Well, sort of.
I am currently mostly active on Google Plus (G+, Google+).
This is my profile page and if you want an invite, drop me a note via a comment here or via the “Send an email” button on my profile page.
Well, sort of.
I am currently mostly active on Google Plus (G+, Google+).
This is my profile page and if you want an invite, drop me a note via a comment here or via the “Send an email” button on my profile page.
Somehow, at some point, all of my is-here.com content disappeared. Dear Josh tried to point this out to me but he was too subtle (ahem) and I thought he was merely poking fun at the agregator I had put on the site (quite) a while ago. Nope…
Thankfully the WordPress DB was still there but the custom theme and various uploads and other mods (local plugins) are still gone. I’ll have to see if I can drag those out of a backup tonight. 🙁
Update: Most (hopefully all) images restored.
Update: I guess DH purged the content because it got hacked? I don’t remember ever being notified about them doing such a thing, unfortunately, so either they never did, or it got lost in my spam folder. Found a rogue wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_plugins/doc.php and several other rogue files. The words this sucks massively don’t come even close to describing how it feels to see this now. I’ve configured the WP installs on DH to be upgraded automatically from now on and will try to figure out if this was a problem with SK2, WP, or something else.
Upgraded the first machine to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) this morning. All in all it took about an hour (first generation MacBook Pro, so newer machines will no doubt process it a bit faster). The only customization I added to the installation was to include Rosetta, just in case (it’s tiny so that’s an easy decision, anyway).
As far as I can tell I gained over 10 GB of space. Not sure how to fully explain the difference with the 6-7 GB number that has been mentioned by Apple. Could be that I had a lot of virtual memory files that got cleared up by the reboot, and of course I haven’t put the machine to sleep yet so there’s no sleep-image yet (that’s 2GB right there).
Some casualties:
Applications that do work, as far as I can tell:
Little change(s) that I don’t recall seeing mentioned yet:
Now running the first Time Machine post-upgrade (on a network share, which is why it was important to get that to work again)… the progress bar with a slightly more detailed indication of what it is doing is certainly helpful. Time will tell if future backups will also be faster as promised, because most of the time the network (802.11g or gigabit ethernet, depending on where I am) will be the limiting factor, I’d imagine. First backup’s size is around 8.5GB, so I’m glad I’m doing this one over gigabit ethernet. 😉
I’m annoyed and confused about NewsGator/NetNewsWire’s recent actions.
For starters, I’ve been a happy NetNewsWire user for several years. It was recommended to me when I started with OS X on a Mac Mini (the original PPC version) when it was still developed independently and had a lite and full (for pay) version. I paid for the full version.
When Brent joined forces with NewsGator, not much changed for me, I just continued to use it and enjoy occasional updates. Later on NewsGator decided to give away the clients for free and just charge for premium services, which I couldn’t exactly complain about.
Then the iPhone came along and Brent released a NNW version for it. After some trial and error I found the best way for me to use it was to sync my feed list to the NewsGator servers, let them deal with the feed-checks (except for a few local-only feeds), have some feeds only visible on the desktop version and the rest on the iPhone version, and push entries to the desktop for later reading or sharing with the clippings feature.
Along comes this blog entry: NewsGator Consumer RSS Reader Product Changes & Google Sync
They’re trying to spin this as an improvement, but so far it’s all downgrades as far as I can tell:
What were they thinking?!
Obviously they’ve been receiving a lot of similarly sounding feedback and it seems they’re scrambling to fix a few of these issues but it really feels like this was an incredibly poorly thought out rush job.
Their blog post started out with You spoke and we listened: In response to customer demand … but I certainly don’t recall ever asking for essential features to be ripped out like this. What are they not telling us?
I like NNW, and I like the openness with which Brent has been developing it but it this is really the direction that they’re going, I guess I’ll have to move on to something else.
Not so much madness actually because aside from one hiccup things went pretty smoothly.
First some comparisons:
Original Mini, first generation model from January 2005:
Then in comes the new version, released three days ago (March 3, 2009):
Hello mister Moore, nice to meet you again!
The migration was very smooth. We swapped keyboard/mouse/monitor a few times while we had both Minis running for this, which was almost the trickiest part. Unfortunately I didn’t have the right kind of firewire cable to connect the old and new machine or I would’ve used that, but fortunately OS X supports migrating machine via ethernet and wifi as well now, which only required installing a bit of software on the old one and setting up wifi on the new one (because of encryption) and then sit back and wait while a few GB of data is transferred between the two.
As far as I can tell almost all settings are included in this migration process, except for a few things (and if I notice more I’ll update this entry):
Now I wait for the kids to get home and actually put it to work with general browsing, flash games, photo booth experiments, etc. Any bets on how many days/weeks until they complain it’s too slow?
In the near future (such a conveniently flexible concept) the front page of this website will point to an instance of SweetCron while the blog will probably be moved to a subfolder. SweetCron describes itself as Lifestream software, which allows me to easily gather RSS and Atom feeds from elsewhere and present them in one place. For me that means feeds from the two idle blogs I maintain, my Delicious, and Twitter accounts, and whatever else that relates to me.
Where possible I’ll keep the URLs of the blog the same as they are, so that I won’t confuse news-clients and other aggregators elsewhere (like the LJ feed).
The purpose of this exercise, if there is any, is to reassure visitors that I haven’t abandoned this site and as I move from one service to another, I can easily switch the feeds around. Anyone subscribing to the combined feed would never miss a thing but I’m not suggesting that you should! 🙂
This Zits episode sounds far too familiar… The kids’ handwriting is bad enough that we occasionally wonder how the teachers can read their handed in homework at all, but nothing seems to be done about it.
A few articles that confirm that this is not limited to the local school district:
Having brought this up with the teachers once or twice, the general feeling is that yes, we’d like it to be better as well but there simply isn’t enough time in a day.
Aside from braving the glares and asking our boys to rewrite parts of their finished homework or things that were written in their planners, what can you do? I really don’t want to bring school-like activities into their spare time but I do wonder how this is going to affect them with their school and careers in the long run.
Suggestions?
I’ve known the song “Going Down To Liverpool” by the Bangles for a long time. Probably over two decades, given that the single was taken from their debut album in 1984.
Now, with them being from the USA, California to be precise, there were two things that never made sense to me:
The former I could somewhat accept given the tendency in the USA to name places after ones elsewhere, like Amsterdam, Athens, Rome, etc, so surely there are places called Liverpool out there, right? The latter is very much a UK reference though. Just like the group called UB40 it refers to the Unemployment Benefit form 40. What the hell were these girls from California doing singing about that?!
However I just ignored that until finally, after all these years, I decide to do some (minor, in retrospect) digging and find out today that the answer is very simple: The song is a cover of one originally written by the (UK) Katrina and the Waves!
It’s all so clear to me now. 🙂
Amazon just let me know they’re getting an early start with their Black Friday sales. Thought I’d let you know. 😉
A pretty cute holiday specific theme for the Koi Pond iPhone app! I didn’t see it coming because I don’t typically check back the iTMS pages for the apps I have on the phone and then a week ago I batch-installed two dozen updates for various apps without checking what was included in them, so when I ran the app over the weekend I got a very nice surprise. 😉
Powered by WordPress