Category: Diary

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:

 

Came home from Brisbane, to find one of the air scrubbers needs its filter replaced. So I ordered a new one.  Went around and cleaned out all the particulate filters from the other scrubbers – it’s kindof like living in a space station.

Did domestic stuff – ordering groceries, bulk-buying Japanese Whisky.

Thursday I picked up a new scrubber filter, and my whisky. Out in my mask, with delivery to my car.

Friday, I was once again picking up air scrubber filters, because the bedroom scrubbers decided to switch to filter replacement mode at about 2 in the morning. I waited outside the shop for direct to car delivery, but the staff had ignored the alert, because they though it was a glitch repeat of yesterday’s pickup.

Had wonderful takeout on the weekend – bought sushi  from a local place for the first time in ages, a place I haven’t been since Covid came to town.

Went over to storage, and picked up my dolly, and loaded it into the car, ready for sculpture bumpout on Tuesday. Also picked up some new steelcap boots.

Tuesday, the sculpture came home – and we didn’t even use the dolly, so that adds to the list of proper indusrial equipment I own that sits in storage.

However, the sculpture is now successfully entombed at storage, and a major thing is ticked off my list for things to do this year.

I also got my 2022-2023 tax return submitted to the accountant.

I concluded my Day And Night series of images on Mastodon – 85 days in a row of posting an image every day. I started figuring out the next series of images, and I think it’s going to be re-examining my Fish Noir images. So, I built a new Capture One library, imported the images, and started trying to recreate the Aperture look.

Ended the week visiting Brisbane – I haven’t had to lock up an empty house for years.

Had the car serviced, and continued to work on tidying the house. I heard back from the producer at Channel 7 to explain that my email had gone to their spam filter. I don’t think they’re going to interview me. I did however email the law firm running the case to ask if they wanted to chat about a tangental thing – the issue about Apple not making spare parts available for Mac Pros.

I did a bit of doodling in Sketchbook on my iPad, for the first time in ages. It was fun.

Sunday I went to storage and assembled my new panel dolly, which we’re going to use to move C45C4D3 out of the library.

So I purchased a panel dolly…

…in the hope it would make it easier for me to bump out my sculpture from the Library’s Makerspace. It’s annoying I have to do this, and it will no doubt add to the collection of industrial equipment I own, pay to store, and don’t use, BUT it’s necessary.

Unfortunately, trying to organise a timeframe to get access to the library to remove the work is proving more difficult than I would have hoped.

Strange thing that happened Wednesday – a producer from Channel 7 Brisbane got in touch with me, asking if I’d like to be interviewed & filmed, to present comment about a new class action lawsuit being launched against Apple, on behalf of consumers over app prices being raised due to a lack of competition in payment processing. They wanted to film me “working” to go with my interview question answers.

It was odd, but didn’t end up going ahead, I suspect because the issue was more complex than they’d originally believed it to be.

Thursday my mother left for several months caravanning, so I am on my blissful lonesome, which makes things a bit easier if I want to do any work etc.