I forgot to make a new site for 2022.
Forgot to unplug it, crashed again. Was up 3 days with the unplugging. 3 whole days! Such progress.
I got 4 consecutive letters (there's a counter on them, 170-174) from an insurance subcontractor.
I've been unplugging the dock after putting it to sleep. This seems to have been working so far. Plus, 12.1 turned the Bluetooth back on and that didn't crash immediately either.
2021-12-26
Second 12.1 sleep, same crash. Maybe unplugging the dock before putting it to sleep? Going to be rough on the usb ports, and it only has the 2.
What is "AvatarPickerMemojiPicker (AccountProfileRemoteViewSerice (System Preferences))" and why does it need more CPU than Messages, Finder, or the Dock? It's great that Apple isn't doing a monolithic kernel, but if you can never shut off any of this, what's the difference?
Blade Runner Black Lotus: animation ranges from great to copy-paste something from Susumu Hirasawa's 1980's Amiga (but less cool). Massive plot holes.
Anime Fall 2021 Review: 'watchable', at best, for the few new shows I watched. The Faraway Paladin has settled down into mega-epic pacing. Aquatope on white sand ended without ever defining what an aquatope is. Sakugan generally seemed to have annoyed everyone, but I like its bonkers premise. takt op.Destiny hit the beats, but didn't soar. Combining all of those complaints, Platinum End had a lot of big concepts, then slowed the pace down to a crawl. (Our hero spent several episodes flying around in circles) The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated was no Squid Girl, but nice enough. The World's Finest Assassin... had its pacing issues and meandering plot helped by the Goddess segments and that time he straight up murders that guy. Restaurant to Another World 2 ("2 Another World?") continued its thing, and so did 86 EIGHTY-SIX. Funimation shows I could probably check out if their subtitles work: Ranking of Kings, Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut.
The Witcher #2: Geralt has some lines this time. Odd twist at the very end, but nice stuff.
2021-12-19
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/12/turkey-sea-snot-climate-change/620756/#:~:text=What%20I%E2%80%99d%20been,can%E2%80%99t%20yet%20imagine%3F What I’d been looking at all summer, I realized, was not only an unfamiliar phenomenon but also an unfamiliar kind of death. To confront global warming is to confront death, and it will show up in surprising places and forms—some painful, some disgusting, some disorienting. We talk about preparing for climate change, but how can we prepare for endings we can’t yet imagine?
Intelligence Squared: "Is Amazon Good For Small Business?" is the big problem I have with the podcast: the host congratulates the debaters for being civil, but there's no judgment for insane comments like "the Internet was invented in the UK" (Did he mean Tim Berners-Lee? Because that's still wrong on several levels.) and governments have nothing to do with enabling commerce. Know what the UK did? Rolled out multiple rail gauges. Or the pretty obvious copies Amazon does and also the dozens of sock puppet brands. You don't need the internal emails to see that. Though having said all that, it is bad for brands and good for small product creators, up until they become profitable enough to rip off.
inside job: not sure who this is made for, given the language and afterschool special lessons
2021-12-12
Psychic Princess: uncomfortable class politics, but nice stuff, and I like the intro.
"People don't remember the conversations you have with them, they mainly remember how you made them feel" — @AbroadInJapan
I was thinking on my WoW update idea: with the tower defense concept, you get the same thing as watching the table missions, but better, and you get an easy way to integrate alts. If your city needs to run so many defense missions a week, but the missions vary, you can swap between alts, instead of doing exactly the same content on each alt every week. (Which I have not been doing.) This was the good bit of Torghast: lower geared characters didn't have to be doing 12's to get the followers or the base amount of currency.
@DavidGarcia209: It's that time of year again where we fetishize old timey, walkable neighborhoods while continuing to ban their existence
Crashing on a daily basis at this point. I made another account but couldn't log into Apple in the setup phase because the keyboard changed. The other account doesn't have the extensions, so I want to see if it crashes too.
2021-12-05
And crashed again. I don't even think I can put it to sleep. I have Karabiner, SteerMouse, the CalDigit TS3 dock with keyboard, mouse, wired ethernet, a 4K monitor. I turn the power off after making sure the Mac is asleep. (because the dock won't let the monitor shut down, also it is insanely hot.) (I also had trouble keeping the mouse still enough after clicking the Sleep menu item.) None of these behaviors has changed, but it crashes more. I guess I could just never turn any of it off, or do what Apple probably wants me to do and give up the dock and accessories. Such a shame as the M1 speed, Air's absolute quiet is very nice. The iPhone's screen is bent and doesn't register touches at random, too.
And it crashed again. It was doing better, now it is doing worse.
Uptime: a big 15 hours
ManHunt: something else I've definitely seen, but not logged under this title. Woo, birds, etc.
I noticed it had turned the bluetooth on, which is still able to crash the M1 Air. That might explain the kernel panics, but not everything else 12.0.1 has been doing.
One of my disk images is corrupted. It hasn't been modified since May. The backup is also corrupted. Oddly, it let me 'convert' it so it could still read it, it just didn't want to. If I didn't have an Intel Macs still somewhat functional, I'd want to look into virtualized MacOS to stop this sort of thing.
Safari crashed. Also, the tab group is not available in the private mode. That would have saved me 3 clicks.
3 kernel panics after sleep in a row...
2021-11-28
Music: Dead Can Dance
The Pathless: birb. Very nice casual Apple Arcade game. It doesn't require you to do this, but you should definitely do all the puzzles on each plateau before moving on, because you can't go back after the end.
Last Action Hero: The Incomparable reviewed it, and I don't think I'd ever seen it. A very modern meta comedy, which might be why it didn't go over so well at the time.
https://www.sciendo.com/article/10.1515/jtim-2016-0016 Post-intensive care syndrome: "The common symptoms include generalized weakness, fatigue, decreased mobility, anxious or depressed mood, sexual dysfunction, sleep disturbances, and cognitive issues (memory disturbance/loss, slow mental processing, poor concentration and so on)."
Twitter: Squid Life Crisis
Violet Evergarden the Movie: Tried to kick you in the teeth then have a bit of a nicer ending. Though one might argue it is pretty sexist and she would have died doing that wearing 8 layers of petticoats.
The Fable: I liked it. A little Leon + T2, bonus points for casual nudity (implied).
Komi Can't Communicate: or KKK (Krusty: Oh, no!). Cute, and this is literally what happens to me when I try to speak Japanese in front of other people, even things I have a prepared response to, so I can relate. However, Netflix really needs to up its subtitling game to cope with the walls of text. Fansubs have been doing it for decades.
2021-11-21
It might have gone over better if it had been "Cowboy Bebop Jazz", where it had been pitched as less the American remake and explicitly 'we are just going to take this and jam for a bit', then just done all the new stuff they wanted to do anyway. Or better: create a series with random premises, characters: the Spike/Vicious buddy comedy, the Jet/Julia cop/not a cop police procedural where Ein is the crook, but nobody acknowledges he's a dog. There's no story, no point, it's just jamming for fun. Compare and Contrast: Dune. Some people think the Lynch version did some scenes better, some worse. Sometimes, the craziness was simply more entertaining. The voiceover did actually convey a lot of information that the new films, despite being probably way more than twice the length, could not be bothered to get around to and just left hanging. My point is if you adapt the same source material, comparisons are going to happen. As a remake, this fails to pick up on anything the original was putting down. One is invited to examine the differences, and assume each is really a choice, conscious or not. Somebody sat down and thought what the original needed was for everyone to be a dick all the time, more blood and torture porn, Qanon dreams of cuckolding and rage, and also much, much less music. If you start out saying "we love it so much we wrote this fan fic, the entire script is on AO3 along with our slash fics", people might be more forgiving. Instead of "You like anime, right? We are going to give you want but somehow it contains none of that and all of the American stuff you have been watching Japanese shows to avoid". And of course, all this skips over the "Hollywood is out of ideas": there are several other unfilmed Dune books you could have filmed. You could tell an entirely Vicious focused side story, given that he's basically the protagonist of this anyway. Or film my sequel, where an older Ed uses the maps of the craters and the satelite lasers to create a chain reaction to bring the moon rocks down, and now has to deal with the cops, gangsters looking to move in to the now livable planet, with the help of her data-dog-brain transplanted into an ISSP assassin's body. And, you might want to sit down for this, you could actually invent new content for the same universe, or entirely new content! I've heard that happens sometimes!
Cowboy Beboy (2021): [No spoilers] Seems like they took post-it notes of the original series, put them in a blender and hit frappe. It takes the traditional Japanese themes of poverty, clinical depression, barely dressed children of indeterminate gender, and replaced them with American values of bloody ultraviolence, cuck fantasies, and the angry white man (The Witcher's non-union Mexican equivalent) who fails upwards. Everybody is a dick all the time, and they know it, but don't stop. It does have something of a twist, but it was also sort of the same thing I was going to do in the rewrite in my head (never a good sign, either that I'm rewriting it rather than watch it, or that it is predictable enough for me to think of it), but less launched out of left field. Some of the musical cues are shoehorned in. Music is never given the same sort of space or prominence. I may have more detailed views about the very end if my brain manages to process it coherently. It may decide to flush the buffer and save itself. It does have good parts: any scene the corgi is in. The sets and scenery are nice. Jet annoyed me in the first scene, but Shakir really grew on me. Cho and especially Pineda are also very good. The fights are nice, but one could guess when Cho got injured, in that they stop. There are many things that are genuinely funny, a lot of little references. The numerous Blade Runner references includes a zoom and enhance. Watanabe, Kanno got paid. I liked all the Classic Macs. One sort-of-semi-spoiler: the big rose window is over the front door of a church, not a bottomless cravas. They'd already gone out the front, so we saw it.
Ford's E-Transit: the boxless option looks nice, could put a much lower box on it as a pop-top camper van, but the very small battery is a questionable choice. I get that their research indicates it is all that is needed, but it is all that is needed for their current customers' current usage. If, as their own pictures indicate, people use these things to move construction supplies, maybe giving them a plug for their tools would be enough to induce them to pay for the second or third battery pack that they could have designed the space for. Example: when factories were electrified, the motors were placed where the water wheel or steam engine had been. The actual revolution was figuring out you could put motors anywhere and redo the layout to be an assembly line.
Uptime: 14 days before the dock refused to connect the usb or network. Better, I suppose.
Johnny Mnemonic: Man, is that some bad acting.
It costs around $10 billion to build a nuclear aircraft carrier, some of which is R&D presumably on the weapon and flight systems and electronics, not specifically the power plant. It costs up to 23 billion to build a traditionally designed nuclear power plant, largely because everything has to be custom designed and built on site. Anybody consider just buying a carrier starter kit, driving it upriver and parking it, running a big extension cord?
Red Notice: formulaic and quippy, but better than the other Reynolds thing that also seemed to be a stealth pilot.
timely hype: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/11/apple-announces-self-service-repair/ Doesn't include the 3s or 5s, but at least its something.
More complaining: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/meet-this-unique-compact-android-phone-from-a-japanese-toaster-company/ It's possible I've not been charging it correctly, given my near total ignorance of passage of time, but the 3s' battery seems to be getting worse, and I think the 5s is swelling again. There's no point in putting a fresh battery into it if it is just going to keep breaking them. The toaster phone is relevant in that there are still people who like smaller, curvy phones. Even Apple, which says nobody buys the 'small' phones it has, makes a smart watch. It's not that Apple has a problem making a device for people who don't use the phone as a tiny computer. Just make the XS Pro version of the watch the same shape as the original iPhone.
Speaking of complaining about medical corporation's inscrutable cost structures, my MAIN Fashion Optical review has hit 1,000 views, which is a lot more than I would have expected. If I managed to disuade just 1% of them, it would have been cheaper for them to have just fixed the glasses to begin with.
The last time I went to Holy Name Hospital, they charged the insurance company a ridiculous $2,000 for a simple blood workup. (And the insurance voluntarily paid it! Or paid some negotiated rate. Who knows?) I want to be a good health care consumer, so I went to Aetna's site, figured out what I needed to put in to get results, but every address they have for a service provider is wrong, or is a hospital. Their reporting form is a web1.0 relic, too. I could also point out all the Yonkers, NY results are a little unhelpful, what with the Hudson River in the middle there. So I'm going back to the hospital, because at least I know where to park, unlike Englewood's busy and one-way streets.
Brain Powerd: 1998 Sunrise anime, Yoko Kanno soundtrack is on Apple Music (OST 2 only), but I don't see the show anywhere. The opening is on Youtube, and it is the cast floating around naked, which might explain why I'd never heard of it. That has nothing to do with the actual show.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/11/netflix-cowboy-bebop-hollywood-anime/620702/ Perhaps I shouldn't see it. I've been rewatching the original. One thing I noticed this time is how little of the soundtrack CDs are actually in the show. Except for some scenes which are nothing but, it doesn’t actually play that much music, just a few bars of something I know goes on for another 4 minutes. A lot of the background music is squeaky fans or the radio.
2021-11-14
I'm finding shack sites that were purchased less than 4 years ago are now for sale at 5 times that price. They are still just lots, so it's not like they fixed up the house. I think I've missed out on the opportunity.
https://www.gawker.com/politics/the-joe-manchin-trolley-problem In related news, Molly Wood is becoming a green tech investor. This is the trolley problem for modern journalists: do all the research, then all you can do is present one opinion, then find an opposing opinion, no matter how deranged, and then throw to the next piece. You don't even get to pull the lever or imply that putting a self-interested coal baron in charge of the country's 21st century energy investment is a terrible idea, or that even he is still better than the entire GQP. At least on the Make Me Smart podcast, Molly and Kai could say things were banana pants, but still, money will make more of a difference. https://imgur.com/gallery/3RLY4Du https://imgur.com/gallery/0lr1uNx
Locke & Key #2: Less novelty, more 'teen' drama. How to have miscommunication drama when there are cell phones and mind reading? Endless people just not communicating.
2021-11-07
My point about the Democrats in a tweet, @GravelInstitute: "The Republican who just won in Virginia was an executive at the Carlyle Group - a private equity firm that has laid off thousands of unionized workers at the firms it acquires. But the Democrats couldn't attack him on it. Because the Democratic nominee was a Carlyle investor."
"There is no way out of the imagined order," Harari writes. "When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison." At least it would smell better. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/08/early-civilizations-had-it-all-figured-out-the-dawn-of-everything?utm_source=digg
Not that I'd want to buy a Ford after the latest Freakonomics episode, but the F-100 Eluminator concept truck is the ideal pickup truck: bumpers at car height, the bed isn't 6 feet off the ground, and it doesn't have the organ mangling front end. (I'm assuming, the pictures didn't have much scale.) It doesn't pretend to be an adventure vehicle while fetching the groceries, or angry about the liberals, or the solution to all problems. It moves you and maybe some of your junk around. Although, the VW T7's rail seating is pretty practical, and unlike most trucks, actually has 4 seats and a narrow 96 inch bed. Or no seats and a wide bed. Or 7 seats and no bed, and a movable center console, which as an excessively tall person, I can appreciate. Still is not the long rumored electric van, though.
2021-10-31
Way of the Househusband (second half of the first season): nothing new, though as noted it is presented as still being the first season, so sure, why not. There's a live action movie coming.
Chaos: odd movie, but it does keep things moving.
Level 16: despite this being exactly the movie I though [French, the girls are ballerinas, was a metaphor for adolescence, can't think of or find the title] was, is decent
"With false collective agreement comes false collective responsibility."
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/27/1049675704/stacey-abrams-medical-debt-relief-pac-donation I'd like to toot my own horn and point out that I did suggest something similar, but also suggest Stacey Abrams is the future of the Democratic Party, and the Clinton, Obama, Biden, Goldman Sachs wing is the past.
Birth of the Dragon: formulaic, but adequate
Any Crybabies Around?: Japanese trailer trash? Every moment is so drawn out, I forgot I had it on 1.25 until some waves zoomed by. They are moving at 75% the speed of a normal human, and it still seemed incredibly slow.
2021-10-24
2021-10-17
I saw another fox (possibly, it might be a UFO, unidentified fox-like object), in a town mulch pile. It saw me and ran before I could get a good look at it.
Blacklist #8: still best with the mad schemes and capers, though the cold war bit was at least faster moving this season, leading up to the last episodes being a bit of a kick in the teeth. (also, Laila Robins could read the phone book.)
Into the Dark #2: No new high concepts, just drama. Also very dark, don't watch on a sunny day.
Oats Studios: terrible. Only Zygote is decent, and even then, didn't accomplish much. Compare and contrast Unsounded's Silver monster: equally as gross, but exists as something the characters can revolve around. This has running, a bit of interesting world building entirely as an exposition dump, then more running. It's not that I'm opposed to short stories, but then at least don't pad out cool stuff with running.
2021-10-10
Anime Fall 2021
I couldn't even be bothered pirating last season's Funimation shows. It's based on a video game/isekai LN, you say, and doesn't end, you say.
Eden's Zero: The super colorful goofy face on a deeper story seems to be a trend. I liked it, though it didn't lean into the post-apocalyptic bit as much as I hoped after the first episode.
2021-10-03
2021-09-26
Summer Anime 2021 round up: not great, at least for the Crunchyroll shows. The best new show is Idaten. The simple colorful art and goofy fights mask a marginally deeper story. 5 sec is OK, but taking forever to do anything. Jahy, Fena are pretty dumb. Aquatope is at least nice to look at, even as not anything actually happens. The one promised plot point seems to have come and gone, and there is apparently another season. Conversely, Night Head is cgi, but has a weird plot.
Harriman update: woke up with a zillion bug bites on my back, a cut on my ankle that must have happened through the sock, and a little burn on my shoulders. Summer doesn't end until I'm incapacitated.
Harriman: some idiot in a very large hunter green truck tried to run me off 106, but other than that, very nice. Farther north this time: Victory, road with abandoned shacks, Sebago, unmarked (but cut into the hill, with a stone wall, at the start. It must have been something at some point, but multiple trees are down so it's a bit of a mess now.) around the top of Sebago, Yellow triangle down a bit so I could take a picture up Sebago (very swampy), then back up to Victory, around Skenonto (which is 1-1 and on-to. Math humor. That's what was floating in my head for a while), all the way back to the dam (IYKWIM), then back to the car because I missed the turn, but loaded up on bug spray again (there was only one bad spot when I guess I had exhausted it and got into the forested valley, fine otherwise), then back up to Red, up Tom Jones, down White to visit the shack, then back out, bumping into the fellow dam enthusiasts again on the way down. There's no Sebago beach anymore, and there was 1 guy briefly using some heavy equipment around some mounds of dirt away from the water. I'm not sure what is going on over there. I filled a bag with trash. I remembered to bring a bag this time, but it was full by the time I got to the shack, so there's still a bunch of bottles and some litter up there.
2021-09-19
I'm thinking of ending things: probably could have stuck to the book at the end
2021-09-12
The Last Mercenary: bit of fun, weird hearing JCVD in French.
Kate: a nice bit of ultra-violence
The Lighthouse of the Orcas: Fastforwarded the bits that didn't have orcas in them. Also the actual people were more Hollywood than the actors.
As much as I like my Matrix sequel idea more, the trailer is pretty nice. I do have Concerns about what happened to Laurence Fishburne, given that they already replaced one black actor with another and did not handle it that well.
https://www.gq.com/story/californias-vanishing-hippie-utopias I don't know about northern california, but if anybody wanted to sell me a hippy commune really cheap to continue its ideals, I'd be interested.
Speaking of games, DE said they redid the intro and it had no effect on the number of people who continued to play Warframe. If they are willing to do that, my input: make the database discoverable. Instead of having a list of things you've seen, scan nodes or whatever to fill out the data you need to get new mods, parts, etc. Connect that to a wishlist app of things to do. I really like the bit when the intro just dumps you into the map and says it's all up to you now, but that is a lot to prioritize. A thing that scans clues like go to Venus, don't mess around on Cetus, defeat this boss for frame parts, always level your stuff, etc.
Cat Quest II: did not play or even see 1, but it is a standard RPG with cat puns. Cute.
FANTASIAN: very visually interesting (which came first, the art or the limitations of tablet rendering?), a lot of hand drawn cutscenes and overall story, but the side quests, combat are pretty old-school and boring. At least attempts were made to update it with the dimengeon. It's been updated with a huge dlc after the walkthrough I saw was written, so it has that going for it.
2021-09-05
"For example, many long-haulers have the hallmark symptom of ME/CFS—post-exertional malaise, in which mild bursts of activity trigger dramatic crashes." "What proportion of ME/CFS is long flu, or long Epstein-Barr, or long cold? No one knows, because few people have cared to look or been funded to do so." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/covid-19-long-haulers-pandemic-future/619941/
2021-08-29
I saw a fox while bicycling. Possibly 2. It was on a ruined foundation, sitting with the brush dangling off the edge looking back at the road. It was still there when I turned around, but then left as a car came by. I saw it again in the shubbery as it turned around to look. The other was a blur running in to somebody's yard. I circled around but didn't see anything else.
Ninja Assassin: adequate ninja cheese. Screenplay by JMS?!
Sweet Girl: meh
Normally, my iPod woes are related to the Mac end, but this time, in the middle of an episode, it forgot it had podcasts. All of them, gone. I assume it was upset that I had dropped it earlier in the day.
World of Demons: Now that I have a controller for the Air, I am trying low power phone games on the M1 instead of PC gaming. The graphics are noticeably low rent on the 4K screen, but it is nice enough. I was not previously familiar with the drunken otter demon.
8bitdo Pro 2: Ars Tech recommended. If you are sufficiently patient, it is shipping. Plugged it in, it just worked. I haven't gotten to any of the firmware features, but haven't needed it, either. My only complaint is the game assumed I have PS marked controller, and there's nothing that indicates what button a triangle is.
2021-08-22
Beckett: slow, but pretty and odd twist
Captain Fantastic: #Shacklife? Maybe. I'd prefer the deep woods, but maybe children would want the house and school to be 'normal'. I was also promised "intense graphic nudity", but it's some 5 year old's butt.
2021-08-15
The Vault: formulaic, also "slowed the atomic motion"?
The Plagues of Breslau: very choppy editing, weird twist.
Midnight Sky: saw this some time ago, didn't log it.
The Paper Tigers: genial at first glance, though the more you look at it, the worse everyone gets.
Message from the King: could have been edited better, but expanding plot. The end makes him seem like a disaster tourist, though
2021-08-08
Tramps: idiots. Kids these days.
Mr. Roosevelt: slightly annoying crazy person.
Shadow: slow in the beginning, nice umbrella weirdness, stabfest at the end.
I just realized Trump is predicted in the Bible: "Love your neighbor!" "That's wokeness! Crucify him! Give us the thief Barabas."
Sweetheart: Tourist exploits native islander, despoils environment. Nice up to that point.
Piercing: crazy people do crazy things
2021-08-01
What Keeps you Alive: Might have used too many horror movie tropes in the beginning, but good stuff, #shacklife
The Night Comes for Us: Another movie I didn't log, or saw with another title. Ultra-violence.
Highpoint, NJ: Very clean, and even cleaner when I got through with it. Great views, very windy at the monument. The lake seemed warm and full of fish. The area seems nice. I'm too tired to enjoy it now, plus covid jacked up all the prices.
Words bubble up like soda pop: cute, less autistic than some of these.
2021-07-25
Midnight run: so much smoking
Shadows House: Started off great, but detoured into a senin exam subplot, then ended.
Anime Summer 2021
American Ultra: solid effort.
The Sum of All Fears: the lesser of the various Ryans, Jack.
6 Bullets: Either this is another movie I saw but didn't log, or Netflix is just re-using movies with new titles, because this keeps happening.
Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness: Our hero, the corporate stooge.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Background_Tasks_API
https://kotaku.com/wow-disappointment-plus-twitch-start-mass-exodus-into-1847283978 I'm reminded of the bit in "Inception": design a maze in a minute that takes 5 minutes to solve. WoW's designers got the same instructions, but then slapped on a 4:55 flight to Oribos to cover their ass.
2021-07-11
Vivy - Fluorite Eye's Song: is a good as WEP is annoying. I love me some depressive Sci Fi weirdness. Was kind of expecting the drone to reveal its not-given real name was "Mawhrin-Skel" or "Flere-Imsaho" or something.
Black Sea: pretty sure the writers don't know what buoyancy is.
Major Grom: Plague Doctor: another installment of the MGCU.
The middle/wheel button on the PC stopped working. This has had the unfortunate side effect of driving home just how much WoW time is spent not doing anything, just auto-running, or tabbed out completely. At least Korthia is pretty small, but my main recollection of 9.0 is Imgur. In related news, I switched to using gold to pay for the game time. It will run out eventually at the current prices, but I may not care by then.
2021-07-04
Better WEP I came up with while on the toilet: cut all the AI stuff, but push it into the future and make the Uras the AIs managing civilization, who are perplexed by suicides in their perfect future and are conducting full-dive vr experiments with the bereaved to try and understand, leading to the sense of acceptance that you'll just never know what people are thinking, and that you can only try to talk to them more while they are alive. And, you know, maybe stop the bullying.
Wonder Egg Priority 13: This was planned as a 12+1 episode anime original, right? Why does it have a cleanup episode that makes no sense in relation to the others, pulls an almost literal Poochi, then sets up another season that will never exist? I accept that it was saying the characters don't get to have all their questions answered, but it can't also introduce huge SF plot points and then say it doesn't matter. And its not a production issue, unless they had started animation before actually coming up with the plot. Very irritating. I think somebody saw Madoka one too many times.
Godzilla Singular Point: contains very little Godzilla, but I enjoyed the nerd-wankery. (look up quaternions and octonions!) I did not like that Godzilla seemed to evolve out of Titanosaurus, an often under-appreciated kaiju. Also: the original monster sounds and music cues are a must-have. Head canon: the red dust is Sand Star and they just want to be Friends.
2021-06-27
Spring 2021 Review: ODDTAXI's collapsing plotlines beat out ETERNITY's timeskip lull. Joran failed to stick the end, while 86 failed to end at all, as it had a bleak end at episode 11, then continues for another episode then another season planned. Revengers is mostly crying. Nagatoro, as predicted, is mostly meanness and chigaiyoooo. Shaved, 300 Slimes exist. Thunderbolt and Spider continue good work, though both might suffer from too many characters. I caught up with and liked Kemono Jihen and Wonder Egg Priority, though WEP is missing an episode, and also possibly a point? It says the characters have learned to embrace not knowing, so the series doesn't have to tell you anything, or end, apparently. Still waiting for the batch torrents for the funimation series. While I have an account, the subtitles just never worked consistently, and its easier to pirate them than use the actual website. Crunchyroll's update is still harder to use to watch new things, but at least once I figure out which new show is new, it plays the video.
Katla: very Dark, also dark, and not just the film. Everyone's pupils are huge. I can't tell how cold it is, either. Some people are in parkas on ice, others outside in t-shirts and flowers are growing. Certainly looks cold.
2021-06-20
Sweet Tooth: ep 1-3 looks great. I guess if it is aimed at children it will all be new to them.
Trese: the background art is great, but the show is meh
Awake: slow start, but nice concept.
I visited the swamp shack site. It would be perfect if it were actually possible to go outside. The flies are huge and everywhere. I got 2 ticks and I didn't ever leave the trail or road. The area did have a vibe of pending climate change disaster, especially the nearby beach erosion that has eaten most of the houses. The high tide is up on to the road. Even with the house on it, it isn't worth the NJ real estate taxes.
I should point out why I still use/complain about the old iPhone and Podcasts. While driving, with 2 2 hours shows queued up, I find that one is actually 30 minutes because it's really a different show, and the other swapped show has auto-deleted and is just gone. I'm in a car, and don't want to download that again over the cell connection on the phone providing directions, and the old phone doesn't have a cell connection. I wanted it set up in advance. This used to work. I don't know why I can't still have that.
Latest Podcrap weirdness: 2 podcasts are in the other's file. I noticed that the iphone had them in the correct stream but with the episode names are wrong. The Mac app has the episode names in the correct places, but the content is wrong. This has nothing to do with getting files on to an ancient phone. The Mac app is playing "Puzzling Evidence June 11" but I'm hearing Friday's Marketplace. #applepodcrap
2021-06-13
Xtreme: Very Wick inspired
Sniper: Legacy: terrible.
The Wind: could have picked a lane, monster horror or unreliable narrator and drama
KILL La KILL: The Netflix subtitles can only do one thing at a time, so all subtitles for the text on the screen block the dialog. On the other hand, other shows don't translate text at all. Piracy includes translation notes!
2021-06-06
Cool Hand Luke: I'm going to have to agree with the squares on this one.
And I spoke too soon. Trying to delete the first item (of hundreds) caused it to want to download all of them. I hate Podcasts so much, and it is getting an update, so Apple can monetize it. But not fix it. And I can't replace it, because Apple made it too hard for anybody else to push files to an iOS6 iPhone3. I just dropped the show rather than deal with this.
Even though I have it set to manual for precisely this reason, Podcasts still tried to download hundreds of episodes of multiple shows, on its own. Fortunately it only downloaded one of each, but the entries are all still there. And the only way to get rid of them is to do them one at a time.
2021-05-30
Verizon keeps telling me there are 3 minute voicemails from the town, but when I log in (which is a needlessly convoluted process that frequently involves deleting cookies), there are no voicemails to be found. Maybe the internet is a mistake.
The Last Three Days: delivers an inadequate amount of Liam. Mostly fun for the vintage Internet, iPhone, and Prius.
Layer Cake: oddly related to 'The Platform' thematically. Pretty sure I saw this, but didn't log it.
The Platform: meh
Still can't leave the Bluetooth keyboard on when the M1 sleeps. Is it the age of the keyboard, or Karabiner?
Bad Day for the Cut: good
Resident Evil: Extinction: sharp cuts at least keep it moving along.
Monsters: Dark Continent: a lot of something.
Better than us: Unlike the Sette Frummagem line of blue shirts ("Better than you"), not great, and at 16 hour long episodes, too much of an investment. Only saw the first.
Ad Vitam: very slow build and the characters are all horrible people, but freaky sf concepts come together eventually.
2021-05-23
To the Lake: Very Walking Dead, but not really a complement
My problem with modern Mac software: "We need a return on our IP," said Cook. "We have 150,000 APIs to create and maintain, numerous developer tools, and processing fees." The maddening weirdness that happens is because it's not anybody's job. Podcasts or whatever the zoom thing was isn't a marketable IP. Michael Tsai and his Mail issues: G-suite became the new hotness and Apple just abandoned Mail because there wasn't a return on IP.
Did they take out the individual podcast download settings? And it didn't delete the old ones again. So the zoom thing might have stopped happening, but I still have to reboot every week to keep the podcasts running?
Federighi said in the testimony. "And as I say, today, we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don't find acceptable and is much worse than iOS." Both app stores are full of dark patterns, shovelware, scams, and outright malware.
The Irregulars: dnf
So the electric F-150 has a 14 cubic foot frunk. They made a deliberate decision to keep the pedestrian-killing front end. There's literally nothing stopping them from raking it back a few degrees. "If you ask people what they want, you get a Homer." but also "And when we did research with customers — we're Ford, [we make] 1.1 million of these pickup trucks every year [...] That scale helps to bring the price down. The second thing [we heard is], "I don't want this to be a spaceship" They could have sold the customer on the same front end as the van, if they wanted to. Instead they went with the Truck-kun organ-mangler, because that's what people want.
https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui-doesnt-work-anymore-d276271bfa40 Not a bad idea, but I use this site for that. (I have a script 'didIWatch' to search it. It's just grep and the path.) I do have file storage, and that includes clippings (the permanent copy/paste). I have that on a NAS in order to keep it away from Apple's attempts to remake the desktop.
Wheelman: adequate, and certainly a great way to make a movie with no sets.
Yasuke: was good until the Church bits started. I stand by my theory that adding Christianity to anime is death.
People have pointed out it is now impossible to actually turn off a Mac. I think my issue with putting it to sleep is that I can't stop the mouse from making tiny movements after/during the click on the menu item. I have much better luck using the trackpad. That's probably the issue with the dock never allowing the monitor to stay asleep, too.
2021-05-16
Love, Death, and Robots 2: The first season has higher highs and lower lows. Aside from the first episode, these are all good.
Oxygen: skipped through the torture bits, but the twist is nice enough.
Shadow and Bone: kind of YA, half-season
Stowaway: could have been shorter
I guess this is it for the iPhone 3S: no podcasts are copying now, out of the ever-increasing backlog of 12, 4 of which had to be manually downloaded. {update: restart seems to have fixed that. It has not done the zoom thing again, so at least it is getting better than Windows95, but still not NT. This kind of thing makes me want to try to virtualize MacOS again.}
HOMONCULUS: deadly dull. I liked it better when it was 3 gay kappas sucking balls out of people's anuses with a song and dance routine from some otters.
Sally and Bin and the flesh golem
Sally is confused about the theological implications of this.
Sally and Kokkuri go to hell
We all are, sweetie.
2021-05-09
Podcasts refused to download or sync fully half of the episodes, and this after a mid-week refresh. This worked, for years and years, then it got broken, and it is obviously not ever getting fixed. That's what irritates me the most. For all the deserved hype about the M1, Apple seems to have abandoned things like podcasts, the education market, quality...
I was looking at shack sites again. So many things were purchased for 5-20K$ in the last few years and are now on the market for 90K$.
Six Colors suggests the reason Podcasts is not able to pick up new shows is no matter how often you set it to check, it only checks Apple's aged information. All I can say is it has been really lousy at keeping up with Marketplace and Make Me Smart on a daily basis. Nothing else really matters, because I load up the pod-device weekly, but then there's all the times where it goes 2 weeks without listening to a podcast (because Apple wasn't caught up), then decides on its own to never download another one.
Firefox stopped working. It might have been the same issue that caused Chrome to stop working. While I was trashing its preferences, I ran into a weirdness where the 'Searching "Preferences"' showed it as in the Preferences, even after I trashed it twice. It wasn't until I tried to rm it that I saw the path had changed, the Finder window was just incorrect. Also the dock stopped working until I unplugged it repeatedly.
11.3.1, and I didn't have to reinstall git. That's progress, at least. I didn't even try to do the TouchID PAM, so no news on that. And the Messages panel had content on wake from sleep, which is nice. This is supposed to have fixed Karabiner's shutdown issue, too, so we'll see how that goes. On the other hand, it still can't go to sleep, and the phone had no podcasts on it. I saw them copy, saw the 800MB audio usage, then the next day, nothing, not even a button in the app.
2021-05-02
Despite quitting next week, people are still giving me stuff to do, because 4 weeks notice wasn't specific enough. I do feel an obligation to get everything actually working. I had 2 hours of actual productivity, but then today noticed that very little of it actually works in the wkhtml2pdf. I won't be fully vaccinated until June, anyway.
2021-04-25
I turned off Steermouse and Karabiner. (not the same thing as uninstalled.) It still won't go to sleep in 3-5 tries. It did survive 2 sleep cycles, which is more than it did with the last reboot. I can't work like this, though.
Zoom thing again. uptime: 7 hours, and it was asleep most of that. It can not be counted on to wake from sleep, and I must be the only person having this problem.
I rechecked Funimation's subtitles. Now they are so on they show up three times to make up for lost time. At least I can turn off the extra ones. Site is still a pain.
Am I really the only person having an issue with the one of 2 monitors being slightly zoomed in on wake from sleep, and the menubar and Exposé stop working? Or is it just that using the word 'zoom' brings up nothing but the app and its issues. Uptime: 1 day. Seems like it would be easier to just mine bitcoin or something to keep it awake all the time.
Related, last year's Thunderbolt Fantasy movie is listed as season 4, so every episode of the current season 3 will try to continue into it.
Sure, Crunchyroll, having watched the most recent episode, I want to watch the entire season to date dubbed in German. That's totally a useful thing to have done.
https://manytricks.com/menuwhere/ I don't have a big enough monitor for this to be necessary, but I am a sucker for NeXT-inspired menus. Would be even nicer if it was more like the modern type-ahead command tool, but the blog notes that's not actually possible with the OS menu system.
https://www.techradar.com/news/the-new-imac-isnt-pretty-its-just-badly-designed and MKBHD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vInUoPtg8m0 point out the thinness is anorexia. Articles that praise it are just the colors: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/why-new-imac-might-be-apples-most-brilliant-product-ever.html This is a poorly designed, well marketed product. I'm hoping this is just some remaining Ive influence, and eventually the Pro line will make better sense. Put the whole computer in the power brick with under-desk ports like ethernet, with a pod for desktop ports! Or just glue the mini to the back of the monitor! In related news, the zoom thing happened again. Yesterday the a11y zoom worked on one monitor, now it's completely dead. I'm so very tired and would just like something to work.
Buying a mini and brain-dead 5K iMac and inserting a new controller board looks like the best solution for an M1 desktop. Bonus: if you shuck the display out of the Mac case, you can have a non-reflective surface! Glue a vesa mount to the back of the display!!! Bwa ha ha!!!1!
Speaking of terrible dock experiences, the new iMac sucks. The design is terrible, to the point it makes the computer worse. It has less ports than the Mini. It has a dock, in the form of an ethernet enabled power brick. (It's not the power dock concept I'm opposed to, given that I basically have that now, but why only one ethernet port?)(and why does it get magsafe, but the laptops don't?) I wouldn't buy one unless there's a way to recover the monitor when the mac dies (or the 8GB RAM becomes unusable). Finally having touch id is nice, but it's been nearly useless on the Air: every update disables the CLI PAM, and every reboot disables the touch id until you use a password. Many dialogs don't seem to support it. (They might, but don't advertise it like others.) The most common usage, Safari passwords, is actually more work with touch id than it was without it, though also probably more secure.
Unplugging the caldigit ts3 dock from the mac, not unpowering either, seems better at reseting the dock when it forgets it has usb and networking.
"This vaccine is free of charge, but your health insurance will be charged an administration fee." So the infomercial definition of free, then?
The Yin Yang Master: a lot of CGI, but nice enough. The demon ferrets were nice.
I'm reaching the opinion that it is impossible to get simulcast anime anywhere. I still can't get subtitles working on funimation, and their site is a mess, and crunchyroll's long standing issues with not being able to tell when you watched a show are now made 1000 times worse with the new UI. So either go with the Netflix or Amazon model and watch seasons at a time, or just pay them, but go back to tracking downloads.
2021-04-18
Synchronic: could have been shorter, but nice twists.
https://slate.com/business/2021/04/good-design-bad-cities-zoning-commissions-preservation-boards.html
People just noticed I quit 2 weeks ago.
Having to reinstall chrome has left me with 2 copies of the same device, sort of. It wants to let me send things to the other device, but google won't let me delete the old chrome because it's the same device I'm logged in to. I guess I just now have new menu items everywhere forever.
Pacific Rim: The Black: introduced a bunch of lore at the end that suggests there's something other than the movie that I haven't seen (or I forgot), but b-movie enough. [apparently, there is another movie...]
Giving 4 weeks notice was probably a mistake. 2 weeks would be just 3 days away, and I don't know if I can make that.
https://aeon.co/essays/to-be-fully-human-we-must-also-be-fully-embodied-animal
2021-04-11
Spring 2021 Anime
Restarted, and images don't display in Chrome. Entering text into a Chrome address bar is deeply messed up. Restarting chrome doesn't help. Restarting the machine didn't help, either! Got an error both times, and the first time, was actually trying to shut down. (That still doesn't work.) I had to remove the ~/Library/Application Support/Google and reinstall Chrome. The first thing that requires reinstalling MacOS will the last thing I do on a Mac.
B the Beginning 2 the Middleling: confusing, and seemed like half a season at best.
I'm listening to a Science Friday about Long COVID and it matches all of my symptoms, but I can't focus on it, because of my symptoms. "We need to be prepared for an influx of work status changes." I'm trying to quit again, but they'll take it more seriously when I just don't show up. No more Ruby version issues and screaming into a pillow. Triggers: unfortunately, my triggers are things like walking up the stairs to my 3rd floor condo, and using my brain goo. It's not like I can stop doing that, unless I quit my job and live in a shack in the woods.
Speaking of heat spreaders, I wonder if adding the G5's thermal stuff to the weirdly hot Caldigit dock would help.
WoW Shadowlands: Losing interest. It's too slow. I log in, check my follower's quests, then tab out while flying to another realm for dailies, which are stretched to cover a lack of new content. Related, the maw. Riding is too fast, so here's walking everywhere. I don't enjoy the mythic randoms or pvp any more, both of which are/were necessary to gear up for raids. The raid was ok. Enh shaman is just not fun, though I get it was designed as a technical spec. I've been enjoying my ass rogue and bm hunter more, and even that has huge down time built in to it, just poison things and tab out. (Imagine if I had a non-suck spec!) I liked the weekly release thing, maybe even the anime drought, though it's been weeks since I upgraded anything. I liked building legendaries, though LW got shafted on that one. I liked Torgast as a concept, but like Destiny, did not take the procedural generation and configurable difficulty as seriously as Warframe. There's no point to it. I am still salty about the 18 level thing, didn't get the meme powers, couldn't kill the last boss. Never went back. The lore seemed better, but there's also a lot of weird stuff that gets mentioned, but never explained. The chatty flight points are great. I think I've taken the Warframe approach to WoW: there is no endgame, the fun is in mastery ranking useless new weapons while you wait for new frame parts to randomly drop. In other news, I've also stopped caring about maxing out Warframe. If I could find a gently diverting game that runs on an M1 Air, I'd probably stop PC gaming. Ironically, that might be slowly leveling all my other WoW characters, as there is an M1 version of WoW, and I'm assuming the single thread doesn't exhaust the cpu. (never got the thermal pads to connect the heat spreader to the case for the Air.)
Went out for a walk, the zoom thing happened again. This time, at least, Zoom was running, but no fullscreen apps. Uptime: 1 day. I'm pretty sure Apple wouldn't have released a device that has this kind of stability, so it has to be the dock or the 2 extensions, neither of which I'm willing to live without. (though if I got a mouse with internal memory, I could live without steermouse. Probably the same for karabiner if I had a keyboard that could do its own macros. Still want to do that RPi0 HID.)
Woke from sleep, mouse and network are down. Power cycled the dock, but now the other monitor is off and the menu bar font is really small. Maybe giving direct memory access to unstable Caldigit TS3 docks is not a good idea?
2021-04-04
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/new-jersey/nj-relaxing-nature/
https://www.escapees.com/event/webinar-domicile-for-rvers/ Escapees employees show newcomers how to establish permanent addresses, at least for legal purposes, in states like Florida or South Dakota, which, like Texas, impose no state income tax.
Reboot for the dock again.
Early Nana-fan kawasemi27 took down all their stuff on twitter. That's what got me hooked on the Nanachi collecting. My 674 Nana-pictures will keep me going.
Screen time: "average" daily usage: 23h 59m. Despite being asleep for at least 10 hours a day!
2021-03-28
Anime Review Winter 2021: Heaven's Design Team is great. I wouldn't want to binge it, but at a weekly dose of weird animal facts, it's pretty good. Spider is OK. Still haven't gotten around to finishing Ramune or ex-arm. The continued series (Cells + Cells Black, Kaisen, Laid-Back, ZERO, AoT, Uma, Non, and even Yatogame) all good. Pretty good season over all.
Dock didn't do usb or network, but did video. 3 dock power cycles didn't fix it. 10 days this time! Almost like a real computer.
2021-03-21
Highrise Invasion: First episode only.
In the Shadow of the Moon: Could have been shorter, but nice plot
https://nova.app/ there are a few things that irritate me, but it is nice to see actual Mac dev and not Electron apps. Does that Mac native thing BBEdit does though, new windows are very tall. Uses a little more RAM than BBEdit, but has VSC-like plugins and git focus. Thing that bugs me: the scroll on the tabs requires a horizontal scroll to move horizontally. You might think that was logical, but it is much easier to just mouse-over and scroll. (Also it scrolls a tiny, tiny amount, but that might be related to the widget scroll below. I might have some issue with the settings and my custom driver.) Both work fine with the touchpad.
I stopped running full screen catalyst apps on the laptop, and haven't had the zoom thing in a week. Possibly a coincidence, possibly catalyst is not ready for prime time. [Nope, spoke to soon. It was asleep at lunch, dead when I got back. uptime: 8days]
The widgets are back in the editor, though the interface is unusable with a mouse. There's no scrollbar, and the amount the scrollwheel moves the list of widgets is minimal.
https://www.vox.com/22298751/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-hauler-symptoms in a hospital for 19 days pre-covids: "what he describes as “a subtle but noticeable difference in concentration and ability to form new memories.”" I would not be describing it as subtle.
2021-03-14
I hadn't even noticed this abomination, possibly because my menus frequently aren't working: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2021/03/throwing-shade-on-gray/ Also, obviously a right-thinking individual: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2021/03/now-i-am-become-macos-update/
All of the notification widgets are gone... Not just from the panel, but the edit screen as well.
Obviously that also required installing the xcode-select again to get git. Another 9 minute download that spends another X minutes on "About 2 seconds remaining" while the disk IO goes through the roof. Also, I had only plugged in the iPhone because it missed 6 podcasts. Turns out, it sees them. It just won't download them. So frustrating.
Downloaded the 11.2.3 update before it made me, because of the zoom/menubar thing again. Might as well get 1 extra reboot out of the way. If I was able to consider myself a working professional, I'd be annoyed and disappointed. On the other hand, it is the Air, it probably wasn't intended to be plugged in to a dock. Plus: the 3.37GB download was mostly at 600KBps. Then it spent 15 minutes "Preparing". Maybe the catastrophic SSD write usage is just system updates. Uptime: 3 days. Maybe: I plugged the old iPhone in while the air/dock was asleep, and this happened when it work up, plus the iPhone was not visible.
I got a text message from a "local landlord" looking to buy my house, and I reflexively deleted it. I've gotten similar things in the mail from actual local people, but I just now realized that was probably Jamie Rubin's address! The one he owes all the back taxes on! That Accounts Receivable Technology has been calling me about for years. I was one step closer to stealing his identity.
I made a Breathing timers for Long COVID relief app. A Weak Aura style timer might be better, but I was aiming for a friendly blobject.
Rebooted again, but for a normal system upgrade. Still generally behaved. I would still like to complain to the manager that version point upgrades still removes git from the system. Also that a normal upgrade takes forever.
Last week's Screen Time average usage: 23h 6m. Given that this is clearly not the case, I'm thinking perhaps there's something wrong with Screen Time.
2021-03-07
The Signal: Nicely paced, with the flow of new situations. I wouldn't think too deeply on it, though.
Love on Delivery: Early Chow. Funny, though possibly too zany, and very much a throw everything at the screen approach.
Rememory: Moody, reminded me of a similarly themed Jonathan Lethem story "Gun, With Occasional Music". This had an additional bit of mega-tragedy, but "Gun" was a motiveless mystery. Also, stop throwing things into the ocean, people.
New design mockup for Crunchyroll Beta The Beta Crunchyroll queue is terrible for simulcasting, but at least has dark mode. It doesn't have jQuery any more, so a new version of my CrunchyrollQ bookmarklet is less than ideal:

for (const a of document.querySelectorAll("h5.c-watchlist-card__subtitle")) { a.textContent.includes("Watch Again") && (a.parentNode. parentNode.parentNode. parentNode.parentNode.parentNode. style.display='none'); }

Problem: the list of shows is hydrated, and absolutely positioned, so the cards don't exist on page load and don't move if you delete them, so you'd be running this every time it adds new content when it scrolls, and it makes you scroll. It would probably have to be hacked into the filter system. There is the API call that returns the JSON being used to create the list, but that has a complicated url and auth-token. I'm not sure how often that changes, but one could inject an app to monitor xhr or re-do that call, get the results, clear the page, correct for that issue where it doesn't remember you have watched a show, and display only the series with unwatched episodes as a series of simple links. You know what would be really handy: the extensible filter system I build for Shopify.

I am aware of irony of complaining about UI/UX on this site.

I just don't want to have to put so much effort into picking my lunch anime. You know what doesn't make me do all this? PIRACY!!!!!


After last week, the M1 has been behaved again, though I still don't dare the Bluetooth. Although there is this thing in Music where there are 4 overlapping scrollbars... And the UI in Podcasts locks up... And random events in Calendar have acquired another alarm 1 day before the event... And Music still can't play or import random mp3s, some of which iTunes burned from CDs...
2021-02-28
It might just be the pandemic, but there is still traffic and the snow still seems reasonably clean. The filth doesn't seem to go as far from the street, and isn't as dark. Could it be cleaner cars? Thanks, Obama and/or Covids.
New anti-readable site idea: each post is a hover on a dot in that svg.
This https://xoihazard.com/tools/halftone/ turns things into svg halftones or 8bit pixel style. I'm assuming this only looks good on a hidpi monitor.
A halftone Nanachi
I don't want to turn this into a log of M1/11 problems, but this really is Windows 95 levels of stability. Today's issue: USB devices got no power on wake. This is probably the dock's fault, but only a reboot fixes it, not power cycling the dock, and Apple doesn't sell its own dock to provide its coherent walled-garden experience. The 2013 is just doing some mail and Netflix next to the PC, but hasn't been rebooted since the last OS update, and it has multiple pending updates because 11.0 would have bricked the machine. I'm sure the Air would be better without any peripherals, because that seems like how they tested it. Maybe I just need to stop using multiple Spaces, as reordering the windows is the most time-consuming part of each reboot, and have it reboot itself every morning. (but then it asks for a password. it just gets worse and worse.) Related: http://morrick.me/archives/9220
2021-02-21
When I tried to shut down, it restarted. Maybe I clicked the wrong thing, but it did it again from the login screen. It did shut down the third time without the dock attached.
I didn't even bother to reboot it this time. Karabiner has been off, so you can't blame that (for everything), and it still sometimes refuses to sleep, and Expose stopped working on 1 monitor.
Again! Nothing says trillion dollar company like an uptime measured in hours. I saw https://mjtsai.com/blog/2021/02/18/why-reporting-bugs-to-apple-may-harm-software-quality/, launched Feedback Assistant and fill out the form, but gave up. This is never getting fixed. I should just use the second screen for 80% of pictures of Nanachi. Though related to https://eclecticlight.co/2021/02/16/why-reporting-bugs-to-apple-may-harm-software-quality/ I content the core problem is Apple has refused to be Unix. No app can stand alone and just be correct at the thing it does. Nobody has responsibility for a thing. Just endless bug tickets and sprints.
Had to restart the zoom/menubar thing again, and this time Karabiner was off, bluetooth was off.
Had to restart for the zoom/menubar thing. At least I remembered that the error on boot is a known Karabiner issue, and the bluetooth thing could be, in that it involves a keyboard, but the zoom thing is off, and happens anyway.
Had to restart because the usb/network on the dock didn't come back on wake from sleep. Maybe it just hates keyboards.
2021-02-14
Midnight Special: Nice, if slow. If you've wondered what Adam Driver drives, it a Prius.
The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity: Unexpectedly, onmiyoji.
Outside the Wire: not sure what the message is, or at least what people are supposed to take away.
"Fun" new thing: you can put exponents into css transform: translate3d(0px, -2.24e+06px, 0px); It's fun because the slider has gone berserk and started creating huge tiles.
Another day, another menubar restart. New weirdness: I turned on the "reduce transparency", but some apps (podcasts, the dock) also turned on the increased contrast. It's just such a mess. Why do I get out of bed for this.
Tesla "investing" in bitcoin is the end of capitalism. An amount equal to a year's R&D, spent in a gamble that will probably pay off more than the R & D would have.
Having to reinstall git after every system update is also incredibly irritating. It's Apple's dev tool package.
Without the bluetooth bug, The Air lasted until Wednesday before the zoom bug required a restart. Then an hour later another restart for the 11.2.1 update...
2021-02-07
Space Sweepers: slightly self-indulgent, but a nice enough spectacle. I did have to turn the CC on because the un-subtitled English was a bit much.
So the bluetooth is off and the Air lived through the night. But the zoom/menubar thing is back so I had to restart it again anyway. I turned off the full screen zoom. It did that on its own. Given there's so little control over the daemons running, I don't think I can stop it from doing that.
http://morrick.me/archives/9150 I do think the Mac11 designers had a theme. I too would argue it's poorly implemented and unnecessary, but just look at Ubuntu. That's a desktop OS that went all in on huge buttons and giant sidebars, and not because of iOS integration. They did a good job, because it took a mess of divergent designs and forced them together. Mac11 did the opposite, by updating some apps and not others. (They can't even agree where the sidebar goes, as in Safari and Finder.) I'm using an old USB keyboard because the batteries died, so the bluetooth is off for a while. I would like to point out, re: PB G3 era nostalgia, that the M1 rebooting in the middle of the night at random (generally) does not result in data loss, only the time loss of logging in, re-ordering all the windows (because they can't remember which space they were on), changing the speaker because that changes at random. Much like the panel gaps on Teslas, its not the core concept I'm complaining about, just the lack of finish on what is being sold at a premium.
And the bluetooth crashed again. I need a wired keyboard, but I have come to like the 60% chicklet, and Apple's is $100. It's been spending so much time on at night, the battery management switched from "is always plugged in", even though it doesn't log its night time adventures at all in the Screen On Usage, because I'm not logged in, presumably.
And the bluetooth crashed again. I guess I can look forward to another couple months of that until 11.3, or this can get added to the list of bugs that simply never get fixed.
I also noticed the night shift is on, but apparently has a very different view of what sunset means.
11.2 is already off to a good start: can't click on the menu bar again, and the laptop screen is slightly zoomed in. This seems to be a different zoom bug than the usual one, because restarting universal doesn't fix it, but restarting the system does.
The counter, scrub bar in the menu bar play thing keeps ticking after you hit the pause button in the play thing, or the app. I considered reporting it, but it is so minor compared to the other issues, I did not. Hopefully the bluetooth crashing thing has been fixed, but the Apple release notes are so vague, there's no way to tell if they even addressed it, or just the mini's much larger bluetooth issue.
2021-01-31
Already restarting because the zoom on the laptop monitor won't zoom out all the way again. Also, it turns out when I try to restart, the menu bar isn't working.
Apes together strong
I restarted the Air hoping that would fix the dock (it did), but I got a kernel panic report when it restarted, and all the window chrome is purple. I'm assuming that is the accent color, but it wasn't like that before the restart.
2021-01-24
Podcasts randomly decided to download hundreds of episodes, and while trying to stop it, the UI froze up again. Plus, quitting it did not actually quit it. Plus, the half-downloaded episodes are still there. It also bugs me that you can set a podcast to daily, but not when it downloads, assuming it happens at all. The daily podcasts are never there when I look for them, or there are 3 of them.
Magicians #5: Who would trust a fox's reviews? They all lie. I'm assuming foxes still know how to be happy. though.
Anime Winter 2021 These are all kind of terrible, but there are some nice new seasons for older stuff.
Bluetooth crash in the middle of the night again. Really need to turn it off before sleep, but I couldn't get an automator to do all that.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/1/15/22232033/marc-lore-walmart-leaving-jet-city-future-capitalism I'm glad somebody is thinking about it, but the article didn't really get into what he wants.
2021-01-17
Still can't get subtitles working on funimation.com. Just Cells Black, unless I missed something, which I might have, because the website is terrible.
Podcasts app stopped responding to mouse clicks. It's running, the menu works, but unclickable, even after an app restart. uptime 9 days. Also I suspect the os doesn't actually quit apps. The re-launch seems very fast.
Some bitcoin loon on Marketplace Morning Report: "Everyday the Baby Boomers are transferring wealth to Millennials or Gen Z" Typical.
My Pictures folder is empty. I'm assuming this is related to the Music thing some how, but I never meant to turn any of this on, and even if I did, it's scary that it just up and deleted everything. Even a Time Machine backup would eventually only reflect the empty directory. If I wasn't trying to save another image into my phone desktop pictures, I might not have noticed for ages. If I connect the phone, is it going to delete those photos, too? Aside from ranting on a website nobody reads, I don't know how to complain about this. The only way to have a stable Mac is not use any of Apple's special directories?
The last blood work was $2,000, up another 100%, up from last year's 100% increase. I don't want the hospital to enter some economic death spiral, but really?
https://scottsantens.com/engineering-argument-for-unconditional-universal-basic-income-ubi-fault-tolerance-graceful-failure-redundancy
I somehow turned on Apple's Music's library crap. I can playlist online things now, which will be nice, but there's now a second copy of nearly everything on my drive and it is offering to download the things that were copied (that are on my drive (twice)). At least it didn't delete everything, but some things are gone. Though I don't know for sure that they were there before this event and after the move the M1. For one I know I have the CD, but the iMac died, so no CD player. At least it can't delete things off the PiNAS: rsync won't delete anything.
Google Maps reports my MAIN Fashion Optical, Bergenfield NJ review is "really popular" and "has helped people". I've been trying to not wear glasses any more because my distance vision has improved with age, but they (the old glasses, not the new ones, which are very expensive garbage) help with the computer and they just live on my face, and I don't have non-clip-on sun glasses. I don't not wear them as much as I'd like. I can't drive with them, which makes the sunglasses awkward.
2021-01-10
Unknown: I skipped the setup, but the meta-twist was decent enough.
Bluetooth crashed again, in the middle of the night, drained the battery because it had the screen on until I happened to get up early.
2021-01-03
Binchotan House interior model
There's an unofficial Binchou-tan site http://www.charcoalhead.com/
Project Binchou-stan is still on hold for Covid. The South Jersey site is (probably) still secretly for sale, suggesting something is wrong with it beyond the pending flooding, and the prices in North Jersey doubled. I still need to go to these places, or farther away, but I'm getting worse. A dream deferred, indeed.
Nothing particularly technically interesting about this year's theme, except the image is webp only, now that Apple has finally gotten on board with supporting at least one next gen format.

2020 Drivel


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