Sometimes you need to go nuclear and get back to baseline on all of those Finder window customizations that you make over time and start afresh. This will get rid of all the .DS_Store files that hold those customizations. I save it as a bash script, chmod it 775 and keep it in my ~/bin/ directory as reset_finder_windows.sh
#!/bin/bash
sudo find / -name .DS_Store -delete; killall Finder
Pinboard Saves for This Week:
I’ve been second-guessing drive read/write speeds on my new iMac because it has a fusion drive. My iMac has a 2Tb Fusion Drive so that means it has 128GB SSD and the rest is spinning platters.
I never really know if I’m reading/writing to/from the SSD or the platters. I mean, it seems zippy so my inclination is just to leave it as-is and trust that Apple knows what they are doing.
I have entertained the idea of splitting up the fusion drive and trying to manage the SSD space on my own but thanks to this post, I’m feeling less inclined to do so. Rauol Pop did it and then ran some tests that show splitting the drive up yields equivocal benefits and some measurable negatives so, I’m trusting that the engineers at Apple know what they’re doing.
That, and I’m making good use of 24GB of RAM and just loading up all my applications into RAM anyway, so, there’s that. Also, as soon as they come down in price just a smidge, I’m going to pickup an external SSD that supports Thunderbolt 3 like the Samsung X5, that ought to be pretty close to the speeds of the internal SSD.
lxml 4.0 doesn’t build on Mac OS Mojave. But the latest version does. Unfortunately pyinstapaper looks for 4.0 when it builds.
I would have never figured this out but another developer submitted a merge request that noted the lxml issue.
The request hasn’t been accepted yet so if you try to install pyinstapaper using pip it will error out. That said, you can still install pyinstapaper from source (assumes you have jumped through all of the ‘brew install $foo’ requirements stuff) to get python 3.x running on your Mac.
To get pyinstapaper to install:
This was my first Cormac McCarthy book. I asked a good friend of mine who is a McCarthy fan to pick one and this was his pick.
Man. What an amazing read. All of the components were there: great story, unfamiliar-sounding yet authentic dialog, characters who you really, really cared about. And then on top of that there is a meta-plot about how the hell one ought to behave when the world around you is falling apart, something that seems especially timely.
The story here seems mostly about choosing to commit and persevere no matter how bad the outcome looks. Doing the right thing in the face of inevitability. But it’s so much more than that. The Sheriff may be one of my favorite characters ever. McCarthy’s dialog partly accounts for that but it is also really compelling to watch his internal struggle reconciling his behaviors, something we all deal with at one level or another. Such a great book. Really grateful to have read it.
The premise of Brave New World is compelling enough to recommend the book. Especially if you’re in high school, which I think is when I first read it. The dytopian future portrayed by Huxley of a world that tries to engineer a better version of itself challenges the reader to pull connections from more modern attempts at these efforts.
Despite the interesting premise, I just didn’t enjoy the writing. The world represented in the book seemed like an academic exercise that Huxley engineered to make a point. It was interesting but only as a thought exercise.
I discovered that Ridley Scott was going to try to make a movie out of the book and seems to have backed away, citing:
I think Brave New World was probably great in nineteen thirty-eight, because it had a very interesting revolutionary idea. Don’t forget it came shortly before or after George Orwell, roughly the same time. When you re-analyze it, maybe it should stay as a book. I don’t know.
I think Scott would have been hard pressed to get an audience to feel real empathy for any of the characters the way he did in Blade Runner.
Huxley apparently was inspired to write the book in response to a trip he made to the US where he observed our obsession with youth and commercialism. That’s easy enough to believe. Out national fixation on self-improvement seems like just the kind of ecosystem that unchecked could eventually yield the kind of attempts to engineer the friction out of life represented in Brave New World.
To me, it’s this thread of the book’s narrative that is so interesting to me. Specifically, what happens when you engineer the suffering out of life. Huxley’s plot seems to fixate on the tools and techniques used to engineer the friction out of life but I think the tools and techniaues are mere disctraction.
Instead, especially relevant and meaningful are the effects of a life devoid of friction or where friction is seen as somehow being different from or seperate from the good life. Huxley fails to really dig into this thread in a satisfying way and perhaps that why it felt a little flat to me.
It certainly seems relevant today where we seem spend so much energy trying to reduce friction, sadness, pain, etc. from our lives. But it occurs to me that those things we try to avoid and minimize (and which have been erradicated in Huxley’s work) are exactly the things that make life worth living.
That is the underlying message of BNW that gets hidden in all of the dystopian engineering: If life is all good, it’s no good. Life is only good to the extent that we are open to the suffering it exposes us to.
The Nickel Boys was on a lot of “Best of” lists for 2019 so I figured to check it out and I’m glad I did. I haven’t read anything else by Colson Whitehead so not sure if this is true with all of his writing but he got me to feel a degree of empathy for his characters that was so deep that by the end of the book I felt wrung out.
I don’t get that a lot.
Moreover, I’m a middle age white guy and here I am feeling really deep connection and empathy towards these African american boys in Jim Crow south. Whitehead’s ability to connect the reader to these characters is unreal. I found myself highlighting certain passages throughout the book that achieved this effect and by then end I realized that part of his skill lies in what I think of as a casual intimacy with the characters’ inner lives.
Meaning the powerfully brutal scenes built connection and alone they would have probably been sufficient. But certain scenes where the narrator makes these offhanded observations—like when waiting for a table at a restaurant, briefly wondering if the delay is racism or just bad service—reveal the lens through which the characters are viewing the world and by the end of the book you and the character are nearly one and the book is just a powerfully moving experience. Grateful that Whitehead wrote it and that I got to experience it.
I implemented this great python script from @micahflee to automatically get rid of my tweets after a specified period of time. Similar to the Chrome extension I use to get rid of my Facebook posts but automated/scheduled so much more convenient.
I’ve seen couple of blogs (Kirkville, BirchTree) recently opining on stereo HomePod configurations and comparing them to a pair of Sonos speakers. I don’t have a pair of Sonos to compare my stereo HomePod configuration to but my experience with the HomePods stereo pair may be useful for some so I am sharing here.
A few months ago we re-arranged the furniture in several rooms in our house. The net effect was that my Vandersteens (and, as such, my serious listening space) were relocated out of our living room and into a smaller room that has become my now dedicated listening area.
We spend a lot of time in our living room and–as we have large families–often times with a lot of people. I needed a music solution to replace my traditional HiFi and Vandersteen towers that didn’t take up nearly as much space. (Note: I have in-ceilings in the living room but they just don’t sound as good as regular speakers and really don’t fill up the room without creating two very loud areas underneath that make it impossible to carry on a conversation so we never use them in that room).
So when the opportunity came to pick up a second HomePod at a discount (I got mine refurb’d from Apple store but they show up new for $200 on sale on occasion), I decided to try a stereo pair of HomePods in the living room.
For this situation they are absolutely perfect. And by this situation I mean: a large living room area with seating all over the place where you want the music to sound good no matter where you are sitting. The HomePods are amazing at delivering good sound in this environment and I would argue that they are way better than my Vandersteens for this situation.
Sure, where the Vandersteens (or a pair of Sonos) might give you good sounds with great stereo imaging and a convincing sound stage, the eight speakers in the HomePods give you a really diffuse stereo field instead.
Yes, you give up a single sweet spot with vivid imaging. That said, about 85% of the seating options in my living room get a really full stereo sound field where you hear a balanced representation of both the right and left speakers.
The HomePods are strange in this way in that you can be sitting very close to one of the pair but still not sure if what you’re hearing is predominantly coming from the speaker closest to you or the one on the other side of the room.
Moreover, as you move further and further away from the HomePods, the volume of the music does not seem to fall off quite so rapidly. Meaning it’s easier to have a conversation in the room while music is playing and the music volume always seems just about right now matter where your are sitting.[1]
In this way, the HomePods remind me a lot of the Bose 901s. Say what you want about Bose but it is near impossible to beat the experience that pair of 901s delivers to a roomful of people listing to music outside of the dead center stereo imaging position that most speaker pairs mandate.
The HomePods, like the 901s before them, are for social music listening (as opposed to the lone experience of sitting dead center between a pair of towers) and they do a terrific job at that.
1.) This volume roll off is similar to the effect that our Bose L1 with an array of 24 speakers has in our live performances where the music seems to be a pretty constant volume no matter how near/far you are from the tower, it’s uncanny
note: forgot to hit publish on this on Friday 🙁 will try to do better this week!
How To Expand Launchpad
Hard for me to imagine Launchpad ever being as useful as Alfred for launching apps. That said, this tip for expanding the rows/columns of Launchpad might make a more compelling use case. Via Chris Hannah via @JPEGuin
On being able to write about whatever the hell you are interested in:
As someone with a bunch of interests, I’m all for a non-directional approach to blogging (via Josh Ginter and Initial Charge). I’m tired of reading commercial sites, have stocked my RSS app with independent publishers and have no regrets, especially when blog authors stray from their usual topics.
Joe Henry – Welcoming Flies at the Picnic.
Loved hearing this rebroadcast of Krisa Tippett’s interview with a very articulate songwriter.
Reeder 4 tips
This old review (from May, 2019) of Reeder 4 has some interesting usage tips/hints that I wasn’t aware of, worth a read if you use Reeder for your feeds.
Check out my album Set It All Down on your favorite streaming service.