The backup and sync saga never ends! Now on my desktop I have been unable to open the Insync UI or apparently get it to sync at all. I killed it and run it by console to see if there was any output, and it fails before it starts syncing anything with an error: GDAuthError: Access token refresher stopped. Only two search results appear for “GDAuthError Insync”. One from a year ago has no solution, but someone commented recently that it happened to them, so perhaps there was a regression.
Read more
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.
Read more
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!
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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 …
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
I received a request from Coinbase to provide more personal information. While I still hope bitcoin replaces much of our current payments system, I must admit I am at least not being interrogated by my bank regarding the use of my account.
Read more
A few weeks ago, when configuring my server to host my mom’s new business website, I finally looked into Let’s Encrypt and decided to go with it. The service provides an automated way to install and update SSL certificates for HTTPS website hosting. Previously I had been using the free-ish certificates from StartCom.
Read more
I signed up for Comcast’s XFINITY Internet service this week, despite a deep seated aversion to contributing to the reign of a giant monopoly. Time will tell if I can live with the decision, but so far, it’s not looking so good. They have already done a hard pull on my credit report illegally, as I did not consent to it and they explicitly told me no such pull would be done since I was paying a $100 deposit. Additionally, the speeds are not as advertised. My attempts so far to deal with both these issues have wasted a lot of time and have been unsuccessful.
Read more
I began studying Japanese vocab and characters through WaniKani in May 2014, a few months after I moved to Japan. After five months, I wrote about my struggles to get caught up with the program due to intentionally advancing through the levels as quickly as possible to maximize my benefit …
Read more
Back on February 19, about six weeks ago, I saw an ad on Facebook for Credible, a company that supposedly helps you consolidate private and government student loans. I had done a consolidation before through the sort of official Education Department route, but only some of my loans qualified, so I was still left with six loan accounts to deal with, ranging from 5 to 6.5 percent interest rates. For a few years they have been on auto pay, so it wasn’t a big deal, but the OCD me would prefer to see just one nice loan account instead of a bunch with weird payment amounts.
Credible claims to solve my “problem” with ease, in just three steps!
So I filled out the Credible sign up form and waited.
Read more
A month ago I wrote about how well my Wealthfront IRA was doing after the first six weeks. Well, I decided to also try one of their competitors, Betterment.
Read more
Two years ago I stumbled on startup called Wealthfront that automatically invests money for users and seemed to have the lowest fees. It was actually a web development blog post I stumbled on, "Reactive Charts with D3 and Reactive.js" (entry is kind of broken now), but it prompted me to look into the company nonetheless.
Read more
Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I found a link to (a blog post linking to) the below video of some boys known as the Rhodes twins, coming out to their father. I wasn’t going to click, as I’ve been experiencing strong overhyped-sentimental-click-baiting fatigue, but then I caved, maybe because they appeared to be cute. What the hell kind of person am I?
Read more
The other day I noticed Facebook has a nice little message in the developer console to warn people they might be about to fall victim to a scam.
Read more
I received a text via the Google Voice app on my Android phone. It was from my brother Ricky asking for math help. I promptly navigated to http://voice.google.com as usual to load the web interface and respond easier via the computer. Only I was redirected to https://support.google.com/chat/answer/3379791…
Read more
I set up a VPS on Rimuhosting using their default Ubuntu 13.04 image and then attempted to follow the instructions on Alex Cabal's PHP Best Practices for configuring PHP-FPM.
Read more
Overall, I feel left out of the conversation, as Spotify is not very forthcoming about how it uses your connection. The only mention I can find in their help documents is a question "How much disk space and bandwidth does Spotify use?" where it states without answering the question:
To reduce download data, increase the cache size. To reduce upload data, reduce the cache size.
Or, just block Spotify from uploading and leave your cache alone, and Spotify will respond much faster and allow your household to enjoy the Internet again. And Backblaze can resume uploading my data. :-)
Read more
I don't remember exactly how I came up with this idea, but when I was looking at some D3.js powered charts, I decided to make something so I could play with them. Somehow I chose to try pulling my daily step counts through the Fitbit API and graphing it against temperature data. I found a neat weather data API, Forecast.io, and used my Foursquare history to determine which location to use for weather data each day. Once I got this working, I created a web page so others can create their own graphs. And I called it Weatherbit.
Read more
Barely two days after I posted about my new gym lifestyle, the Fitness SF website got replaced Feb. 14 with a cutting open letter from the company's former designer, Frank Jonen.
"Fitness SF preferred to ignore our invoices instead of paying them. As a result this website is no longer operational," Jonen wrote.
Read more
I was setting up a search domain last night, and went to bed while the latest draft of my SDF file generated. This morning I tried to upload it on the "Create a New Search Domain" dialog, and got this new error.
Read more
I had this account, zach_eastwood, on my Yahoo! buddies list for a long time, but I don’t remember why or if it was ever a real person. I thought I’d message.
[12:07] Charlie Gorichanaz: hi
[12:07] Zach Eastwood: hi!
[12:07] Charlie Gorichanaz: i don’t …
Read more
I started using Google's Picasa to manage my photos probably two years ago when I learned of its awesome facial recognition feature to largely automate tagging people. Then when I discovered Alan Lundeen's plugin to automate uploading to Facebook, life was blissful.
Read more
I've never been one to use the same, simple password for everything, like many FBI agents and possibly 92 percent of Sony customers. For the better part of a decade, my strategy was to use a ridiculously long "secure" password for important sites, and a simple (but nondictionary) password for the rest. Then a number of years ago I switched to the much more robust strategy of using a complex sequence combined with parts of the website name following some formula. I didn't want to make it too complicated, though, so I limited the password to eight characters, as one of my banks had this limit on passwords.
Read more
Apparently Facebook hasn't taken into account how to handle someone who pokes you and then disables poking.
Read more
I have now abandoned my www.MySpace.com blog, because it sucked! This one will be so much better once I get it set up - now I just need to move all of my MySpace.com blogs….
Read more
