shards mvr

  • strange: when adding a link to an (Apple) Notes document: if the URL has a comma, everything up to the comma is silently stripped (permanently; editing the URL afterward, is too late) - one solution is to encode commas (the first time) as %2C

  • brilliant - and beautiful!
    a human “walk” through time, across the earth
    out-of-eden-walk.nationalgeographic.org/media/201…

  • In the story about VT’s US Rep Becca Balint and contributions by crypto-jerk SBF, theVPO has it right: thevpo.org/2023/10/2…
    Sadly, coverage by both VTDigger & SevenDays is uncharacteristically sensationalist - a glaring and concerning shift. What’s up there?

  • $14 / month - and you better believe you’re still the product 🤮
    arstechnica.com/tech-poli…

  • it’s increasingly easy, to feel like the formerly reasonable expectations, of working hard, are now less and less likely to happen, as we descend further into dog-eat-dog.
    so, the choice is between: a) get increasingly resentful; b) temper expectations - while continuing to fix this broken system

  • with piles of books across the place (and devices) I noticed that, depending which pile I find myself at, I’m reading both “The Midnight Kingdom” by Jared Yates Sexton [@JYSexton], and “How to Be an Antiracist”, by Ibram X. Kendi [@ibramxk] - concurrently.
    and, each being seriously grounded in important - and suppressed - history, I find that they’re almost meant to be read together.
    much learning - and much needed.
    which reminds me, that I’ve also been meaning to read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”.

    www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/673…
    books.apple.com/us/book/h…
    www.howardzinn.org/collectio…

  • Wow: The Nib is sadly on the way out 😢 - but making all their mags available for free download!
    membership.thenib.com/donate-fr…
    (These folks are amazing - please consider tipping them!)

  • got my first pension check; nice. retiring, is the best (work-related) decision I ever made - LOVING it.
    (BTW: kudos to Cox Auto, for continuing to offer a pension.)

  • Keef, with a great way to look at our obligation to actively make a better world: www.dailykos.com/stories/2…

  • ugh: just after 3am, I got an email that my HSA was going to start charging a fee - per month - after today. so much for that account being - as they so often market it - “my money”. 😟
    “luckily”, I had enough med. expenses to drain the account 😕

  • reminder:
    that thing you opened you phone/computer for - to be immediately distracted by other notifications? do the first thing FIRST - those notifications will still be there.
    (otherwise, you’ll likely forget the first - likely more important - thing.)

  • A sudo softwareupdate --install --all never got past Downloaded. 😕 No prompt (cmd-line or GUI) to restart & nothing in-process (ex: verification). I was watching logs, and saw nothing amiss. Solution was to ^C & run it again - with --restart too.

  • Uninstall is sometimes not so simple

    Drat; I’ve been meaning to try the Smile AppleScript editor, but waited too long, and it’s incompatible with modern macOS - HOWEVER:

    I trashed the /Applications/Smile directory (no uninstaller in there), and then re-opened Script Editor to get back to work - but it hung; never completed startup and showed no error messages. Strange.

    After a bit of debugging, I recalled that when I’d installed Smile - since I luckily already had Apple’s built-in Script Editor app open - the Installer told me it had to quit that first. Interesting - and seemed maybe relevant now.

    So I started hunting for evidence of just what had been installed - likely something conflicting with Script Editor (at least).

    /var/log/install.log did have some info, and so did /private/var/db/receipts - which led to the solution (in my case anyway), which was also deleting these directories:

    /Library/Application Support/Smile
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/FITS.osax
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Numerics.osax
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Satimage.osax
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/XMLLib.osax

    After which, Script Editor was able to finish startup - and even showed the unsaved script that I’d been working on. Nice.

  • every once in awhile the Danzinger balance, tips more from the usual woodchuck dry humor, to poignance - which some of us know all too well: https://www.rutlandherald.com/features/weekend_magazine/teeds/image_9a74d4f8-2072-572a-b595-a67fbff38408.html

  • ugh: in a dir within iCloud Drive, replacing a regular file, with a symlink of the same name, apparently breaks sync’ing 😟 - and good luck trying to find that via brctl log -w. (only reason I knew it broke: a periodic check of sync status)

  • oh; weird: if you happen to have /tmp open in a Finder window, brew install wget fails with dir_s_rmdir - apparently due to a “.DS_Store” file, a few levels below /tmp

  • vtdigger.org/2023/04/2…

    these are distractions

    - interim president Mike Smith – confirming he’s all in, on continuing to gut VSU, as soon as the outrage dies down

  • Google - the company whose motto WAS “Don’t be Evil”: arstechnica.com

  • as usual: doing the right thing is - if moral reasons aren’t enough for you - also the less expensive choice: thevpo.org/2023/04/1…

  • Apple Savings: % ain’t bad & it looks like xfer between a linked external account, is much more pleasant (fee-free) than with most others: www.apple.com/newsroom/…

  • another sign that several justices on the US Supreme Court are partisan hacks: this is nothing but a trial balloon, to see if the majority of the US that’s uninfected with MAGA, keeps paying attention to these increasing abuses by “conservatives”: arstechnica.com

  • are you in the cloud majority? twitter.com/Grady_Boo…

  • wow; the Murad situation just looks worse and worse - and why indeed, is it so very important, for some of us, to keep pushing him as police chief?! thevpo.org/2023/04/1…

  • macOS Login Items, and other "Allow in Background"

    There are lots of Login Items and other “Allow in Background” items in macOS these days (especially if the Mac is managed…) so it can be useful to get a list of them all - especially when names shown in the GUI, are not clear. The dumpbtm tool is verbose - though generally all you need is this abbreviated list:

    sfltool dumpbtm | grep -E '^([[:blank:]]{0,1}[^[:blank:]]|[[:blank:]]*(Name|URL):)'

  • how to convert macOS clipboard RTF (ex: from Notes.app), to Markdown? this’ll get you 95% of the way there: osascript -e 'the clipboard as «class RTF »' | tr -d '«»' | sed 's/^data RTF //' | xxd -r -p | /usr/local/bin/pandoc -f rtf -t markdown

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