“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak, or woke. And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
While I have your attention, watch this video, where Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson interview Jane Fonda. It’s a great interview where you’ll learn about her activism and her life.
I’m trying to share a Time Machine volume with another Macbook on my home network but it’s not working. I’ve tried Google, and read through a few Reddit threads, but I haven’t been able to get it to connect. So, I asked Perplexity for help.
It helpfully listed a number of things I could try, but then I saw tip number seven.
When you look up advice online, don’t copy and paste any instructions into your computer without knowing what it does.
What does sudo rm -rf /Volumes/* do? It recursively deletes everything in your /Volumes folder. A little bit destructive.
I told it that was a dangerous command, and it went on to talk about using the mount command to list every mounted volume and then unmounting them with umount.
Me: Tip 7 is not helpful. That would delete all the data in /Volumes/
Perplexity: You’re absolutely right, and I sincerely apologize for that dangerous suggestion. Thank you for pointing out this critical error. You are correct that deleting the contents of /Volumes/ would be extremely harmful and could result in data loss. Let me provide a corrected and safer approach.
PS. Otherwise, Perplexity is great. I’ve had great success with it and other AI tools when developing software.
I only recently found out why people sometimes comment “F” on Reddit threads. It comes from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014).
At one point, you walk up to a casket at a funeral and have to press F to pay respects to the fallen soldier.
As others on that Reddit thread said, I thought it had something to do with following a thread to get notifications. Just to prove how out of touch I am, it even has a Wikipedia page where the viral meme is described as iconic, but the authors of that page describe it well:
“Press F to pay respects” is an Internet meme that originated from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, a 2014 first-person shooter in Activision’s Call of Duty franchise. It originated as a set of instructions conveyed during an in-game quick time event at a funeral service. Widely mocked by critics and players due to its forced element of interactivity that was not perceived to be tastefully executed, the phrase would later become a notable Internet meme in its own right. It is sometimes used by Internet commenters to convey solidarity and sympathy, either sarcastic or sincere, in response to unfortunate events.
I never thought I’d be tagging a post with “Call of Duty” again, but here we are in 2025!
Storm Éowyn is battering the country with winds gusting to 130km/h. Hope everyone stays safe tonight. It started raining here around an hour or so ago, and I can hear wind gusting outside from where I sit.
Status Red – Wind warning for Carlow, Kilkenny, Wexford, Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Waterford
Met Éireann Weather Warning
Storm Éowyn: Gale to storm force southerly winds becoming westerly with extreme, damaging and destructive gusts in excess of 130km/h
Impacts:
• Danger to life
• Extremely dangerous travelling conditions
• Unsafe working conditions
• Disruption and cancellations to transport
• Many fallen trees
• Significant and widespread power outages
• Impacts to communications networks
• Cancellation of event
• Structural damage
• Wave overtopping
• Coastal flooding in low-lying and exposed areasValid: 02:00 Friday 24/01/2025 to 10:00 Friday 24/01/2025
Issued: 17:08 Wednesday 22/01/2025
Updated: 08:28 Thursday 23/01/2025
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started watching this video, but it is so sweet and lovely, you have to watch it.
Today I learned that the development of Kennedy Quay in Cork is on hold because An Bord Pleanála decided to refuse permission to develop Marino Point. To save you a click, it’s because they never had any plans for improving the roads in the area.
An Bord Pleanála decided this week to refuse planning to agricultural and chemical firm Goulding to develop port facilities at Marino Point in Cork Harbour, a decision that was two years overdue.
Despite being located in Cobh, the impact of this decision will be felt most harshly in the city centre, with hopes that these proposed developments at Marino Point would pave the way for the wider regeneration of Cork’s docklands and the construction of hundreds of new homes.
However, ABP refusal has brought ambitious redevelopment plans to a standstill and the construction of more than 1,300 city apartments indefinitely on hold.
That area is ripe for redevelopment. When everyone saw the massive R&H Hall building go down, we were sure it was only a matter of time before badly needed homes were built there.
Here’s a great video showing some of the development around the harbour in the last year. Things are moving slowly, elsewhere.
My wife and I have started rewatching Cold Feet, and I couldn’t help but notice that we’re now older than the characters during their original run at the turn of the century. It’s a strange sensation to watch characters who are at a younger stage of life than I am now, especially since I once thought of them as older, embarking on family adventures that I wouldn’t consider for several more years.
Anyway, in season 3, one of the characters is getting IVF, and they want some music. It’s weird how the nurse got the name of the song wrong, but I guess they weren’t able to license that one, and the music would have been added later…
There’s a funny meme about that song. If I find it, I’ll add it to this post.
Eon is an astonishing Amiga demo released a few years ago. It runs on a bog-standard Amiga 500, a machine that first saw the light of day in 1985. Here’s how it was made.
Andreas shared a comparison that will make it clear to any developer on a modern machine just how much slower the Amiga 500 is compared to a modern machine.
Let’s MD5 ~800Kb data, using reference RSA MD5 code.
- On an old, but modern, Surface Laptop 2 that took 2ms.
- The Amiga 500 took 29 seconds.
This CPU is more than 10,000x slower than the CPU in your PC or Mac.
One of my WordPress plugins will do an MD5 calculation of the URL on every request, and it’s like nothing. It’s not a big job for a web server to do. An Amiga could not do that.
However, it can, in the right hands, seemingly perform miracles and create cool looking demos that even today impress! There’s something to be said for programming in a constrained environment.
I’ll spare you the long story of why I had to edit a JavaScript file, but today I learned that since Firefox 128 you can add a script override in the browser Debugger Panel. This downloads the JavaScript file in question, where you can edit it with your favourite editor.
The file I was editing was minified, so Firefox doesn’t save the nicely unminifed file you were looking at, but it’s not too hard to unminify it. It was a small change I was making, so it wasn’t too difficult to find the right place to edit.
Yes, yes, Chrome has been able to do this for a long time, apparently. Thanks for letting me know.
Warning: this is potentially terrible advice as it disables your backup system temporarily, or until you remember to enable it again. It also deletes backups which might be needed if you need to restore a file that was modified during this period.
When downloading massive files like the 50GB tgz archives from Google Takeout on your Mac, you might consider temporarily pausing Time Machine backups. This can help avoid the creation of enormous snapshots that quickly consume your free space. It’s a bit perplexing, though—my Time Machine backup disk is always connected, so I’m unsure why snapshots are generated at all.
In theory, the operating system should delete or move those snapshots to your backup drive, but it seems to take its time. While most advice suggests leaving snapshots alone, some external tools can be finicky about free space. For example, Backblaze has complained when my internal drive space got too low.
To get an accurate picture of your available space, check the Storage Settings in System Settings. However, it can be disconcerting when the df -h command shows a much smaller figure. To quickly recover space, you can use Disk Utility’s “Show APFS Snapshots” feature to examine and delete any large backups.
Just remember to re-enable Time Machine as soon as you’ve moved those large files elsewhere. This approach does carry some risks: disabling your backup system leaves you vulnerable to data loss, and deleting backups may prevent you from restoring files modified during this period. Proceed with caution!