In my email inbox this morning I found this email.
Hi, Mark
How is it possible to have so much hate against one person who show how it works much better, than all Biden Harris bullshit ever can do? You are exact this what you are describe over and over on your website… you can see that in your friendship description very well.., Trump will fight for you too. to make your current shit hole country great again or you and we will end in a dystopi made by peoples like you and your most corrupt and cheating democrats…
hope as we in Germany say " Es möge dir ein Licht aufgehen" Mark
may be you leave the states too. like all the stupid democrats promised 2016, but never done
here another German saying for you
" Schuster bleib bei deinen Leisten "
as nerd and It enthusiast you are welcome
m. bortolon
Here is my public response.
Herr Bortolon,
I don’t hate the current President-Elect, he’s not worth that much emotional investment on my part. I do find him odious, and I am staggered by the seemingly limitless bounds to his stupidity.
The America you call a “current shit hole” only exists in the President-Elect’s mind. Wages are up, inflation is down (and without creating a recession), crime is way down, investment in American industries and American jobs is up, unemployment is way down. By any factual statistical measure, America is demonstrably better off today than it was 4 years ago.
The “distopi” you speak of may very well come in the chaos that will result from the President-Elect’s intended actions. Europe already has the largest land war since World War II on-going in Ukraine. Do you honestly think that the Russian dictator will stop there? A weakened or broken NATO could well have grave consequences for Western Europe.
I don’t expect any of what I’ve said to sway your opinion, based on comments like “Biden Harris bullshit”, “current shit hole country”, “most corrupt and cheating democrats”, and “stupid democrats”, it appears to me that your information source(s) are clouded by extreme right-wing rhetoric.
As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” We’ve seen who the President-Elect is, and a legitimate majority of the voters want that again. If I hate anything about this, it is that so many people will be harmed as a result of one man’s ego and vanity. And not only the people who didn’t vote for him, but the people who did vote for him.
Many of the points Ken White brings up here resonate strongly with me. The whole “Fuck Civility” section in particular.
America died on November 5, 2024. The undercurrent of hate and vitriol that was exposed in 2016, has grown into a malignancy that has metastasized throughout this country.
The ideas of equality, and fairness, and democracy are gone. They’ve been replaced by fascism, misogyny, xenophobia, and hatred. That there are so many people in America who want this, is truly disheartening.
In the 1930s the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy resulted in people immigrating to the United States. In the 1940s, America, along with rest of the allied countries, defeated fascism. Now, less than 100 years later, America is the epicenter of a new fascist power.
This is not the dawning of a new day, this is the sun setting on 248 years of a democratic republic, and the beginning of a night of terror.
I am grieving for my country, for the place where I grew up, and the place I was proud to call home. I am grieving for the millions and millions of people whose lives will be damaged or destroyed by this new regime. I am heartbroken.
When Apple announced Universal Control, their feature that lets you control multiple Apple devices with a single keyboard and trackapd (or mouse), I was quite pleased. For years I had been using Synergy with mixed success. Having this feature built into the operating system would surely make it better. Right?
Below is a list of some of the ways Universal Control fails. For these descriptions Host computer is the one that the keyboard and trackpad are paired to via Bluetooth. Guest computer is the machine being remotely controlled.
Any of the following failure modes can happen multiple times a day. It’s frustrating to continually have to open Settings and reset the control. When it was a third-party app it was somehow easier to take the problems, after all, the third-party didn’t have 100% control. Apple does have 100% control and yet this feature fails constantly.
While working on the Guest computer, the Host will momentarily lose the connection, which moves the insertion point back to the Host. When this happens in the middle of typing something on the Guest, you can end up with extra inputs to whatever gained focus on the Host.
How can it lose the connection when it is actively being used?
Solution: Briefly open the Displays panel in Settings on the Host computer.
Sometimes you can’t get the cursor/pointer to return to the Host; the Guest has captured it. Often times you can no longer see or find the pointer.
Solution: Open the Displays panel in Settings on the Guest computer. Sometimes on the Host computer as well.
From time to time Universal Control just stops working altogether. This is perhaps the most aggravating failure mode, as it usually requires restarting one of the involved computers.
Solution: Usually opening up the Displays panel in Settings on both the Host and the Guest and disabling Universal Control on both, then reactivating it, is enough to get things working again.
Alternate Solution: Restart the Guest computer.
To be fair, I believe this has happened only one time, and it may have been something I did. In any event, I have had the situation where the orientation of the Host and Guest computers gets changed in the Displays panel of Settings. When you got to access the Guest computer you can’t get the pointer to cross over from one screen to the next.
Solution: Open up the Displays panel in Settings, and rearrange the displays.
I’ve been playing the cello for almost 15 years now. It’s an entirely acoustic instrument, but (for me at least) there are several electronic bits that go along with the cello.
I use the TonalEnergy tuner app on my iPhone. It’s my tuner, my metronome, and a drone generator, all in one. Since the app keeps the phone on, I keep my phone plugged in while I practice. This allows me to spot check my intonation or practice with a click without interrupting my flow very much.
I scan and create PDF copies of all my music. These are imported into forScore. forScore is a PDF viewer that has been customized for sheet music. You can add finger number, bow directions, notes, and text quickly and easily. Instead of carrying a bag full of bound music, I bring an iPad with hundreds of pieces of music.
I’m using a 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which nearly duplicates standard US paper size. Combined with forScore, it’s a perfect digital sheet music library.
forScore has an incredibly neat feature where you can use facial gestures to turn the page forward or backward. You can choose between winking, nodding, or pursing your lips to the left (backward) or right (forward). I’m only able to wink one eye, so I can’t go back a page with winking. The lip pursing or nodding is too easy to accidentally do, which isn’t useful, especially when performing.
So I bought a Bluetooth foot pedal. Two big buttons, one for forward, one for backward. After only a few days practice, it has become second nature to use.
For several years now I’ve been wearing some kind of hearing enhancement. About a year ago I got a pair of Jabra Enhance hearing aids. These have four different modes: normal, music, restaurant, and outdoor. On normal mode my cello has an odd echo effect. Switching to music mode eliminates echo.
When I go to practice or play I first plug in my iPhone and open the TonalEnergy app. My phone goes into a clamp on a flexible stalk fastened tomy music stand. Next I flip on the foot pedal, and turn on my iPad Pro and open forScore. Finally I use the Apple Watch Jabra app to select the music mode for my hearing aids.
After all of that, I’m ready to play my acoustic instrument.
For bonus points I also have a 5-string electric cello from NS Design. This gets plugged into a Peavey bass amp. Then everything is electric.
I voted for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President and Vice-President.
Even if I didn’t appreciate the policies and promises the Harris/Walz campaign is espousing, I would have cast my ballot for them. The alternative is a fascist, hate-filled, twice impeached, serial rapist, and convicted felon, who is surrounded by a circle of sycophantic enablers who view him as a means to unchecked power–for themselves, and who view ordinary people as serfs who should be grateful for any table scraps that fall their way.
I voted for Kamala Harris because I want the vision of America that has lasted for 248 years to continue.
I voted for Kamala Harris because I want our democracy to continue.
I voted for Kamala Harris because I happen to think she will be an incredible President.
I voted for Kamala Harris because I don’t want to live in a fascist dictatorship that hearkens back to Nazism.
I sincerely hope that you have, or will, vote for hope, equality, democracy, decency, and the promise of what American can be.
I hope you vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
The Lazy plugin manager for Neovim makes use of a lock file to track the
current version of each plugin. The file, lazu-lock.json, is a peer to the
init.lua file at the root of my configuration.
Between my personal laptop, work laptop, virtual admin workstation for work, and two or three other personal machines, I have multiple active installations of my Neovim configuration. MacOS and several flavors of Linux make up the operating systems involved.
I’ve been using Git and GitHub to manage my “dotfiles” for years. Any time I setup a new machine I create a new SSH key and copy it to GitHub, then I clone my dotfiles repository, and finally run my install script. Neovim, Git, tmux, bash, and several other configuration files are copied or linked into place.
Until a day or two ago, the Neovim configuration included the Lazy Lock file.
However, every time I’d update the plugins on one machine, it would create merge
conflicts on the other machines. The easiest way to resolve the conflicts was
to delete the lazy-lock.json file, and then run a Lazy Sync to recreate it.
It occurred to me that having the same exact version of plugins on each machine wasn’t important. I was re-running the sync process already, to clean up the merge conflicts, why not just run it as needed? I’d still have the same plugins installed, but the exact version may differ slightly.
This has made running a Lazy Sync have less mental overhead (no more worries about merge conflicts) and it has made pulling the latest version of my dotfiles to a machine quicker and easier.
A nicely humorous look into the weirdness that are time zones.
Raise your hand if you hear George Carlin saying, “hot water cooler or cold water heater”
Sometime between a late morning shower on Saturday and a Sunday morning shower, we lost our hot water. Trying to relight the pilot light didn’t work. So we called the plumber. It was mid-afternoon before we managed to make contact with the weekend on-call plumber. After explaining the situation to him, he said it was likely the gas control valve, a part he couldn’t get until at least Monday.
On Monday I called the plumber and requested someone come look at it and let us know what needed to happen. When the dispatched learned the brand name of the unit (Rheem) she audibly groaned. Turns out it’s a “big box” store brand, and parts are hard to come by.
The plumber came and said it was either the gas control value or the pilot light assembly. He left to try and find parts. Late in the afternoon I called and spoke some more with the dispatcher. They might be able to get the parts by Thursday or Friday. Both would be approximately $350, and there would be a 2 hour ($89/hour) labor charge.
When I asked what the cost of a new water heater would be, she said $1750, installed. Our non-functioning heater is 14 years old. After talking it over, we decided to get a new one installed. I called a left a message on their after hours voice mail requesting an installation.
Tuesday they called and said they could install the new heater Wednesday afternoon.
Today the plumber came, and in about 90 minutes, drained and removed the unit, and installed the new one. Since our house was completed in 2010 there have been a couple of code changes. First, an expansion tank is now required. This protects the main tank from expanding and contracting each time the burner comes or or goes off. The second change is a carbon monoxide detector requirement.
We both enjoyed a shower about an hour after he left. We had been making due with heating water on the stove using our stew pot, and mixing it with cold, and pouring it over each other. This worked surprisingly well. A real, hot running water, shower was nicer though.
I was impressed by the confidence and skill the plumber displayed. When I asked he said he was working through his apprenticeship. He knew what he was doing, and worked steadily. He cheerfully answered my questions and genuinely seemed to enjoy his job.
If the new unit lasts 14 years, it will cost us about $125 a year. Excluding water and gas, of course. Worth every penny. This was a good homeowner experience.