Homebrew rocks as a package management tool for Max OS X. Except when it doesn’t.
A couple of days ago when I ran
brew doctor
I got a whole slew of messages instead of the
$ brew doctor
Your system is raring to brew.
output that I expected. The primary issue centered around a file called voldemort.rb. I have no idea what in my collection of brews required that formula. Rather than go through a potentially lengthy debugging session to figure out how to untangle the mess I decided to just wipe out brew and reinstall everything.
I started by making a list of all the brews I had installed
$ brew list > ~/Desktop/brews.txt
Next quick Google search lead me to Uninstalling brew (so I can reinstall) by Eneko Alonso. His posting neatly outlined these steps for removing brew from your system:
$ cd `brew --prefix`
$ rm -rf Cellar
$ brew prune
$ rm -rf Library .git .gitignore bin/brew README.md share/man/man1/brew
$ rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew
To install brew again:
$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
Next up you need to reinstall any brews you had on hand. Since doing this to my laptop my brew doctor output is clean and raring to go.
The landing sequence for getting Curiosity safely onto the surface of Mars is wildly complex and seemingly improbably. Since communication takes 14 minutes one way to reach Earth from Mars, and since the landing sequence is 7 minutes long, by the time we know the landing sequence has started Curiosity will have been safely on Mars for 7 minutes or already destroyed.
You know how dolphins like to play in the bow wave or wake of ships? Turns out Orcas do too. They’re just really big dolphins. All of which brings to mind the line from Jaws where Sheriff Brody says, “[You’re gonna need a bigger boat](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gciFoEbOA8 “You’re gonna need a bigger boat””)".
For the past three weeks my wife and I have been using Lose It!, an iOS App, to track our daily caloric intake. In a word the app is fantastic.
Six years ago I lost 57 pounds in 12 months. I did it by eating less and exercising more. And by tracking what I ate in a spreadsheet. I recorded calories for each meal and tracked my daily weight. By tracking my foods it was easy to see where snacking and poor food choices were hurting me. I was able to eliminate about 1000 calories a day from my diet and lost weight rapidly for a few months.
I wasn’t able to sustain my lowest weight for more than a couple of years. Over time it slow crept up until I had gained about 20 of the lost pounds back. I was eating more and exercising less. While my weight has been stable for the past 3 years I wish I weighed a bit less.
Lose It! makes it very easy to track all the foods I eat in a day, and it tracks my exercise to give me a more accurate feel for my net calorie intake. I can see in graph form my weight loss and I have a historical record of my food, including a nutrient breakdown day-by-day or week-by-week.
##Extensive Database of Foods One of the best features of Lose It! is the extensive database of foods. You can perform brand name searches for both supermarket and restaurant foods. Want a Starbuck’s chocolate brownie? 410 calories. Olive Garden Lasagna Classico? 850. Frosted Flakes cereal? 427 for 2 cups. The app also includes a bar code scanner making it very easy to add foods. Instead of searching for Crispex cereal I just scanned the box.
Once you’ve had a food there are two ways to repeat it. Lose It! keeps a list of “My foods” that has everything you’ve ever entered into the app so you can quickly find a favorite again. The app also keeps track of your previous meals making it simple to repeat them. I tend to eat the same thing for breakfast several days in a row - Crispex cereal (220 calories) with milk (81 calories), and a glass of orange juice (165 calories). Until the box empties and I switch to a different cereal I’ll eat the same meal, so being able to just look up yesterday’s breakfast and reuse it today is a real time saver.
You can also easily repeat portions of a meal. Once you’ve selected a previous meal you can swipe any food item listed to delete them. Had a sandwich with pickle yesterday and the same sandwich again today without the pickle? Reuse the meal and delete the pickle with a swipe.
##Recipes Lose It! lets you record your recipes. Once you’ve entered in all the ingredients you can set the number of servings the dish makes and get a calories per serving estimate. In the three weeks we’ve been using the app I’ve already created 7 recipes. Best of all through the Lose It! website it’s possible to share these with my wife so she can track her portions too.
Now I know a bowl of my homemade chili is 264 calories or that 7-layer cookies are 316 calories per cookie.
##Usage Patterns In my use of Lose It! I’ve found it’s best to enter foods prior to eating them. As with anything you need to budget knowing the cost before you spend a limited resource is important. Based on my weekly goal of losing a pound per week I can only net 2064 calories per day. Eating first and recording second makes it all to easy to over indulge and exceed my calorie budget for the day.
The first time I eat something where there’s any question as to the size of the portion I get out a measuring cup and determine the exact size. I always thought I had about a cup of Crispex or Frosted Flakes in my cereal bowl. Turns out it’s 2 cups.
Exercise works the opposite way. I don’t enter my music playing, gardening, or walking exercise until I’ve completed the activity. It’s all too easy to think I’ll walk for 30 minutes on the treadmill and enter that into Lose It! and then not finish the walk for some reason.
##Goal Setting and Tracking When you start with Lose It! you can set a weekly weight loss goal and it determines a calorie budget for you. I set my gaol to be one pound per week and so my budget is 2064 calories a day. I believe your height and weight are factored into this calculation as my wife (who is as tall as me) has a different calorie budget goal.
The app lets you record your daily weight and produces a nice graph of your weight loss.
##Success In the three weeks since I’ve started using Lose It! I’ve lost 3.8 pounds - just a little ahead of my pound-per-week goal. Just as recording everything in a spreadsheet 6 years ago increased my awareness of what I was eating using Lose It! has me thinking about my diet proactively. I’ve also started exercising on a daily basis - seeing the net calories go down as I walk is a great motivator.
I highly recommend Lose It! Having an app on your phone to track your exercise and calorie intake is wonderful. No matter where I am I can easily track my nutrition and exercise. Best of all it’s free.
Six years ago in early July 2006 I joined eHarmony hoping to find someone to spend my life with. I wasn’t at all sure it would work but I was determined to try.
Six years ago today I received the following email at 6:31 am in the morning.
Dear Mark and Sibylle,
eHarmony’s Compatibility Matching System has found that you two are a highly compatible match, based on our rigorous 29 Dimensions scale. With this level of compatibility, we believe you two will have a lot to talk about and may even find true love together.
So, Mark and Sibylle, we’d like to make an introduction.
Sibylle lives in Manhattan, Kansas United States. Mark lives in Overland Park, Kansas United States.
The next step, Mark, is for you to begin communicating with Sibylle. Explore your shared areas of compatibility, and have fun discovering if there’s chemistry.
Remember, your match has been carefully selected from millions of candidates because you share extraordinary levels of compatibility in the areas proven to create relationship success. So we encourage you to consider this match with care and find out what lies beyond your summary profiles.
The next step is simple—just begin communicating today!
Sincerely,
Dr. Neil Clark Warren Founder, eHarmony.com
At the time I didn’t know that Sibylle would become my companion, lover, best friend, partner, and wife. We moved through the first questions and then “must have’s and can’t stands” followed by second questions and finally to sharing messages through eHarmony. Within a week we were emailing each other multiple times a day. In the three weeks between our introduction and when we first met in person on August 12th, we sent over 400 emails.
In the intervening six years we have lived together, traveled together, moved together, and grown together. We are very fortunate to have each other, to have the relationship that we share.
Yes, we are an eHarmony success story. More importantly we are our own success story.
The reaction of the little children is priceless.
I love time lapse videos. Seeing our little planet in the vastness of space this way is beautiful and sobering at the same time.
At the tail end of last week I noticed that my mid-2009 MacBook Pro was making an intermittent rattling sound. My first fear was that my hard drive was failing. I did some Googling and found this command which queries the hard drive’s S.M.A.R.T. status:
$ diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART'
diskutil is the command line interface to Disk Utility. A returned status of verified is good. Anything else is cause for alarm. My hard drive consistently shows verified when I run this command.
My next thought was that one of the two fans in the enclosure must be the cause. After shutting down the laptop and removing the bottom of the case I used a can of compressed air to blow out any accumulated dust and cat hair. I didn’t get much out and after reassembling the machine the rattle returned.
Using the Dashboard widget iStat Pro I could see that both fans were running about 2000 rpm under normal load. To test the theory that one of the fans was causing the rattle I fired up Portal 2. As the fan noise increased, and the measured speed cleared 3000 rpm, the rattle increased in volume and frequency. And I was able to locate the sound on the left side of the laptop, under the ESC key.
A search for replacement fans led me to the iFixit site where I was able to order a replacement left-sde fan. That part came in the mail today and after a few minutes work I had swapped the fans. The iFixit site has very clear, concise directions complete with pictures to walk you through the process. I cannot recommend them enough.
My laptop has been up and running for nearly 30 minutes since the replacement without a hint of rattle. I’ll give it some more time just to be certain but I am confident that I diagnosed and fixed the problem.
102 years ago the idea for air condition was conceived.
I continue to plow my way through the Prey books by John Sandford. Since the first installment I’ve read or listened to 12 more books in the series.
{{ “1416502327” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425157539” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425168298” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425174271” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425178765” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425182878” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425189864” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425195449” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425199606” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425204308” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425221156” | amazon_small_image }}
{{ “0425227987” | amazon_small_image }}
There are only three more titles to go and I’m all caught up. I had managed to read all of these except Naked Prey. Somehow I missed this book when it first came out. Since it introduces the character of Letty West it’s an important part of the storyline. Even after reading all of the Prey books back to back I still find them compelling. The characters are multidimensional and interesting and their lives move forward and change outside of each book. That there is overlap with two of Sandford’s other series, the Kidd books and the Virgil Flowers books, also adds to their pull. Easily one of my favorite authors.