After dithering on it for several weeks, I finally ordered a blue iPhone 12 mini late Friday night. I plan to keep it for the next four years, and also plan to keep using my iPhone 7 Plus as an occasional video player/video game player around the house.

It was supposed to be delivered here on Tuesday, but it came late this morning—a couple days early. Strangely, I find myself not ready for it! I have too many things to do today, and will have to wait to open up my new toy until after the kids go to bed.

The following children’s books are on the docket for me to read aloud to my daughter:

1. A Wrinkle in Time
2. The Secret Garden
3. Little Lord Fountleroy
4. Pollyanna
5. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

That should keep me busy for the next few months or so. I wonder if the sequels to A Wrinkle in Time will be demanded immediately.

I have never watched an inauguration before, and don’t plan to today, though the rest of my family is very interested. My wife’s school has disallowed live-streaming it over Zoom due to its political nature. My employer sent an email warning people in the NYC office of potential demonstrations and unrest over it. What a messed up country and time to be alive.

This is old news, but I just discovered it this week. If you use Arq for backup on the Mac, you can email their support team for access to the next version, Arq 7, which (among other things) ditches the non-native interface in favor of a much simpler and much quicker native UI.

Note to self: just use rsync to sync files. Stop avoiding the terminal!

I’m doing the usual Monday morning brain boot-up sequence right now. I hear the hard drive platters grinding in my head. 😅

Today, I read the second-to-last chapter of A Little Princess to my daughter, and chose the next book I will read to her: A Wrinkle in Time. She is very excited.

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.

COVID vaccine rollout in New Jersey is disorganized and haphazard. After a few days of nail-biting stress and uncertainty about it, I, and the other adults in my family, finally got appointments for our first dose, for about three weeks from now.

My cheap plastic iPhone 7 Plus case broke and now I want a new phone. 😠😳😢😅

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).

Then 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.

While 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.

Impeached twice. Not a good look. Let’s hope for the sake of the country that this is a one-time thing.

I haven’t had my M1 Mac mini for very long, and have only done a little Xcode work on it thus far, but I already love having a silent desktop that has tons of power. Since yesterday, I have mostly used that power merely to move tons and tons of gigabytes of data around my home network and to cloud storage, and everything has been rock solid and unnoticeable.

I have been very busy automating processes at work. I just got access to Automation Anywhere, which is a cool platform to build bots with. My practice with iOS Shortcuts in the past couple weeks is serving me well with its click, drag, and customize programming steps interface.

The House of Representatives is voting for impeachment along party lines so far, which is disappointing but not unexpected. Republicans don’t get it. It’s shameful.

On my M1 Mac mini, KensingtonWorks software somehow disables double-clicking on my Kensington Slimblade trackball. I can assign another button to perform a double-click, but it is hard not to double-click anyway, after doing so since the late 1980s.

I found a third party mouse utility called SteerMouse that does a much better job than KensingtonWorks, and offers a lot more options. I’m not sure I want to spend $20 on it, but I do like all my mouse buttons to do something.

This article in USA Today confirms my suspicions that all the anti-COVID measures would drastically reduce the prevalence of seasonal flu in the U.S.:

During the 2019 flu season from Sept. 29 to Dec. 28, the CDC reported more than 65,000 cases of influenza nationwide. During the same period last year, the agency reported 1,016 cases.

I get a vaccine every year for the flu—and luckily have not caught it since I was in elementary school—but other than that, I never think about it. My dream right now is that the COVID vaccine be the same kind of thing: a prick on the arm once a year, and otherwise nothing much to think about.

🎵 I’m trying out PlexAmp again, and am listening to Herbie Hancock’s “Gershwin’s World” (in ALAC) which has been in my library for over twenty years and probably hasn’t been listened to since 2000.

My thought of the day, as I do my house tidying: Systems of human behavior break down when people stop putting energy into them.

I have been writing Amazon product reviews thousands of words long this evening, on products as mundane but important as insulated coffee mugs. Ten years ago I was pretty close to being ranked in top 1,000 Amazon reviewers, and was very close, but couldn’t quite crack it.

Per Ethan Anderton on SlashFilm, quoting Bill Hader:

“Right when the lockdown happened in March, we were a week away from shooting. So the last time I was in a room with a lot of people was the table read episodes one and two of season three, and we were ready to go. Then it all got shut down. Season three is completely written, ready to go, and then during this time we actually went and wrote season four. So we have both of those kinda done. We’re just waiting until we can start shooting again.”

“Barry” is a _ sui generis_ example of peak TV. It takes a lot of risks in terms of both plot and tone, and so far they have all paid off. I certainly couldn’t predict how Bill Hader and Alex Berg were going to write their way out of the end of Season 2 of “Barry,” but I guess they cracked it and then some.

I made the mistake today of turning off my home media server (HP N54L) for a few minutes to see how quiet my office is without its fan running. Now I can’t help but be annoyed by it. 😀

Music for Programming is definitely not for me, but I love the all-text site design.

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. 😅

I 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. 😂

I 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.

Pelosi, Schumer Join Chorus Of Calls For Invocation Of 25th Amendment Against Trump. I cosign. Swear in President Pence and swear him out in about two weeks when Biden is inaugurated.