De Fenestra

Cancellation

2023-10-22T23:40:15Z

I killed off my old Mindspring email account yesterday. bad_karma@mindspring.com is now a dead address.

To be fair, I hadn't used it regularly since about 2007. I got that account in 1997 as part of my dial-up internet service in my apartment in Bowling Green, but once I switched to Macs for home productivity and writing, I jumped on the mac.com/MobileMe/iCloud integrated services and switched over all my correspondence. The old Mindspring account had a lifetime's worth of saved emails, but they were all stored in Thunderbird, which won't even run under newer versions of MacOS. So with those only available to me on the backup laptop, I was paying eleven bucks a month for nostalgia and the someday-maybe thoughts.

With the events of the past couple of months, I've been looking at things from my past that I can afford to cut away. This was one of 'em.

Also canceled Netflix and my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but there was a lot less introspection associated with those decisions.

comments

COBRA 27

2023-10-18T00:32:25Z

The internet sure is a thing.

Leaving a medical appointment today, I looked up to see a four-engined, bulbous-nosed, USAF-liveried jet in a low-altitude bank. Sixty seconds on my phone gave me an ID:

So that was a Rivet Joint ELINT training flight out of Omaha.

But I'm sure the pants-on-head crowd will something something chemtrails mind control vaccine 5G.

comments

Throughput

2023-10-04T13:52:44Z

Every time I run a backup on the new MacBook Air, I am utterly astonished at the speed difference between older USB standards and USB-C.

comments

Fluid

2023-02-12T16:29:08Z

One of the things I loathe about living in Iowa is the extended (compared to what I'm used to from Kentucky) winters. My last couple of years in Lexington, I was able to start bike commuting - about seven miles each way, with a great shower facility and secure bike storage at the office. The equivalent facilities here are much less satisfactory, and honestly, living less than two miles from work means it's not actually good exercise to ride in. Counting the time to prep riding gear and change clothes after arriving, it's actually more of a time suck than driving - whereas in Lexington, I was actually seeing no time loss compared to driving in.

In months that don't suck, and on weekends when the prairie wind isn't howling, my partial substitute has been to ride downtown to pick up mail. That's about an eight-mile round trip, but I usually screw around for a couple of hours and extend it to 20 or so by doing laps around downtown and campus. However, that's only viable on good-weather weekends about May through October.

This is one of several reasons that my general fitness level has been slowly but steadily deteriorating since the move.

I've been eyeing indoor bike trainers for a while, thanks to DC Rainmaker's site (which I originally started following just for reviews on Garmin watches, but dude knows his shit). Over winter break, I broke down and wandered into the FLBS. I came away with their entry-level option, a Saris Fluid2.

I've gotten in about a dozen "rides" since then, which is pretty good considering I hadn't been on my bike since last August. The mind-numbing boredom of pedaling for an hour and going nowhere is alleviated by my ~~excellent foresight and planning~~ fortunate but completely-unrelated random action of wall-mounting our smaller television in the basement on an oversized VESA arm. I have to crank the volume up to hear it more-or-less-clearly over the hum of the trainer, but I can quite readily watch an hour-long show while maintaining a simulated pace of about 10-12mph. It's helping me chew through my various streaming queues, which I otherwise kind of forget are there.

comments

M2

2023-01-17T13:48:22Z

I bought my MacBook Pro in early 2014. It was my third Apple computer and second Apple laptop, a belated graduation present to myself after finishing my master's and landing my first full-time emergency management job. It's been uncomplainingly robust until fairly recently, when it started to labor under what I guess is, for it, intensive load - large InDesign layout jobs and some other stuff that seems to tax its graphics capabilities. It's not throwing any errors but I don't want to risk a catastrophic hardware failure at an inconvenient time, and nine years is a lot to get out of any laptop. It feels like I'm pushing my luck.

I have an uncomfortable cheap/atavistic streak that wants to get the most out of any piece of essential hardware while simultaneously feeling guilty about setting aside something that still works just fine. But I'm also in a place where I can afford to spend money to (a) forestall problems and (b) have a backup system of known quantity in case the new primary craps out. So yesterday, I threw Apple a fair bit of coin for a mid-range MacBook Air M2.

The transition has, so far, been remarkably straightforward and drama-free. File transfer on a peer-to-peer wireless connection took about four hours for ~380 GB of data and applications. Leaping a few years of MacOS updates in a single bound will no doubt throw minor complications in my face for some time to come, but the basic user experience is the same, and it seems that almost all my accounts and credentials transferred over without issue.

I'll continue working in parallel on both machines for a bit until I'm sure the new rig is stable and I haven't lost anything essential in the transition. But the MacBook Pro is now in the basement with its external monitor, where it will likely remain for a few more years as the workshop's research/YouTube computer. It's a well-earned semi-retirement.

comments