Demi Adejuyigbe has been making videos to the famous Earth, Wind & Fire song September since 2015. This year’s is the last and is spectacular. He asks for a donation to one of three charities. They are all good choices. Donations are accepted here. I would suggest The West Fund to help women facing assaults on their reporductive rights in Texas.
We just love these fidget toys by Whity. Print files are available on PrusaPrinters.org.
Last night as I was scrolling Twitter I learned that Norm MacDonald had died after a private 9 year battle with cancer. I’ve always enjoyed Norm’s comedy. I loved his deadpan delivery and the way that he seemed to care more about the craft of telling a good joke than the result. A lot has been written about Norm chasing the perfect joke. I think it was clearly evident every time he was on stage that he was a craftsman and completely dedicated to the craft. I’m thankful that we live in the time of YouTube and other media so that we can remember him and the great laughs that he brought for so many years.
In his book Based on a True Story: A Memoir, Norm wrote,
It can be difficult to define yourself by something that happened so long ago and is gone forever. It’s like a fellow at the end of the bar telling no one in particular about the silver medal he won in high school track, the one he still wears around his neck. The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth. . . . But it is impossible for me to be bitter. I’ve been lucky.
We should all feel so blessed.
I ran across a nice python package recently. Pretty_Errors formats python exception messages so that they are more legible. Installing it universally also enables the package to make syntax errors more legible. This is one of those packages that I wish I had years ago and I will automatically install for every project going forward.
python -m pip install pretty_errors
python -m pretty_errors
Running these commands will install the package and then add it to your python startup procedure. If it is not setup universally then it must be imported into each project import pretty_errors. I prefer the universal method.
I need a place to test webmentions without spamming anyone. I created this post for that purpose. If you need an endpoint to test against you can use this page also.
This video tickles all my fancies. We see chemistry and physics, craftsmanship, passion, mechanics, and a sheer love of work and life. Someone could make a full documentary a la “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” here and I would gladly watch it.
From the always excellent blog FYFD.
It’s possible to work remotely on a Mac by enabling screen sharing from the System Preferences/Sharing pane.
If you open screen sharing on one computer and then use that computer to screen share back to the original computer an interesting effect occurs.
I’ve been fortunate to have never lost any data in my computing life. It is fortunate because it will happen. No matter how good your backup system is it will happen eventually. I have always been able to fall back on a second, third, or in some cases, forth copy of data. I use a lot of Raspberry Pis. They are all booting off of MicroSD cards. They are notorious for dying because the SD cards are not designed for significant read/write cycles. It is important to back them up. Even if you don’t save important information on them it will save you countless hours in setup time. It isn’t hard to do. Below are my steps on a Mac.
From terminal find the SD card.
>> diskutil list
You should have several devices (/dev/disk*) listed. Find the one that matches your SD card. Mine is /dev/disk2
Copy the SD card to your Mac.
>> sudo dd if=/dev/disk2 of=/users/name/backup-directory/backup-file.dmg
if is the input file. of is the output file. You can save this anywhere you like on your system. This can take several minutes to an hour depending on the size of the card. Don’t interrupt the process if it takes a long time. That is normal.
To restore to another SD, unarchive the file, run the same command, but reverse the input and output files.
>> sudo dd if=/users/name/backup-directory/backup-file.dmg of=/dev/disk2
All my Pis use 32Gb drives. I don’t want a bunch of 32Gb files so I archive the backups in Finder after this process is completed.
I’m most concerned with backups for the systems that run my 3D printers. I run Octoprint and stream video on all my printers. I don’t want to go through the setup process if I lose a card. Last year I moved all these systems from Raspian to DietPi. DietPi is much smaller and allows for a RAMDisk with minimal logging. This is less taxing on the SD card. I have not lost an SD card since moving to DietPi.