Despite the horrid reviews on Amazon, I just bought Dragon Professional Individual for Mac V6 mostly due to a minor but recurring finger pain. I have mostly been having issues with my right hand, particularly my thumb and pointer finger. I sometimes notice it when I have been clicking a …
After accidentally deleting my Runkeeper activity today, I was able to mostly restore it thanks to Google’s somewhat creepy location history. Perhaps some day Runkeeper will be more user friendly.
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The Insync client on my macOS 10.12.5 installation freezes at least daily, which I only notice when I find files are not syncing across my computers. My hacky solution was to write an AppleScript to check if the client is unresponsive and create a launchd agent to start the client any time it is not running or crashes (different than “Not Responding”).
Every once in a while, I write a blog post where I want to put a few footnotes. More frequently, I reference sources. My writing is far from academic, but I figure the least I can contribute is pointing readers (usually just my future self) in the right direction. When I consider the best ways to accomplish these goals, I am reminded of all the other rigor and consistency related issues I have yet to adequately address. The Buddha was right: life is suffering.
I am so far enjoying “The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, 2007). In searching briefly for a summary both to inform the rest of my read and to send to Yizhen, I found a review and critique by David Aldous from January 2009. I have no strong opinion on Aldous’s main disagreement about the cumulative impact of non black swan events, but I appreciated more perspective. I should check out the other critiques mentioned and Taleb’s “shorter and more cohesive account”, “The fourth quadrant: a map of the limits of statistics“.
I am nonreligious, yet religion fascinates me. In particular, evolving knowledge of Jesus has separated his life and teachings from my notion of the Church.
As a young Wisconsinite, I learned the Church, God and Jesus are a conglomeration, like AOL-Time Warner. Or was it the Holy Spirit and Yahweh and the Lord Pope? The details eluded me, but there were definitely three entities, all the same. Or maybe I am thinking of the trifecta of less important Eastern competitors, Buddhism and Islam and Judaism. Religion was nebulous. All I knew for sure was in America we are united, under one monopoly of God.
Day of Silence at Hartford Union High School in April 2006
Growing up I was not much of a reader, but apparently that has changed. I started using Goodreads earlier this year to track my reading, mostly to encourage me to write some notes upon finishing, and partly to remember what I even read. It has been helping! After some investigation …
I sat down this week to start writing a small Python application to aggregate my data and generate a status page like the AWS Service Health Dashboard but with my goal completion instead. This is largely supposed to motivate me to find ways to spend more time doing deep work, but more automatically planned than my past efforts. Well, as I feared, it has taken a few days to lay the groundwork. The last piece involved more trial and error than I would have liked due to lacking documentation, but perhaps someone can make use of this configuration.
After a few months mostly typing in QWERTY due to a compromise to get some programming done faster, I am recommitted to forcing myself to use Dvorak. I picked it back up quickly. In fact, right off the bat I was possibly faster than when I left off. Strange. This entry will continue documenting my progress.
I almost pried myself from reading news story after story this morning thanks to Google Now’s suggestions and the endless shenanigans of the current administration. Then I clicked one more, a SitePoint article “The Best Markdown Editors for Mac“. I skimmed it, mostly looking to see if MacDown was mentioned. It was not, but another caught my eye, and I was converted to Typora before I even tried it. The editor itself is the live preview!
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Over the past few months of using Anki consistently, I have been trying to streamline my process of adding and organizing cards, as well as making them somewhat pretty. It has not been easy!
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Pictures coming later, but I wanted to write this now before I let it slide for a year like last year!
I expected this marathon to be bad, and it was, but I did finish. I really hope I manage to do a proper training schedule for my next marathon …
I spent some time today reading Vim documentation and a handful of blog posts. I learned the extreme basics of Vim many years ago, but I have not graduated much past cut-paste and search-replace until this year. In my mission to memorize more things I never bothered to for lack …
My long running goal of properly training for a marathon will again not be realized this year, but I still feel good. And kind of crappy. If only the San Francisco Marathon were in a few more weeks instead of a few days!
At 950 miles of running plus all the walking I’ve done in the past two years, my Venada Rojas from Luna Sandals are showing some strap wear. That is objectively pretty good, though I know they could last a lot longer. I need to figure out how to avoid wearing the strap. Perhaps a wider back, or tighter?
I was listening to Reality by Oliver Koletzki with my headphones when I thought I accidentally switched the audio to my large speakers. Alan was in the room and indicated he heard nothing, so I was momentarily very confused! Then I rewound the track and found the same thing happen again, at which point I realized the track was either post processed or the microphone physically moved so the sound would seem to have moved behind. I couldn’t find any web pages mentioning this track, hence this blog, probably only for my future reference!
Following my issues using the official Google Drive client, I tried another Google Drive client called Insync. I wanted to write more, but time is flying and I wanted to post some screenshots before I forgot. Bottom line: I managed to get about 700GB of my documents uploaded to Google Drive using Insync, though I needed to employ a folder by folder approach else it would freeze. I am using some of Insync’s filtering features to keep my projected synchronized on my laptop and desktop, but the app itself is somewhat clunky and the UI blocks the folder name once I enter it in the filtering section. Here are some screenshots I intended to document earlier.
I received this small brittle starfish in my last order a week and a half ago. It crawled onto the sea whip I had barely touching the Rock the starfish was on originally, and since then it’s been crawling up and down the sea whip. I did not think it was causing any harm but now today suddenly most of the flesh fell off the first half of the sea Whip and probably the rest will die. :-(
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Amazon pioneered consumer confidence with their product ratings system, but my confidence in that system is greatly diminished. As if the SEO driven keyword soup product titles were not bad enough, many vendors now differentiate their products with false descriptions and claims backed by fake five star reviews. The products are often cheap enough customers likely don’t bother with returns or complaints, but at the same time I am surprised the fake reviews are submitted by accounts that did not first buy the product. It would only cost vendors the small Amazon fee to ask their employees to actually buy the products and give them back to the seller. Clearly vendors see no point in even that small expense since Amazon’s system enables fake, unverified reviews to drive search and sales. As it stands, you can only filter by verified purchase status and eliminate many of the fakes once you are on the product page. It’s a shame Amazon includes the fake reviews in the ratings by default and forbids filtering out the fake reviews from the product search.
I set my alarm for 8 a.m. but struggled to get up then. I shouldn’t have set an alarm, for I hit snooze every seven minutes for two hours and I’m quite tired now. I made tea and three eggs and sat down to work, though I …
I recently pieced together a list of my mobile phones from journal entries and emails, which I have going back only to 2006 when I switched to Gmail. That could have been easier had I written a journal entry each time I switched phones, but better late than never. So, Thursday, June 22, I switched phones. To the Samsung Galaxy S8.
I’m a bit frustrated right now trying to work through a small cascade of issues so I can file some claims for some corals that arrived yesterday. This is a quick entry to document where I am in the process.
Since Amazon canceled the unlimited storage I planned to use to replace BackBlaze, I have been weighing my options. I decided to pay $100 to upgrade my Google Drive to 1TB for one year and try syncing my documents (~900GB) there, but after three days I have not managed to upload much due to the Mac client crashing frequently. Not promising!
Other books by John McWhorter and Steven Pinker had already stripped away most of my linguistic sense of right and wrong, but “Words on the Move” finished the job. It convinced me the new words and new uses for old words we hear, even if disagreeable to some, are exactly …
This is simply to register my conversion from a tabs-to-spaces guy to a tabs guy, thanks largely to finding Nick Gravgaard’s elastic tabstops page, which also turned me on to Input, a “a proportional programming font”.
Less than a month ago I posted Switching from Backblaze to Arq+Amazon and already Amazon has canceled its unlimited plan, thus foiling my backup plan.
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Years ago, I started using Mint to aggragate my financial information. The idea made sense, like browser based Gmail made sense compared to using Outlook on the desktop. Mint seemed to be the first free service to connect with most financial institutions. Now there are many such services, and Mint has not managed to resolve any of the usability issues I have experienced all those years. I was about to look for alternatives today till I found a workaround for my latest annoyance: lack of bulk import.
I right clicked the updateTransaction.xevent request and selected *Copy as cURL*.
This morning federal agents detained someone close to me. His continuous employment and clean record since entering many years ago were not enough to make his illegal entrances legal.
Also today, two housemates moved out, too soon to count them close to me. Mysterious towings and a neighbor shouting “We don’t want any n_____s around here!” may have contributed. This is San Francisco? More directly, derelict landlords apparently let avarice supersede fostering relationships. Yes, this is San Francisco!
I spent a bit of today taking photos of creatures in my saltwater tank, and while I had my Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens out, I figured I would take a photo of Alan’s eye and then my eye. One thing led to another, and I tried to figure out how to tether my Nikon D800 to my laptop so I could use the screen as a viewfinder, making self eye portraits easier. It was not easy.
I have been behind in blogging about the tank, but here are some more photos.
These duncans were an interesting piece from Aquarium Depot. At first I didn't even realize it was a duncan since it had a bunch of small heads and not a single large head like my first one. But after a few days, they opened up, and now the heads expand almost an inch beyond the base and look quite healthy.
This is just to document that I solved a somewhat innocuous problem with a quick command. I use CloudPull to back up my Google Drive and email, and I think it has been working fine. I have noticed a bunch of errors in my console, though I don’t think …
I realized the software for Folding@Home was not set up since I reformatted, so I took care of that today. There was of course a small hurdle.
Creative released a Sound Blaster Omni Surround 5.1 firmware update that allows the SB1560 to work with macOS Sierra. Despite the notes claiming it must be installed from a computer running either Windows or a version of OS X older than macOS Sierra 10.12, I was in fact able to install it directly from within Sierra. This entry serves simply to document that fact.
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The hamsters have died of shock. That's all folks, sorry.
It’s been a while since I updated about my saltwater aquarium since I have been focusing on wrapping up some personal projects as soon as possible. For now, here are a few photos and videos of strange creatures, including a pretty cool albeit not terribly high quality video of a spaghetti worm (Eupolymnia crasscornis) that climbed the glass and possibly tried to attack or at least irritated a nassarius snail, who then fought back and jumped to the ground onto a starfish.
I found this spaghetti worm climbing the glass one night after dark.
I noticed May 11 I could not upload photos to Facebook via the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Facebook plugin I had been using for several years. This was not a surprise, as I have been having intermittent issues with my publisher connections through my recent reformatting and data shuffling process. I thought the worst case would be needing to reauthorize the plugin and perhaps create a new “May 2017” album to continue uploading to. Then I checked Facebook and saw it was much worse. Thousands of photos were missing, and I was not alone.
After returning January 4 from visiting family in Milwaukee for Christmas, I moved to a new apartment to live with my friend Yida and two others. The first months have flown by, and already one roommate moved out to return to Taiwan. I figured it is about time I post a few photos, though of course improving everything is an eternal process.
Proper lighting makes a house a home! Or something!
These plans already have been foiled: Amazon Drive failure to launch
Having recently reformatted my desktop to document my setup in my dotfiles and hackintosh Git repositories, I needed to reinitiate my backup process. It became clear Backblaze was not going to work for me any longer due to the fragility of their architecture. After admittedly minimal research (I have pursued far too many tangents lately!), I am ditching Backblaze and trying Arq+Amazon Cloud Drive instead. Backblaze was at least kind enough to give a refund for my unused time.
Backblaze Inherit Backup State / Backblaze failed to make this computer inherit your backup state. / ERR_error_unknown
While posting the last entry about the sucky Withings experience, I wanted to upload a few screenshots I knew were on my system somewhere. I pasted the filename into Spotlight, and it popped right up.
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I just completed migrating my weight and heart rate information to a new Withings account because they are incapable of figuring out why my Wi-Fi Body Scale (WBS01) (new version) can no longer be associated to my original account. Their export and import process does not support temperature data, so I need to continue using my Thermo with the Thermo app signed into my original account, while using my blood pressure monitor with the Withings app is signed into my new account. Additionally, the import process ignores comments, so I needed to manually copy and paste all the comments for each measurement. What a pain!
I thought I had low confidence in Fitbit based on my experience over the years, but man, now I don’t know who I would recommend for smart body devices. I really want to support the pioneers instead of the big companies, but if they keep screwing up, I guess there’s no point.
I can only seem to sync my Fitbit Charge 2 on macOS Sierra with the Fitbit wireless dongle and with my system Bluetooth explicitly disabled.
An error occurred while syncing! / An unknown error occurred!
After initially thinking it was a crab due to some possibly erroneous information on a vendor’s website, I realized I found my first sea spider. He measures about a centimeter. Despite my revisionist inclination to nurture what others consider harmful pests, I quarantined him and will probably keep it that way.
I found a pycnogonid, or sea spider, in a batch of small corals and algae. It apparently survived the wash stage, unless it caught a ride inside a tube worm. I'm not sure what I will do with him, as he might prey on corals.
I had seen and run the defaults command many times on my Macs, usually in the course of following a tutorial to change some behavior Apple had removed the ability to easily modify. I never looked into the command much, but now that I did, I am glad I will be able to automate more of my setup!
This is the most painful entry I have ever written, but hopefully the pain will be worth it. I am typing in the Dvorak keyboard layout thanks to a deceptively enticing set of lessons at learn.dvorak.nl, which I found linked on Reddit while researching what people do with programmable layers like my CODE 61 key has.
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The last two times I upgraded, I used the app FlashFire, and it was a very simple process. So simple I figured I didn’t need to write it down. But by the time I needed to upgrade most recently, I forgot how simple it was, and I ended up down a rabbit hole pursuing a full backup before upgrading.
I have a Nexus 6P running Android 7.1.1, but I am a few updates behind. I haven’t gotten the process down for updating since my phone is rooted and I am wary of losing data, so I tend to delay. I almost documented what I did last time, but it turned out to be simpler than I expected and I neglected to save the instructions. Now I sat down to do it again, but figured I would first try to understand how to fully back up and restore the phone at more of a disk image level. It didn’t end as well as I hoped, and this entry serves more as a log of what I did than as a guide for anyone else.
I tested the water today using my new test tubes with rubber stoppers and Mohr pipette. It was delightful, as the rubber stoppers work far better than the plastic caps that come with the API test kits. I won’t buy these test kits again, as I again was not …
My red gorgonian had been opening somewhat consistently when it was in the refugium, but has barely opened since I moved it to the display tank. I’m not sure if that is related, or if it has to do with other changes I made. I received another gorgonian, but yellow, last week, and it had been opening in the display tank till a few days ago. I tried moving them to very high flow and then to low flow to no avail. I think I’ll move them to the refugium now.
A feather duster peaking out of the tube a few days after he popped his crown off, I think due to stress from my experimenting with different powerhead placements.
I have gone through half a dozen lettuce sea slugs, so I guess I need to call it quits for now. The first one, which was the largest, died in December at Alan’s place. It probably did not have enough algae to graze on in that tank. Then I got a few smaller ones from Aquarium Depot, Live Aquaria and the local store, 6th Avenue Aquarium. I lose two or three due to getting sucked into pumps and getting attacked by the sponge decorator crabs. Then I isolated the last ones in the hang on box full of hair algae and other food, but they still managed to die within a week or two. I knew they would not be easy, but I hoped my abundant supply of algae would make the difference. I’ll reconsider once the tank is mature.
I discovered the lettuce sea slugs either crawled or got sucked into a water pump. I took him out and seemed to be doing fine, but later died, probably because of insufficient food. :-(
Feb. 20 I noticed between 20 and 30 white spots on the front of the display tank. I had noticed some on the back of the refugium a few weeks ago, but I’m not sure what happened to them. I assumed these were due to the five “tapestry nerite snails” I got from Aquarium Depot.
Feb. 16 at 9:48 a.m. I received a combined delivery of two orders and replacements for previously DOA items from Aquarium Depot. It was a little nuts dealing with all the pieces, but I’m pleased with the result for the price paid.
I fell prey to Aquarium Depot's half off coral sale, so I got most of these for about $5. I placed them all in a bucket and then drip acclimated to the water in my small quarantine tank.
Last week while mesmerized by my tank’s visible plankton, I spotted something that looked and moved like a jellyfish. It was probably half a millimeter, and quickly disappeared. Today I found another one, or possibly the same one, but larger. I captured it with a pipette and photographed it under a microscope. It measured about 1.0 mm.
Possible baby jellyfish under microscope
I isolated the pregnant decorator sponge crab from Aquarium Depot in a 2.5 gallon heated and aerated tank at the point her eggs seemed to be lightening in color. A few days later, she did indeed expel the eggs all over the tank Feb. 13.
I put her back in the refugium and left the eggs to hatch. As of nine days later, the eggs seem not to have hatched. They lightened in color to the point I cannot tell if they are even present any longer, but I have seen no live babies as I saw in the initial shipment.
I put the pregnant split nose decorator sponge crab in a small separate tank so she would lay the eggs in safety. She did indeed lay the eggs, as seen here, but they unfortunately did not seem to hatch. They lightened in color till I could not see them anymore, but I saw no signs of life after two weeks.
After waiting two months for the tank from Windrider Creations and seeing it still had not shipped, I ordered a similarly sized tank from Marine Depot instead. I received it Thursday at 12:54 p.m. and spent the rest of the day figuring out my plumbing setup.
Reading Friedman’s book The World Is Flat more than a decade ago inspired my interest in the global community. I’ll have to read his newish book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations! He talks about it in this clip, and then comments on Trump…
[youtube OTMHFjkk674]
I initially used two types of sediment, with the finer stuff on top. I noticed water was not penetrating more than an inch down, and the entire layer of thicker substrate was untouched. Also, the snails were unable to move in the fine stuff. I tried to stir it as gently as possible in an effort to bring some of the coarser sand to the top, but even after just doing a small area, the water clouded pretty badly. That unfortunately led to my amphipods and smaller porcelain crabs being unable to breathe apparently, for they all died.
I received a crab Aquarium Depot markets as a “lavender sponge crab,” and the bag contained hundreds of what I initially thought were some sort of pods, but later identified as baby crabs in the initial stage, zoea. I’m not sure they survived my tank, but after a few days the crab is apparently again carrying tons of eggs.
Video of one of the hundreds of baby crabs under microscope with a 10x objective lens
I meant to write more, but again, here are some miscellaneous photos from January.
Another DIY light fixture for my refugium. The strips are bright white LEDs and the black enclosures are blue COB LEDs
I don’t have time to write at length, but here are some photos and captions.
Black rock sea urchin from Aquarium Depot that arrived poking through the bag
Along with some chaetomorpha from Aquarium Depot I got a bunch of small bristle worms, tiny hard shells (fan worms?) and a bunch of these creatures I have yet to identify.
I’m constantly baffled by strangeness in working with Files on Apple operating systems. Even after using OS X almost exclusively for years now, I still find file operations to be unintuitive or plain silly. This could be a laundry list of issues, but I’ll just mention a few …
When I message a new person using Messenger, I frequently want to copy and paste the phone number elsewhere once I have begun talking. This is maddeningly difficult and requires me to either copy and paste the number before I hit enter upon first entering it, write it with pen and paper or fully open the Contacts app and locate the contact and number.
Once a conversation is started, double clicking the number or the contact name produces a little popup with the contact info. You would think you could copy the info easily, especially since you can highlight portions of it. But the copy function does not work at all here.
I am me! I’m also a scientist minded software engineer who loves reading, running, listening to music, and recording photos and videos and data of all sorts. After earning a biochemistry degree, I lived in San Francisco and Tokyo, and now I find it difficult to stay put. Read more about me and my online life.
SF: 87% complete; Oakland: 27%
San Francisco Bay Area running progress
Charlie says: “What a wonderful region!”
30 November 2022
In-N-Out Burger (Fast Food Restaurant)
333 Jefferson St , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “It was super hot and we got a taste for salty fries, but by the time we walked there it dropped 35° and was cold. Still tasted good!”
28 September 2020 at 20:32
Taqueria Zorro (Mexican Restaurant)
308 Columbus Ave , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “Restaurants are hoppin’ around here, feels weird.”
26 September 2020 at 19:42
碼頭老火鍋 (Hotpot Restaurant)
仁愛路四段409-1號 , Da’an District , T’ai-pei Shih
Charlie says: “Delicious spicy hot pot with Harry. I am so full!!”
25 March 2020 at 08:40
桶好呷滷味 (Asian Restaurant)
, Taipei
Charlie says: “We pick a representative set of ingredients and they build out the rest into a braised soup like thing over noodles.”
23 March 2020 at 06:46
Addiction Aquatic Development (上引水產) (Fish Market)
民族東路410巷2弄18號 , Taipei
Charlie says: “Standing sushi bar at a fish market.”
21 March 2020 at 07:03
ACME Breakfast CLUB (Breakfast Spot)
3F., No. 10, Ln. 27, Chengdu Rd., , Taipei
Charlie says: “Brunch w/ Shawn! Was tempted to get the avocado toast kind of as a joke since I never get it in SF, but resisted, sourdough was good. :-)”
20 March 2020 at 22:27
三甲和風創意料理 (Japanese Restaurant)
Charlie says: “Late dinner with Shawn, at a lovely place!”
20 March 2020 at 09:28
中央藝文公園 Central Culture Park (Park)
北平東路與紹興北街口 , Taipei
Charlie says: “Social distance.”
20 March 2020 at 03:42
虎頭山環保公園 (Scenic Lookout)
Charlie says: “Exploring the hillside in Taoyuan City.”
14 March 2020 at 23:49
Abura-Ya (Japanese Restaurant)
362 17th St , Oakland , CA
Charlie says: “Dinner with Beam before Sarah McLachlan!”
24 February 2020 at 18:55
