mike.whybark.com

For many years I have run an antiquated virtual answering machine on one of my Macs using the long-unsupported and discontinued Parliant PhoneValet software and dongle combo. Sometime about midyear I noticed that the software was no longer picking up and doing the various things it was supposed to, such as presenting a phone tree to callers and forwarding messages via email and calling our cell phones and so forth.

After some troubleshooting I concluded that my housewide move to OS X 10.x Yosemite around June had finally done in the software. I have a very elderly pre-Intel Mini that I keep around as a print server for some older printers and figured at some point I would move the dongle and software to that machine, still a possibility.

However, at some point well after that, date uncertain, I noticed that there had been no messages left on the traditional handset-base answering machine either, which seemed strange, especially in an election year. Sometime around then, my parents mentioned in a conversation that they had tried to call our land line but been unable to leave a message.

I thought that was strange, so I called the number from my cell. It rang in the handset but not in the hardware attached to the line, even though our DSL was working fine. When I picked up the landline handset, there was no dial tone.

After looking into it, I concluded that the likely course of events was that our cat had knocked a handset off a cradle at some point and we had not noticed it until after the emergency tone had been cut off and the POTS voice line disabled, probably in telco software, and would likely need to be reinitialized. I did not expect that there was a hardware or wiring issue because our DSL service remained fine.

We traveled a great deal in the second half of the year, on the road an average of a week a month through November, and that, plus the definite bonus of not even receiving any of the electioneering robo calls that plague election years, meant that I was in no hurry to get the line back up at all. 

Yesterday I finally filed a ticket and CenturyLink sent a truck. The technician was friendly and informative and although surprised to hear that the DSL remained functional and concurring that the infrastructure was likely fine, determined that his best reccomendation was to replace the line-drop to the node. 

So now we have landline POTS again for the first time in at least six months. Minutes after the hookup, we received our first call, from a scammy travel-offer telemarketer! We had qualified for a week of free travel, food, and lodging in Florida!

Hunh.

We really did not miss the line at all. I suppose I should look into seeing if we can keep just the DSL portion of the service and cut our rates by about $25. I’d like to keep the number, though. I wonder, can I port it to a virtual service or VOIP that would enable screening and phone tree forwarding for, oh, $5 or so? I sure wouldn’t be interested in paying any more than half the current cost and honestly any more than five bucks doesn’t generate enough savings annually to motivate me at all.

On December 23, the boot drive in my MBP failed and I had to interweave backups and recovery and troubleshooting through the additional activities of the holidays. As I usually do when experiencing hardware issues, I journaled it. However, for reasons unknown even to me, I kept the journal on Facebook rather than here. 

Today, with the removal of the failing drive and its’ replacement with a 1TB SSD, I am done with the portion of tasks associated with resolving this issue that have to do with physically troubleshooting and replacing hard drives. There is a longer-term set of tasks upcoming involving the machine-by-machine deployment of outboard backup volumes, signaling the definitive end of my five years of desultory seeking to create a LAN-based backup system, but that’s a series of blog posts for another day.

Here’s all the stuff I posted on Facebook regarding this issue from December 23, 2016 until today, January 3, 2017. I have removed posts that were from friends and observers here; they can still be seen on the original FB thread.

December 23, 2016 at 12:38am ·

Arrgh, the boot volume on my MPB failed! The data I need, all my working files, are safely mirrored and I can just go work on one of my other machines, but geez, I won’t have time to fix the damn thing until next week!

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December 23, 2016 at 9:17am
I was awakened this morning by my parents urgently calling to ask if I could locate some financial information, one of their HDs having failed, I think, although it was somewhat hard to follow their explanation of the issue.
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December 23, 2016 at 12:00pm
I was able to mount the MPB as an external drive and am now ‘imaging’* the data over to another outboard. Roughly 600gb to sling, running at 16gb/hr give or take. The process ought to complete in 37 hours or so. Aargh.I cloned a 1TB SSD to a 2TB last night, coincidentally. A mere 12 hour process with today’s blazing transfer speeds. At least we don’t have to sit with the damn machine rotating floppies or swapping DVDs out any more.Oh, wait, hold on: SuperDuper just choked! Damn data integrity shinola!

*not actual, you know, bitwise imaging
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December 23, 2016 at 12:57pm

hm, might be well fucked. I’ll look at CCC after I run an errand or two. I moved to SD! after CCC for some reason I now forget.

After SD! choked I went back to recovery mode and told DU to image the bad volume to the external and that failed too with an i/o error. SD! gave me a diagnostic on an individual file and halted instead of skipping and moving forward with a log, which would have been my preferred option.

I think my next best options here are directory-tree restricted copies and after that manual copies. I don’t actually think there’s anything unique or mission critical on the machine that’s not already mirrored, I just didn’t want to have to do a hand rummage and compare if I didn’t have to.

I set up the drive after the last machine failed this summer days before a revenue gig and I had to source this axe right quicklike. That machine was still on Mavericks and I migrated everything to Yosemite after I wrapped that gig. The old Mavericks boot drive is still viable and in the old machine, and I know it can reboot this machine, so I do have a known-good outboard boot solution.

All this fucking travel this year has prevented me committing the week or so of sustained effort to get that last-mile stuff set up. Bummer. At least the local mirroring stuff seems bulletproof, it’s twice this year that’s saved my bacon.

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December 23, 2016 at 4:01pm
Well, disconcertingly, the Pro just self-booted in the middle of various tasks including running a CCC copy. CCC was able to pick up and move forward, though. CCC also reports physical read errors and, thankfully, does NOT abort the copy.
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December 24, 2016 at 1:03am · Edited
Well, good news, and although I can’t match CCC’s bad file report with the size of the uncopied data, there’s nothing here that should prevent the cloned drive from booting. Trying tomorrow. Still probably best to wipe and bump to Sierra and then migrate. Man, I HATE running the current version of an OS release, it just offends my sensibilities. Maybe I can rig a work around to run that Yosemite clean install again. There’s nothing that makes me happier than defeating installer restrictions.

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December 24, 2016 at 11:19am
Cloned drive boots. Now to ponder whether ’tis nobler in the eyes of man to clone and clone again, to a drive week-wiped free of foul corruptions’ stink, or to take up arms, and by opposing the screwdriver’s lance to the helices of steel that bind the shield, expose the innermost parts of that foe and servant, thereby to effect a transplant?
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December 24, 2016 at 11:27am · Edited
I had actually planned on a drive swap to an SSD on this machine after Xmas. I still need the machine to work on a couple things before then. Opening and swapping drives two times in rapid succession increases the chances of zapping the mobo. Recloning it it is, because what s a day between friends?
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December 24, 2016 at 11:55am
hm, I just had a thought – I think my old-style cloning of bootable volumes as a backup and migration strategy is probably not viable longterm any more because it won’t migrate the recovery partition. so even when I get this back in working shape I will need to do an install/migrate route for the SSD later on.
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December 24, 2016 at 3:58pm
CCC has a Recovery HD creation function, cool. But it requires an extant recovery volume, and I have just noticed that my current primary boot vols were all stood up as clones, and thus lack the partition.
I will direct a squinty-eyed gaze at the one volume that did have said partition, the MPB drive that failed, kicking off this tech struggle journal.
Normally I keep a technical journal of these incidents on ye olde blogge, and these will migrate there in time.
I think the thesis is that I may record my mistakes, and learn from them.
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December 28, 2016 at 12:42pm
Status update: internal drive reformatted and restored from successful CCC backup clone. No recovery partition in place yet. That requires a clean install of Yosemite to some machine or other, something that will require another hour or so of supervision and drive swapping, then CCC can clone those volumes as needed.Next steps: transfer this set of tech logs to the blog, finish deferred production tasks on the MPB, begin the SSD migration on the Pro, finalize SSD install to this machine. I’ll give myself a calendar week for each of these.
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December 30, 2016 at 12:34pm
In working toward getting a clean install of Yosemite on an outboard drive so that CCC can harvest and distribute the recovery partition I ran afoul of a driver conflict on the Mac Pro – that machine has had an NVIDIA GTX 970 as its primary video card for a couple of years now, and running late-model NVIDIA cards in post OS X 10.7 systems requires custom drivers, without which the machine goes into a boot-looped kernel panic. Naturally, the temporary installer volumes created when you run an OS X installer lack this driver, and boom, a day of wondering where the heck the right web forum was again.Anyway, clean volume created. Next challenge is migrating the 1TB SSD to the 2TB SSD and re-merging the 2TB vol with the old Mavericks 2TB vol document directory that went from primary to offline when I moved to the SSD.

I guess I could hand merge, since the local Yosemite docs dir is intentionally thin and all the applications and licenses are on the SSD. What really want is a tiered local torrent cloud sync, where the current solution I use mixes with a longer-term storage solution for older files and docs. just figuring out the ruleset is time consuming enough that I doubt I’d ever try to set something like that up though.
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December 30, 2016 at 4:21pm
Alrighty, both SSDs boot and have recovery partitions on ’em. Now to research folder-based one-off sync tools. Seems like CCC or Super Duper should just have that as a core feetch.
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January 3, 2017 at 4pm
Closing in on winding this up. The initial drive failure appears to have recurred on the same drive, so it’s likely an unrecoverable hardware fault, although I haven’t traced that down to the bare iron yet. I was anticipating this as a possibility and had prepped to swap in the 1TB SSD in that event, which has now been done.

The last little cleanup bits are re-merging the various disaporan Documents folders, something that, as hoped, CCC can handle, but which will require a written plan and a couple of afternoons. Once that’s been done, I need to distribute local backup drives to all the machines and get that set up and I should be hard-drive circus complete for another year or more. I fucking hope.

Viv’s general and continuing desire for ever-higher levels of illumination always leads me to musing about how to solve her need while preserving the murk I desire and yet illuminating the art in a specific, spotlit manner.

I usually don’t find anything that suits. Today is no exception. 

However, as I was musing and idly click-click-clickety-clickin on the internet a couple of ideas presented themselves. 

One, the installation of dimmable LED indirect-source lighting in the form of LED tape slotted into a picture rail, crown molding installed several inches below the ceiling for the purpose of hanging art, an interior design trend that went out with, uh,  plaster and lath, I guess. Natch, there are some interesting DIY tutorials (gakk) but no apparent mass-market and therefore cheap and therefore of interest to me millwork or moldings that fit the bill. Whatever, brain. Shut up already.

Two, an offshoot of the expressed desire originating with Viv, reflecting my ongoing acquisition of and desire to look at art. I want an LED picture light, battery powered, which is attached directly to and extends out from the frame of the picture. I want that light to operate in three modes, via a remote and wireless switch, much like a security light. 

Mode one: on/off. Rarely employed. If you want constant lighting for your art, you are literally just burning money in order to brag to yourself and nobody cares. Stop that, you horrible shit. 

Mode two: timed on/off. On between 5pm and 10pm or whatever time you get home from the casino robbery or dive bar or whatever. The idea here is that like Sebastien’s toys in Blade Runner, the light – and the art – is there to greet you at the end of a hard day’s grift.

Mode three: Proximity sensor, with timer shut-off. This allows you to approach the art in a darkened room, possibly while crawling or on your knees, for whatever personal reasons might have led you to express your relationship with capitalism in that manner in a darkened room, religious, depressive, fetishistic, poor schedule management, like, WHATEVER, ok? No judging. No judging here.

Like, the light could be shining on some hotel art you stole when you were twenty or whatever. It’s cool, technology gives no shits, man. You know that. You knew that already.
Uh.

Oh yeah! Proximity sensors and a timer shut-off. Just wave your hand in front of the highly collectible big-eye Keane print or painting, and “let there be light”. After an appropriately respectful but still-too-short period of illumination,  your image will be plunged in darkness once again.

Sadly, my google-fu fails me on this last product.

According to this Yahoo Finance story, Amazon filed a patent in 2016 for the use of blimp warehouses to be used as distro bases for the much-lampooned and puzzled over drone delivery initiative.

Working on my newish MBP today I noticed it beachballing like crazy. So I pointed Disk Utilities at the boot drive and kept working. After repairing permissions I had DU run a Verify Disk and the report instructed me to reboot into recovery mode and run DU / Repair Disk from there. It’s been years since I felt like I had to be suspicious of Apple’s maintenance toolkit so I just toddled off and did that last thing before bed.

DU couldn’t repair the drive and suggested a hasty immediate backup followed by a wipe and restore or reinstall. No problem, thinks I, and went to reboot the machine into the main partition.

Naturally, it won’t. 

Casting about for the external boot drive I used to set the machine up a few months ago I am surprised to note, oops, I cannibalized them when I finally bumped us all over to Yosemite, two years after that vesion of the OS was released. I do still have the original bootable Mavericks drive that was migrated up to Yosemite in August or whenever it was, so I can rebuild from scratch, but fuck me, it’s Christmas! I won’t have time to do that for a fucking week.

The data I want and need and have been working with is all fine, my habitual local working directories are all mirrored to other machines in the house and I can just work from the Mac Pro downstairs to finish the specific deliverables I have for a client in the morning. So there’s some good news. But what a colossal pain in the ass, and what an idiot I am for not putting on the bakes and running a quick clone to an external drive before fucking around with the recovery tools. Lesson learned, I suppose. Yeesh.

After our return from Cuba in September, I spent more than a month working on a dual-media project for our photos and such to distribute to the family. The components were a large glossy hardback photo book and a DVD, with the DVD tipped into the back of the book. 

I ended up ordering four copies via Blurb.com, at my aunt Anne Tayloe’s suggestion. The first round of books had a serius error in the submission and I ended up having to argue with them to get the order refunded while placing another. The first order was discounted at 50% and the second at 40%. The 86 page books cost individually about $60 in the end, taxes and what not included. They are large, like 11 x 13 inches or so.

Anyway, the books have started to land in the hands of their intended owners, so it’s time to make the PDF available.

Of course, as soon as the books came in, I found typos in the essays I had written for the material. At any rate, there are maps showing where we were, a timeline, and brief captions. I hope you enjoy it.

CUBA 2016

That’s a link to a google-hosted copy.

The books use about 300 pictures out of the 2000 or so we took while there. I used about 600 of these for the DVD. I also made that set of pictures available as an Apple-hosted picture gallery.

CUBA COMPLETE 2016

I have a couple thousand words of mostly raw notes that I do intend to use as the basis of a series of blog entries here. That will come in 2017, I expect.

I am posting this today, Christmas of 2016, to provide a single point of access to the gallery and PDF.

Viv and I went to Pacific Place this weekend to see the movie “Arrival.” I liked it a great deal and found it respectful of Ted Chiang’s original work. I don’t think that Vivian liked it as much as I did. we had forgotten that this was the last shopping weekend before Christmas this year so when we arrived the mall was a zoo and it was impossible to get anything to eat except for hotdogs at the movie theater. After the movie went to the Mexican restaurant on the top floor of the mall which is currently called Mexico, and which has previously been several other also-Mexican restaurants since it opened sometime in the 1990s.

The mall felt tired, and over, and the restaurant moreso, just worn out and finished. There weren’t any vacancies in the shops, although the top floor restaurant space that has only ever had mayfly restaurants in it remained vacant. There were, however several shops that were not high-end national chain stores. I wonder if this represents a longterm change in shopping, a local matter, or something else. 

Years late, I’m finally getting the chance to dig into Hugo Pratt’s landmark of BD, Corto Maltese. Immediately it’s apparent how indebted Pratt is to the master of non-underwear pervert adventure, Milt Caniff. Seems I’m not alone in the insight.

Well, looks like I might have cut things a bit too close for holiday delivery of the various Cuba-related stuff I’m hoping to distibute at Xmas this year. I finally got the text proofing on the book completed and went to submit it to the publication  service and their Pdf proofs show an unacceptable (and unsourced, in my generative InDesign files) tint to the type boxes. So that means I might not get everything wrapped up before Thanksgiving. Dammit.

We have one more, mercifully brief, trip this year. I’ve traveled more this year than I have since 1998, I think? What’s clear is that I hate constant travel maybe even more now than I did when I was younger. It takes me about two weeks to recover from a trip in terms of getting back to routine, doing the daily things that are necessary to the maintenance of a 21st century household. So if I take a trip that lasts five days, I have to project 14 days of recovery time to get back to efficiency with regard to data entry and financial management. So there’s a total loss of approximately 19 days for a short trip, in addition to the added expense of dining while away from home, renting a car, and lodging. 

Just drives me nuts.

The flip side of running old tech is falling off the forum horizon, where the software and hardware you are working with lacks a critical mass of interested commenters and experts. I have been assembling and proofing a DVD of pics from out trip to Cuba to distribute in conjunction with some photo books and similar stuff for Xmas gifts. The book’s nearly done, looks great, and should be ordered on Monday. 

I thought the DVD was done more than a week ago, but I keep finding a persistent error in two slideshows, always on the same slides, even when the assets have been reencoded from scratch. I even rebuilt the whole project from scratch.

I’m using Apple’s long-discontinued iDVD. I started the process blissfully unaware that the software has begun to break in fundamental ways – for example, building slideshows from JPEGs, even ones exported directly to iDVD by Photos, produces a duotone bluish-purple pallette shift in iDVD which is obviously unacceptable. The solution is to export the pics and batch convert them to PDF, and the colorshift does not occur.

Now that was a solution surfaced via fora searching. But these slideshow hangs? Crickets.

Anyway, I think what I have to do is export the slideshows in question as Photos slideshow movie files, mpegs, hopefully with the sound embedded. I did that early on in the project as an experiment and found that the movie I had made lacked audio, so I had to lay that back in via iMovie. It was always time consuming to build these things, which is why people didn’t throw themselves into it with abandon when the tools were given to them. But this project is setting some records in this house.