My sister has booked the flights for our next Japan trip, which will now be in March; this Thanksgiving just wasn’t working out for her schedule. That gives me more time to build up my cash reserves, more time to get my knees worked on, and more time to finally go through all the pictures from the last trip…

We’ll be flying in and out of Haneda again, but spending most of our time in Kyoto; this adds two shinkansen trips and luggage transfers, but makes sense because she could get us free business-class upgrades for Haneda, but not for Kansai. So we’ll ship our bags directly from the airport to Kyoto, spend the night near Shinagawa Station, take an early train the next morning, drop off our carry-on bags at the hotel, and spend the first of our 10 days in Kyoto. Then it’s back to Tokyo for a few days of museums, shopping, and penguins.

I’ll be driving up to Mount Hood next month for a week of kumihimo, but that’ll be it for this year, I think. We’ve got a week-long family thing in Sedona in February which will be another long drive, but low-stress.

It’s been bugging me for a while with Mojave. I’ll be working along in a window, and suddenly there’s a flicker, and the current window is no longer current. Something grabbed focus and didn’t give it back. With all the crap that ends up running in the background on modern MacOS, it’s hard to figure out exactly what might be at fault, but I just had one pop up that can’t be blamed on anyone but Apple.

For my recent trip to Japan, I took along a Western Digital 1TB SSD as a Time Machine backup drive, and put it in my checked luggage for redundancy. I turned on Apple’s full-disk encryption (for the laptop as well), so when I plug it in, it pops up a password dialog box.

100% of the time, this dialog box steals focus, and then doesn’t give it back. The front-most application does not have an active window, and I either need to click on it or switch to another app and back again.

The drive is fantastic, by the way. I prefer it to the Samsung T3 and T5 models I’ve used, not the least because it comes with the only high-performance USB3(male)-to-USBC(female) adapter I’ve found, carefully designed to mate securely with the supplied short USBC cable. All the other small adapters I’ve tried significantly degrade performance despite claiming otherwise, but if I could buy a dozen of these (with or without the matched cable), I would. Sadly, WD doesn’t offer them separately.

Related, if you have multiple Time Machine backup sets for your machine, and you want to manually kick off a backup to a specific one (say, /Volumes/BackMe), the script looks like this (note that this requires the third-party jq tool in /usr/local/bin, because Apple plist format is garbage):

#!/bin/bash
export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

VOL=BackMe
if [ ! -d "/Volumes/$VOL" ]; then
        echo "TM backup '$VOL' not mounted!"
        exit 1
fi

ID=$(tmutil destinationinfo -X |
	plutil -convert json -o - - |
	jq -r '.Destinations[]|select(.Name == "'"$VOL"'").ID')
time tmutil startbackup -a -b -d "$ID"

I really like this image from Hebitsukai; sadly, it’s the only one that just feels detailed rather than cluttered.

Just got mail from someone offering $4K for one of my old .com domains. Tempting, since we haven’t updated any content on it in fifteen years, and I just put in 301 redirects to point anyone still using it to a sub-directory on this site.

My first question is, if a random person is really offering $4K, and it’s not just a scam or spam (the use of “cash” in the email sent up a red flag…), should I list it on a site like Sedo instead, to see if it’s worth more?

Second, how does one do this? I acquired it for free when the previous owner no longer wanted the hassle of keeping it up.

Third, “Hey, Bryce, want a piece of this? You did give it to me for free back in the day…”

In Traveller 5, you can identify as Goatse.

Drinks free of charge.

Rune Soldier.

The loosely-related Record of Lodoss War series is collected on Bluray and available for streaming from Funimation, but I doubt RS will ever get a re-release.

Fortunately I have the DVDs, although I suppose I should rip them to avoid eventual bit-rot (and load them onto my iPad for the next trip to Japan…).

(OP video after the jump, because Youtube embeds just keep getting heavier and more intrusive, and I haven’t had time to set up a “click static thumbnail to load video” wrapper).

more...

…laptop backups. I have four independent backups of my current laptop (2x Time Machine, 2x SuperDuper!), one of which is stored on a RAID 6 NAS that backs up to a second RAID 6 volume. Additionally, all source code and blog entries are under source control (Mercurial) and get pushed to a remote server; the blog also gets rsynced to two virtuals in different parts of the country. Which get backed up to the NAS.

I mention this because I just found two external drives containing full backups of my great-grand-previous laptop, plus the actual SSD pulled from it when the board failed. And then I checked the NAS, and found a disk image made from that SSD and a VMware virtual made from it.

For some reason, it doesn’t go over well at work when my first response to someone with a dead computer is, “how many hours ago was your last full backup?”

The good news is that the requirement that we encrypt laptops for people in sensitive positions provided the leverage we needed to get a PO signed for a centralized laptop backup service. Which proved itself pretty darn quickly.

Pity there’s still no cure for people who think that it’s smart to conspicuously put your laptop bag into the trunk of your car when you arrive at a restaurant in the middle of Silicon Valley…