A Geek Goes Flying

Long story. I bought a cheap (IIRC it was a Black Friday-ish sale for like $39) Fire HD 8 tablet to have a cheap e-reader, and got a waterproof case to go with it. The case was misidentified and only fit a different generation, which I found on eBay. (Works fine, but of course now the complex hot tub is closed due to COVID-19. But I digress.) I ended up with an “extra” cheap Fire HD 8, apparently a generation 6. It’s been floating around as I haven’t really found a use for it until now, it’s just not in my normal (iPad, iPhone, Mac) workflow, and let’s face it, Android File Transfer is a kludge. Anyway. Found myself with some spare cycles while I was waiting for a long task to complete, so I dug into things a bit. With FolderSync I was able to get it talking to my WebDAV server, and automatically syncing a directory of files. (First, add an “Account,” then, add a “Folderpair.”) But in order to get that installed and running, I had to install the Google Play store. Simple instructions

I have an old “Mid-2007” MacBook (Core 2 Duo, upgraded with 3GB RAM and a 60GB SSD), that’s well past its prime, but still works fine. (The battery, swapped in 2015, only has 25 cycles on it.) I gave up trying to get Linux installed on it, and although somewhat more modern versions of OS X have been hacked to work on it, Lion works well enough for most things and is actually supported, vs. being a mostly-working-but-broken-in-various-aspects hack. (I respect a good hack, but when the screen doesn’t redraw properly...) So, it’s a frozen in time machine running OS X 10.7.5, “Lion,” an operating system dating back a decade or so. All is not lost, though. I installed Arctic Fox for web browsing. Frustratingly, because GitHub has deprecated older TLS mechanisms, I had to download the browser on another machine and copy it over using Screen Sharing. (I get the impetus behind HTTPS Everywhere, but for simply retrieving open source code from a site like GitHub, in my opinion users should

Rick and Morty: I throw footballs good. Just words and phrases I’ve encountered here and there, that neatly encapsulate something. Roughly akin to a personalized “word of the day” collection, except, they’re all in one place. Tsundoku : The Art of Buying Books and Never Reading Them. Kintsugi : The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum ... As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Enchiridion: book containing essential information on a subject (discovered here ). Otaku . Turbidity - the clarity of water , a measure of the degree to which the water loses its transparency due to the presence of suspended particulates ,  the measure of relative clarity of a liquid . 9/17/2020. metonym - a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated. For example, Washing

I’ve been abusing Unicomp SpaceSaver keyboards, buckling spring keyboards that are direct descendants of the famed IBM Model M , for about a decade. My first from them was before they had a Mac version, but they’d supply “command” and “option” keycaps, and macOS / OS X makes it trivial to remap those meta (“modifier,” in Apple parlance) keys in the keyboard control panel: (You didn’t don’t get the media control keys, though, or the eject key for an optical drive.) Eventually, Unicomp came out with the SpaceSaver M , and I was in heaven. Most of the time. I have five (5) of these keyboards, some from as far back as 2011 (and one I think even a bit earlier than that). I’ll have to verify, but I think all (or at least 4 out of 5) of them have stickers on the bottom from when they were repaired by Unicomp. Some more than once. Keys would stop working, or I’d start getting phantom keypresses doing things like turning the volume all the way up or down. So frustrating. I literally ha