August 2017 – Something Odd!

Crashplan Home RIP

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.

Eclipse 2017 in Ireland

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. 🙂

Remapping the Keyboard on a new Macbook Pro

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. 🙂