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Do not use MacOS Calendar on Catalina
You would think that after 50 years of the calendaring madness that it would end, but with two non-profits, a for-profit and two personal calendars, like is just not easy and conflicts are happening everywhere. So starting at 2AM last night, I finally resolved to try to fix this problems, but the main issue is…
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COVID-19 Music
OK, in these times, sometime it seems like a good music playlist is just so vital, so here are some that we’ve been listening to: Hotel Costes Curated Lists. If you sometime need to feel like you in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, there is nothing like the playlist that this cool boutique hotel has.…
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Memorial Day Sales and buying HomePod, AirPod Pro
Well there are some decent Memorial Day sales, but when you are buying electronics, you also have to pay attention to obsolesce because sometimes the reason for the sale is that they are going to get rid of the product. So with that said, what are some pretty good deals here, so using the MacRumors…
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What happens if a submodule repo name changes
OK this is kind of an edge case, but if you have a submodule and someone upstream changes it’s name, what should you do? First you probably want to change the location of the module, so you can now just do a git mv old_name new_name and it will be correct in your directory. Then…
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iPhone SE vs iPhone 11
Wow Apple has actually made it pretty hard to figure out what to buy. The iPhone 11 is pricey but has premium features. I think that for most regular users, the iPhone SE is super compelling if you really need a new phone. And of course we are about 4-5 months away from the iPhone…
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Finally fixing AFP vs SMB on MacOS
OK, we know that AFP is not a reliable long term protocol. When I try to do a long running rsync for instance, it fails after a few hours. What you want is to use SMB but it isn’t easy to force it. There are two ways that both involve some hackery: Remove all AFP…
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Getting Mail to work properly from WordPress
Well this has always been a little bit of a mystery to me. When you work with WordPress, it eventually does like to send mail to folks as an administrator. How do you make this work. If you are using Amazon AWS Lightsail, the default Bitnami image has something called WP Mail SMTP preloaded. You…
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Using Zoom with Slack
Well this a cool feature, you can just say /zoom meeting standup and it will automatically create a Zoom call from within Slack. There are a few tricks though: Connect to Slack with your main administrator account so that you are not using a personal one if you are in a corporation. Then you have…
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Vuescan hangs on Calibrate with MacOS Catalina probably due to Grain Dissolver
I had this problem a few years ago Sierra, but Vuescan, an image scanner, hangs on calibrate and results are wrong. I never did get to the bottom of it and just switched to USB from Firewire, but how it is back. I think it is probably some bad parameters, so how to reset Vuescan…
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Doing versions numbers right SemVar
I had never thought much about it, but Semvar.org has. This is a way to think about creating version numbers of your projects. That is to give real meaning to 1.2.1 and there are some great ideas here all based about what is stable in the API set. For an Excel spreadsheet you can think…
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Mac Long-running network shares use SMB and Finder connection problems
Ok I’m trying to do something a little crazy. I want a reliable way to copy things and maintain checksums on long term backups. It’s a project that I’ve done off an on for a long time and it is nearly done! Here are some notes: Rsync is a great utility for copying things. The…
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Making more space on your Mac 2020
Well, if you made a mistake, like me, of ordering a MacBook Pro with too little SSD. In this case 256GB is really too little, then you are going to spend a lot of time getting rid of stuff. With most Macs, if you are writing code, using Dropbox or Google Drive and Homebrew, you…
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Migrating Your Google Drive data to a new organization
This is actually more complicated than you would think. That’s because Google Drive documents are really links into the cloud. So if you just copy them, you are still referring to something. And if the “owner” deletes it, you lose the document completely. The second reason for all this brain damage is a hole in…
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A decoder ring for Trello and it’s mashup of teams, user name and boards
Every company seems to have a different way of thinking about users and groups and Trello (now part of Atlassian is no different). If you are using this, here are the key things to know: Github-like identities. It is much closer to github in that it prefers that a person have a unique identity. You…
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Scary git message with git lfs
Ok got a scary message today when I tried to git push, a bad object error! Turns out that if you have git lfs (Large File Storage) turned on and you try to push and you are behind the upstream and have LFS changes, then you get this error. The solution is that you have…
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More Github madness on forking, transfers and Zenhub
Ok, Cassian says forking does not sound completely healthy thing to do. Well, for those none geeks out there, what it means is that if there is that in github, a bunch of code is collected together in a repository. If you want to work on someone’s software, then there is the concept of a…
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Forking a Private Repo
Wow this is now amazingly complicated as Github probably for very good security reasons, so here are the steps if you are creating a new organization: Go to the Organization and in Setting turn on Private forks so that you don’t accidentally Then in each Repo, go to settings and turn on forking. Also security…
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Eureka! URL, Landing Pages and Domain Redirects from Registrar to DNS to MU WordPress
Man this information is just littered everywhere and it is nearly impossible to figure out and has taken me three months of wandering the Internet, but for most modern installations, you really want three levels of flexibility: Lots of different domain names pointing to the same base site. In these modern times, you want to…
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What all this then about Tesla of electrification and autonomy and the Power of TWO
Well most of this is already coming to pass, but right now Tesla stock is again at near it’s all time high. While I have no idea what the market will bring, there seem to be three factors that are coming into play. It’s like most business school cases, whether you like Elon or not…
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Week 7 of Life in COVID-19 Land
Well it’s been nearly two months since we started self isolation. Since that last trip, I’ve been in the physical presence of four strangers which is pretty remarkable (always masked up). Some notes on living this way: Goodness, nerds like me are dangerous, but a combination of Zoom and work keeps me busy. This is…
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Qi Charging Efficiency
A great question from Alex. If you use Qi Charging, how efficient is it really vs how much wear you are putting on the Lightening port. Well it is actually better than I would have though. Much depends on the thickness of your case, but ideal is 80% efficiency, but 60% is more common.
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Using WordPress Gutenberg to embed other websites
The new Gutenberg editor is pretty neat. You can use edit blocks and widgets easily. It’s not quite as nice as Elementor in terms of control, but that doesn’t matter that much for ordinary blog sites. One thing that is handy though is to be able to embed complex sites. The COVID-19 tracker metapage that…
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Latest COVID-19 statistics
Well, the core news sources I use show that the tail down in Washington State is happening. Even Uncle Dave is talking about it and California is tailing down as well, so we are to the “dance” part while we wait for an effective treatment or a vaccine. For basic reading, there is an absolute…
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Microsoft Outlook Can Block OneDrive Shortcuts
In a kind of hilarious, this company is too large, problem beware that if you go use OneDrive to share, you will get a wonderful URL shortened version to share with folks, you will get a URL that looks like But when it gets filtered through Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection in some organizations, then…
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Bitcoin and cryptocurrency tax accounting
Well Alex asked and the rules are sensible if hard to enforce. As usual this isn’t tax advice. Just clips from the network. As your accountant ???? If you buy and sell you declare this as short and long term gains. If you buy something with a Bitcoin even for $1 that’s a taxable event…
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Ultimate Home Theater Sound Tests
Ok I don’t really mean sound test. I mean butt rumbling bass. Most of the movies I used to use sound thin theses days like Fifth Element or the Matrix helicopter crash don’t sound as great. So what movies really hit the 10 hertz. YouTube has some great ones. So here are some of my…
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Simple keyboard shortcut tips
Well some are so obviously useful If you are editing with WordPress or the iOS app. It has a smart paste. If u have a url in the clipboard. Highlight text will be be replaced. Instead a link goes there. Nice with shortcuts as highlight and ctrl-v just works. iOS track pad mode. If you…
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Bike sales galore
Bikerumors Sales says 50% off trek and big sakes on canyon. Time to get that gravel bike!
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Cool Zoom Backgrounds
Well now that Zoom has cool backgrounds, everyone seems to be building “licensed” content. Well with Pexels, you can get generic backgrounds which are great. So there is now a cottage industry around these backgrounds: Shutterstock also ahs a dedicated section for video backgrounds. The most interesting are pretending you are in an old school…
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Zoom Security Upgrade and 2FA resets
Ok, Zoom says they are at over 300M users (from 200M a few weeks ago!). So for all of you using it, some tips and tricks: You should turn on 2FA. That actually isn’t super easy because you turn it on in admin > Advanced > Security pane and then actually connect it with the…