Shamus Young’s Project Good Robot is now on Steam Greenlight.

[Update: all switched over, and the only difficulty in the install was discovering that Comcast still ships routers that hang onto MAC addresses for dear life, preventing you from reusing an IP address on the LAN side unless you reboot the silly thing. This was dumb on a home line ten years ago, and inexcusably stupid on a business line today. On the bright side, it came with native IPv6, so I can get rid of my Hurricane Electric tunnel sometime soon.]

So on March 9th, I got email from sonic.net informing me that their current DSL service was going away on April 10th, and that I needed to call right away to upgrade to their new faster-cheaper-better service.

The person who answered the phone seemed surprised that I’d actually called right away. Then she put me on hold for several minutes while she looked at my account, then she said she’d call me back. She didn’t.

So I replied to the original email, which surprisingly actually went to someone, who answered and said someone would call me back. Today, I got a long, casual voicemail from someone who eventually got around to explaining that the new service isn’t offered in my area, and I’d need to find a new ISP. Yes, I was expecting this.

(short version: they had a contract with AT&T to use their lines for DSL, and that expired)

So now I’m waiting on a callback from Comcast Business to schedule an install. It will cost more, but even their cheapest plan is much faster than the 6000/768 I have now. Internet-only; I’ll keep the Dish for TV, and migrate the landline to an Ooma box.

(the only reason I still had the landline was that Sonic’s agreement with AT&T required it)

Refrigerator so “smart” it joined a spam botnet. When combined with the eavesdropping Samsung TVs, we face An Exciting Future.

(and, yes, if they ever roll out IPv6 in a significant way, that fridge will be serving up kiddie porn to the world, too, with no need for crude NAT redirects or UPnP automatic hole-poking)

(via (generally NSFW))

The almost-ready Shapeoko 3 CNC mill will come with mounts appropriate for the DeWalt DWP611 compact router ($119 on Amazon). Often discussed in the forums is the fact that you only actually need the motor, which is available separately as the DNP611 ($79).

The DNP611 sold out at that price, came back into stock at $99, sold out at that price, came back into stock at $109, sold out at that price, and is now back in stock at $129. So it’s now cheaper to buy the standard router package and throw away everything but the motor.

(I haven’t bought one yet, since I’m waiting for a confirmed ship date before I buy router, bits, etc)

[Update! Today the circle is complete, as the full kit is now $99, a full $30 cheaper than the motor-only SKU. Perhaps I’ll buy mine now…]

[Update: speaking of almost-ready, today’s email says “Batch #1 will begin shipping in a few weeks!”, and I’m in batch 1. A quiet “woo-hoo” is in order, I think.]

…this novel’s blurb makes my head hurt:

Space travel has always come with risks. But hyperspace travel comes with one particularly frightening risk, namely, the non-corporeal dark energy-based macrobiotic entities that inhabit the void and are drawn to the presence of human minds. Once penetrated by a macrobe, the infected human mind rapidly devolves into raving insanity, which usually presents in a homicidal manner. Fortunately, hyperspace-capable ships are protected by a dark energy resonator that keeps the macrobes away and thereby permits safe interstellar travel.

I think I’ve read enough.

My laptop died recently after 5+ years of loyal service, and between the fact that pretty much all the Macs are due for a refresh soon, that I only reluctantly upgraded to Mountain Lion a while back and have no desire to migrate my very stable environment to the iPad-and-Helvetica beta known as Yosemite, and that I just don’t want to spend $3-4K right now, I had the office buy me one instead. My official work laptop had just turned 8 years old, so it seemed a reasonable request.

They didn’t want to spend $3-4K either, so now I’ve got a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro with a Core i5 and 512GB of SSD rather than the i7 with 1TB that I wanted. Got the 16GB of RAM, at least, which makes it possible to allocate 6-8GB for a VMware session containing my old hard drive. This allows me to split off my work and personal environments (which wasn’t a problem when I owned the hardware…). I’m waiting on a new USB3 enclosure for my old 1TB SSD, so at the moment I’m running the virtual on a Western Digital 2TB USB3 drive, and the spinning disk makes things take a bit longer than I’d like. Fully functional, though.

I have only a few things to complain about migrating my old environment into VMware Fusion:

1. Added: vmware-vmx can take several minutes to exit after suspending the virtual machine and completely exiting VMware Fusion; this prevents me from ejecting the external drive. Specifically, the logs show that "pagefile sync to disk" starts running after the GUI shows the virtual as suspended, and doesn't finish until 2-3 minutes later; the GUI doesn't seem to know about this, and cheerfully exits.
2. random resolution changes every time I switched between fullscreen and windowed (fixed by manually editing the preferences file to include pref.autoFitGuestToWindow = "FALSE" and pref.autoFitFullScreen = "stretchGuestToHost" and then forcing it to use the non-Retina screen resolution).
3. iTunes crashes immediately (known problem with workaround: sudo nvram boot-args='vmw_gfx_caps=0').
4. Photoshop CS5.5 doesn't seem to be working correctly; the most obvious flaw is the lack of item highlighting in menus. Illustrator seems to be fine, though. (update: the iTunes workaround also fixes Photoshop)
5. Aperture doesn't work, because it spits on the emulated graphics card.
6. collision between real and virtual Mission Control hot corners in fullscreen; not much I can do about that one, it seems.
7. installation hell: I needed a Mac virtual to bootstrap the copy of my old drive into VMware container format, and every single one of the painstakingly-saved installers I have for Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite failed at the end of the install. Re-downloading Mountain Lion fixed that, "somehow", which led to the next problem, which was incredibly slow copy speeds in SuperDuper. The trial copy of Carbon Copy Cloner worked, although it was originally going to take forever, too, because of a Yosemite bug that I had to work around.
8. The Yosemite bug: if you create your user account as part of the Yosemite installation, and link it with iCloud, then a mandatory security policy is set that forces screen-locking after five minutes of idle time. This cannot be disabled, even by shutting off iCloud and breaking the link to the account. Performance of your VMware session goes to hell when the screen is locked, which I consider another OS bug. There are only two fixes: create a new user account that has never known the whip-hand of iCloud, or install Caffeine from the app store to fake out the idle timer.
9. General Mac cruftiness: far too many preferences are tied to your hardware ID. Some of the stuff I had to reconfigure was just stupid.

I’ve migrated most of the work stuff over to the physical machine already, and with Homebrew and Perlbrew I’m almost fully functional again, and no longer need to carry a Mac Mini back and forth every day. I need to carry an external drive now, though, along with Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet and Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapters. And a USB optical drive for those Special Occasions…

I vaguely remember hearing something about this “coming soon”, but I happened to be browsing torrents and they’ve released an extended cut of the last episode of Gatchaman Crowds, which ties up all the loose ends.

The episode title is “Embrace”. The rest of the series is still on Crunchyroll, but it doesn’t look like they’ve licensed this, and of course the US box set was released a long time ago, so there’s no alternative to torrenting it.