This year I spent more money than I should have on computers. Of course, I am happy about that.
\nFirst, I bought a Beelink mini PCs with two NICs so I could set up an OPNsense router. My primary goal was to have a router/firewall that was up-to-date with security patches. That has been a rousing success. OPNsense, if anything, updates too often. My secondary goal was to have something I could set up as a VPN or proxy server so I could access my own stuff while I am away form home. I am unhappy to report that I could never get Wireguard working properly, and have given up on it for the time being.
\nI liked that PC so much that I bought another one to use as an app server. I installed Proxmox on it and have been having fun setting up numerous services in LXC containers using Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts. I set up LXC containers for Jellyfin (a media server and streamer), Paperless-ngx (a document manager for scanned papers), and several tools for downloading Linux ISOs and the like. It has been pretty easy to set up. The hardest part was getting all the LXC containers to connect to my NAS file shares, but even that was not very hard. (I do have many years of basic homelab-style Linux administration under my belt.)
\nThe experience has been so good that I decided to buy a laptop to mess around with Linux on the desktop. I bought a 5-year-old used Thinkpad. It cost way less than $500, was in like-new condition, and runs Fedora 42 Workstation perfectly. I have been having more fun computing than I have for a long time.
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-11T17:34:16-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2025/08/11/linux-pcs.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2023/02/01/paid-search-engines.html", "title": "Paid Search Engines", "content_html": "A couple new, paid (or optionally paid) search engines have caught my attention recently: Kagi and Neeva. I am trying to figure out if switching to either of them, and paying for a search engine for the first time, makes sense for me.
\nThe main problem with search engines—and Google is the prime example of this right now—is that search results are often worse in quality than they were five or ten years ago. This is because their algorithms have been gamed with SEO, so site creators can make more money, and the search engines themselves have junked up their results listings with ads and promotions for their own properties, so they can make more money.
\nAt this point, I don’t trust Google or Bing to order search results in a way that is beneficial to me, rather than to their partners and their paying customers: advertisers. Paying a subscription for search would, theoretically, align the search engine’s interests with my own.
\nKagi and Neeva promise aligned incentives and a more personalized search experience with higher-quality results. Both have iOS apps, which are web browsers that default to their own search engines. Both allow for sign-in with Apple, which allows me to hide my email address/real identity from them, if I choose to. Both have Safari extensions that hijack the address bar search (even on iOS).
\nI have tested out Neeva the most. I really like its AI-generated summaries of the top few results pages. Kagi is clean and much faster. I find it hard to judge which is better, per se. I think I’m finding what I want on the first page or so. I think I prefer Neeva’s AI summary to Kagi’s lack of one. The summaries are not always that impressive, though; it seems to pull one sentence out of the top three search result pages and smoosh them together into a paragraph.
\nOne thing I have discovered is that I spend a lot less time looking at search engine results pages than I thought I did. Most of my use of the browser search bar ends with me clicking an autocomplete suggestion—one that is handled by DuckDuckGo, rather than Neeva or Kagi. (This is due to limitations in the default search engines in Safari.)
\nIt probably makes sense for me to wait until Google, Bing, and whoever else integrate AI summaries into their offerings and re-evaluate all the search engines again. The Internet rumor mill suggests that change will come fairly soon.
\n", "date_published": "2023-02-01T12:37:04-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2023/02/01/paid-search-engines.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2023/01/24/im-happy-tapbotss.html", "content_html": "I’m happy Tapbots’s Ivory Mastodon client is out. My love for its predecessor, Tweetbot, far exceeded any feelings I had for Twitter. I installed it and am trying it out. At present, however, I’m not that interested in Mastodon, and I don’t think Ivory will change that. It was hard to kick my addiction to Twitter and I don’t think I need to replace it with something that is almost exactly the same.
\n", "date_published": "2023-01-24T15:50:12-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2023/01/24/im-happy-tapbotss.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2023/01/24/i-have-been.html", "content_html": "I have been happy to sit out the whole Twitter implosion, though I am beyond tired of hearing about it all the time on the podcasts I listen to. I still have an account over there, mostly to be able to read tweetstorms (that really should be blog posts) that other people link to. I haven’t posted anywhere in a while. I’ve been busy reading and working and haven’t had much to say.
\n", "date_published": "2023-01-24T11:48:20-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2023/01/24/i-have-been.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/11/01/for-the-first.html", "content_html": "For the first time in about 15 years I am no long a customer of Verizon Wireless. My family is living the MVNO life. I hope it works out, but I get the impression that, because eSims make switching quick and easy, we can always switch carriers again if we need to.
\n", "date_published": "2022-11-01T09:12:17-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/11/01/for-the-first.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/10/17/i-started-using.html", "content_html": "I started using https://hckrnews.com to browse Hacker News in a less redundant way. It collects the stories that reach the front page of Hacker News and groups them by day. Each story shows up once and doesn’t move around, so it takes a lot less time to browse.
\n", "date_published": "2022-10-17T18:10:06-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/10/17/i-started-using.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/10/17/i-finally-changed.html", "content_html": "I finally changed over my personal email address to use iCloud. That will save me $20/year on my Hover.com bill and give me an excuse to use my iCloud email account, which has been checked fruitlessly by Apple Mail for many years.
\n", "date_published": "2022-10-17T18:04:54-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/10/17/i-finally-changed.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/09/21/i-have-some.html", "content_html": "I have some light reading tonight: Polars User Guide. I basically hate Pandas’s API and hope to use something more nicely designed, and a heck of a lot faster, instead.
\n", "date_published": "2022-09-21T23:35:21-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/09/21/i-have-some.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/09/21/im-uninstalling-visual.html", "content_html": "I’m uninstalling Visual Studio from my work computer. It feels weird to do it, but I haven’t used it in years. Visual Studio Code killed it for me.
\n", "date_published": "2022-09-21T10:50:04-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/09/21/im-uninstalling-visual.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/09/17/i-wrote-a.html", "content_html": "I wrote a SQL script that queried, cleaned, and loaded data into a table. It failed after 9 hours of runtime because of a NULL value in the source data that I had forgotten about. 🤦♂️
\n", "date_published": "2022-09-17T09:42:25-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/09/17/i-wrote-a.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/28/yesterday-i-wiped.html", "content_html": "Yesterday I wiped my old iPad, which was running iPadOS 16 developer beta 3, and reinstalled iOS 15.6. Of course, an hour after I did so, a new developer beta was released that may have fixed the Music app crashing bugs that were vexing me.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-28T22:07:14-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/28/yesterday-i-wiped.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/26/i-want-to.html", "content_html": "I want to install Linux on an old PC that I have. After looking at all sorts of reviews and videos showing the various desktops and distros I could try, I came to the conclusion that boring old standard Ubuntu would probably suit me best.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-26T21:21:02-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/26/i-want-to.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/25/standard-ebooks.html", "title": "Standard Ebooks", "content_html": "In my quest to fill my new Kobo with some good things to read, I quickly found Project Gutenberg, which has tons of public domain books to download in various ebook formats. Unfortunately, most of its books are basically plaintext files. That is great for longevity and flexibility, but is not great for readability on an e-reader. Many (most?) of its books don’t look great on your Kindle or Kobo (or what have you).
\nLuckily, I found a website that fixes those formatting problems—at least for a subset of Project Gutenberg books: Standard Ebooks. From its About page:
\n\n\nStandard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.
\n
So far, I like Standard Ebooks. Impressively, each of its books are available in four formats: ePub (in both “compatible” and “advanced” flavors for most e-readers), azw3 (for Kindle), and kepub (for Kobo). I wish there were more selection, but I guess that’s partly on me. I could clean up a public domain ebook and contribute it to the site.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-25T20:33:53-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/25/standard-ebooks.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/23/back-to-converting.html", "title": "Back to converting e-Books with Calibre", "content_html": "I bought the Kobo Clara HD thinking that I could side-load ePubs on it without converting them. While that is true, when you read a normal ePub—with at least some of them I have tried—you cannot change the font, margins, or line spacing. That is very frustrating.
\nI learned that Kobo has its own format, kepub, which is basically ePub with some extra stuff added to it. Kepub files work exactly how you would expect e-books to work. This means that I am back to using Calibre to converting my ePubs to a different format to read them on my e-reader.
\nThis isn’t the end of the world. Calibre is an amazing piece of software, and it does just about everything you would ever need an e-book library manager and converter to do. Unfortunately, it is also the jankiest piece of software on my Mac. It is ugly (which doesn’t really bother me), it crashes regularly, and one time this week it froze so badly I had to do a hard-reboot to get rid of it.
\nLuckily, I don’t plan to use Calibre very often. That’s because I can also convert ePubs to kepubs with a command-line tool called Kepubify. It works great! (There is a web-based version of Kepubify, too, but I couldn’t get it to work.)
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-23T21:40:57-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/23/back-to-converting.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/22/google-fonts.html", "title": "Google Fonts", "content_html": "I don’t always like Google’s products or business practices, but some of its offerings are great. Google Fonts is a case in point. From its (hard-to-reach) footer:
\n\n\nGoogle Fonts is a library of 1,429 open source font families and APIs for convenient use via CSS and Android. The library also has delightful and beautifully crafted icons for common actions and items. Download them for use in your digital products for Android, iOS, and web.
\n
The site offers a wide range of free fonts, which you can test out in the browser and download for free, without jumping through any hoops. Other free font sites I have used in the past bordered on scammy, with all sorts of ads, trackers, and dark patterns that steer you toward non-free fonts. I almost always end up going to Google Fonts first when I am looking for a new font for coding or reading.
\nIt also offers a pretty extensive knowledge base that covers why typefaces are important and how to choose them effectively.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-22T09:42:47-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/22/google-fonts.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/21/lexend-change-the.html", "title": "Lexend: Change the way the world reads", "content_html": "When installing fonts on my new Kobo e-reader, I came across a font that I had never heard of before: Lexend. It is a free, sans-serif font with a bold mission and a rather audacious website. Here is some of its most informative copy:
\n\n\nIn 1999, as an educational therapist, Dr. Bonnie Shaver-Troup, working with clients, began observing that reading issues masked the individual’s true capability and intelligence.
\nIn 2000, Bonnie theorized that reading performance would improve through use of:
\n\n
\n- A sans-serif font to reduce cognitive noise
\n- Expanded scaling to improve potential for character recognition
\n- Hyper-expansion of character spacing, which creates a greater lag time and reduces potential crowding and masking effects
\n- These changes led to the development of seven specially-designed fonts, which create an immediate improvement in reading performance.
\nThis is where Lexend was formed.
\n
There is also a Google case study that goes into some detail about the font’s unique features.
\nSo far I installed its vanilla variant, simply called Lexend, on my Kobo and read a few pages with it. It looks nice! I can install it on my iPad with FontCase, but I can’t use it in the app I read in most, which is Apple Books. That severely limits how useful it will be for me. At some point, I would like to test it out on difficult reading material and see if it helps me stay focused and improves my recall.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-21T22:07:22-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/21/lexend-change-the.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/21/first-impressions-of.html", "title": "First impressions of the Kobo Clara HD e-reader", "content_html": "I got my Kobo this afternoon, set it up, and started noodling with it.
\nMy library card needs to be renewed, so I was locked out of logging into Overdrive to worry library books. Side-loading books was very easy, and I don’t need to convert my ePubs beforehand either, which I had to on my Kindle1. I wish the Kobo had a USB-C port instead of micro-USB, but I won’t be plugging it in too often, so that’s not a big deal.
\nSo far, I find the reading experience to be OK. The screen is sharp, but it is really small! I had read that it was the same size as the Kindle Paperwhite’s screen, but it is, in fact, noticeably smaller. I am not sure how much I like it. I feel like I can only fit a paragraph or two onto the screen at one time. I probably just have to get used to it, and think of it as a “paperback” compared to the “hardcover” size of my iPad.
\nMOBI is a technically inferior file format to ePub. It bugs me even though I don’t see the guts of it when I’m reading. ↩︎
\nToday I learned about ChromeOS Flex, which is an easy way to install Chrome OS on any computer:
\n\n\nTry the cloud-first, fast, easy-to-manage, and secure operating system for PCs and Macs. ChromeOS Flex is a sustainable way to modernize devices you already own. It’s easy to deploy across your fleet or simply try it to see what a cloud-first OS has to offer.
\n
I don’t really have a use for it, but I wish I did. I think ChromeOS, with its Linux support for things I care about, like Visual Studio Code and the terminal, would be a fantastic OS for web browsing and some types of software development. I have been thinking about taking an old or underpowered Windows computer and putting Linux on it, but Chrome OS may be more polished and better suited to my family’s needs.
\nBack when I was an IT auditor, I would recommend that IT organizations at big companies shift their lower-skilled workforce from Windows to ChromeOS. Doing so would reduce support costs for their computers considerably, and would not impact their ability to do their jobs. (All their systems had a web front-end.) That was a long time ago, and there were no takers, but I still think it is a good idea. I’m glad Google is pushing forward with it, and expanding the vision beyond ready-made ChromeBooks to an installable OS.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-21T21:38:16-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/21/chromeos-flex.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/20/impulse-purchase-kobo.html", "title": "Impulse purchase: Kobo Clara HD e-reader", "content_html": "I just impulse-purchased a Kobo Clara HD. I hope it wasn’t a bad decision.
\nI need an e-book reader only for a few weeks each year, during my summer vacation, which is coming up soon. I have an old Kindle, which I trot out annually to read outside with during my vacation, but its lack of a backlight and its low resolution make it hard to read in way too many places—not just indoors, but outside in the shade as well. It is disappointing in every way.
\nI probably should have purchased a Kindle Paperwhite during Prime Day instead, but I don’t want another Kindle. I want something that handles ePubs natively, can side-load fonts, and can interface with my local library. The Kobo fits all these criteria.
\nIt will be delivered as soon as tomorrow. I’m excited to take it for a spin.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-20T01:00:36-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/20/impulse-purchase-kobo.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/18/i-dont-use.html", "content_html": "I don’t use Drafts anymore even though it used to be my all-time favorite iOS app. It became way more than I need it to be. Ulysses and Apple Notes have completely overtaken it for writing, and I don’t bother using it any more to create calendar events or execute searches.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-18T19:41:04-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/18/i-dont-use.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/15/learning-with-vs.html", "title": "Learning with VS Code on Chromebooks", "content_html": "My son needs a Chromebook for school and a computer to run Visual Studio Code in. I kind of want to get him a MacBook Air (which can run Chrome), but one is too expensive. I kind of want to get him a Linux laptop (which can also run Chrome), but that is likely not going to work 100% right. Why not get him a Chromebook and install Visual Studio Code on it? That might be the best and cheapest solution.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-15T20:26:18-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/15/learning-with-vs.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/14/pilcrows-and-silcrows.html", "title": "Pilcrows and silcrows", "content_html": "I have been writing and editing documentation all week—so much so that I have been dreaming about applying styles to text in Microsoft Word.
\nToday I really got deep into the minutiae of Microsoft Word and legal citations. I was delighted to find an online guide called Typography for Lawyers, which not only has lots of useful tips about typography, but also tells you how to do it in Word, Mac OS Word, and WordPerfect. Its pages helped me get a handle on things like inserting pilcrows (¶) and silcrows (§) correctly, which (as I suspected) includes entering nonbreaking spaces after them.
\nI now know the Word keyboard shortcut to insert nonbreaking spaces (Control+Shift+Space in Word). I doubt any of my coworkers even know what nonbreaking spaces are.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-14T21:39:31-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/14/pilcrows-and-silcrows.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/13/peazip.html", "title": "PeaZip", "content_html": "At work, I rely on compression to keep my hard drive from filling up with huge data files that I need to work with and keep for the duration of a project. Because I mainly care about saving storage space, when it comes to file compression, I care mostly about compression ratio and only secondarily about compression and decompression speed.
\nOver the years I have become somewhat of a file compression nerd. To that end, on a whim today, I uninstalled my longtime favorite archive manager, 7-zip, from the Windows machine I use for work and installed PeaZip in its place.
\nPeaZip is a front-end to a host of open-source file compression methods, including old stalwarts like Zip and 7Z, and also newer entrants such as ZPAQ, Zstandard, and Brotli. These newer methods offer higher compression ratios, greater speeds, and differing trade-offs between the two.
\nPeaZip’s main benefit over 7-zip is its far-nicer file manager interface than 7-zip. Its nicer UI has never been enough to entice me to switch from 7-zip, but I made the switch to try out Zstandard (primarily) and ZPAQ. With the data I have on hand, which is mainly data files in text format, I found that ZPAQ offered the best compression ratio (which is the most important thing to me), but that 7Z offered almost the same compression ratio while being the non-Zip format I am already used to using1.
\nThis surprised me, but it is good to know because my usage of PeaZip may be limited. While PeaZip has a nicer interface and more features, it is slower to launch (even to create an archive), and it lacks 7-zip’s integration with the Windows File Explorer right-click-and-drag handler. If I am going to use it primarily to make 7Z archives, and rarely use its file manager interface because I use its the Windows File Explorer right-click-and-drag handler, PeaZip does not offer me any features I really care about.
\nI am still curious about Zstandard, and will continue to explore how I can use it to compress my data files more quickly, but with better compression ratios, than 7-zip and Zip do.
\nThis observation is likely not true with other types of data. I would not extrapolate it to other situations. ↩︎
\nEarly in my career, I ended up working on Microsoft SQL Server projects as a software developer and a business analyst. Over several years, I became an expert1 in data modeling, performance tuning, ETL, numerous database connection options, numerous database programming libraries. Even after I left my software development job behind, I wrote queries and developed metadata layers for analytical reporting. Over that time, I wrote a ton of SQL queries, and I had a very opinionated way of structuring them, which was essentially clean ANSI SQL.
\nWhen I moved to audit, I had no use for SQL for years. Consequently, I did not keep up with Microsoft SQL Server for years. When my job became more technically oriented again, I was surprised to learn that SQL—or at least Microsoft SQL Server’s support T-SQL language—had evolved. One of my favorite features, which premiered in SQL Server 2005, but I was late to learn about, is common table expressions, or CTEs. Learning CTEs changed the way I write queries entirely.
\nConceptually, a CTE is a temporary table based on a SQL query. Practically, CTEs let you break up a complex query into several simpler ones. I like to consider each CTE to be a step in a multi-step process that builds the dataset I need.
\nCTEs are very useful when you want to create a calculation and then group on the calculated value. Without CTEs, you have to copy/paste the entire calculation into the GROUP BY clause, which is error-prone and confusing to read. With CTEs, you can filter the data in one step, then make your calculations in another step, then group by the calculated values in the next step, then sort and select the top 10 calculated values in the final step.
\nFrom a performance standpoint, SQL Server optimizes the query you type in. Behind the scenes, it doesn’t actually create a temporary table for every CTE you create. That means that there is usually no, or negligible, impact to using CTEs in your queries.
\nNow, all but the simplest queries I wrote are a collection of common table expressions. Once you understand what they are, they make complex SQL queries a lot easier to reason through when writing them, and a lot easier to understand when reading them. In my field, audit, understanding the query and being able to reason about its correctness is often the most important consideration.
\nA local expert, at least. ↩︎
\nOne thing I learned today is that Microsoft essentially made a fork of Visual Studio Code and customized it for database work. The app is called Azure Data Studio. Out of the box it supports Microsoft SQL Server, including non-Azure-hosted versions, despite its name. With an extension, it supports Postgres, too.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-08T23:59:37-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/08/azure-data-studio.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/08/i-was-delighted.html", "content_html": "I was delighted to learn this evening that I could install the excellent, open-source database Postgres on my Mac by downloading a simple app bundle—Postgres.app—and copying it to my Applications folder. In contrast, installing SQL Server on my Windows machine at work was a big deal.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-08T22:50:04-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/08/i-was-delighted.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/06/etl-with-python.html", "title": "ETL with Python", "content_html": "I have been experimenting with writing ETL (extract, transform, load) scripts in Python for work. The scripts were mostly fun and easy to write, but the outcomes have been disappointing: unacceptably slow load times.
\nI usually work with an instance of SQL Server that runs locally on my computer. I use it for data collection, analysis, and reporting, and have never needed a shared server. In the local environment, I have always loaded .csv files to staging tables via BCP or the BULK INSERT command in T-SQL scripts; then I use T-SQL queries or stored procedures to load the data into the destination tables. This approach is very fast, but it only does “L” part of ETL (load). It also doesn’t work for remote databases, unless I have access to a filesystem that database server can read.
\nA Python script using a library such as PETL or Pandas, on the other hand, can do the whole thing: read a file in from just about any file format, transform the rows and columns in various ways, then load it into the database.
\nLately I have been working with various databases that are stored somewhere in the cloud. They are the slowest databases I have ever worked with, and I don’t have access to the filesystem they can BULK INSERT from. Writing an ETL script lets me work around that problem easily. By far the hardest part of writing my first ETL scripts with Python was getting working SQL connection string. (I think that part would have been a cinch if our database was something open source like PostGRES.)
\nUnfortunately, my simple ETL script could load a table at the rate of 5 records per second, which is comically slow. At that rate, our data will take days or weeks to load. I’m not sure what the bottleneck is. It is probably slow network transfer time on top of a hugely sub-optimal data insertion method on the database side. I think that, in the end, it may not be worth figuring out. I should probably try a better tool for the job.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-06T22:24:26-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/06/etl-with-python.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/06/03/enable-recycle-bin.html", "title": "Enable Recycle Bin on mapped network drives", "content_html": "My favorite tech discovery of the week was this one: an old TechNet post titled “Enable Recycle Bin on mapped network drives.” This article helped me figure out how to get the Windows Recycle Bin working on my primary documents folder, which is a mapped drive that isn’t really a mapped drive.
\nFor historical reasons, I store my documents on a mapped drive that is actually a deeply nested folder on my hard drive. Several years ago, my company implemented Microsoft OneDrive for file sync, sharing, backup, and so on. While that is great, it did mean that I had to move my folder tree to a very long path. Because I like to use long, descriptive names for everything, I ended up bumping into “file path too long” errors, especially in Excel. Excel will not even open a file whose path is over 256 characters long.
\nWhen your Microsoft OneDrive root folder already takes up almost 100 characters, that leaves too little left for me to use. To get around the character limit, I used the [SUBST] command in a startup script to substitute a drive letter (Z: in my case) for a folder on the C: drive.1 The downside of using SUBST is that you get no support for the Recycle Bin2. To get around that limitation, I found that using FAR Manager, rather than File Explorer, as my file manager would actually move files to the Recycle Bin upon deletion. Unfortunately, FAR Manager’s text-only interface and general jankiness led me to abandon it for Double Commander, which is superior for my needs but does not move the file to the Recycle Bin on my mapped Z: drive.
The TechNet post I found describes a way to make a .reg file that will update the Windows Registry and create a new mapped drive to whatever location you want, with full Recycle Bin support. You create the file, run it once, and you are all set. The drive, unlike one mapped with SUBST, will persist across reboots, and it will have full Recycle Bin support.
I love it, and think I should try to write a PowerShell or Python script that will create such mappings without having to edit a .reg file manually.
\nMuch to my surprise, I have been relying heavily on a very old Windows app, Robocopy, at work the past few days. Part of the work I need to do this week involves moving very large files to and from a network share over a very slow VPN connection. Those file transfers were hosing my file manager, DoubleCommander, so I started doing them from Windows Terminal via Robocopy. It’s a tool I haven’t really used in about 20 years, when I wrote batch jobs to deploy my software or move data files around, but it still works.
\nIt defaults to copying folders, but it is easy to configure the command to move individual files or groups of files. I love how it provides a summary of what it is going to do, and provides a completion percentage as it copies or moves each file.
\nTonight, I learned of a feature that I should have been using the whole time: the /compress flag. It will request network compression during the file transfer, if it is available. I will try that tomorrow to see if it speeds up those enormous file transfers I have been doing.
I’m setting up a web server for my five-year-old son to play with on an old Raspberry Pi that fell into disuse a long time ago. I was delighted to discover the Raspberry Pi imager exists now to make OS installs a breeze.
\n", "date_published": "2022-05-27T13:23:21-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/05/27/im-setting-up.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/04/26/when-i-used.html", "title": "When I used Mac OS 8", "content_html": "Seeing Mac OS 8 emulated in a web browser today brings back some pleasant memories of my years as a Mac tech in college. Most of the machines I worked on for that job ran OS 8 or OS 8.5, which to my Windows-centric mind were beautiful and fun to work on.1
\nFor two years, I worked in the theatre building with one of my best friends. We were in charge of keeping the theatre professors’ computers—and almost all of the computers in student areas, working. That entailed defragging hard drives, installing productivity software, setting up backups, installing RAM, replacing laptop keyboards, performing OS upgrades, and so on.
\nWhen I first got the job, I had never even used a Mac before. The only Apple computers I had ever touched at that point were the Apple II and Apple IIGS in my middle school and high school, which I had used almost entirely for word processing. I would not have gotten the job if my friend had not vouched for me during the interview process. It turned out that my experience messing around with Windows software (warez mostly, at the time) and reinstalling Windows every six months after inevitably bogged down, made me somewhat overqualified. If anything, fixing problems on a Mac was a lot easier than fixing similar problems on my PC.
\nMy friend and I—and eventually a third person who I only met a few times—whipped the theatre building’s computers into shape within about a year. In my last year of college, the job became a make-work job for me. I set my own hours and did largely whatever I wanted to. People approved of my work, but a lot of it probably didn’t need to be done.
\nThat year, I spent many hours working in FileMaker Pro to build a sophisticated inventory system for the theatre’s hardware and software. I was a bit obsessive about it. Some nights I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking too much about solving programming- or database design problems. Well after midnight, I would get out of bed, walk across campus to the theater building, find my way inside2, and program in my little office for hours.
\nMeeting those theatre students—most of whom I would never have crossed paths with if not for this job—was one of the pleasures of working there. I remember that grad students were especially friendly and chill; they seemed like students from a completely different school than the competitive, stressful one I attended. The best part of the job, though, by far, was that I got comped two tickets to every show at the theater—whether they were student productions or professional ones. I went to every single show, which otherwise would have been far outside of my budget, and loved almost all of them. The experience kicked off a life-long love of theater…and of Macs, too, of course.
\nA few of the older Mac in the building ran the last version of System 7 and had monochrome monitors. Even then they seemed like relics. Still, I learned a lot about Hypercard on them, so I have a soft spot for them, too. ↩︎
\nAfter hours, the theatre building was always locked. If you worked there, though, you knew how to get in. Even after midnight, there were often students doing theatre work inside, and none of them were supposed to be there, either. ↩︎
\nMy five-year-old son is really into coding. He doesn’t know how to do anything yet, but he wants to learn. Currently he plays around with Swift Playgrounds a lot on his iPad (which is a little too old and slow to run it properly). He also orders his grandfather to program a collection of JavaScript games, utilities, and other doodads for him on a personal website. I’m going to start him on Scratch and Swift Playgrounds on the Mac. Because he is very interested in websites, I promised to introduce him to HTML and “Hello World!”-level JavaScript.
\nTo get the ball rolling on this endeavor, I decided today that I will let him borrow (or use most of the time) my 15” 2013 retina MacBook Pro. It’s a little too big for him, screen-wise, but it’s the only machine I have. Tonight, I spent a half hour prepping it for him. Tomorrow, I plan to get NextDNS set up for web content filtering, and also to explore what other safeguards I can put on the machine to keep him out of trouble. He has a history, believe it or not, of setting up accounts on internet services and contacting the companies via web forms or email. I locked down his iPad, but he started to find ways around it today. I know I will have to keep a close watch of him.
\nI know he’s going to love using a real computer, not only for programming, but for Pages, Garage Band, and Photos as well. I hope that things go well.
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-22T21:40:32-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/04/22/prepping-my-old.html", "tags": ["Journal","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/03/08/thinking-about-the.html", "title": "Thinking about the new Apple products", "content_html": "Since watching the Apple announcement today and learning about the Mac Studio, I have never been happier that I did not wait for a more powerful Mac mini before I bought mine. The Mac Studio is more computer than I need and is out of my price range (for a desktop at least). I am thrilled that it exists for other people to use, and will happily listen to the pundits talk about for the rest of the month. For myself, though, the M1 Mac mini is more than enough, and the one I bought cost about $800 less than the least expensive Mac Studio.
\nThe M1-based iPad Air is more relevant to me. I would love to hand off my current generation 4 iPad Air to my daughter and buy the new one for myself. I don’t need the performance for much, but for photo editing it will be a leap forward. I don’t think my daughter would ever go for this plan, though; my iPad Air is blue, not pink. I should have bought a neutral color.
\n", "date_published": "2022-03-08T18:45:04-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/03/08/thinking-about-the.html", "tags": ["Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/02/10/knockoff-laser-toner.html", "title": "Knock-off Laser Toner", "content_html": "Tonight I performed some surgery on my color laser printer’s empty toner cartridges and installed knock-off ones in their place. I feel a little dirty, but I saved about $400.
\nI resent that toner cartridges now have microchips in them that are required for the printer to print. The chips help the printer report its toner levels, but otherwise are there to make a rather generic toner cartridge into into something proprietary and overpriced. The knock-off toner cartridges I bought came with tools and instructions for transferring the chips from the original printer cartridges to them. It was pretty easy to do, and the printer prints in color again with the new cartridges installed.
\nThe printer will always report low toner now, no matter what the toner level actually is. I expect to field questions about it from my family for the rest of my life.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-10T22:22:36-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/02/10/knockoff-laser-toner.html", "tags": ["Journal","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/01/08/a-miracle.html", "title": "A miracle", "content_html": "Digital media is a miracle. It is infinitely reproducible with no loss of quality. The internet and all the devices we have make sharing digital media less expensive, on a marginal basis, than was possible via any other technology that came before it. We have invented a way to make some resources—like art and entertainment—effectively unlimited and nearly free.
\nWe take it for granted now, and moneyed interests are busy trying to dismantle it with blockchains as I write this, but I think we should all step back sometime and consider how incredible and wonderful it is. The miracle of digital media isn’t that it can be made finite; it is that it is infinite. We should embrace that miracle rather than try to replace it with something mundane.
\n", "date_published": "2022-01-08T23:25:54-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/01/08/a-miracle.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/01/06/web.html", "title": "web3", "content_html": "I advised a colleague today to research web3, because I think it may be the most interesting InsurTech technology of the year. I don’t think that glomming cryptocurrency and smart contracts onto the web is a good use of technology at all. The idea is especially dubious, and that is the reason it is interesting to me. I honestly think that web3, along with the cryptocurrencies that make it possible, are based on a long con.
\nWeb3 appears to be something to make cryptocurrencies, which are useless—except as a speculative asset or a way to pay the criminals who ransomware-attacked you—useful. Web3 will require you to have a digital wallet to pay for and log into any website with a web3-type paywall. The rest of web3 is just another name for smart contracts, which—as far as I can tell—are an interesting idea that has not caught on very well in real-world applications.
\nPerhaps the scope of both my research and my imagination is too narrow, but I don’t think web3 is going anywhere outside the venture capital community, at least not for a very long time.
\n", "date_published": "2022-01-06T22:17:32-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/01/06/web.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/01/06/double-commander.html", "title": "Double Commander", "content_html": "I am on a mission to replace Far Manager, which is a Windows file manager that I really love, and have used for over a year. Far Manager is a text mode file manager that has been in development since the 1990s. It is a lot like Norton Commander, which I used briefly in my DOS days. I like how fast the UI is, how easy it is to navigate the filesystem, and also how easy it is to read the file and folder names in text mode.
\nUnfortunately, it has a few drawbacks that have been driving me crazy. First, opening Visual Studio Code from it, which I have to do all the time, will often mess up the UI and require a restart. Second, the keyboard shortcuts—many of which I have memorized—are bonkers. The left and right shift keys act as completely different modifiers, and the left and right control keys act the same way. This is not a problem for my standard ANSI keyboard, but I am trying to move to an ortholinear keyboard which doesn’t have two shift keys or two control keys, so some of the functionality I rely on is inaccessible.
\nToday I found another orthodox (two-panel) file manager that runs on Windows, has a full graphical UI, and is very, very customizable. It’s called Double Commander. Life Far Manager, it is free, and it has the two-pane interface I love. Unlike Far Manager, you can customize nearly every part of the user interface, including all the keyboard shortcuts. I was able to pare down the default toolbars to a minimum, color the interface to have white text on a navy blue background, and learn the few keyboard shortcuts I need to know without any trouble. Prior to learning about it today, I thought I had tried all the orthodox file managers for Windows. Double Commander is my favorite of the bunch.
\n", "date_published": "2022-01-06T21:47:15-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/01/06/double-commander.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Keyboards","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/01/04/i-should-never.html", "title": "I should never have bought my daughter an iPad with only 32 GB of storage on it.", "content_html": "I never imagined she would use it as a camera and fill it with photos and videos. iCloud Photo Library has been enabled from the start, and we have plenty of cloud storage space. Unfortunately, Photos will not free up space no matter what I do. If you delete a photo or video from Photos, it is deleted everywhere, so that is not an option.
\nTonight, as I update iOS via tethering the iPad to my Mac, I am weighing my next move. Do I wipe the iPad and set it up as new, which would at least forestall the problem? Or do I simply turn off iCloud sync, wait a while for the photos on the device to be deleted, and then turn it back on? I can’t remember if I have tried the latter before. I think I may wipe the device because my daughter’s notes app has 39 notes and is taking up over a gigabyte of space, too. Strange things are afoot.
\n", "date_published": "2022-01-04T22:04:14-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/01/04/i-should-never.html", "tags": ["iPad","Journal","Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/12/11/one-last-thing.html", "title": "One last thing about the Apple TV today", "content_html": "It puzzles me why the optimal settings for HDR and framerate are not selected by default. I always have to go to the audio/video settings and set the frame rate to “match content”. If I don’t, I get audio drift (lip sync problems). I also learned tonight that I have to set the default video output to non-HDR because the Apple TV menus look terrible in HDR, but then set the HDR setting to “match content.” That’s the sweet spot for me.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-11T21:44:38-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/12/11/one-last-thing.html", "tags": ["Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/12/11/the-top-of.html", "content_html": "The top of the new Apple TV 4K remote looks just like the iPod click wheel. Unfortunately, it does not work anything like one; you can’t slide your thumb around the perimeter to scrub. I don’t get it. It seems like a big missed opportunity to me.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-11T20:33:22-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/12/11/the-top-of.html", "tags": ["Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/12/10/why-do-i.html", "title": "Why do I even bother running a home file server?", "content_html": "Over the past year, my TrueNAS Core server has been bugging me every few months about one of my boot failing. In this case, the boot drives are simply two USB sticks, run in a mirrored configuration. If one fails, the other one handles the load. (The reason I use a USB stick for a boot drive is that my server has an internal USB port for that very purpose, and no other place for the boot drive to go.)
\nThis week, after yet another USB stick failed, I tried to resolve the problem by buying new USB sticks and installing TrueNAS onto them. The OS installs took hours and the server would not reboot. Eventually I discovered that I could buy an SSD drive with the form factor of a USB stick, which is what I have wanted for years. It fits inside my server like a USB stick, but contains a fast, durable SSD drive instead of slow, fragile flash memory. I installed TrueNAS onto it, which seemed to take seconds rather than hours, but I could not boot from it. I spent an hour swapping USB drives and trying to boot the server until it would not boot TrueNAS from any USB drive I had. It was a disaster.
\nI gave up and installed Ubuntu Server onto the new SSD drive. I knew that Ubuntu supports ZFS now and could import my existing data pool. Luckily, it boots like a champ. After the install, I found some instructions to help me set up ZFS, Samba, and Minio, and—after editing file permissions—everything is set. I didn’t lose any data during the OS switch, but I did mess up my Arm backups when I tried to move them into a new Minio storage location. Luckily, I wasn’t depending on those backups for anything, because my important data is in the cloud and I have backups on Backblaze B2 as well.
\nI use the NAS daily for media sharing and backups. It takes very little maintenance except once in a while when it becomes a headache and money sink. I sometime wonder if I should go back to having an external hard drive instead, now that 8 TB external hard drives are pretty cheap. The problem with that approach is that external hard drives get hot and die, which happened to me so many times that I bought a NAS.
\nI will miss running TrueNAS (which used to be called FreeNAS) because I have run it for ten years and used to be really into its FreeBSD underpinnings. Now, all the servers I rely on run either Ubuntu Server or Debian, and I will just have to deal with administering them via SSH rather than via a web page.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-10T22:14:58-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/12/10/why-do-i.html", "tags": ["Journal","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/12/09/maybe-its-just.html", "title": "Maybe It's Just a Product Nobody Wants", "content_html": "I love how Matt Birchler compares crypto to BitTorrent in his latest blog post, “Maybe It’s Just a Product Nobody Wants”:
\n\n\nI don’t think crypto is going to disappear, by the way. I think it will always have a place in the world, but much like bittorrent before it, it was new & exciting, people tried to use it for basically everything, and then it settled into being used for, well, nothing for most people. Blockchains likely have a more prominent future, but there’s a lot of spaghetti being thrown at walls right now, and I think very little of it will stick because it’s not actually making better products.
\n
I’m a crypto skeptic who thinks a lot about blockchain for work-related reasons. I dislike blockchain technologies because I think that, in the real world, they would fail to eliminate trusted intermediaries in financial transactions. Establishing trust without intermediaries is the whole point of blockchain.
\nI believe people and businesses are too risk-averse to do away with intermediaries like governments (who offer useful things like a legal system and deposit insurance) and the technology providers, agents, and brokers who make business work today. If crypto really takes off, and the old intermediaries are pushed out, I think that new intermediaries will pop up to fill in the gaps left behind. That future—blockchain with trusted intermediaries—is no better than what we have now, and is in many ways worse.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-09T00:20:41-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/12/09/maybe-its-just.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/12/07/i-wonder-what.html", "content_html": "I wonder what specifically happened this week to make “web3” a topic on every tech news site and every tech podcast I listen to.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-07T09:52:05-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/12/07/i-wonder-what.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/18/the-new-macbook.html", "title": "The new MacBook Pros…wow!", "content_html": "Today’s new MacBook Pro models are the first in a very long time that seem too “pro” for me. Their processor specs make my M1 Mac mini—which is fantastic—seem pretty pathetic by comparison. I’m not in the market for a new machine, but I look forward to reading the reviews.
\nAfter a long time it feels great to be a Mac user again, because there are really good products up and down the line.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-18T21:30:06-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/18/the-new-macbook.html", "tags": ["Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/09/iso.html", "title": "ISO 2145", "content_html": "I never knew there was an ISO standard for numbering document sections. I kind of love it and kind of hate it.
\nI am the sort of person who developed a deep preference for the ISO 8601 date format, so it may be inevitable that I end up adopting it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-09T17:42:25-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/09/iso.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/15/incremental-improvement.html", "title": "Incremental improvement", "content_html": "I think all the products Apple announced this week are great. I am tired of hearing that some people are disappointed that they are only incremental improvements on the previous models, or that Apple isn’t exciting anymore. That’s true of every product that isn’t a new invention. And how exciting could the umpteenth smartphone be?
\nThe steady ratchet of incremental improvement is one of humankind’s greatest achievements. The entire modern world is built on it. It’s how you get from good to great. Complaining about it is nonsensical.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-15T20:40:18-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/15/incremental-improvement.html", "tags": ["Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/08/15/after-thinking-about.html", "content_html": "After thinking about it quite a bit (too much really) I ordered a 4-pack of Apple AirTags. I think it will be useful for my wife and I to have them on our keychains and in our go-bags, especially because we are spending more time away from home now. I look forward to kicking the Tile app off my phone.
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-15T21:42:02-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/08/15/after-thinking-about.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/26/back-to-feedly.html", "title": "Back to Feedly (for now)", "content_html": "I have given up on Reeder 5’s native RSS feed handling with sync via iCloud. I had expected my devices to keep in sync, and for Reeder to sync in the background rather than whenever I started it. I think I asked too much from it. I use three iOS devices each day, and Reeder was showing me stale content on all of them at various points each day. I suppose local device syncing of 75 feeds was a bit too much for it to handle quickly and smoothly. I moved my RSS subscriptions back to Feedly and am once again satisfied with multi-device support. I think I have learned that a web service works better for me, which probably should come as no surprise.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-26T21:35:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/26/back-to-feedly.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/24/apple-to-pull.html", "title": "Apple to Pull 'iDOS 2' DOS Emulator From App Store", "content_html": "I am neither surprised or disappointed by Apple’s impending pull of “iDOS 2” from the App Store. The whole point of buying Apple hardware has always been to buy into a unique ecosystem: the “walled garden.” While the Mac has never been locked down to Apple’s Mac App Store, the iPhone has always been locked down to its App Store. It’s easy to forget now, but the iPhone grew out of Apple’s prior consumer electronics smash hit, the iPod, which was was completely locked down. It didn’t have an App Store. Neither did the iPhone at first, either.
\nI hate to side with one of the world’s biggest companies here, but I totally believe that the iPhone is a console, as Steve Jobs described it. I knew that going into the iPhone ecosystem, and that’s actually what I wanted, and still want, from that ecosystem. I want an apps console that (for the most part) just works, and doesn’t require a lot of my time and effort to work smoothly and securely. I came at this from the other wide: an Android users who jailbroke and hacked his phone into something completely different than what its manufacturer and mobile data provider wanted or intended. The thing is, all that customization led to a system that was unstable, and I had no idea if it was secure at all, because the code (apps and OS) came from a bunch of different places. I just had to trust, blindly, that everything was OK. The iPhone imposed guardrails on my hacking activities—guardrails that I wanted, because what I was doing wasn’t working for me anymore.
\nI think a lot of people chafe at the idea that their most useful device is a console because we reserve that word for entertainment devices like the Nintendo Switch and the PlayStation, or the humble cable set-top box. It doesn’t matter, though, if the iPhone is more useful and more important than a video game system, though. What matters is how it is sold.
\nIt isn’t exactly a secret that normal customers can only download iOS software from Apple’s App Store. Beyond hardware, access to that App Store is the fundamental thing being sold by Apple. Customers should know it when they are choosing a product. I doubt any of the complainers and hand-wringers commenting on this article on MacRumors didn’t know that going into their iPhone purchase.
\nI would love to run Windows games on my Nintendo Switch, but I can’t because it is a console and Nintendo does not allow it. That doesn’t surprise me, or anybody else for that matter. The situation is not really different than the one with the iPhone. If you want to run DOS on your mobile phone, the far-more-open Android universe is there for you—and it’s the most dominant OS platform in the world, too. Vote for it with your wallets and your time.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-24T09:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/24/apple-to-pull.html", "tags": ["Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/23/playdate.html", "title": "Playdate", "content_html": "Panic’s bright yellow pocket game system, the Playdate, looks cheerful and cute. I want one, plus the blocky stereo dock, just to put on my desk like other people place toys and figurines. Ars Technica published a review of the hardware and a preview of some of the games yesterday, which whet my interest. I don’t know if it is worth the money for me to have a geeky object d’art for my workspace, though.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-23T14:56:06-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/23/playdate.html", "tags": ["Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/15/the-steam-deck.html", "title": "The Steam Deck", "content_html": "The Steam Deck looks fantastic. It’s like a Nintendo Switch for Steam games. Considering I wrestled with a Windows laptop for 8 hours to get it ready to play Steam games just days ago— and had the whole thing fail, the very next day, to understand how to work with the very Xbox 360 controller I was using the day prior—I never want to bother with PC gaming again. It’s too fiddly and too expensive. But this device might be easier to set up and more performant than the $2,000+ (but not specked for gaming) Windows laptop I already have.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-15T14:31:14-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/15/the-steam-deck.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/14/winget.html", "title": "Winget", "content_html": "I decided to upgrade my Windows laptop to Windows 11 yesterday. It was an awful slog, replete with many failed Windows Update attempts, permissions issues that prevented me from changing the necessary diagnostic data sharing settings, and even a hardware firmware update. I ended up having to “reset” Windows—which deleted all my apps, data, and settings—to move forward.
\nHowever, hours later, once Windows had finally gotten all of its updates in, I had the opportunity to use Winget for the first time. Winget is Microsoft’s command line package manager. Although not as mature as the package manager I am most familiar with, APT, Winget is pretty awesome. I was able to use it from the Windows CMD shell (because Windows Terminal does not come pre-installed) to install everything I needed, from Visual Studio Code to Vim to NextDNS. It saved me a ton of time. If I set up new Windows machines frequently, I could write a script to automate all of it.
\nIt is interesting to see all the developer- and administrator-friendly enhancements Microsoft has made to Windows over the past few years. Windows Terminal, Winget, and Visual Studio Code are miles ahead of what Microsoft offered just a few years ago.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-14T14:53:48-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/14/winget.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/11/you-really-need.html", "content_html": "I saw this article by Caitlin Flanagan on Om Malik’s blog. It’s a fun read if, like me, you’ve been through the quitting Twitter part she goes through.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-11T15:46:05-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/11/you-really-need.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/08/transloader-a-remote.html", "title": "Transloader: A remote control downloader for iOS and macOS", "content_html": "I learned about the app Transloader thanks to a MacStories article that popped up in my RSS feed today. Transloader lets you send a URL from any Mac or iOS device you have to your Mac, and the Mac will download it, send it to an app, or pass it or the downloaded file to an Automator workflow.
\nSaving downloads to my NAS is something I have longed to do for ages. I have tried to make iOS Shortcuts that do this, but I never got anything to work reliably. Transloader makes this task possible, though it ropes my Mac into the process. Fortunately, it even works (albeit with delays) if you don’t keep your Mac on all the time.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-08T22:07:11-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/08/transloader-a-remote.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/04/what-im-looking.html", "title": "What I’m looking for in an open source project repo", "content_html": "When the Micro.blog client apps were open-sourced, I reviewed the Github repos for the two I use most (the iOS app and the macOS app). I wondered if I could contribute something to the projects—probably something small, like more hardware keyboard shortcuts or an enhancement to how the post editor works. I wasn’t sure if that would be welcome, based on the brief “About the open source project…” verbiage in the REAMDE, and based on (1) the very old, but open, issues in the iOS repo, and (2) seeing no issues in the macOS repo.
\nI “know” Manton because I have been listening to his podcast with Daniel Jalkut for years (which is where I learned about Micro.blog), so I think of him as thoughtful, considerate, and certainly not as unfriendly. But I did not actually expect him to open source the apps when he did, and I figure that her has a business to run and may not be ready for a bunch of user requests on client apps that he may be happy enough with already. Manton saw my prior post about the apps and commented on it: “I wrote that README quickly and should expand on it…”
\nIn true blogging fashion, I am responding to his comment with this blog post, with the aim to be helpful to Manton as he thinks about how to expand on the README he wrote.
\nTwo things, really. Can I report an issue? And, can I contribute?
\nIdeally the issues list will be kept current and will tie to development efforts (bug fixes and enhancements) going forward. Very old issues that the maintainer no longer wants worked on will be closed. Issues that the maintainer is interested in will be labeled “help wanted”, “good for beginners”, etc.
\nThe maintainer should say in the README how user-reported issues will be addressed. It is OK to state that the maintainer does not plan to consider some or all feature requests from users. It is best to be open and realistic about how the project will operate.
\nI always look for a CONTRIBUTING document or section in the README to learn whether or not the maintainer will accept pull requests, and if possible, how that process should work. Is opening an issue, then resolving it with a pull request later on, the right way or the wrong way to go about it? I have worked with maintainers who preferred that approach, to solicit conversation, and have worked with others who preferred the code change to come first and the discussion afterward.
\nAlso, it is OK if the maintainer is not going to accept pull requests; I would rather know up front.
\nI think it is perfectly OK if the way a project is maintained changes over time. Not every decision made on day one has to be carried out forever. As a potential contributor, I just like to know what I might expect if I approached the maintainer now.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-04T22:08:33-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/04/what-im-looking.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/02/on-opensourcing-the.html", "title": "On open-sourcing the Micro.blog client apps", "content_html": "This week @manton open-sourced the iOS and macOS Micro.blog apps. I think that is a great move in general, but it is not one of the things I require in the software I use. I never felt that comfortable when, a while ago now, I read users’ blog posts expressing anger or dismay that the client apps were not open-sourced. (Let’s put aside, for now, that what makes Micro.blog work is the server-side code.)
\nAs a paying customer, and as a developer myself, I don’t think Manton and his team are obligated to share their client source code with me. I don’t think anyone is. If they want to, that’s great—but it is no guarantee that the client app itself will be better, more secure, more feature-rich, or even have a future many years from now. Heck, it doesn’t even look likely that Micro.blog will accept pull requests, so it is unclear whether open-sourcing it will change its development direction or iteration time at all. I’m not complaining about that, though. Maintaining an open source project/community and running a successful blog hosting business are almost entirely orthogonal to each other. Open source doesn’t really give me added comfort that an app I love or depend on will be there for me forever, because nothing is forever, even open-source software projects.
\nAs a computer user and enthusiast, I used to care a lot more that I do now about free, libre, and open-source software. My primary reason was that I thought I could trust it more than closed source software. It is harder to hide malware, tracking, and obvious security flaws when the code is publicly viewable. History has shown that not to be entirely true. Remember Heartbleed? That incident showed us that widely used libraries may be maintained by only one or two people, and their source code can contain bugs and security flaws that go unnoticed for years, because no one is actually looking at the source code.
\nMy secondary reason for preferring open-source software was more theoretical, but larger in scope and more exciting to me: open-source software can be a more practical and a better use of humanity’s programming resources. That’s because one of the great, unfulfilled promises of computer science is the ability to solve a certain problem once and for all, for everybody. Open source utilities, like the Unix command line tools, and open-source libraries, like OpenSSL, theoretically could make this happen. But it didn’t happen, at least not fully. We spend a lot of time, collectively, solving the same software problems over and over again. We may approach these problems in new ways, with new languages, and on new platforms. But in the end, we are repeating ourselves. Imagine where we could be if we didn’t keep repeat ourselves!
\nI actually think that most of the repetition is the inevitable result of human nature. Humans are curious; we want to know how something works, and how to do it ourselves. Humans are also prideful: we think “I can do the same thing, but better.” Most importantly, humans need to learn; each of us is born knowing nothing, and must learn extensively from our forebears to push our collective knowledge out just a little further.
\nIn the end, what is most useful to me about Micro.blog open-sourcing its codebase is that I can look at it and learn from it. That could be very helpful. Long ago, I was interested in creating a dead-simple iOS app (extension, widget, whatever) for Micropub posting. Eventually, well before this week, Micro.blog open-sourced its Snippets library, which would have made writing such an app much easier. Now, with the client app also open sourced, I could review its code to see (presumably) how to call, configure, and use the Snippets library in an iOS app. That is even more useful than the Snippets library alone.
\nNow that the Micro.blog client app source code is free and open, maybe I could use some of it to help me build that little utility app now. In the same vein, maybe someone else could use much more of that source code and build a better, more feature-rich client app based on it. Maybe the Micro.blog app is a solved problem, and no one has to solve it again (at least until Apple stops supporting the frameworks it is based on), and a hundred other Micropub-blogging-based small businesses could spring up, all using a common client app. Who knows? That possibility is a risk to Manton and Micro.blog, but it is also a gift to the greater world.
\nThanks, @manton, @cheesemaker, and @jean (are there others at Micro.blog?) for all the work you do.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-02T22:24:16-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/02/on-opensourcing-the.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/15/pipeline-investigation-upends.html", "title": "Pipeline Investigation Upends Idea That Bitcoin Is Untraceable", "content_html": "\n\n\nBitcoin is also traceable. While the digital currency can be created, moved and stored outside the purview of any government or financial institution, each payment is recorded in a permanent fixed ledger, called the blockchain.
\nThat means all Bitcoin transactions are out in the open. The Bitcoin ledger can be viewed by anyone who is plugged into the blockchain.
\n
Bitcoin was never really anonymous. It is pseudonymous, so it makes sense that transactions can be traced to some extent and tied to a unique owner or wallet.
\nWhat is interesting is not just that law enforcement can identify which Bitcoin wallet was involved in the fraud, but also that law enforcement could also crack the wallet’s password and retrieve/steal the money out of it. I wonder how. Was it a weak password? Was it social engineering? Was it a brute-force password crack? If so, was it cracked by a normal computer or by a quantum computer that no one else knows about?
\nBitcoin seems fundamentally broken to me. I won’t touch it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-15T09:38:05-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/15/pipeline-investigation-upends.html", "tags": ["Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/05/20/i-am-a.html", "content_html": "I am a little too excited to be getting Office 365 installed on my work laptop tomorrow. I have been on Office 2016 for so long it is absurd.
\n", "date_published": "2021-05-20T09:51:12-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/05/20/i-am-a.html", "tags": ["Journal","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/05/19/google-wants-to.html", "content_html": "Google wants to build a useful quantum computer by 2029. If it does, I’m sure it will cancel the project by 2030.
\n", "date_published": "2021-05-19T09:46:49-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/05/19/google-wants-to.html", "tags": ["Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/04/30/i-unblocked-redditcom.html", "content_html": "I unblocked Reddit.com earlier this week because the domain keeps coming up in tech question-related search results. After only a few days, I’m back looking at mechanical keyboards and expensive headphones on Reddit like an addict. I just blocked the domain again.
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-30T09:23:29-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/04/30/i-unblocked-redditcom.html", "tags": ["Journal","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/04/28/microsoft-is-changing.html", "title": "Microsoft is changing the default Office font and wants your help to pick a new one", "content_html": "\n\n\nMicrosoft is changing its default Office font next year and wants everyone to help pick the new default. While there are more than 700 font options in Word, Microsoft has commissioned five new custom fonts for Office, in a move away from the Calibri font that has been the default in Microsoft Office for nearly 15 years.
\n
I am unusually attached to Calibri so I am not looking forward to this change. Then again, at work I often have to publish using Arial Narrow, which I think is objectively awful in terms of aesthetics and legibility, so it probably won’t affect me too much.
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-28T12:34:28-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/04/28/microsoft-is-changing.html", "tags": ["Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/04/13/microsoft-announces-surface.html", "title": "Microsoft announces Surface Laptop 4 with choice of Intel or AMD processors", "content_html": "Tom Warren’s article on The Verge caught my eye:
\n\n\nMicrosoft is refreshing its Surface lineup with the Surface Laptop 4 today, which now offers the choice between AMD or Intel processors across both the 13.5- and 15-inch models. Both sizes will ship with Intel’s latest 11th Gen processors or AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series processors. Microsoft is shipping its Surface Laptop 4 on April 15th in the US, Canada, and Japan, starting at $999 for the AMD model and $1,299 for the Intel version — a $300 price gap between the pair.
\n
If I was more of a Windows guy I would probably buy only Microsoft-brand laptops at this point. They don’t always have the best specs, but I like their designs a lot.
\nI spend most of my computing time using Windows for work. I try to forget that I have a Lenovo laptop by putting it behind a giant monitor and using an external keyboard and trackball to operate it. Lenovo laptops are good, I guess, as long as I don’t have to touch them. I don’t like their keyboards (both in terms of layout and feel) or the pointing devices (the trackpad is too small, and I’m done with using the trackpoint/eraserhead thing). The Surface Laptops keyboards and trackpads have always seemed a lot more sensible to me in how they are designed.
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-13T11:21:36-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/04/13/microsoft-announces-surface.html", "tags": ["Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/04/12/i-never-would.html", "content_html": "I never would have predicted that in 2021 I would be using a text-mode file manager from the 1990s, a command-line based to-do list program, and, at least sometimes (by choice!), the Vim text editor.
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-12T09:50:04-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/04/12/i-never-would.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/04/09/linux-on-the.html", "title": "Linux on the M1 Mac Mini", "content_html": "The Linux kernel is gaining Apple M1 support. I have been wondering if, years from now, I can move my M1 Mac Mini to a home app-server role, running Linux, when it gets too old for Xcode and stops getting macOS updates. I have a Celeron based PC doing that for me now, but it runs hot and can be noisy, too. If a machine can run Linux, it extends its lifespan considerably for me.
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-09T12:00:20-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/04/09/linux-on-the.html", "tags": ["Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/04/05/today-i-discovered.html", "content_html": "Today I discovered that there is an open-source community creating a modern GUI file manager for Windows. It’s called Files and it is OK and seems to be heading in the right direction. It is a shame that Microsoft essentially abandoned feature development for their file explorer many years ago.
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-05T16:58:41-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/04/05/today-i-discovered.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/04/02/apple-arcade-just.html", "title": "Apple Arcade just got a huge update of new games, including some mobile classics", "content_html": "As reported by Andrew Webster in The Verge:
\n\n\nApple’s gaming subscription service just got a massive influx of new titles. The headliner is Fantasian — the latest release from the creator of Final Fantasy — which is joined by other titles like new versions of NBA 2K and The Oregon Trail, and World of Demons from PlatinumGames. As part of the update, the service is getting two new categories of games: Apple calls them “Timeless Classics” and “App Store Greats.”
\n
I literally just canceled my (second) Apple Arcade free trial twelve hours before this announcement. I just can’t seem to get into Apple Arcade at all. For the most part, the reason is that I find my iPhone 12 mini to be too small to be a compelling gaming device. Secondarily, I don’t want to get into a complex, involved game on my iPhone or iPad. I prefer my mobile games to be simple things that can be jumped into and out of, more like the “Timeless Classics” that Apple is now adding to Apple Arcade. It’s too bad for Apple Arcade that I already own almost all of those games.
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-02T14:45:49-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/04/02/apple-arcade-just.html", "tags": ["Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/29/after-a-few.html", "content_html": "After a few days of work, I just published my new, Hugo-based website for one of my iOS apps: Simple Call Blocker. The site is not as beautiful as I would have liked, but it is way better than it was, and now I have a framework I can use to add more content to it if I need to.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-29T22:05:19-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/29/after-a-few.html", "tags": ["Programming","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/29/openais-textgenerating-system.html", "title": "OpenAI’s text-generating system GPT-3 is now spewing out 4.5 billion words a day", "content_html": "James Vincent reports in The Verge:
\n\n\nThe best-known AI text-generator is OpenAI’s GPT-3, which the company recently announced is now being used in more than 300 different apps, by “tens of thousands” of developers, and producing 4.5 billion words per day. That’s a lot of robot verbiage. This may be an arbitrary milestone for OpenAI to celebrate, but it’s also a useful indicator of the growing scale, impact, and commercial potential of AI text generation.
\n
The obvious industry target for auto-text is journalism. It is already being used there for sports reporting, and could probably be used for local government reporting too. There are other areas it will encroach on that are news-adjacent (think financial news or business book digest services like Blinkist), like education and entertainment.
\nI’m an auditor, and I think that, eventually, auto-text is going to destroy about 50% of our billable hours. Auditors spend a ton of time writing. We document our procedures. We record our work. We summarize our findings. We write reports for our clients. Making sense of all the work, both for our own understanding and for our client’s, for the sake of writing it down, takes a lot of time. Moreover, the simple act of typing it out and, especially, hyperlinking everything together so we support our conclusions, requires a lot of manual work. Some of this work is communicative, but a lot of it (like the hyperlinking part) is mechanical. Consequently, much of it is ripe for automation.
\nI think, though, that transforming this laborious and time-consuming writing process into something auto-generated by a bot would produce a lot more information but a lot less knowledge than we had before. You gain a lot more understanding how a company, business process, or control works by writing about it than by reading about it. Why? Because writing is thinking. To write well is mentally strenuous. It requires you to think how you would communicate an idea to someone else, notably someone else with a different perspective and different knowledge than you have. At the end of the writing process, you should understand your subject backwards and forwards and from all sides; you could probably describe it in a number of different ways; and you will likely remember the gist of it, and specific nuances about it, for far longer than you would if you had just read about it in a report.
\nThe world won’t end, and few will shed tears, when AI writes audit reports and work papers. Audits cost money, and businesses mostly don’t think they benefit from them. If it makes the auditors less knowledgeable, however, side effects will develop, and those will be long-lasting. Knowledgable auditors help make good control environments possible, which leads to more stable and more solvent companies. Decreasing the understanding of auditors could make systems and processes more unstable and less trustworthy over time. Additionally, knowledgable auditors often move to the business side and go on to manage well-controlled organizations. While the auditor-to-manager career path will likely continue, such moves would not result in the same level of management quality if the auditors don’t have to think as deeply about what they are auditing as they did before the AI text-bots took over. Neither of these side effects bodes particularly well for the people the auditors and the audited companies (and their fancy AI) serve.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-29T17:27:08-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/29/openais-textgenerating-system.html", "tags": ["Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/24/does-anybody-know.html", "content_html": "Does anybody know if scheduled posts, posted from Ulysses, show up in the timeline? I think my 1:00 PM Eastern blog post did not show up in the timeline, but made it to my blog on time.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-24T13:22:52-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/24/does-anybody-know.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/24/altf.html", "title": "Alt+F4", "content_html": "I have been using AutoHotKey for many years, and I never thought until today to map Windows+Q to quit the active app and close the active window. That creates something very similar to Mac’s Command+Q shortcut to Windows.
The default Windows keyboard shortcut for quitting an app is Alt+F4, which is a two hand operation for me. Note that in AutoHotKey, you don’t even need to send that key command; you can use the WinClose function instead:
#q:: \nWinClose, A \nReturn \nOne of the best things Apple has ever done with their support of keyboard shortcuts was to pretend that function keys (F1 through F12) don’t exist.
Chiam Gartenberg reports in The Verge:
\n\n\nAt the company’s “Engineering the Future” announcement today, Gelsinger announced plans to outsource more of Intel’s chip production to third-party foundries; a $20 billion investment into two new fabs in Arizona; and a new branch of the company called Intel Foundry Services, which will see Intel’s foundries produce chips for other companies.
\n
Intel has had an awful decade, having missed out on smartphone chips and having stalled out at their 14nm process for years. Still, it is a strategically important company for my country, and I have to ill will toward it, even if I don’t prefer their products right now. I would love to see them become competitive again.
\nThe idea of Intel fabbing chips for other companies is a big deal. Intel has never done that before. It seems to me like it could be the first step of spinning off that part of the business into its own company, and focusing on process shrinks in ways that the fully integrated Intel could not before.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-23T18:33:12-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/23/intel-invests-billion.html", "tags": ["Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/23/ulysses-and-microblog.html", "title": "Ulysses and Micro.blog", "content_html": "It is amazing that Ulysses supports posting to Micro.blog now. I love the functionality, and its inclusion definitely cements Ulysses as my only writing app on iOS and macOS at this point.
\nNow let’s bug the Ulysses team to do some other cool things:
\nI was bummed to find out that my favorite regular expressions editor for the Mac, Oyster, completely disappeared from the App Store (and it seems, the Internet). I wish I hadn’t deleted it from my old MacBook Pro, because RegEx is hard, even if you have used them off and on for decades. After failing to find something helpful for free, I had to buy another app (Patterns) which did the trick.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-19T21:02:57-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/19/regular-expressions-app.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/19/i-deleted-my.html", "content_html": "I deleted my LastPass account today. I have switched over to Bitwarden and love it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-19T17:13:47-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/19/i-deleted-my.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/05/im-setting-up.html", "content_html": "I’m setting up a new Celeron based mini PC. It came with Windows 10 Professional on it, which surprised me for such a low-end PC. Microsoft must be giving those licenses away now. Its fan spins up and for a second or two each time I do anything, which reminds me of the frequent hard disk chatter from my 90s and 00s PCs.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-05T15:04:40-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/05/im-setting-up.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/04/the-first-time.html", "content_html": "The first time I heard the term “NFT” was yesterday, and I’m already sick of it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-04T15:51:53-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/04/the-first-time.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/02/27/microsoft-onedrive-ios.html", "title": "Microsoft OneDrive iOS Files Integration 🙄", "content_html": "I just looked at the latest release notes (see picture). So that’s why I couldn’t save my files to OneDrive this week. 🤦♂️ I figured out a workaround, but was bamboozled for days why something that once worked now did not. OneDrive’s iOS Files integration was always pretty unreliable. Maybe after this feature pull Microsoft will finally fix it.
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/2098/2021/19e7a1123e.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2021-02-27T13:02:33-04:00",
"url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/02/27/microsoft-onedrive-ios.html",
"tags": ["Tech"]
},
{
"id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/02/21/the-projects-listed.html",
"content_html": "The “projects” listed on my Hugo-based website are hyperlinks when I run it via hugo server but are not when I publish the site. Sadly, I have no idea how to fix it. Perhaps I have to try another theme.
This week, I have been watching educational videos on YouTube about Excel Power Query. My wife thinks it is insanely boring, but I am learning things that are going to be very useful at work.
\nPower Query is a feature of Excel I have used sporadically for the last five years to pull data in from SQL Server. I recently discovered that I barely scratched the surface of what it can do. It could probably save me a ton of time on some of my data analysis projects.
\nWhat’s funny to me is that I didn’t even know these functionalities were where, hiding in the Data tab behind some boring-looking buttons.
\n", "date_published": "2021-02-18T23:38:42-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/02/18/microsoft-excel-power.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/01/15/macbook-pro-will.html", "content_html": "2021 MacBook Pro will ditch the Touch Bar and bring back MagSafe, say reports. I don’t know about the Touch Bar disappearing, but I expect it to look a lot more like the iPad Pro, have 4 USB-C ports, and thinner bezels than the current models do.
\n", "date_published": "2021-01-15T12:44:21-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/01/15/macbook-pro-will.html", "tags": ["Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/01/13/a-noisy-server.html", "title": "A noisy server that I once again love", "content_html": "I spent about two hours last night trying to figure out if I can move my FreeNAS server, which constantly generates about 40 dB of fan noise white noise in my home office, to the basement, so that I can escape the noise. The problem I have is that there is nowhere else in my house where I can get a wired connection. I tried a wireless-to-ethernet bridging solution, and was super disappointed with how slow it was (40 mbps up/down).
\nThen I thought about scrapping the FreeNAS server, because I don’t need such a robust platform for my backups. I started looking into buying a Synology or something and loading it with larger hard drives so I don’t lose capacity.
\nWhile I was doing that, I started moving files off my FreeNAS server to prepare for retiring it. Of course, in doing so, I fell in love with the dang thing all over again, because I released how many services I am running and how flexible and reliable it is. I would like to get rid of the fan noise, though, but if I do, I will then be bothered by the 25 dB of fan noise from my work laptop.
\n", "date_published": "2021-01-13T20:49:08-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/01/13/a-noisy-server.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/01/08/why-did-i.html", "title": "Why did I get a webcam again? 😂", "content_html": "I just got a Logitech C920 webcam to use for video calls at work. Testing it out has shown me that (1) my office looks awful, and (2) I look awful. 😅
\nI thought the default webcam settings made me look like Emperor Palpatine, but an image search soon revealed that Emperor Palpatine looks much, much better than I do. 😂
\nI did find out how to adjust the white balance to make me look less cadaverous. However, for now at least, I’m going to apply the built-in black-and-white filter to my video stream. I wonder if that will be annoying to others, but I like the simplicity of it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-01-08T10:40:35-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/01/08/why-did-i.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/12/04/after-about-eight.html", "content_html": "After about eight years of service, the right-click button on my trackball just stopped registering clicks. I guess the switch is broken. Luckily, there are two other buttons I can use, so I remapped right-click to one of the buttons on the top. I hope I can get used to it.
\n", "date_published": "2020-12-04T10:03:57-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/12/04/after-about-eight.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/11/02/raspberry-pi.html", "title": "Raspberry Pi 400", "content_html": "The always interesting Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new “desktop PC” form factor that integrates its latest board into a keyboard:
\n\n\nWe’ve never been shy about borrowing a good idea. Which brings us to Raspberry Pi 400: it’s a faster, cooler 4GB Raspberry Pi 4, integrated into a compact keyboard. Priced at just $70 for the computer on its own, or $100 for a ready-to-go kit, if you’re looking for an affordable PC for day-to-day use this is the Raspberry Pi for you.
\n
If the keyboard is decent enough for you, and your computing needs are pretty basic, this is fantastic deal.
\nMy favorite part of the new design is that all the ports are on one side. My biggest beef with the Raspberry Pi (I own 3 of them!) is that the ports are on all four sides, and I always need to plug cables into two or three of them, which makes for a mess of wires surrounding a nice, small box.
\n", "date_published": "2020-11-02T11:53:23-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/11/02/raspberry-pi.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/09/24/i-didnt-realize.html", "content_html": "I didn’t realize that Amazon was having a hardware event today. Am I the only one who has been hoping for updated e-ink Kindles?
\n", "date_published": "2020-09-24T14:12:05-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/09/24/i-didnt-realize.html", "tags": ["Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/09/15/pixelmator-photo-adds.html", "content_html": "Pixelmator Photo Adds ML Super Resolution Powered by Apple’s Neural Engine and Split-Screen Preview Slider. I love Pixelmator Photo and am excited to try out these features. Hopefully my old iPad Pro isn’t too slow.
\n", "date_published": "2020-09-15T14:33:39-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/09/15/pixelmator-photo-adds.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/09/11/zoom-completely-failed.html", "content_html": "Zoom completely failed today for my daughter’s classroom. The teachers' stream had distorted audio and frozen video much of the morning. I think the school lacks sufficient upload bandwidth, because the other students' video feeds were smooth. It’s frustrating.
\n", "date_published": "2020-09-11T12:11:34-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/09/11/zoom-completely-failed.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/09/05/i-decided-i.html", "content_html": "I decided I wanted a universal snippet on my Mac to use to insert the date in the format I want it in. To my surprise, Dash, my code reference tool, can do that. If I want something more focused, it looks like aText might be the best, cheap app to do it on the Mac (and there’s a Windows version, too). (I used to run TextExpander, but that’s too expensive and way more feature filled than I need.)
\n", "date_published": "2020-09-05T22:30:36-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/09/05/i-decided-i.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/07/27/two-of-my.html", "content_html": "Two of my independently hosted WordPress sites were down for several days last week due, I presume, to DDOS attacks or something. I’m grateful that I’m not on the hook to makes sure my Micro.blog hosted site stays online. 😀
\n", "date_published": "2020-07-27T21:08:47-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/07/27/two-of-my.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/07/20/someone-needs-to.html", "content_html": "Someone needs to inform The New York Times that black text on a white background, even in dark mode, is not a “brand identity”—it’s just rude at this point.
\n", "date_published": "2020-07-20T21:14:09-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/07/20/someone-needs-to.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/07/20/john-grubers-return.html", "content_html": "John Gruber’s Return and Enter Are Two Different Keys has got me thinking about all sorts of uses in my computing life for Fn+Return (aka Enter) key commands.
\n", "date_published": "2020-07-20T19:44:41-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/07/20/john-grubers-return.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/07/20/nextdns.html", "title": "NextDNS", "content_html": "I decided to retire my pi-hole install yesterday, in large part to reduce the pain points I was having administering it. (It is no fun when you don’t have network connectivity, sometimes, because the pi-hole server isn’t accepting connections for no reason in particular.) I signed up for NextDNS instead, and so far I’m really happy with it. It blocks malware; it blocks adult content; it blocks ads. Unlike the pi-hole, it can be used away from my home network, too. I have set up different profiles for everyone in my family, and switched everyone’s devices to use it today. The funny thing is, my wife hasn’t noticed yet that ads are being blocked on her phone or computer. I think that’s a good thing—it means that content filtering hasn’t broken anything for her yet.
\n", "date_published": "2020-07-20T17:16:34-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/07/20/nextdns.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/07/20/thunderbolt-dock.html", "title": "Thunderbolt 3 Dock", "content_html": "I finally got my work laptop connected to a Thunderbolt dock that charges it, drives my peripherals, and drives my 4K monitor. It was not as easy as it should have been to set up, though. It does not help that my laptop has a USB-C + charging port, and a Thunderbolt 3 report (that also charges, though that wasn’t clear at first). I was not sure why I could not charge my laptop through the dock, until I noticed the distinction between USB-C and Thunderbolt, and I was not sure why my Thunderbolt-to-DisplayPort cable would not work from a USB-C port in the dock. Having the same ports/connectors does not make USB and Thunderbolt easier to deal with: it makes it harder.
\n", "date_published": "2020-07-20T13:48:30-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/07/20/thunderbolt-dock.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/07/01/i-just-had.html", "content_html": "I just had my butt saved by Microsoft Outlook’s “did you forget to attach a file to this message” feature. 😅
\n", "date_published": "2020-07-01T13:13:01-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/07/01/i-just-had.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/04/08/the-march-visual.html", "content_html": "The March 2020 Visual Studio Code update just came out. Microsoft and the community are adding feature after feature to it at an astounding pace. As long as you have a fast computer, it is an amazing programmer’s editor and Git client now.
\n", "date_published": "2020-04-08T21:39:44-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/04/08/the-march-visual.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/04/08/arq-backup-was.html", "title": "Arq Backup 6 was released", "content_html": "Arq Backup 6 was just released. It is really compelling software if you want to “roll your own” backup service, rather than use something tightly integrated with the back-end, like BackBlaze. I’m very glad, now, that I bought a lifetime license when Arq Backup 5 came out, four years ago. I got a free (as in, already paid for) upgrade! Arq Backup 6 is much simpler looking than prior versions were. It is set up almost like a web app. Unfortunately, it no longer looks and feels much like a Mac app, which is one of the things that brought me to it in the first place. I don’t use its main UI that much anyway, though, so that probably is not a big deal.
\n", "date_published": "2020-04-08T13:30:29-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/04/08/arq-backup-was.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/04/07/pixelmator-photo-my.html", "content_html": "Pixelmator Photo, my photo editing app of choice on iOS, dropped a new version with more great features. I love this app, because it is very easy to use, and it integrates very well with Apple Photos. I hope that, someday, it does not become subscription-only, because I don’t know if i use it quite enough to justify a monthly payment.
\n", "date_published": "2020-04-07T10:27:45-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/04/07/pixelmator-photo-my.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/03/01/i-am-currently.html", "content_html": "I am currently rebuilding my macOS Photos library, which is something I never wanted to do. It’s missing months worth of photos, which is not making me feel as comfortable as I would like to about its management of all those memories.
\n", "date_published": "2020-03-01T22:01:12-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/03/01/i-am-currently.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2019/11/25/airplay-and-an.html", "title": "AirPlay and an audiophile DAC/Amp on Ubuntu", "content_html": "I did a little audio geekery this evening. I set up shairport-sync on the little Ubuntu server that sits toward the back of my desk, so that I can AirPlay to it from all my iOS devices. AirPlay is great because it transmits audio over WiFi with no quality degredation, and AirPlay devices are always listed in iOS, unlike BlueTooth speakers, which have to be connected to. Next, I configured PulseAudio to automatically switch to my headphone DAC/Amp when I turn it on. (My DAC/amp is a portable one with an internal battery, so I can’t leave it plugged in all the time.) So far, so good with the new setup! By far the hardest part of the setup was searching online for the correct instructions to type into the terminal. I was happy to learn that shairport-sync is now in Ubuntu’s repositories, but I think that things like this need to be easier to discover, and possible to install, in the GUI.
\n", "date_published": "2019-11-25T23:25:20-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2019/11/25/airplay-and-an.html", "tags": ["Audiophile","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2019/06/04/listening-to-atps.html", "content_html": "🎧 Listening to ATP’s WWDC live show at the top of my work day.
\n", "date_published": "2019-06-04T08:23:58-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2019/06/04/listening-to-atps.html", "tags": ["Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2019/02/11/amazon-acquires-eero.html", "title": "Amazon Acquires Eero", "content_html": "John Gruber’s take is dead on. For privacy reasons, there is no way I’ll buy an Eero now.
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-11T20:48:54-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2019/02/11/amazon-acquires-eero.html", "tags": ["Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/10/23/i-really-enjoyed.html", "content_html": "I really enjoyed reading John Gruber’s iPhone XR review this morning. I am thinking of waiting for the initial buying rush to wear off, and taking my wife to the store to buy her one.
\n", "date_published": "2018-10-23T11:09:44-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/10/23/i-really-enjoyed.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/10/16/a-new-chromebook.html", "title": "A new Chromebook", "content_html": "I just ordered a new Chromebook for my daughter, based on Wirecutter’s recommendation. It was a lot more expensive than I thought Chromebooks sold for, but I bought a decently-speced one for the battery life, screen, and RAM.
\nI’m not sure what to expect when I have to set it up. I am not even sure what a Chromebook is anymore, now that ChromeOS runs Android apps. I was an owner/user of the original Cr-48 (the prototype Chromebook from Google). I loved CromeOS when it was just a browser, but Google started to loose me when they adding windowing. Now that the Play Store is available, it just feels like another Windows-type platform. I would prefer the “just a browser” version I had before. Perhaps I will soon learn, once the Chromebook arrives, that it still can be run that way. I have been away from it for too long at this point to know.
\n", "date_published": "2018-10-16T14:43:39-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/10/16/a-new-chromebook.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/09/27/wondering-if-the.html", "title": "Wondering if the AnyList Apple Watch app is any good now", "content_html": "I’m debating whether I should pay for AnyList Pro again, just to use the Apple Watch app. I paid for a year a while back, and the Apple Watch app did not work very well. It kept crashing or getting killed, and would not stay in sync with my iPhone. None of the other paid features are interesting to me. I like the rest of the app’s features, though, and I’m getting the new Apple Watch in about a month, so maybe it will work this time. 🤷🏼♂️
\n", "date_published": "2018-09-26T21:30:58-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/09/26/wondering-if-the.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/07/06/thomas-finchs-ios.html", "content_html": "Thomas Finch’s iOS 7+ Icon Generator is a nice, little utility. It takes a square app icon and masks it to match the rounded corner shape of modern iOS icons.
\n", "date_published": "2018-07-06T12:34:36-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/07/06/thomas-finchs-ios.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/04/26/blocker-x.html", "title": "1Blocker X", "content_html": "I picked up 1Blocker X based on this review from John Voorhies on MacStores.
\n\n\nThe first thing you will notice when you set up 1Blocker X on an iOS device is its 7 toggles in Safari’s Content Blocker section of the Settings app. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher at first until you realize that this is what allows 1Blocker X to expand beyond the confines of its predecessor.
\nYou see, iOS limits the number of blocking rules that can be implemented by an app to 50,000. That’s a lot of rules, but sadly not enough given the amount of junk on the Internet these days. As a result, it’s a limit that 1Blocker began to run into not long after it launched in 2015.
\nFinding a way around that hard limit required a rewrite of 1Blocker from the ground up. The result is 1Blocker X, an app with around three times as many blocking rules, room to grow, and enhanced flexibility for applying those rules.
\n
I don’t think I really needed to replace the content blocker I had been using, but it hadn’t been updated in a really long time, so I’m not sure it’s blocking rules are up-to-date.
\nMuch of the work these things do is invisilble. It’s easy to see if ads are blocked, of course, but not so with trackers and malware, which I care more about. At home I also block ads at the DNS level using Pi-hole, running on an old Raspberry Pi. I heartily recommend setting up a Pi-hole (it’s easy; there are tutorials to follow). I miss having it when I’m out of the house, which is why a content blocker is helpful, too.
\nSo far, 1Blocker X has been working just fine. I’ve noticed no decrease in speed from Safari, despite the crazy amount of blocking rules I have enabled.
\n", "date_published": "2018-04-26T10:52:04-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/04/26/blocker-x.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/04/23/airpods-batteries-drain.html", "title": "AirPods batteries drain much faster on phone calls", "content_html": "I thought my AirPods batteries were already aging out of their useful life span, due to quick draining on numerous hour long phone calls today and last week. It turns out, talk time is only “up to 2 hours”, while listening time (my main use case) is 2 1/2 times that.
\n\n\n\nAirPods (single charge): Up to 5 hours listening time,(2) Up to 2 hours talk time(5)
\n
So…phew! I’m more worried about having to replace them after less than two years due to a battery issue than about shorter battery life on calls.
\n", "date_published": "2018-04-23T10:56:09-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/04/23/airpods-batteries-drain.html", "tags": ["Tech","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/02/20/i-finally-installed.html", "content_html": "🚀 I finally installed Rocket on my Mac. It’s a lot nicer to use than Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space) to drop emoji into text boxes.
\n", "date_published": "2018-02-20T00:45:59-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/02/19/i-finally-installed.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/02/15/adding-my-nest.html", "content_html": "Adding my Nest thermostat to HomeKit via HomeBridge has made my life a little better. I do have a suggestion for Apple, though: “Hey Siri, set thermostat to 70º F and let no one in my family change it, ever, for any reason.” Maybe I don’t need a smart thermostat after all.
\n![](\"http://mjdescy.micro.blog/uploads/2018/1642f56be2.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2018-02-15T11:09:06-04:00",
"url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/02/15/adding-my-nest.html",
"tags": ["Tech"]
},
{
"id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/02/02/based-on-my.html",
"content_html": "Based on my podcast listening for the week, I’ve concluded (and I’m being half serious here) that Amazon Alexa’s key feature, and Siri’s key shortcoming, is support for multiple named kitchen timers. That seems like an easy gap to fill. When Apple will finally ship that feature?
\n", "date_published": "2018-02-02T12:34:09-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/02/02/based-on-my.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/24/people-on-reddit.html", "content_html": "People on Reddit are bitching tonight about Apple’s “bug fixes and improvements” iOS and watchOS updates. I must be uncool or something because those kinds of updates are my favorite kind.
\n![](\"http://mjdescy.micro.blog/uploads/2018/1f9c065d4e.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2018-01-23T22:45:07-04:00",
"url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/23/people-on-reddit.html",
"tags": ["Tech","Apple"]
},
{
"id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/20/is-it-awful.html",
"content_html": "Is it awful that I kind of want a HomePod? When I first watched the product announcement, my impression was “too expensive: hard pass” but now I kind of want something that sounds really good and just works with my iPhone.
\n![](\"http://mjdescy.micro.blog/uploads/2018/7eafcf55d3.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2018-01-20T01:11:11-04:00",
"url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/20/is-it-awful.html",
"tags": ["Tech","Apple"]
},
{
"id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/18/unpopular-opinion-calendars.html",
"content_html": "Unpopular opinion: Calendars 5 is better than Fantastical. I have had both on my iOS devices for years and finally chose just one today. I prefer how Calendars 5 handles tasks and how it displays the results of natural language parsing, which is just as good as Fantastical’s.
\n", "date_published": "2018-01-18T11:15:51-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/18/unpopular-opinion-calendars.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/04/dear-apple-music.html", "content_html": "Dear Apple Music: Just because I listened to Sixpence Non The Richer’s cover of “There She Goes” (originally by the La’s, and arguably about heroin, for goodness sake), doesn’t mean I want to listen to Christian music in all my personalized mixes. 🙄
\n![](\"http://mjdescy.micro.blog/uploads/2018/f15a2eda19.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2018-01-04T15:45:08-04:00",
"url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/04/dear-apple-music.html",
"tags": ["Audiophile","Tech","Apple"]
},
{
"id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/04/i-hope-i.html",
"content_html": "I hope I set up mirroring to GitHub correctly. It is a geeky feature, for sure, but I’m not 100% sure if I set it up correctly.
\n", "date_published": "2018-01-03T23:31:54-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/03/i-hope-i.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/03/i-like-tweetbothttpstapbotscomtweetbot.html", "content_html": "I like TweetBot a lot more than I like Twitter.
\n", "date_published": "2018-01-03T00:35:55-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/02/i-like-tweetbothttpstapbotscomtweetbot.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2017/12/31/i-dont-love.html", "content_html": "I don’t love how en-dashes (–) and em-dashes (—) look identical in Ulysses. I know it is because I use monospace fonts. I just wish Ulysses did something to differentiate them. I don’t know/trust that macOS is inserting the correct symbol when I type (dash) (dash) (dash).
\n", "date_published": "2017-12-30T23:37:56-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2017/12/30/i-dont-love.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2017/12/29/im-demoting-tweetbot.html", "content_html": "I’m demoting TweetBot to page 3 of Spingboard. I’m not sure how long that will last.
\n", "date_published": "2017-12-29T15:05:20-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2017/12/29/im-demoting-tweetbot.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2017/12/23/i-bought-castro.html", "content_html": "I bought Castro 2 this week because I like the design and it was on sale for a pittance. I am not sure I will switch to it from Overcast, though. Castro 2 has a better UI and better product focus, but Overcast has the better audio engine, which really is the most important thing.
\n", "date_published": "2017-12-23T11:01:25-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2017/12/23/i-bought-castro.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2017/12/20/twitter-is-abuzz.html", "content_html": "Twitter is abuzz about UIKit, perhaps, going to the Mac late next year. We’ll see. I would love to code a new version of my todo.txt app, SwiftoDo Desktop, in UIKit rather than AppKit. The different table view model is a big factor in that, though UIKit’s window and split view controls are, of course, different, too. WWDC will be especially interesting next year.
\n", "date_published": "2017-12-20T15:11:03-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2017/12/20/twitter-is-abuzz.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2017/10/26/jannis-hermanns-blog.html", "title": "Jannis Hermann’s blog post: The iPad as main computer for programming", "content_html": "Jannis Hermann’s blog post about developing full time on the iPad Pro is fantastic. I’ve heard about others using his approach: offload development tools to a server and connect to it using Mosh. I wish I could set something similar up for my programming hobby, but it wouldn’t apply very well to Xcode. Still, Jannis’s blog post inspires me to figure out a better way to update my non-Wordpress-based websites via my iPad, which is just something I haven’t tried yet.
\n", "date_published": "2017-10-26T23:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2017/10/26/jannis-hermanns-blog.html", "tags": ["iPad","Tech"] } ] }