Tralfaz

Category: Tech

  • Apple Mail – Revisited

    Apple Mail – Revisited

    As a long time Apple person, and a dedicated Mac user, starting with Mavericks, I had stopped using Apple’s built in mail client.

    I stopped using it for a variety of reasons, but essentially, the integration with Google mail really became, uh, shitty. Really weird, unreliable connections to the Gmail IMAP server, and finally I just gave up.

    I also subscribe to a mailing list of some really cool Mac OS-X users, and around that time there was tons of traffic about how shitty Apple mail was.

    I ended up first using Thunderbird (meh), and finally bought licenses to Postbox as it worked pretty well, and their support for Google’s mail services was quite good.

    Finally, with a recent upgrade to El Capitan (OS-X 10.11.2) the experts allowed that Apple finally un-borked their mail client. It even handles two factor authentication properly. Kudos!

    So, I am giving it a second try. And you know what? It isn’t bad. It is better than Postbox.

    Finally.

  • More tinkering fun

    Back to the real world. I have re-immersed myself in the learning required to build a little automated, web connected weather station.

    I have been learning a lot about working with the Arduino (proto boards built around the Atmel ATMega 328 microcontroller), and have added some goodies around connecting sensors, working first with a 1 wire humidity and temperature sensor, and soon to come some more sophisticated modules that will be more flexible.

    However, while it is possible to do almost all of the work I want with the arduino based system, ultimately, I am going to want to drive a little display for review here in the house, and to log it to one of my internet servers, so I can be a geek and see the readings at home wherever I happen to be.

    This weekend, I dove into the Raspberry Pi, as that is a suitable central control, data logging station, and a vehicle to push the readings to the internet. However, it was a wee bit more complicated to get working than the Arduino. (more…)

  • More web hosting thoughts

    I learnt early on that you get what you pay for, and web hosting is no different than any other good or service. There was a time when $3 – $6 a month got you a pretty good deal as the explosion in hosting services was happening, but as with all services that are shared, the only way the economics work out is to over subscribe.

    The same happens with internet service (if everybody downloads at full speed at the same time, the “promised” throughput will fail miserably) and with hosting.

    Usually, you either suck it up and deal with glacial response from massively shared mysql servers, or someone destroying the IOPS on the SAN, or you move to a provider that isn’t a dirtbag, and you pay more for that service.

    Of course, if you have done that, and you get long downtimes and poor support, well, you moved once.

    Last week and a half were trouble for my web properties. The hosting I used, a VPS on A Small Orange was part of a lengthy and poorly handled downtime. Staring around X-mas eve, and continuing through to the 3rd of January, their VPS services were hosed. Hosed bad. Like can’t ping, no network route, and the brief flashes where I could ping, the storage was offline, so that my websites were down.

    Down hard. (more…)

  • Web Hosting Blues

    Why is it so hard to find a decent web host?

    Way back in 2009, I began blogging on wordpress.com, and by the end of 2009, I was hooked. I took the plunge, and signed up with MediaTemple hosting, a pretty slick operation that had a quite good product offering, with their “gridservers”. That worked well, and apart from some shared Mysql server bog downs, it was a pain free time. The few support issues I had (mostly around my ignorance) were handled cleanly and quickly.

    In 2012, at the formation of Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption, I was drafted/volunteered to create and run their website. They had selected GoDaddy for their domain registration, and hosting. I had heard lots of bad things, but for the basic linux hosting we did, running a Joomla site, and handling a bunch of forwarded emails, it worked well. But what I hated about it was the constant hard sell. “Upgrade to xxxx“, “Buy more yyyy“, “DOn’t you need an SSL certificate?“. As a marketer, I was completely alienated by their hard sell at every interaction. Hell, when I called tech support, they even tried to sell something to me. They were worse than Comcast! (more…)

  • Project 2 – Variable LED flash timing

    This project builds upon the flashing LED of the first project. If you were motivated, you could change the frequency of the flashing, by adjusting a constant in the program, a “delay” value that was used to turn on and off the power to the LED.

    This circuit instead brings in the concept of analog versus digital circuits, something that is worth explaining.

    In the digital realm, a signal is “on” or “off”. It is “binary” in that there are solely two states, represented by the values “0” and “1”. An awful lot of the modern world can be reduced to such simplicity. (more…)

  • First project – Flashing LED

    The Sparkfun Inventors Kit arrived, and I have to admit that it was better than I expected. Packaged in a nice box, it has plenty of goodies, and projects to play with. There are enough parts that I am sure I can go well beyond the scripted projects.

    Last night, I did the (really minor) assembly, but didn’t dive in. However, this morning, I dove right in, and did the first project.

    As one would expect, it was a pretty simple introduction, probably more to ensure that the software was setup and the hardware is functional.

    The goal was to blink an LED at 1 second intervals, and to accomplish this you need to download the Arduino developer’s kit, download the sample source files from Sparkfun, and finally to install the USB->FTDI drivers. Nothing too difficult, but the process is documented well enough that a grade school kid should be able to do it.  (more…)

  • Showing its age – or is it

    My main computer since 2013, has been a rocking MacBook Air. It is the first generation of the system based on the Haswell chipset, and it has been awesome. It came with Mountain Lion (10.8), and has been upgraded thrice now, recently to El Capitan.

    When I got it, one of the huge benefits was the battery life. The data sheet said 12 hours, and it easily beat that. I often went several days between charging the battery. I think my record was 14 actual operating hours, and I still had ~ 10% of battery left.

    Of course, as time has gone on, I use it more and more, but until the upgrade to El Capitan, it was still rocking the great battery life.

    I held off on the El Capitan upgrade as long as I could, but in a moment of weakness, I hit "ok" when prompted.

    Unlike many of my friends, my upgrade went smooth and frankly, it was the easiest upgrade, and for Apple, that is saying something. Two entries of passwords (I have different iCloud and Apple Store accounts, a long story, don't ask).

    The changes were fine, no issues, and since I don't use Apple mail, there wasn't any re-index.

    However, there is a downside. The battery life seems to be about 1/2 what it used to be. Of course, the laptop is 2.5 years old, so the battery might be wearing out. But I doubt it is that drastic. El Capitan really appears to be a battery hog.

  • Computer Repair Man

    Computer Repair Man

    Earlier this week, I got a Facebook message from my sister. Their iMac was behaving poorly, lots of spin-y beachballs (the “I’m thinking” on the Mac OS-X), so I asked the usual questions.

    • What model iMac is it? (from the about and system report)
    • How much memory is there?
    • How big is the disk, and how much is used (from DiskUtil)?

    All the standard things, but the DiskUtil reported that there was a problem with the disk, and to back it up and take it for service.

    Sigh, a failing drive. And their closest Apple store is about 90 minutes away. Rustic, rural living has a downside. (more…)

  • Evernote Dumpage

    Back in 2010, I was looking for a note taking solution. I had a taste of the Microsoft solution, OneNote, but being a “Mac” person, and the fact that OneNote wasn’t cross platform, and I went looking for a solution. The obvious choice at the time was Evernote. Cross platform, and while it wasn’t as flexible and convenient as OneNote, it was serviceable.

    Over the years, the Evernote did a lot of incremental improvements, and it worked well for most of my needs. They added a pretty feature rich ios application that made adding notes from the road trivial. Adding the capability ingest PDF files, and do OCR on them, making them searchable.

    But, some things were always clunky. Exporting via copy and paste was an unmitigated disaster. It was compelled to export in some really funky HTML format that always required a shitload of finicky reformatting to make presentable. (more…)

  • Cursing Apple – trying to lose data

    My old MacBook Pro has seen better days. For far too long it has been my “main” home computer. All my photos, music and videos were stored there. However, with iTunes Match (and now the new streaming service), and the moving of all my photos out from under Aperture to Photos (grrrr) and more importantly, to Adobe Lightroom, there isn’t much need for a massive system anymore.

    Starting in OS-X 10.8, Apple made available the possibility of making a fusion drive, a blend of SSD and spinning disk storage. As this laptop has both a traditional disk, and an SSD, I have long wanted to do it. However, it would be majorly disruptive, so I held off.

    Now that much of the content serving has moved off local storage and armed with a fresh, complete time machine backup, I decided to take the plunge.

    What I was unprepared for was how difficult it would be to accomplish.

    Step 1 – create the Core Storage filesystem

    This was not trivial. Partly my fault, I had the second drive set for all the user data, and it automounted on boot. Back in early 2012, this was the best way to setup a SSD/Spinning disk combo. It required some CLI hoo-doo, but once done, it rocked.

    However, it made this step difficult.

    I first copied the boot disk to an external (thanks to the wonderful Carbon Copy Cloner, software that is easy to use, and creates a bootable copy.

    Alas, this wasn’t so easy. Yes, I created a bootable copy, and was able to boot from it, but it still automounted the spinning disk, so I was unable to setup the new Core Storage spanned disk.

    I tried to re-install OS-X from the recovery partition. This failed too.

    Turns out that Apple does a really good job of preventing you from losing data from a dumb mistake. If there is a valid file system, with files on it, the installer goes to heroic efforts to not lose that data.

    Admirable, and helpful for most unsophisticated users, but maddening to me, who actually DID want to blow that data away.

    grrrr

    I ended up “installing” OS-X on an external, booting from that external, and then using diskutil to wipe both drives.

    Even that wasn’t easy. I had to delete partitions, recreate them, and delete them again to get it setup.

    nothing is easy

    Creating the spanned core storage “disk” (aka Fusion drive) was trivial, and done from the terminal.

    Making and partitioning it was about a 5 minute process. After dinking around, making two carbon copies, reinstalling the OS twice, and finally getting to a point to install on my new fusion drive. Total time: 1.5 days (ok, I did bike, and do some other things while I was waiting for cloning and installs to complete)

    I now have a MacBook Pro, running 10.10.4 with a 256G SSD/750G spinning disk Fusion drive, and not much else on it. I will out it through its paces, but it is just a backup computer now.

    Summary

    I have been a hard-core Apple fan for a long time now, but this was a rather frustrating process. In the Windows world, it is truly trivial and easy to wipe out your drive and start from fresh. I have done it at least 100 times. since the early 1990’s (yeah, I am an old fart)

    Apple makes that difficult to accomplish. Probably with good reason, as most people would be screaming at the Genius Bar if they had made it too easy to lose all your data. So they take a “preserve the status quo at all costs” approach. Commendable. Maddening too.

    I stumbled around, and because I was more familiar with how to accomplish this task in Windows (wipe and reinstall) I had more difficulty than I should have. C’est la Vie.