…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.

Outsider and Stone Clouds are both promising to resume Real Soon Now.

Dear DeWalt,

The instruction manual for the DWP611 compact router is quite clear and straightforward, with one slight exception:

(source)

[Update: he tried again, and when I asked if the scam actually worked on anyone, he responded with a butthurt message insisting he was a real person offering honest assistance, and calling this post “cyber-bullying”. Best laugh I’ve had all week.]

Obviously machine-generated spam based on scraping search engines, since the suggested replacement has absolutely nothing to do with the original link. Never mind the fact that it was sent from a site hosted in Amazon’s cloud (rickgrimes.asoshared.com, which identified itself as www.buzzstream.com to the next hop), or that it was sent with JavaMail and includes a List-Unsubscribe header. Those just ice the spam-cake.

To: jgreely+temp201501@dotclue.org
Subject: Found an error to fix on your website
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 14:55:14 -0800 (PST)
 
Good Afternoon,
 
I'm a criminal justice student and I recently visited your site while
researching for a paper I'm working on... This is a note for your
webmaster, as I found a dead resource link on your site that visitors
like me might be trying to access.
 
It's on this page: 
 
dotclue.org/archives/001527.html
 
I got an error message when I tried to click on the link to this site: 
 
atf.treas.gov
 
It looks like that website no longer exists... anyhow, I found another
link that might be useful in its place so your visitors can still find
some helpful information:
 
http://www.safewise.com/resources/guns-at-home
 
Thanks for your help and for providing great information!

From the comments over at According to Hoyt, a simple, elegant statement about Our Would-Be Overlords:

"A multiculturist would bring bring marshmallows to a suttee."
---Timid1