Author: Matt

Monday evening, things seem to be back in service. I have new nameservers for all my hostcolor served stuff, and I think I’m going to set up my mail programmes to use the physical server names, rather than the domain names, so as to ease through the transition to the new host.

Tuesday I re-established mail accounts in mail.app for the new hostcolor-based mail servers, and they seemed to agree with MailMate, another email programme which is a little more standards compliant, insofar as numbers of messages. Adding the accounts back to all my other devices seemed to go well. I have progressed to “having functional email on all my devices”, Huzzah.

Wednesday, mattgodden.com finished its migration to Hover’s registration system. Still waiting for metaning.net to make the jump.

Thursday was a public holiday, but I spent it setting up the new Samsung 990 Pro SSDs in their carrier – checking that the firmware for the drives was up to the latest versions, etc. At some stage over the weekend, I should get them installed in the Mac.

Saturday, I installed the new drives in the Mac Pro. It went well  the drives and card add about 8-9 watts to the sleeping draw of the machine, which is not the best, but 8TB of storage for $1100 or so, Vs. $4200 for Apple’s 8TB storage.

Sunday morning, really Saturday night, I updated my UPS’ firmware – a housekeeping task I’ve been putting off for a long time.

Web host screwing things up again – there’s been a number of outages in the past week as of Monday, and today I had to run a database table repair.

Edit: Hostcolor fucked up my web hosting and email again, I’ve lost 2 weeks of currency and spent the week researching a new hosting provider. I managed to find one, based in Australia. The proprietor is deaf, so I can’t just phone them up to solve things, but at least it’s someone who isn’t the people at Hostcolor.

By the weekend Hostcolor seemed to have a plan for recovering data, though as usual even when they were trying to be precise, they left just enough ambiguous that it was worrying.

One thing I did do, is shift all my domains that were registered with Hostcolor out to Hover. That way, I can simply switch my sites and email away from them to the new provider at will, without Hostcolor being involved.

The week was spent on altogether too much arguing on a web forum. The pest inspector finally turned up to check the termite traps. One of the butcher birds left half a green tree frog in my car’s windscreen wipers.

Sleep was randomised, and fitful, but an upside of the week was the arrival of my Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server DVD. It installed in VMWare, and is running comfortably.

Another arrival, a pair of 4TB Samsung 990 Evo NVME SSDs

Bad news, it looks like Apple Books isn’t going to connect to an iPad while virtualised. I did more testing, and it turns out the situation isn’t quite as grim as I’d feared, but it still isn’t good.

Then I had more bad news – a PCI card for hosting NVME SSDs I’d been eyeing has gone out of production. It’s problematic, because the alternatives really weren’t suitable.

I started looking around to see if there were any in the channel still, and found Amazon US had a few. So, I pulled the trigger, and then also on a pair of 4TB SSDs. So a thousand dollars gone, but hopefully this will let me consolidate a bunch of stuff onto my main machine, rather than having it on a Mac Mini fileserver.

A holiday week – hanging out at home, playing video games, and chilling. It rained non-stop pretty much the entire time.

Saturday I ordered a High Sierra Server installation DVD on eBay. This was a bit of a steal at $80. Granted, it’s ancient unsupported software, but it’s also the only old MacOS version which is legally able to be virtualised, is a supported virtualisation option for VMWare Fusion, and is a supported OS release for my old Adobe CS apps.

I also ordered a discontinued Apple leather case for my new iPhone. It has to come from Britain, and is a fair bit more expensive than they were when they were new because of the shipping etc, but I think it’ll be nicer than the silicon.

Monday: Research stuff, did some tidying around the house. Organised to chat with a friend about some scripting stuff for this podcast idea of RSS feeds from folders. Did a razor shave of my head.

Tuesday: More house tidying, waited around for a termite inspection guy to turn up, but he was a no-show.

Wednesday: Started looking back at Surfing The Deathline, and found problems with the last update, so I took the opportunity to think deeply about the output process, and map it out in my flowcharting software.

Thursday: Had a chat with a friend about trying to figure out a scripting solution to create RSS feeds from local folders, to act as an intermediary for podcasting, so you can build feeds out of arbitrary folder contents.

Friday: Mostly spent writing up the spec document for the aforementioned podcasting tool.

The big news announced towards the end of the week was the US DOJ bringing an antitrust suit against Apple.

A new iPhone arrived. I haven’t switched to it as my new phone yet, but it’s a 2023 iPhone SE. I’m slowly working through setting it up, and waiting for a case I ordered to arrive before I start using it.

In the meantime, I’m setting everything up, working though different combinations of home screens, etc. This seems to be working well as a way to get to where I want to go, without breaking where I already am.

One observation  – The compass on the new phone seems better:

I also had a nice little braided lightning to stereo minijack arrive:

On the software side, I’m finding an expanded use for Shortcuts – for example, I built a sound output switcher: