Storm Brian made landfall at Galway this morning. I wouldn’t like to be walking along Salthill now.
The south and west coasts are getting battered though.
A status orange wind warning for the coasts of Mayo, Galway, Clare, Kerry, Cork, Waterford and Wexford is in place from 10pm tonight for a period of 24 hours.
Stay safe!
Hurricane Ophelia hit Ireland yesterday and while it was a baby compared to the monsters that ravaged the Caribbean and US it still did plenty of damage and left 3 people dead. Many areas were left without electricity or running water for most of the day. A day later and there are still areas without those basic amenities. Telecoms services were disrupted too as lines were cut and exchanges and mobile sites ran out of power. 30,000 people were without access to phone or Internet access. A red alert was declared nation-wide. Schools closed (for 2 days), public transport wasn’t running, shops and businesses didn’t open. There was a definite fear and expectation that this would be a big one. And it was. Gusts of 156kmh were recorded off Roches Point!
We were without power from just after 11am, then the mobile phone network, Eir, went down, except my wife’s phone was able to go online for minutes at a time throughout the day. Winds really picked up around 10am, and lasted until after 2pm with driving rain almost horizontal in the wind. Later in the day I walked around Blarney village and from the far corner of the square got a weak signal from a remote antenna and had just enough connectivity to get a few text messages.
Trees behind our home were knocked down by the wind, blocking most of the main Waterloo Road. Luckily the very tallest trees survived as they’re within reach of some of the houses!
Even this stop sign was twisted around by the wind, and mushrooms flattened too..
Two trees were knocked down in the village square, and someone had attempted to drive a car and caravan up that narrow road before getting stuck and abandoning their vehicle!
Power came back late yesterday evening, as did mobile data, but friends are still without power even now so it’s going to take some time before things are back to normal. Our satellite dish is broken, and it’ll be early November before someone can come out to replace it. Parts of my garden fence blew over too, but that was on it’s last legs anyway! A TV antenna ended up in our front garden, but I have no idea who owned it.
This morning there was a lovely sunrise, and the sky was a gorgeous mix of blue and soft orange. 🙂
Next weekend we can look forward to #StormBrian apparently. Hopefully it won’t be as bad as Ophelia.
It’s frightening seeing this rotating mass of energy that is Ophelia just off the Irish coast.
This is impressive. The demo needs 4 C64s to run but you get a high res 640*400 display and 12 channel SID music!
I wonder if I can run 4 Vice windows side by side to watch this? Getting them synced might be a problem..
Edit: I found this video on this episode of the excellent Commodore / Amiga Users Ireland podcast.
“1:55 a.m. PDT
Cassini engineers have received the signal that Cassini has started a five-minute roll to point the instrument that will sample Saturn’s atmosphere (INMS) into the optimal direction, facing the direction of the oncoming gases. Along with this roll, the spacecraft is reconfiguring its systems for real-time data transmission at a rate of 27 kilobits per second (3.4 kilobytes per second). Final, real-time relay of data starts immediately after. That relay marks the beginning of Cassini’s final plunge.”
Not long now before Cassini plunges into Saturn. It’s sending data back as fast as it can, at a speed comparable to a modem used by many in the late nineties!
Absolutely amazing.
Check out the NASA live stream for commentary.
Many Android phones can shoot RAW photos now but some of them will record a Jpeg file at the same time. This didn’t bother me until Google Photos started backing up DNG files, but it would back up the Jpeg files too so I ended up with duplicate images. I created a FolderSync shortcut to move the DNG files out of the DCIM/Camera/ directory but of course half the time I’d forget and duplicates would end up on Google.
I bought Tasker a few weeks ago when it was finally on sale, but only used it for one task, to auto rotate the Maps application, but then this morning I realised I could use it to fix up my DNG files!
So, here’s the task I created with much help from various forum threads, especially this one. I added it as an exit task for the Samsung Camera app which at least ensures I won’t need to remember to move files around any more. It would be handy to fire it every time a photo was taken but this is a good start.
Move DNG Files A1: List Files [ Dir:DCIM/Camera Match:*.dng Include Hidden Files:Off Use Root:Off Sort Select:Alphabetic Variable:%Filestomove ] A2: For [ Variable:%Files Items:%Filestomove() ] A3: Move [ From:%Files To:dng Use Root:Off ] A4: End For
I did try adding a flash notification if %Filestomove was set but it never worked and I don’t know why. If any Tasker experts want to chime in I’d love to hear how to get that working!
With Crashplan Home on the way out I’m in a bind. I was using it to backup my Dad’s laptop to my machine. It was so very handy as it was plug-and-play. Fire up the app on his machine, type in the code and it started sending over his data whenever he was online, wherever he was. All that comes to a screeching halt in October 2018 when Crashplan drop their Home product.
I’m not sure what I’ll replace that with. I’m tempted to try Backuppc, and setup dynamic DNS on his router, but it’s a Windows machine, which is always a complicating factor. Maybe I’ll try that Backuppc Windows Client but all I need are a local ssh server and rsync, right? It might just be simpler in the long run to use Backblaze however. They even published a blog post to encourage Crashplan customers to migrate!
Besides using Crashplan for my Dad’s backup, I also used it to keep versioned copies of my photos directory on a separate external drive, but I zapped that and installed rsnapshot on my Macbook using Homebrew, and configured it to back up every few hours. It’s working fine so far too, and the simplicity of rsync and hard links is comforting. Sort of like Time Machine you can use Finder to navigate through the backups, and copy files from it to restore them. As an added bonus it’s not running in the background the whole time. A cronjob fires it up on a regular basis.
If that all sounds too technical, just use Backblaze. I’ve been with them for years, and recently renewed for another two years. If you want to get a month free (after signing up following the free trial) you could do worse than sign up using this signup link. I currently have over 2TB of data backed up there and it’s still going strong!
Edit: Over on /r/datahoarder there’s a lively discussion about Backblaze, including a rep from the company answering questions. Also, I’m not the only one looking for a replacement for PC to PC backup.
Edit 2: I wonder if Syncthing could be a replacement for PC to PC backup. The Backups aren’t encrypted unfortunately, but it has support for file versioning now which is a plus.
A tiny portion of the August 21st solar eclipse will be visible from Ireland as seen in this NASA web app that shows you the track of the Moon’s shadow across the Earth.
It’ll probably be cloudy anyway but don’t look unless you have special glasses. I doubt most people will notice anything, it might get slightly dimmer around 8pm local time for a few minutes. Wait for the photos from the US to show up on social media. 🙂
I must have an odd keyboard, at least for one that’s paired with a Mac. It’s a Microsoft split keyboard and has a bunch of extra keys that aren’t on a Macbook Pro keyboard, like a dedicated # key and the keys are all over the place compared to the laptop keyboard. But I like it that way.
I’ve heard comments from people who use my laptop and they are confused by how shift-2 doesn’t print @ but ” instead, and the key by the left shift prints \ instead of ~ (which is over by the Return key). They’ll say, “Oh, it’s some sort of PC keyboard?” Well, yeah.
This is not the first time I’ve had to fix my keyboard. A long time ago Justin Mason created a useful Irish Fixed Keyboard Layout, but for some reason with this latest hardware upgrade it wasn’t working exactly as planned. The #, \ and ` keys were mixed up. Luckily, with the help of the Key Codes app I could detect the the key code of the physical key pressed. For example, the key next to the left shift is key code 10 so it was just a matter of editing the keyboard layout in a text editor and changing that to output “\”. Logout and login to refresh and the key works!
What’s odd, is that this keyboard layout has served me well for almost a decade and didn’t need editing, which is why I’m documenting it in this post.
I looked at both Ukelele and Karabiner but the former looked overwhelming (yeah, then I went editing XML by hand..) and the latter doesn’t work in macOS Sierra (there’s a simplified “elements” version for Sierra). Then I thought I should just edit the keyboard mapping directly. 🙂
