Month: August 2014

NYC trip today – The Met and MoMA

I took a trip into NYC today to visit the Met and MoMA. It worked out pretty well. I got to the Met right around 10am, just after they opened. It wasn’t crowded at all, so I had a nice time casually strolling around and enjoying a nice quiet Sunday visit. I went to MoMA after lunch, and spent a little time there, but not too long. It was a lot more crowded at MoMA, but still manageable. And I finally managed to visit the Monet water lily room, which I blogged about back in June. I got caught up in some Brazilian street festival while walking back to the train station, but managed to extricate myself and get to my train in one piece. So, all in all, a good Sunday in NYC.

Windows 8.1 refresh shenanigans

Yesterday, I decided I wanted to do a system refresh on my Windows 8.1 laptop. This machine is a Lenovo ThinkPad that originally shipped with Windows 7. I’ve since upgraded it to 8 and 8.1. I bought the Windows 8 upgrade online from Microsoft, so I have no install media. And of course I have no install media for 8.1. This leaves me in an awkward position, where I can’t do a normal refresh, as I have a Windows 8 product key, but no media for either 8 or 8.1. This is a pretty well-documented problem, and I think it really reflects poorly on Microsoft that they’ve done nothing to address it.

There are various (slightly Rube Goldberg style) workarounds, none of which worked out for me. The one thing that did work is the solution documented here, using the “recimg” command to create a restore image on my hard drive, which can then be used for the refresh. What that article didn’t make clear, though, is that the image you create that way has all your installed programs in it. That’s clear from this support document, but I didn’t find that one until today.

So, basically, I spent three hours creating a restore image that contained all the installed apps that I wanted to get rid of via the system refresh! Then I ran the refresh, and wound up with a Windows install that was nearly identical to the one I started with. Oh well. I guess the only way to clean things up would be to do a full format and re-install. But, again, since I have no 8.1 install media, I’m not sure I could even do that. It’s enough to drive a guy straight to Ubuntu. (Which probably works pretty well on a ThinkPad. Hmm.)

The main motivation for wanting to do the refresh was that I wanted a nice clean machine for the fall, since I will probably be taking a class via Coursera, and I wanted a good fast machine to work on. Well, I can still mess around with it some more and see what I can do with it.

Poirot

I’ve been binge-watching old episodes of Poirot (via Amazon Prime) recently. I haven’t seen the early episodes since they first aired, and I probably haven’t see all of them, since I (of course) didn’t have a DVR in those days.

The series is coming to an end now, after about 25 years. There are good write-ups on it at NPR and the NY Times. I don’t think I’ll be signing up for Acorn TV just to see the last few episodes. I’ll wait until they show up on PBS (or possibly Amazon Prime or Netflix).

WP-CLI on 1&1

After coming back from WordCamp, I mentioned that I wanted to start messing with WP-CLI. Well, today, I decided to give that a try under my 1&1 account. I first tried installing it with curl and running it, as described on the WP-CLI home page. But (to make a long story short), I had some problems getting it to work.

Then, I did some searching, and found some indication that WP-CLI might already be installed and configured on my account. So, I just typed in “wp cli info” and hey, it’s there and working. (Thanks, 1&1!) I’ve had some problems installing Jetpack updates from the WP admin page, so now I can just ssh in and type “wp plugin update jetpack”. Much smoother!

Of course, nothing’s perfect, so right now, some of the WP-CLI commands are throwing a whole bunch of warnings up on the screen, but they’re all working, so I’ll see if I can fix the warnings later.

New York Comic Con

I had pretty much decided not to go to NYCC this year. I wasn’t really that enthusiastic about it earlier this year, so I didn’t get around to checking on tickets until after they’d sold out on every day except Thursday. So I said “oh well” and forgot about it. But then a friend at work mentioned recently that he might be able to get me a free ticket, so that got me interested again. Well, that didn’t work out either, but I noticed that tickets would be going on sale at some comic books stores today, so I thought I’d give that a try.

I headed over to The Fallout Shelter in Highland Park today at lunch time to see if I could get tickets. They open at noon, and I got there just after noon, maybe 12:02. There was a long line out the door and down the street. Apparently, a number of people got there early and lined up! I didn’t really want to get in line, so I decided to wander around a bit, then come back. Highland Park had a farmers market going on, so I stopped by there and got some fresh peaches and bread, then went back to the comic shop. I got back there at 12:10. The line was gone, but they’d just sold out on tickets! So I picked up Sandman Overture #1-3 and headed back to work.

So I’m still not going to NYCC, and I probably missed my last chance to get tickets, but I’ve got a few good comics, and a handful of fresh peaches and fresh bread, so it wasn’t a wasted trip!

WordCamp NYC notes

I just got back home, after attending WordCamp NYC this weekend. Overall, it was pretty good. The presentations were mixed, with a couple of really good ones, and a few that weren’t really useful to me (but might have been to others). I’m kind of surprised at how much they were able to do for only a $40 registration fee. Free t-shirt, and free breakfast and lunch on Saturday. And all in a nice hotel. (I guess a lot of the cost is borne by the corporate sponsors?)

I was going to write up a long post with links to some of the more interesting topics that came up, but I think I’m too tired to do that now. I’ll just link to two things that I’d like to look into a bit further: Piklist and WP-CLI. Maybe I’ll post more detail later, if I can find the energy.