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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…
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Creating a RAID drive on MacOS
This is not the most obvious thing with any operating system, but it’s particularly confusing on the Mac. If you have some data that is really sensitive, then you want to create a RAID1 also known as a mirror set. This means that if you have two 16TB drives for instance, the system writes the…
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DigitalOcean WordPress Database Connection Cannot Be Reestablished
This happened again on one of my servers. The last time, it had to do with the lack of a swap file and then running out of physical memory. Usually a reboot helps which you do like this: Rebooting a Digital Ocean image by ssh into the machine and then sudo service apache2 restart and…
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COVID-19 Things to Watch and Ways to Buy
OK, been spending lots of time at home. Here are some fun things to do: The COVID-19 One World: Together at Home. What an uplifting concert. Made me smile and cry at the same time. Maluma, Kacey Musgrave, Keith Urban, they were all so awesome! The 7PM New Yorker Cheer. Wow. And if you are…
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Zoom Security Part Trois
Ok, so here’s the final things about making Zoom work: 2FA. Make sure you have two factor authentication on, but this is actually pretty complicated because it’s really at its heart an enterprise product. So there are three separate steps, first even though you probably have a personal account, there is the concept of an…
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Argh Airplay 2 is still broken for streaming audio and video
Well, for a long time I’ve been using Rogue Amoeba (a great name!) Airfoil. This plugs itself into the Mac sound system and lets you stream content to just about everything. From Chromecast, to anything else. Apple introduce Airplay 2 which does the same thing. This works at the application level. That is if you…
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Customizing Astra Sierra Industry Template
If you have finished importing this, then time to do the conversion to your site, here are the details: Change the logo, this is a little trickier than you think. The easiest thing to do is to use Noun Project to get a nice graphic and then add your company name to it. You can…
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Using Vuescan with the Minolta DiIMAGE Scan Elite 5400
It’s hard to believe a 10 year old peripheral still works, but Vuescan is still functioning and I’m scanning 35mm slides again after a long hiatus. Just a few things to remember: When you create file names, you should try to remember the date of photo and where it is. That is way more useful…
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Tesla Dashcam Storage and Viewer
Tesla 2020.12.5 has a cool feature. You can now view the Sentry Mode videos inside your car. That’s pretty awesome, but using an old USB Flash drive, you really do see how slow it is to bring things up. When it was just batch, that wasn’t a big deal since you have to yank the…
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Free books for COVID-19 quarantine
Do getting tired of watching TV. Well as we wait it out there are some good resources: You local libraries. No they are not closed. Get a virtual card and use Libby to read and listen to audiobooks. Apple Books has free classics and even audiobooks in their library. Some great kid ones too. Amazon…
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Tips on using Google Sheets for an old Excel and 1-2-3 deal
Google Sheets is wonderful for cooperative spreadsheet development, but really using it there a number of formulas tips and tricks: Blank cells. If you want to detect if a cell has a number, then BLANK() and then if you want to see if a cell is non-blank, then NOT(BLANK()) Indexing in a range. If you…
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IPad Pro 2020 and Magic Keyboard for iPad
Well, in a break from COVID-19 news, I’m using an iPad Pro 2018 with Folio Cover and I must say it works pretty well. You can’t quite use it as a Mac replacement mainly because the applications aren’t quite there. Some of the things that don’t work are writing software on it as there are…