Category: 2024 Diary

So the filter holder arrived, and it had problems:

The purpose of this device is to be a consistent, light-absorbing structure – and it’s a couple of hundred dollars for this part alone – you’d think that the basic QA would make sure that products that aren’t “factory seconds” would get picked up.

Anyway, I called the distributor, who was very apologetic, and sent me a replacement part:

This one appears to have either a flaw in the anodising, or has had a drop of adhesive, possibly from the light-absorbing flocking material, wiped away, without being cleaned off with a solvent.

Halfway through the year of Getting Shit Done, and I’m on the closing stretch of cleaning up and fixing Surfing The Deathine from the discovery of how broken it was after some modifications I made on my old workstation. The work is going well, I’m pretty content with how InDesign functions in VMWare Fusion.

The big news this week, is I decided to buy myself a 50th birthday present – on the assumption that not much is going to happen in terms of house movements etc by the time my actual birthday rolls around.

So, I bought a Nikon D850 – it’s basically an almost obsolesced camera, given Nikon have moved to mirrorless, but my reasoning is that this is the best, final evolution of the DSLR, whereas the new mirrorless models are the early version one editions. It won’t be here for a coupe of weeks, as it has to be ordered from Nikon Australia by the retailer, but it was available for ~$500 off and that took it into the realm of “I can recoup this with a few months interest on my savings”. I also bought something I’d wanted for a while – a filter holder, and circular polariser for my giant, bulbous 14-24 lens.

I’d also been toying with the idea of a tilt / shift lens, but they were around $5000, and I think I was interested more in a FOMO sense because they were discontinued recently. Thankfully that anxiety was removed from me, as they’re not available from Nikon Australia.

So maybe as a longer term plan, when I know what is happening with my housing situation, I’ll think about digital backs, and technical cameras.

Chasing some gremlins out of my computer – there was a partial unplug event on the usb hub my monitors are connected into, and that messed up the firmware in them, so they were running constant disconnect / connect events for their built in card readers. This eventually crashed the USB bus.

Rebooting the computer didn’t solve it, but power cycling the displays did.

New battery for the UPS arrived.

Had my 8th Covid shot.

Cracked the code for InDesign in VMWare Fusion, and Surfing The Deathline is being repaired and cleaned up. It’s a large number of small changes – typography, margins, and renaming / reorganising stylesheets.

Progress is made on resurrecting Surfing The Deathline in VMWare Fusion – All the images were relinked, and the text is slowly being updated for fonts that had to be replaced etc.

Made a breakthrough with VMWare Fusion and Mac OS X Server 10.6 Snow Leopard. I realised I needed to disable LDAP directory functions, and the virtualised machine could see the network, and be seen BY the network.

That let me disable VMWare’s filesharing, and just use the built-in filesharing to access the network from within the VM.

I managed to get Adobe CS5 installed and running, and the process of rebuilding my workflows is underway. The plan from there is to fix the problems with Surfing The Deathline, publish new updates of the books, then publish a CBZ version, then update the store.

My new audio library scenario is coming along- I’m slowly adding music to Doppler, and that will sync it to my phones.

It’s been a week of frustrating dead ends for technology, trying to figure out solutions, and learning new things that eventually don’t pan out to be solutions.

What’s becoming increasingly apparent is a lot of the ways I’d hoped to preserve old workflows just aren’t working – there’s all these edge cases, like I can sync my iPhone with iTunes within VMWare, but I can’t import images from the phone to Aperture.

A great deal of time was also lost trying to deal with my computer refusing to sleep when file sharing was enabled. It really had me pulling my hair out as first the Thunderbolt networking proved disastrously bad for sleep, then ethernet less so, but still problematic.

In the end, I think it might have actually been Apple Remote Desktop triggering a wake event in the client Mac Mini, thus keeping the Mac Pro awake. With ARD quit, the Mac Pro is sleeping successfully.

I brought a new piece of hardware into play – an Airport Express, which provides a direct Airplay bridge between WiFi devices, and traditional stereo gear. It’s working nicely.

Tech gremlins continue with my photography network drive refusing to stay unmounted – something keeps re-mounting it over the network, so I’m doing some basic elimination testing to solve the problem.

By Wednesday, it was beginning to look like the problem may be SuperDuper!’s method of duplicating the disk.

Things I did to eliminate problems included:

• Duplicating the server volume and switching names with the duplicate – the volume with the “correct” name gets auto-mounts.
• Creating a blank drive and giving it the name – the volume auto-mounts.
• Deleting the contents of the copy on the workstation – the volume auto-mounts.

So Thursday was spent on a great re-wiring – I’m burning the user account and operating system to the ground, and going to try an install on the new Samsung Evo Pro drive.

The operating system install went well – booting was stable on the Evo Pro, wake sleep likewise. The only glitch wasI had to unplug displays and replug them in a specific order to get the numbering consistent between the displays prefpane, and SwitchResX.

Sketchup and the weird mirror to an iPad thing to get measurements the right way around worked ok as well.

I discovered my Mac Mini, which is now just an Aperture / iTunes machine, is capable of using iTunes with the music drive as a network share, thouh my hopes of networking it via Thunderbolt were dealt a blow, as the Mac Pro won’t sleep while they’re connected. I may have to virtualise iTunes more aggressively than I’d hoped. First step will be to put the preferences file on the Music drive, and then symlink to it from the preferences directory of the Mac Mini – which worked splendidly.

Started the week in Brisbane, and came back to deal with re-powering the house after everything was switched off for the weekend. I need to get the air conditioner sorted so that when it starts up after a power failure, it isn’t in auto heating / cooling mode.

Ordered Indian takeout, and had a beer with it, something I haven’t done for over a month, and I think I ended up putting on almost a kilo after that, and the weekend in Brisbane. I’ll try to take it easier and drop some of that.

I copied my photo drive to the new SSD storage, it’s so astoundingly fast.

I’ve been dealing with an odd filesharing issue – one drive keeps re-loading itself over the network. I’m watching it, to see what happens.

Some VM Progress, I’m getting to the point where I have a clear idea of the problem, and the steps to solve it.

The new SSDs seem to have settled in – I haven’t loaded them with data yet, they’re just sitting in the system, while I see if they have any negative effect on stability. The major change is an increase in sleeping power draw of about 8-9 watts, but hopefully that will be offset by using less power than the mechanical hard drives they’ll replace.

It’s continued to rain. It’s been raining for months.

An album I bought arrived, which was pleasant.

Brisbane over the weekend, stopped by the Apple Store to get AppleCare on my new iPhone, as well as have a screen protector installed.