloud files become damaged or corrupt. I had a scare a couple of weeks ago when Pages showed me a dialog saying “This file is corrupt and can not be opened”; the document in question was saved on iCloud Drive so I could access it everywhere (sync) but to restore it, I needed to pull it from my Time Machine or, failing that, my Backblaze account (backups). If I hadn’t had those other two levels of redundancy, I would have lost nearly 50,000 words of my novel-in-progress.

If you have one, you have none

I heard this saying recently: If you have one, you have none; if you have two, you have one. I believe it comes from the military, and the meaning should be clear: you need multiple plans for any contingency if you want to be safe. Or, more simply, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

iCloud Drive and iCloud Backup are better than nothing at all, but there are some common situations where they’re not enough to save your data. Even Time Machine, on the Mac, only goes a step or two further: I give it points for saving the past state of your computer, but if you’ve ever peeked under the hood at all the crazy things it needs to do its job, or if you’ve ever thought about the fragility of spinning drives or the USB connection, you’d be worried and paranoid like I am.

People don’t like being told they need to spend that extra money to buy an external drive, or a service like Backblaze (note: I’m a customer of theirs and they’ve saved my bacon several times) to ensure the safety of all that content they create. But that’s my strong recommendation to you.

Apple can, and should, do more to make saving and securing for the future our files–and, let’s be honest here, the files that are most important to the vast majority of people are our pictures. Apple puts very high-quality cameras into iPhones and people love using them. They are precious memories to us.

All the points of failure

The tech available to us today is amazing: ultra-thin laptops, amazing desktops, always-connected smartphones and tablets, all of them connected to each other with wireless connections and beautiful easy to use software at every level.

But to a pessimist, that just means there’s many weak points, places where a failure can mean you just lost something of immense personal meaning to you. To protect against that loss, a complete backup plan needs to cover at a minimum the following contingencies.

The physical loss of a primary device, like your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Loss of a subset of your data: deleted documents, corrupted files, mistaken edits that you want to undo.
And the one that most people don’t think about: failure of your backup. What if your Time Machine hard drive dies, as all hard drives do eventually? What if your iCloud storage shits the bed? What if you lose your password to the online storage you’ve been using and can’t get it back?

You need more than one backup method. And preferably, those backups need to be in more than one location, using different kinds of backup mechanisms. And ideally, one or all of the backups you use need to be automated, or you need to make a serious habit of making them happen.

No such thing as too many backups

Here’s what I do: On my MacBook Pro, I have a Time Machine external drive plugged in at all times, and I have a Backblaze account giving me an offsite, network-based, current state. Plus, from time to time, roughly once every week or two, I will make a separate, manual clone of the entire drive. Anything that’s extra special to me, like, say, my novel-in-progress, gets emailed every Sunday night via Gmail, giving me an extra copy. And when I’m particularly nervous, I’ll stash a copy on Dropbox, where they have also implemented a system for recovery of deleted files up to 30 days old on their standard personal plan.

On my iPhone, I mainly rely on iCloud Backup, but I also have my photos automatically upload to a private section of my Flickr account. I do have to open the Flickr app on my phone sometimes to ensure that it is all working, but testing a backup is part of my responsibility for now. And maybe once a month, I’ll plug my phone in to my laptop and import all the pictures into iPhoto (I haven’t upgraded to the new Photos app yet), where they then become part of my MacBook Pro’s backup scheme.

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright

Tech

…in the forests of the night.

I “borrowed” the system restore discs for an iMac G5, to try to upgrade the OS on my G4 Mac mini. I tried every crack and hack I could find to get the iMac Tiger discs to install on my Mac mini. Unfortunately “every hack and crack I could find” amounts to two – modifying the .pkg and using a program called XPostFacto. Neither one worked. In both instances, when I tried to actually install, it would simply recognize that my mini was not an iMac, and refuse to install.

So I realized I was being a pirate and decided to do the honorable thing and buy a damn copy of Tiger. I looked at craigslist to see if anyone was selling a copy for cheap. No go. Then I checked other online retail stores. The best I could do was Amazon – I’d save $10, not including shipping. $10 and I’d have to wait?

That did it. I headed down to the Apple Store, plucked a copy of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger off the shelf and stood in line. The tall and lovely black-shirted C. rang up the sale.

“So…” she said, curly brown-haired head hunched over her little handheld computer, stabbing at the screen with the stylus (I have it on good authority that the handheld POS boxes run Windows CE – that authority being my own eyes), “…you’re buying Tiger. That’s exciting.” Her flat tone added irony to her statement.

“Yeah.”

“What do you have?” She asked, marginally more interested.

“A Mac mini,” I said.

Her head jerked up, her brow furrowed and her brown eyes darkened as she mentally paged through Apple’s product line. “But that… that should run Tiger already?”

“No,” I said, sadly, “It’s got Panther on it. It was one of the first ones sold. It’s two years old.”

“Oh.” She nodded. “Oh, right.”

“There’s too many applications that require Tiger now. Time to upgrade. And since Leopard is going to be late, I might as well bite the bullet now.”

The fact is, the main application I want to run on my mini is HamachiX, a Mac OS client for the Hamachi VPN network. It will let me access my home computer over the internets, a very valuable tool. I can then set up secure browsing, have my music and videos available everywhere I’ve got a net connection… and… and… well, that’s all I can think of right now. I’m sure there’s more I can do.

I’m sure of it!

Boot Camp report

Tech

Even though I haven’t actually posted about it yet, I have, in fact, used Boot Camp to install Windows XP on my new sexy thing. It had it’s scary moments, not the least of which being the fact that I was installing Windows XP on my Macintosh, but mainly related to the fact that this is beta software and drivers. But once it was on there, it seemed to work OK. I installed a couple of games and they ran pretty smoothly (I’ll finish up the longer report and post it… um… soon).

I haven’t run it a lot this week because I’ve been working on my site re-design, and everyone is right – rebooting is a pain in the ass. I keep thinking I’ll get around to playing those games soon…

But now, via The Unofficial Apple Weblog, I’m reading a discussion thread about a bunch of people who are stuck in Windows XP! They’ve booted in, and they can’t boot out again. I haven’t read the whole thing (there’s 117 replies to go through) but mostly it’s a sad sad tale of doom and woe.

Maybe I’ll get rid of that partition… until the beta software is a little less beta…

Boot Camp

Tech

I’m totally stealing this from John Gruber, but I think he’s being really really eloquent when he says:

“Holy shit!”

Apple has released a public beta of a utility to let you dual-boot Windows XP on your Intel-based Mac, called Boot Camp.

And the bestbestbest part: this technology is going to be included in the next version of Mac OS X, 10.5, Leopard.

This totally looks like a surprise strike at a target of opportunity. What’s that? Oh, haven’t you heard? Windows Vista isn’t going to ship until 2007. But IT OK, Microsoft is going to put stickers on any PC even barely capable of having Vista installed on it, thus guaranteeing that anyone who actually upgrades in ’07 has a really really shitty experience. Nice one, Microsoft! Go, Apple!

Once people get used to running Mac OS, and can compare it side-by-side with XP on the same hardware… I’m betting that some folks eventually just get rid of XP altogether. Not all, mind you; I’m sure some will continue to use both, and some will actually prefer XP for many reasons. But there will be at least some switchers, and that only works to Apple’s advantage, since the bulk of their income still comes from sales of hardware, not software.

Knowledge Base article with all your FAQs about Boot Camp found here.

OK, that does it. I’m totally dual-booting my new sexy thing this weekend.

Freecell port

Tech

Don’t worry, Windows users.

Now there’s Freecell for Mac OS X.

Which means there’s now no good reason to put off switching. Unless you enjoy using an operating system that shrivels your soul.