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 …

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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 …

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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?

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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!

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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.

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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.

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