Month: October 2015

recuperating

I had surgery to repair my hernia on Monday. It went well, I guess, all things considered. I’ve taken the week off from work to recuperate. It’s Friday now, and I’m feeling a lot better, though I know I’m not nearly done healing. I walked over to the grocery store yesterday and got a few things. (This is one of those times when I’m really grateful that I have a ShopRite that’s only about a block away.) But I’m definitely not ready for any long walks.

I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to do next week. I have a follow-up visit with the surgeon on Tuesday, so hopefully he can give me an idea of how I’m progressing, and let me know if it’s OK to go back to work. I may just see if I can work from home next week. (And, again, this is one of those times when I’m grateful that I do the kind of work that can be done remotely.)

another busy week

My company’s upgrade to Dynamics AX 2012 R3 over the past weekend went well, all things considered. We’ve been having lingering problems all week, but we expected that we would, and we were prepared for it.

My hernia surgery is still scheduled for Monday, so I’ll be out all next week. I still have some open issues at work that I’ll have to close out or hand off to someone else today, but I’m sure they’ll get along fine without me.

Meanwhile, my warranty replacement SSD arrived from Samsung yesterday, so I can spend some time this weekend rebuilding my MacBook, hopefully. I have a tentative plan for doing a clean El Capitan install on the new drive, and then migrating my user data over from my old backup drive, but I’m not sure if it’ll work or not. Either way, I should have plenty of time to work on it next week.

A busy week

It’s been a busy week, starting with my follow-up visit to my doctor, where I found out I have a hernia. So a lot of my energy this week has been spent just thinking about that and planning for the surgery that I’m likely going to need.

And, at work, we’re in the last stretch of our upgrade from Dynamics AX 2012 RTM to R3. This is a really big update for us, as we have a lot of custom code, so there was a lot of work to do. The final upgrade is scheduled for this weekend, so I’ll have to work on Sunday. And the first week after the upgrade is liable to be a doozy, as various stuff we didn’t catch in testing shakes out.

Meanwhile, the RMA process for my MacBook’s SSD is plodding along. I got the RMA # and the UPS return label this week. I need to print out the label and package up the drive this weekend. I’ve been without my MacBook this week. and have been using my ThinkPad a lot, which is actually a pretty good experience, except that I keep wanting to use Emacs key bindings for a few things, like Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E for beginning of line and end of line. As soon as I get used to using ‘home’ and ‘end’, I’ll probably get the MacBook back up and running, and I’ll have to re-learn the Emacs key bindings.

And I’ve got my TiVo Bolt set up now. I dropped by the cable company office after work yesterday and picked up a CableCARD. I got it installed easy enough, but it took two calls to Optimum support to get it working. I think that “support tech roulette” gave me a clueless rep on the first go-round, and a more experienced one on the second. But both reps were polite and patient. Then it took me a couple of hours to set up the channels and my recordings. I’ve discovered that the channel line-up is a little different when you’re using a CableCARD than when you’re using a box. So I’m going to have to get used to some new channel numbers. The recordings seem to be working out OK too. I’ve got last night’s Daily Show, Nightly Show, and Late Show all on there, ready to watch. But I’ve also just figured out that I needed to re-run the guided setup to get the TiVo to fully recognize the channels that didn’t show up the first time around. Hopefully, that’s the last thing I’ll have to do, and it’ll be nice and stable now, with all the right channels and a fully-populated guide.

hard drives and health

I’m trying to get myself back on a “normal” diet today, after my clear liquid diet over the weekend. I’m not sure it helped anything, but I assume my doctor knows what he’s doing. It turns out that not eating any food for 72 hours really takes a lot out of you. I went into work this morning, but gave up on it and went home around noon. I’ve since had a sandwich and a nap, and I think I’m feeling a bit better.

Meanwhile, I called Samsung to see about replacing my failed SSD drive, under their warranty. My first call to them was a failure, as the rep said he’d email a form to me, but didn’t. The second call got me as far as getting the form, which I filled out and emailed back. So now let’s see if the support rep does anything with it. What he should do is issue an RMA # and send me a prepaid UPS label. I’m not sure how long their RMA process will take, overall. I’ve been trying to decide if I should put the original drive back in the MacBook and use it until I get the replacement. If I had more energy right now, I’d probably do that, but a second nap is sounding pretty good.

Out of commission

My MacBook hard drive, a Samsung 840 EVO, seems to be good and dead. I had hoped that it was just the file system that had gotten messed up, and reformatting it would allow me to use it again, but that didn’t work. It’s less than a year old, so I’m hopeful I can get a replacement from Samsung. But their support line is only open Monday to Friday, so I’m not going to be able to deal with that today.

I had a plan all mapped out to reformat the drive, install OS X, migrate my data from my backup drive, re-install a bunch of applications, and so on and so forth, but I’m not getting that done today.

And I had also been planning to drive out to my local Cablevision store to pick up a CableCARD for my new TiVo Bolt, which should be arriving next week. But, after visiting my doctor yesterday, I’ve found out that my little stomach problem might be a bigger deal than I thought it was. He’s got me on a clear liquid diet for the weekend. So I don’t really have the energy to get in the car and drive anywhere.

So I’ve got the MacBook disassembled on the kitchen table, and I’m using my ThinkPad instead, for now. The rest of the weekend will, I think, involve lots of comic book reading and napping, with occasional breaks to consume Jell-O, ginger ale, and mushroom broth.

MacBook crash

The hard drive on my MacBook got messed up last night, somehow. It’s pretty much unusable at this point. Disk Repair won’t fix it, and I haven’t had any luck copying files off of it. I don’t have a recent backup, just the old drive from when I replaced the original drive with an SSD, back in December. I can boot from that drive, and see the files on the SSD, but I can’t do much with them.

I’m not sure what caused the problem, but I have a feeling that it might have something to do with removing Trim Enabler, and running “trimforce enable” on the drive, which I did a few days ago. The drive has been running reliably with TRIM enabled via Trim Enabler since December, and I don’t see why enabling TRIM with an OS command vs a third-party utility would be an issue, but maybe it is.

I’m a little embarrassed and mad at myself for not having a more recent backup. But, the way I work now, it’s actually not that big a deal. Most of the stuff I need from the Mac is in Evernote or Dropbox. I really don’t create any irreplaceable files that don’t wind up in the cloud one way or another. So I’ve been thinking through things, and I’m going to have to reinstall a bunch of applications, and re-download a bunch of Doctor Who audio files, but there’s really nothing that’s going to have been irrevocably lost. Still, I’ve had “backup my MacBook” on my to-do list since January, and I just never got around to doing it.

TiVo Bolt

I ordered a TiVo Bolt yesterday. I’ve been using a cable company DVR ever since I upgraded from standard def to high def TV, and I’ve never been really happy with it. I had a TiVo Series 2 from 2004 to 2008. I retired it in favor of the cable company box because, at the time, I didn’t want to pay for a new HD Tivo. (I can’t remember exactly how much they cost, but I think they were pretty expensive at the time.)

The old Series 2 TiVo was pretty cool, but with a few rough edges. The IR blaster that you had to use to control your cable box was a kludge, and it didn’t always work. And, initially, the box had no connection to the internet; it had a modem connection that was used to dial directly into TiVo’s servers every night to download program guide updates. (At some point, I hooked up an external wifi adapter, which allowed me to unplug the phone cord, and allowed the TiVo to pull content down from the internet.)

The cable company DVR service costs me $12/month. And the cable box itself costs a little less than $8/month. So I’m paying about $20/month for equipment. With the Bolt, the first year of service is free, then it’s $15/month, if you pay monthly, or about $12.50/month if you pay for a full year in advance. And the cable company will charge me $2/month for a CableCARD. So. in the long run, the Bolt should turn out to be less expensive than continuing to use my crappy cable company DVR.

I don’t know why I haven’t bought a new TiVo before now. There always seemed to be good reasons not to. First would be the cost. The more recent boxes have actually been pretty affordable, and I get occasional emails from TiVo with specials on refurb units, but I could never quite talk myself into it.

Second would be perceived risk. Nearly every time TiVo releases a new unit, the reviews on it inevitably start off with a paragraph about how TiVo is a “troubled” company that can’t compete with DVR boxes provided by the cable companies. Yet they’re still out there, making new boxes, and doing well enough, as far as I can tell. And it’s been maybe ten years since cable companies started renting DVR boxes to their customers.

Third would be ambivalence and/or guilt about how much TV I’m watching. I’ve been toying with the idea of “cutting the cord” recently, but buying a new TiVo is also, in a way, a commitment to continuing to pay for cable TV. There’s not much point in the monthly TiVo subscription if I’m not also paying for cable TV. So I feel like I’m committing to cable TV for at least another year or three, if I’m paying for a TiVo now.

So I’m pretty well committed to keeping my cable subscription going for at least another year, I think. I’m having thoughts about dropping down to a slightly less costly service level, but I’m grandfathered into a plan that doesn’t exist anymore, and there really isn’t much flexibility in their current plans. I’d love to drop down to something that just has the broadcast channels, and a few basic cable channels, like Comedy Central and SyFy. But there really isn’t a plan like that.

I also need to figure out what to do with my old Series 2 TiVo. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it’s still sitting on the shelf under my TV. It’s at the bottom of a stack of equipment that’s basically stacked in “relevant” to “obsolete” order: Roku, Apple TV, Cable box/DVR, HD-DVD player, TiVo. So I can really get rid of the Series 2 and the HD-DVD player, and of course the Cable box will go back to the cable company. I did a little digging, and it looks like Best Buy will accept the TiVo and HD-DVD player for recycling (along with some other old electronics I have lying around), so maybe that’s a task for this weekend. I’d actually like to plug in the Series 2 and see if it still works, before scrapping it. Partially out of curiosity, and partially so I can wipe the hard drive. I don’t think there’s much that anyone could do with the information on the drive, but you never know.

And I’m also thinking about the best way to get the new TiVo hooked up, and in what order I should do things. The TiVo should show up in the mail next week, maybe on Tuesday. I need to get a CableCARD, and maybe a tuning adapter. I should be able to take care of that by going to my local cable company office on Saturday. Then I’ll have all the equipment I need to do the setup. Then I can hopefully return the cable company DVR next weekend. It occurs to me that there’s probably no way to transfer my unwatched content from the cable DVR to the TiVo (or anywhere else). And I don’t think I can have the TiVo and cable box hooked up at the same time. So I’m going to have to either binge-watch all the stuff on my old DVR before hooking up the TiVo, or just write it off. Well, I guess it’s good to get a fresh start once in a while, right? I am finding that I’m letting a few shows pile up, and I’m just not that enthusiastic about them, so maybe it’s time to start over and trim down on what I’m recording. I really haven’t been excited about Gotham or Blunt Talk, for instance, even though I feel like I should like them.

Not at New York Comic Con

New York Comic Con is starting up tomorrow. I won’t be going this year. I was a little sad about that last week, but I’ve caught a little stomach bug this week, so now I’m glad I don’t have tickets. The Javits Center is no place to be if you need to use the bathroom every 30 minutes.

If I’m feeling better next week, though, maybe I’ll see about going to the “Superheroes in Gotham” exhibit at the New York Historical Society.

OS X El Capitan and third-party software

I’ve upgraded my iPhone and iPad to iOS 9, but I haven’t yet upgraded my MacBook to El Capitan, aka OS X 10.11. I use a few oddball bits of software on my Mac, so I like to make sure everything’s up to date and compatible before doing an OS upgrade.

For El Cap, I’ve found a few items I need to review and make some decisions on. First, Bartender, which is a nice little menu bar organizer, has a new version out, and it’s a paid upgrade. Version 1, which I’m using, is compatible, but it would be better to upgrade to version 2, since v. 1 requires you to jump through some hoops to get it working in El Cap. The upgrade price is only $7.50, so I’ll probably get that.

TotalFinder is a Finder add-on that I’ve used for years. I’ve been using it for so long that I’m not even sure what the regular OS X Finder looks like. But I guess I’m going to have to find out soon, since TotalFinder isn’t quite compatible with El Cap. You can get it running, by turning off System Integrity Protection, but the developer doesn’t recommend that, and he’s not going to keep actively developing TotalFinder anymore. He’s recommending a few alternatives, such as Commander One, which is a separate file manager and doesn’t plug in to Finder. There’s a free version, and a paid “pro” version. I may consider it, after seeing whether or not the plain old OS X Finder is good enough for me. I know Apple has enhanced it a lot since I started using TotalFinder.

I’ve been using a little program called Trim Enabler to enable trim on my SSD, since I replaced the drive in my MacBook a while ago. Why this is necessary is a long story, but now, it can apparently be done with the “trimforce” command at the command line, so Trim Enabler isn’t necessary anymore. But the company that released it now has a utility called Disk Sensei which might be worth buying, though it’s not necessary. I can buy it as an upgrade from Trim Enabler for $10.

TextExpander is compatible with El Cap, as far as I can tell. I paid for the upgrade to TE 5 recently, so I should be fine there. LaunchBar should be fine too. I installed the latest update for that last night. My preferred VPN client, Viscosity, is up to date also, and is probably compatible with El Cap.

And I think that about covers the oddball apps that do weird system-level stuff that’s likely to break with an OS update. I’m sure Firefox, Evernote, 1Password, and Microsoft Office are all going to be fine. They’re all actively maintained and up to date.

So I’ll probably try to clean up the issues noted above this weekend, then maybe do the El Capitan upgrade next week at some point. I should probably back up my hard drive too. Which reminds me that I need to update Carbon Copy Cloner too!

TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt, BitLocker, and so on

I still don’t use any disk encryption on my (personal) laptops, but I try to keep up with news about this stuff, and I came across this article about a couple of flaws in TrueCrypt. I hadn’t really been keeping up with the fallout from TrueCrypt’s meltdown a while back, but I knew that there were some forks of it out there.

It looks like VeraCrypt is probably a good fork to choose, if you’re looking for one, as they have already patched these flaws.

I don’t see any mention of this flaw on Steve Gibson’s TrueCrypt page yet. At one point, he was advising that people continue using TrueCrypt, and that there wasn’t any good reason to abandon it. (And that was certainly true at the time.) But now there definitely is a good reason to switch to something else.

Since I have SSD drives in my ThinkPad and MacBook now, I could probably enable BitLocker on the ThinkPad and FileVault on my Mac, without too much of a performance hit. But honestly, there’s not really anything on either of those machines worth stealing, and I’m still nervous about scrambling all the bits on my drives.