Tag: MacOS

Courteous Bad Stomach Fun

I’m having another unhappy stomach day today. It’s not bad. I won’t have any problem working or anything like that. The stomach pain feels like bad gas so far so maybe I will try to take a Gas-X pill and see if it clears it up.

The pain is nothing but courteous this time as it waited until morning to start bothering me. I didn’t wake up with it at 1:30am or anything like that. I woke up with it at 5:30am, which was when my alarm went off. Nice of my stomach, eh?

Change of subject, I think I just did something I’ve never been able to pull off before. I think I just saved an external hard drive. Sort of, at least. The drive I had been using for my Time Machine backups corrupted itself somehow recently and went into read only mode. I tried fixing it with Mac Disk Utility but didn’t have any luck.

I replaced the drive with a new 2tb drive over the weekend and yesterday I had my first successful backups. This morning, in between powerful burps and even more powerful farts (sorry) I tried fixing the first drive again but it wasn’t happening. I reformatted the drive instead and remounted it and whatdayaknow, I can write to it again. It’s now my music files backup disc and maybe it might be my Flickr backup disc too if I ever get the energy to back up the zillion photos I have stored there. Yeah, I should do that soon. There’s so much to lose on that account. Now is the time.

My stomach has made me late to get started for work. It’s 8:21 now and I still need to take a shower and get dressed and all, so I will do that now. Happy burping, everyone.

Weigh Ins and Time Machine

I have been thinking about what to do about weigh ins now that I’ve passed the one year since surgery mark. Once a week suddenly seems gratuitous, especially when I’m not really losing a lot with any degree of regularity anymore. I think I am going to ditch the Wednesday weigh ins. At least in terms of tracking everything. I might step on the scale now and then, but I don’t see myself recording the data like I was in year one.

The monthly weigh ins are another story. I think I am going to continue to do that. Maybe it’s a compromise. The data analyst part of my tiny little pea brain will still have regular data to keep track of, just not quite as often. I think that’s a good plan going forward. I can still obsess about weight, just not as often. Good and good.

My in-laws, Charlotte and Sherman, gave me an Amazon.com gift card for my birthday. Thank you so much. Big smile. Right on queue, the two terabyte USB hard drive I use for my MacBook Pro’s Time Machine back ups sort of bricked itself today. It’s suddenly in read only mode. Guess what I used the gift card for! It’s almost like the disc drive knew today was my birthday so it took full advantage. Timing is everything, kids.

Okay… back to work, Robert. Your customers don’t care that it’s your birthday. You don’t care either, but they care even less, you know? Get to it.

Saturday Morning

I slept late today. I didn’t get up until almost 8:00am. The temperature outside at that time? 31 degrees. Shit. Winter is here.

I did my morning exercise before breakfast today. Over the last couple of weeks I have been walking in place for a bit then running in place for a bit and alternating until I hit about 5k in simulated distance. Yesterday I just ran the whole thing About 32 minutes, I think. Today I did the same except I actually used the indoor run workout in the workout app instead of the indoor walk setting. I went a little over my distance goal so that I could get up to 700 calories. I ended up at four miles (simulated). My feet and my calves are hurting, but I feel like I accomplished something.

The plan for today is another small kitchen improvement project, a visit to my mother, and a visit to my father. Beyond that, I don’t know for sure. Guitar, I hope. Bond movies, I assume. I want to watch yesterday’s That Pedal Show but the topic is a Boss pedal and I don’t really like Boss pedals, generally speaking.

I just stumbled over the new clock app in the new MacOS. I opened the clock on my phone and it came up on the laptop as a handoff. Sweet. Now I can track my time between bites on my computer instead of my phone.

I started a Bond movie while doing my faux running today. A View to a Kill. The last Roger Moore. It’s better than I remembered it, but it’s not very good. Christopher Walken as the bad guy. Can he play the bad guy in every Bond movie going forward? That would be fun.

I haven’t done my pick for the World Series post yet. Game one was last night. No spoilers on my pick, but the Phillies won and I am happy. I’ll do the real post later today. The UMass Lowell Riverhawks won too, and the Bruins are off to their best start in 10000 years at 8-1-0 after another win last night. I failed to watch/listen to either game, but I followed the scores as best I could. It was the first time I didn’t listen to at least a few minutes of either team’s game. Oh well.

Last night Jen and I both threw our names into the hat to be beta testers for Jack Dorsey’s new social network, Bluesky Social. Over the last year or so this page has been the only sort of social networking service that I’ve really been using. Actually, that isn’t entirely accurate. I stopped using Facebook and I’ve nearly stopped using Twitter, but I still use Flickr and lately I’ve been using the Flickr Groups more than normal and all of that counts as a social network. I have no idea what Bluesky Social is going to entail, but if it lets me thumb my nose at Musk and Twitter a little then sign me up.

Okay, time to wrap this post up. Bond and Tanya Roberts just stole a fire engine and jumped a draw bridge and that’s not cartoonish at all, right?

Almost Time to Punch In

I’m sitting at my desk eating some scrambled eggs (two eggs, four ounces total). My exercise ring is closed. Dad’s camera has been reloaded. I could use a shave, but otherwise the full morning routine is complete. It’s 8:53am. Time to punch in for the day.

I screwed up the Time Machine backup on my Mac the other day. I tried to restore it but failed (don’t ask). I kicked off a new backup yesterday after work. It still has 15 hours to go. Urgh.

I have a meeting at 10:00. I have to wait 60 minutes after eating before I can drink. I am not going to finish these eggs before 9:00 so I am going to be pretty dehydrated when the meeting starts. Coworkers are going to see me sippin’ not long after the meeting starts.

I tried Googling the problem I had with Dad’s camera today but didn’t come up with much. I found a few more tips on loading film so that it winds, but nothing about what happens if it stops winding halfway through the roll.

I checked the forecast. Tomorrow will not be a good day to try again (too cloudy), but Thursday might be. We’ll see. I’m kinda pissed off. Partly at the camera, partly at the roll of film, partly at the universe in general (fucking Covid), but mostly at myself for getting so hyped over something so stupid that could so easily go wrong.

I wonder if Nikon makes an equivalent, fully manual film camera that can also use the lenses I already own for my D90. Also, I wonder if such a mythical camera would be really cheap on ebay. That might be the next thing I research.

Okay. Time to punch in. Happy Tuesday, folks.

Steam Fail?

I’m a Mac user, babie. None of that Windows crap for me. Well… except for work… and except for when I want to use something that doesn’t run on a Mac.

Jen has inspired me to try my hand at gaming so I installed World of Warcraft on my Mac. It works fine. Cool. Then there was the game I tried to play the last time I tried to get into gaming… which was something like 2012 or so? Star Wars: The Old Republic. That puppy doesn’t run on Mac.

So what’s a red headed Mac douche to do? Emulate, bitches! I installed Parallels and Windows 11. That works fantastically. Groovy like you’ve read about. Next, I installed Steam. That seems okay except that I always always always lose my password and had to jump through 2000000 hoops to actually get in. Once that mess was clean I downloaded and installed Star Wars. Success! Then I had to go through another 100000 password hoops before finally getting into the game and finding out that it doesn’t work with a track pad. I’m sure it works fine if I had an actual mouse with two buttons, but for the moment?

Fail, apparently. Bummer… for now.

Doofus Moment

Way to go, Apple Fan Boy. Way to miss out on the simplest, yet ridiculously useful function available on your Mac.

There I was, thinking that I could only use the Messenger Application with fellow Apple folks.

Imagine my surprise when I was a single check box click away from having all of my SMS messages show up on my computer.

Ugh… dumb ass.

What was it Brody said? Here is your finger, far from the pulse, shoved straight up your ass? Something like that.*

*That’s a Kevin Smith reference. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Would you like a chocolate covered pretzel?

Lunch Break

I’m on my lunch break. What’s going on?

Podcasts… What’s the deal?

MacOS used to have its podcast functionality baked into iTunes. At some point recently (was it the current MacOS or the last one? I can’t remember) they spun it off into its own application. It sucked. Like… bad. It sucked bad. The interface is terrible and nearly impossible to use. Discovering new podcasts… can you even do that? I don’t know. It just sucked.

iOS and iPadOS had their own standalone podcast apps. The two are virtually identical. There’s a screen thing here and there that is a little different, but the two of them are basically the same. That app (I am going to refer to the two as if they are just one app on different platforms. Hey, it’s my post I can do whatever I want. FREEDOM!) was never good. In fact, it was always pretty crappy. It was, however, a work of absolute genius when compared to the MacOS app.

Something happened recently. I don’t know what. I heard the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast talking about it a few months (I think) ago, but I am still not sure what happened. Whatever it was, it took the two mobile platform podcast apps, stabbed them in the heart multiple times, cut their heads off, and flushed all the bits down the toilet. It is absolute garbage now. Nothing viewable has changed. The interface is exactly the same. It’s just the performance that has more or less overnight become unusable. The Apple mobile podcast applications are now as useless as useless can be. Crap-tastic. Crash-tastic. Terrible. Garbage.

They are so bad that I am currently listening to podcasts while I work via the MacOS podcast player. I have my MacBook Pro streaming through the HomePods in my bedroom. I’m using the awful Mac version… that’s how bad the mobile versions are.

There are new versions of all three OS’s on the way. I am hopeful, though not optimistic, that improvements are coming.

Come on, Apple. Let’s fix this. You are making my work day more annoying than it needs to be.

Oh No!

Oh no!  The inherited MacBook wouldn’t install the backup from my 2016 MacBook Pro, and then it wouldn’t reinstall the current MacOS from the Apple server either!

I’m going to try a couple more things, but I am sad.  Not really, because my 2016 MacBook Pro is still in pretty much perfect shape, but I like new stuff, you know?

We’ll see what happens.