Some interesting topics, to be sure

No offense, but Adam Selipsky is no Steve Jobs

https://www.php.net/eol.php

Thanks for the awesome afternoon, Jim!

Now that I’ve been in my new role as systems engineer at TPT for a month, I figured it was a good time to reflect on this change and write about my experience so far. The organization’s post-COVID return to the office has been branded as a “Return to Lowertown” and it literally is for me too. Hard to believe it’s almost a year already since we left Rayette Lofts to head on down the river…

The commute back and forth has been great so far, usually taking under 15 minutes each way. Next spring, I hope to ride my bike a few days each week if I can sort out the storage issues. I splurged on the expensive parking option in the Lowertown Ramp, which is easy-in on Sibley and easy-out on Jackson (plus covered spots with no winter scraping). I’ve never really had any security trouble in Lowertown, but it is convenient to have a parking spot right next to the office entrance.

Some other logistical things: currently working a hybrid schedule of four days in the office and one day from home (Wednesdays), which has been very nice. While every day has been focused on getting up to speed on systems and technology, I’ve been trying to use the work from home day as a deep-dive research day (which is easier alone). TPT has a nice lunchroom, so I’ve mainly been bringing in frozen lunches to eat. The reawakening of the downtown St. Paul lunch dining scene has been slow, but there are pockets here and there. Still exploring the skyway, but always open to suggestions and recommendations.

Totally digging the culture and mission of the organization:

Enrich lives and strengthen our community through the power of media.

How can you not smile walking into an office with a two-story Big Bird on the wall? I grew up watching Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The Electric Company and 3-2-1 Contact, while my kids were raised on Teletubbies, Arthur, Caillou, Zoboomafoo, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Sagwa and Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman. Our family was addicted to the old Action Auction they produced in the former studios across from the fairgrounds on Como, regularly bidding on 25-pound salted nut rolls (among other things).

Looking at some of the other pictures and signs around the office bring back a flood of other positive memories: Downtown Abbey, Rick Steves’ Europe, Nova, Nature, Austin City Limits, Lowertown Line and Almanac. So much good content has been broadcast from this PBS affiliate and I’m really excited to help such a talented and creative crew. My high school friend Terry Gray has been at TPT for 15 years and was a major influence on me considering this role. Super excited to work with him again (we worked together at HSRA Minnesota and I saw him occasionally on the sidelines at U.S. Bank Stadium).

The Information Technology team at TPT is solid and I really enjoy being part of a larger group again. Former McNally Smith veteran Nick Kaihoi is great to work with and we have so many shared tech experiences and philosophies, it’s scary. The team picked out a new M2 MacBook Air for me to use, which was just perfect. I also appreciate that the HR department has an actual “No Jerk Policy” and find the overall vibe just so refreshing. It reminds me of this Mr. Rodgers quote:

There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.

“Funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and contributions to your PBS station from Viewers Like You”

Contact is the secret; is the moment when everything happens! Contact is the answer; is the reason that everything happens! Contact! Let’s make contact!

https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/dnssec/root-signing-ceremony/

Twitter is really having a moment, isn’t it? Too bad it feels like the verge of implosion, as it has been my favorite social media platform since I joined back in February 2008. Not sure of all the dates, but I think I joined LinkedIn (the first time) just after Twitter, followed by Facebook in December 2008 and Instagram sometime in 2010. I deleted my Facebook account in June 2020, followed by Instagram a few days later. Dropped off LinkedIn for about five years, as it became a huge source of spam and unsolicited sales pitches. I rejoined last year for career reasons, but it seems rather sad that may be the last one standing if I decide to drop Twitter.

Now, I don’t really want to leave Twitter. I likely use the service differently than 99% of the rest of the world, and it has served me well. I’m rarely on the actual twitter.com website, using the awesome Tweetbot client on both macOS and iOS. For reasons I don’t fully understand, using those tools means I never see ads and my timeline is always in chronological order (with only accounts I want to see).

I currently follow about 400 accounts (many of those, it turns out, have been inactive for some time) and I’ve carefully curated what accounts I follow to get useful and timely info in my personal areas of interest (music, sports, food, travel, running, casinos and technology). There are friends and family on there that I know from real life and a bunch of real people that I only know through Twitter. Some of these people I’m connected with on LinkedIn, but I’d miss out on so much if Twitter was out of the picture. Hoping for personal blogs to make a comeback – RSS is solid tech and NetNewsWire is still a great reader on macOS.

Decided to spend some time this week studying what content has been hitting my timeline since Electric Rocket Boy took over. There are a few friends that I follow that use the service *a lot* and I don’t think I fully realized just how much they shape my Twitter experience (hello @rstanzel, @russohockey, @bynkii and @peril_in_pink). I’m closing in on 23,000 lifetime tweets, but Russo is nearing 200,000. I respect how everyone uses the service – you can always unfollow or mute if you don’t like the frequency (or the content). Of course, the new ownership may have other plans. Seriously wondering just how long third party clients like Tweetbot will be allowed access to the system…

So where do I go from here? Just like I did with the other services, I requested a download of my data (which you can do on this page). The Twitter archive you get is actually pretty nice – it creates a local web page you can open with your browser and view all of your tweets, likes, replies, direct messages and media files. I would like to find a way to take this archive, strip out the private stuff and just have a page with all the tweets (like I did for my old Instagram pics here).

I’ll likely stay on the service as long as Tweetbot works the way I’m used to, my favorite people continue to post and it remains free to use. If any of those things change (or the “Chief Twit” makes me as mad as the “Meta” joker did), I will deactivate & delete the @kingsbury account, pour one out for the bird and get to work on improving this little corner of the internet…

7 Minute Miles Twitter Hall of Fame

@4waytest
@acidprime
@acpage_77
@adenab
@alanbergo
@amanjo
@andrewrcraven
@arekdreyer
@badbanana
@bgervais
@bigdad3233
@bigriverpizza
@billamend
@bloomcounty
@blushnbashfuls
@bradleysklein
@brandon_seekins
@briankrebs
@brianstucki
@bryanhansel
@bryanrossi1
@bynkii
@cedge318
@charley_walters
@chuckgoolsbee
@cmkingsbury
@cookcovisitors
@ct_turf
@dailyangst
@danielle_ottman
@danothebeach
@dasharez0ne
@davidkingsbury
@davidshamaminn
@deardara
@derushaeats
@drunkhunk
@dskoglund_mn
@erheil
@ericsieger
@fairmontsprings
@fallon
@firstavenue
@fortunebay
@grandmasmara
@grayter1
@gregneagle
@gregswan
@grlitman
@gruber
@hammen
@harvdog1
@hazeltine
@hewittstrib
@hsra_mn
@jakeaune
@jefflagrua
@jeffshelman
@jemsekgolf
@jessflem
@joebissen
@johntdrumjr
@jonbream
@kerifromkansas
@kevinleecy
@kilbo
@lamppag
@letsreallylive
@linebackrbarbie
@lovesbassets
@lutsen_tofte
@lutsenmountains
@macshome
@mauioceancenter
@mfpip
@michaelguille
@minikahdaturf
@mlindstrom
@mnstatefair
@mnzoo
@muccisitalian
@munsongs
@myprontopup
@mysticlake
@niess_lisa
@nihilist_arbys
@nkrnz
@nwstwincities
@officialwilbury
@palacestpaul
@pashcam
@patricktalty
@paul_brinkman
@paulkaps
@peril_in_pink
@peterdog5
@pmdigolf
@pooserville
@richwang3
@ricknelsonmn
@riverviewtheatr
@robertcrayband
@rossraihala
@rskohner
@rstanzel
@russohockey
@ryanmathre
@schweitzerid
@saintdinette
@samcrut
@sarahmariette
@schoun
@schutz
@skatergirl916
@stephmarch
@stpaulsaints
@summerofjumbo
@susanruns
@tapinbirdie
@tbridge777
@tbtduluth
@tcmarathon
@tdelibassis
@techgrltweeter
@tenaciousd
@thecedar
@thecharlieparr
@thefitztheater
@themasters
@tjdsbtom
@tldresen
@tniver
@tompetty
@tonyminnieapple
@turfclubmn
@twindependent
@twinsprez
@twodots
@usbankstadium
@wtipradio

Thanks for all the awesome micro-content and socializing 💜

Not sure which is worse: “doing more with less” or “work is no longer just a place—it’s an experience”

…and beyond!

…and to all of the finalists too #MinnesotaCIO #ORBIE

Lots more to read, then the transition will start

https://www.austinmann.com/trek/iphone-14-pro-camera-review-scotland

Damn you, Tim Cook 💵

Wi-Fi Scores 100X Data Increase at the Super Bowl over 10 Years for 20X Less Money than 5G

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

People are confused enough by regular malware (wait, is this malware?)

…but 700 move days is still something

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2022/mar/14/msg-spheres-vast-digital-displays-taking-shape-jus/

Valhalla, the 14-inch MacBook Pro

Temporarily lost access to my Star Wars Card Trader account because of Facebook

Back on my birthday, The Verge reported what I heard was rumored to be coming: the service formerly known as Google Apps for Domains would no longer be free to early adopters like me. Now known as G Suite legacy free edition, it was originally a great way to get free email hosting using Gmail’s infrastructure.

At one point, I probably was admin on 7 or 8 domains that used this service – most of which were not businesses. In addition to my personal 7minutemiles.com email address, I also set up email for both kid one and kid two on their personal domains, along with a few charity and friend domains whose websites I hosted. Sure Google would mine the data in your email, but I thought that was a fair trade for good spam filtering and not having to manage my own mail servers (which I did for several painful years).

Google may change course for some users like me (after getting a lot of “feedback” on this plan), but I decided to start looking for alternatives. If I wanted to stay with Google’s Workspace product, the cheapest Business Starter plan was $6 per user per month. Many people like the Microsoft 365 options, which start at $5 per user per month (or $150 a year if you also want to get the Office apps). Lots of other services too at many different price points and service options. What to do, what to do?

I’ve been an iCloud customer for a few years now, first as a cloud backup tool for my iPhone, then expanding to lots of other uses: Photos, Notes, Calendars, Contacts and file storage via iCloud Drive. It really makes using multiple Apple devices much more productive. I paid for a 2TB plan with Family Sharing, so everyone in our family could have their phones backed up automatically. We had a free trial Apple TV+ account, then started experimenting with a paid Apple Music account. When the Apple One plan was announced, it was cheaper for me to switch to that. Turns out that gave me iCloud+ and the ability to use custom email domains with iCloud Mail. Intriguing…

With the Google May 1 and July 1 deadlines looming, I decided I needed to start early on a migration plan. Email addresses are tied to so many things these days, you can’t really just throw them away and start over from scratch. I wasn’t super concerned or worried about retaining old emails, but the mailbox on my personal account was 7.25GB in size (and must contain *some* things I want to keep). A few of the accounts I was still admin for weren’t being used any longer and could just be deleted. The three family domains were the ones that needed a plan. Here’s what I ended up doing for each one:

• Logged in to Google Takeout and downloaded all Mail data in MBOX format for each account.
• Logged in to icloud.com, clicked on Account Settings and then the Manage button in the Custom Email Domain section.
• Followed the directions on this page, then read up about the needed changes to DNS on this page.
• Since I use the Route 53 service on AWS for DNS these days, I had issues getting the Apple-supplied DNS information to work at first, but this great post by Dale Clifford helped solve that puzzle.
• Once Route 53 was changed correctly, logged back into icloud.com to finish setting up the domain in Account Settings.

After iCloud confirmed each domain was ready to go, I needed to turn on iCloud Mail on each device we wanted to use. This was troublesome for kid one and kid two, as you need to have a default iCloud Mail address defined before it will let you use your custom domain name account (i.e. – I also have davidmkingsbury@icloud.com, which doesn’t ever get used). We kept getting various errors setting that part up for them, but eventually a random iCloud Mail name took for each of them and sending and receiving worked right away on their custom domains.

We still need to take their MBOX files from the Google Takeout exports and import them to their new accounts, but that can wait for now. For my domain, I found that I could be connected to both the old Google mailboxes via IMAP and the new iCloud hosted mailboxes (also via IMAP) in Apple Mail on my laptop, then just drag and drop messages from old to new. This took a lot of time for thousands of messages, but I also didn’t have to manually re-sort messages after importing from the large MBOX file.

Congratulations if you made it to the end of this very long post. I haven’t done a long form post in quite a while, but it’s always good to document stuff like this for the random one in a billion person who might stumble across it while Googling for help on formerly great Google services…

Onward!

View at Medium.com

https://fourseasons.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/search/job/Minneapolis/Assistant-IT-Manager_REQ10233293

https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/against-crypto.html

But Cisco + fiber + Cat6 is good

…or would that be an MDF?

Just learned about Rivian today – interesting stuff

https://arstechnica.com/features/2021/10/securing-your-digital-life-part-1/

The Belkin BOOST↑CHARGE™ PRO 3-in-1 Wireless Charger with MagSafe – pricey, but awesome

I’ve turned into a marketing executive’s dream. Here are seven of my current favorite brands:

• Apple
• Descente
• Disney
• Johnston and Murphy
• Mizuno
• Polo Ralph Lauren
• Sony

Most of those have been on the list for years and years too…

https://recruiting.adp.com/srccar/public/RTI.home?c=1152751&d=ExternalCareerSite&r=5000780763706#/

Pre-drywall meeting was a success

The first of many, I’m sure

Still trying to figure how best to use Apple Music, but this was nice

Townball Tavern @ Target Field

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkx8vw/the-forgotten-history-of-the-oregon-trail-as-told-by-its-creators

Events are coming back and U.S. Bank Stadium needs help getting ready. Looking for an entry-level tech support candidate to join my team this summer:

• Will train – great first job for a tech-savvy graduate
• NFL game day excitement at least ten days a year
• Good chance of working with roadies from world-famous bands
• Get paid to learn really expensive systems and equipment
• Flexible hybrid remote and onsite work environment
• Cool office that makes the news on a regular basis
• Fun team, decent boss

The posting is now up on the stadium website, while here is the direct link to the ADP hiring site (PDF here).

Had to reboot the Honda

Getting ready for another go

I really want one, but will probably wait until after we move…

https://www.kentik.com/blog/the-mystery-of-as8003/

Not quite ready, but nearly there

That one was rather fun – ordered all the cat 6

Looking back through the archives, I don’t think I’ve ever actually written about our baseball ticket group. State Farm Insurance Agent Kirk Detlefsen (and his family) have been running a Twins season ticket group for quite some time. I was introduced to them through my Northwest Airlines mentor six years ago and have been hooked ever since.

Each season, Kirk buys up a bunch of season tickets in different sections, then divides them into shares at various price points. A ticket “draft” is held every year and each shareholder picks the games they want to attend. Usually this is held in February in the Delta Club with snow on the field, guest speakers from the Twins and an assortment of ballpark food available for purchase. We didn’t have one at all in 2020 and the 2021 version was held via Zoom (of course). Kudos to all the Detlefsens for pulling that off (and managing 100% digital tickets for the first time ever).

The smallest share in the group is two tickets to two games in the Champions Club. Since these seats are super expensive (and generally not available to the general public via single game sales), this was a nice way to splurge once a year (I split the share with my uncle). After a few years of that, we switched to a share with two seats for ten games in the Delta Club. That’s what we currently have, although it appears that our actual seats may be all over this season because of capacity restrictions.

So what was the return of fans like?

To be honest, the thing I was looking forward to most were the new Andrew Zimmern KFC wings that Stephanie March wrote about for Mpls/StPaul magazine. They are available in Bat & Barrel (which will now be called Truly On Deck, but none of the signage has changed yet), so we headed there first. They still apparently take advanced reservations, as most tables had reserved signs on them and you couldn’t order food from the counter (just drinks at the bar). I asked the person standing at the podium if I had to order through the app, but she wasn’t sure. The tables had QR codes on them, so I scanned that, which took me to a menu page, but no link to order online. Hmm…

So let’s talk about apps for a minute. MLB offers several, but these are the two primary ones I’ve used (and had on my phone): MLB and MLB Ballpark. I could’ve sworn the first one used to be called At Bat, but maybe I’m making that up. The MLB app lets you follow games around the league, while the Ballpark app is supposed to handle all the stuff you need at an actual game – tickets, mobile ordering, Twingo. I opened the wrong app so many times – maybe I need to move them to different screens. I also added the ParkWhiz app to my phone today to park in Ramp A, but more on that later.

There were multiple reports across the league of issues with mobile ordering on opening day, so I was interested to see how the process worked. I was also under the impression that all food needed to be ordered from the app, but that was not the case at all. With limited stands open, lines were long all around the main concourse, but you could place an order at a stand and pay with a credit card (no cash accepted – Apple Pay did work fine, which has been an issue for me there in the past). Here’s what the Ballpark app screens looked like to order my KFC wings:

The first disclaimer screen comes up every single time you try to order. The app doesn’t automatically try to figure out where you are located, so you have to select from the drop-down menu, which has what seems like a million options to scroll through. When I selected Bat & Barrel, there was a limited selection of items – I could order the wings, but no drinks or sides. The app was not integrated with Apple Pay, so I had to manually enter my credit card information. My card got billed right away and the screen said I would receive a text message when my order was ready. The app didn’t ask for my number, though, so I never received a text. Also, once you closed the confirmation window, it was not obvious how to pull up your order info (with the important order number) and I did not receive any email receipts of the transaction. Later I found that you can access a “My Orders” section, but that is only available by starting a new transaction:

There was signage at the front serving area for mobile order pickup, but there was no one working there. After a few minutes of standing around, someone came and asked me if I was waiting for an order, then went back to the kitchen to get it. By this time, there were a few other people waiting too. When they brought out my food, it was in a stapled shut brown grocery bag that just contained the food in a container – there were no utensils or napkins. This was only the second game back after a year of no fans, so hopefully these issues will get worked out as operations get back into the grove. The quality of the wings was really good, but a cheese brat I bought later from the Kramarczuk’s stand was small and overcooked.

While it was great to be back at a game, we had a few other negative experiences. The digital tickets in the app say you must enter at the gate indicated, so we headed to gate 34 when we arrived. Since we were early, there was no one in line at all, but a guest service staffer immediately confronted us. She said this was an ADA entrance and wanted to see our “Sweet Spot” card on the app before letting us proceed (?). That part of the app was not working and she eventually just let us proceed to the empty security screening line. Guessing this process will also get better as the season progresses.

The announced attendance for the game was 9,817 and the concourses never felt overcrowded. People in general followed the mask and distancing rules while moving around, but the concession lines were tight and the group of “bros” behind us decided that since they were drinking all game long, they didn’t need to wear their masks. At all. Seat spacing was similar to the Saints last season, alternating rows with four-seat blocks on both ends in one row with two-seats blocks in the middle of the next. Blocked seats were zip tied shut, but one group asked an usher if they were supposed to cut them to sit (they were in the wrong section). We didn’t see any ushers trying to enforce mask rules, the scoreboard and PA announcements were minimal and it would be nice if the fancam operators would only show people following the rules.

With state regulations capping attendance at 10,000 right now, I don’t envy the task of the ticket office managers. We really like our experience in Delta Club and hope that we can have seats back in there later in the season. It was rather frustrating to see entire empty sections up there the whole game, but I’m guessing that’s because most people wanted to stay inside the warm part of the club (which we would have traded our 12th row seats for in a heartbeat – it never got above 47F). Target Field’s current published capacity is only 38,544, so jumping up to 50% shouldn’t be a huge change. It will also be nice to see the menus expand back to normal – Red Cow, for example, was not offering turkey burgers yet.

The final issue we had (aside from the dumb start-a-runner-on-second rule and Twins loss) was leaving the parking ramp. I drove up to the exit kiosk and opened the ParkWhiz app, only to find my barcode gone and a prompt to login. When I bought the parking pass earlier in the day, they sent me an email with a link to the barcode, but never asked me to set up a login ID and password. With people waiting behind me (and no staff at the exit), I had to pull my car over to the side, find the email, then get back in line. I will now know to have this ready before I start driving, but I wasn’t the only car that had to do this. If there was a regular-sized crowd exiting at the same time, this would be a disaster.

A return to hockey is up next for me tomorrow night (with another Twins game on 4/23). Stay tuned for more reports…

https://www.paulosyibelo.com/2021/04/this-man-thought-opening-txt-file-is.html

Happy 15th birthday, 7 Minute Miles! Current stats:

• 12,192 Posts
• 216 Pages

Skipping unique visitors or page counts this year, as my web server logs are all mixed up after the big move to AWS Lightsail. I do hope to get that cleaned up soon – want to learn how the new nginx logs differ from Apache (which I used for years). WordPress.com stats report 8,066 visitors in 2020, along with 20,522 views, but I don’t really know how they calculate that. They also report that the “Reflections on Spring Hill Golf Club” post continues to be one of my most visited stories of all time. Rather hoping this will be the year I actually play there…

Won’t get too much into the technical weeds this time, as I have a lot of things cooking right now that I’m sure I’ll cover in more detail soon. Aside from the move to virtual AWS servers, I’m still on WordPress (v5.7) with the same old custom theme and the same set of plugins I had last year. Hoping for a new look in 2021, but I don’t know the timing of that launch yet. No new functionality recently – just lots of under the hood things (including a fix for the weird SSL/emoji issue).

Thanks for visiting!

Working in technology usually means a fair amount of fixing stuff that’s broken. The advice of Roy and Moss from The IT Crowd is often handy: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Strong Google/DuckDuckGo skills and some free time are usually all you need to fix almost anything these days. I’ve really only had one situation in my tech career that had me stumped for a long time: bad networking at HSRA. That issue eventually got resolved with new hardware, but it’s a terrible feeling when technology doesn’t follow a logical troubleshooting process.

A week ago, another issue surfaced that may join the troubleshooting hall of shame. It started with a team member who couldn’t login to the file server on our office network over the weekend. With most of our staff working remotely, the on-premise file server is usually accessed via VPN, from both Mac and Windows clients. I connected from home and was able to see the file server (and thankfully all of the files) from my office iMac, but could not connect from my MacBook Pro. I find it useful to keep troubleshooting notes for future me, so please continue on if you’d like some nerd-tastic reading.

Like most everything in our building, things are starting to get old. The file server is part of the core infrastructure that was installed back in 2016. Our EMC VNXe3200 SAN is the foundation of a virtual environment with VMware hosts (Dell acquired EMC in 2016). There are a pair of Windows virtual servers, along with a Linux VM. The Windows servers act as our primary and secondary directory servers (Active Directory, still on Windows Server 2012), while the Linux box runs our intranet and some other IPTV services. It’s a fairly complex setup, but has been rock solid up to this point.

The VNXe3200 can serve CIFS shares directly, using AD for file permissions and access management. My AD servers are set to automatically install Windows updates, which I suspect was the root cause of this problem. The SAN hardware all seemed to be fine – no disk, power or network issues. People who were connected had no problems; it was looking like an issue with the authentication from AD. The web-based Unisphere management interface for the SAN was still running the Flash version of the Operating Environment (OE), so I needed to figure out a way around that issue to get more info from the logs (since Flash is now dead).

One of my original project engineers was able to set me up with a very old VM that had a copy of Firefox with the Flash plugin. Being careful to restrict network access for both security and auto-update reasons, I managed to get Unisphere updated to the latest OE version with HTML5 (3.1.12.10186894). Looking at the logs, the SAN had lost connectivity to directory services:

All Domain Controller servers configured for the CIFS server are not reachable. Please check this is not a network connectivity issue. Ensure at least one Domain Controller is up and running and is reachable by VNXe storage array.

It did not appear to be a network issue and I could login to the AD servers with no problem (with multiple user accounts). The support contract I had with Dell/EMC on the VNXe3200 expired and my experience trying to contact them did not go well. They took forever to respond and when they finally did, they wanted to charge me for all of the expired time, plus another year (for an amount that was about equal to just buying a new solution).

My immediate concern was making sure we had reliable backups of all files and folders. My ultra-low cost cloud backup strategy is to connect to the file server on my office iMac and use an app called qBackup that connects to a Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage account. This has worked great for years – the script runs nightly with an incremental backup, qBackup was a one-time cost of $30 and the monthly Backblaze charge is usually under $10 a month. The flaw in this cloud backup strategy is that it takes a really long time to restore 2.5 terabytes of data online (you can pay $189 and wait for Backblaze to ship a hard drive copy, but I don’t know how long that takes).

Since I still had access to the file server from the iMac, I stopped at Best Buy to get a 4TB external hard drive (and some thumb drives for people that needed files right away via SneakerNet). Now I had the cloud backup *and* locally attached copies of everything in my office. I tracked down the original engineer that helped install and configure this setup and he helped me create a new share that is served directly from the domain controller. I copied over all of the backup files from the 4TB drive and tested connections. That worked, so I reviewed security settings with our GM and applied permissions to folders via AD security groups. Cloud backup was re-pointed to the new share and ran successfully from my iMac. I created cheat sheets on how to connect to the new share from both Mac and Windows clients and sent them out to our staff. Done, right? Well…

All of my Mac users had no problem connecting and seeing what they were permitted to see. Some Windows users were also completely fine, but others connected and could not view all of the folders they were allowed to see. I initially had access based enumeration turned on, so some hidden folders were expected (but not ones they should see). One colleague saw all folders in the office, but not over VPN from home (on a brand-new laptop). This TechNote pointed towards a local cache issue (which this article also talks about). We’ve been experimenting with various offline settings and most people are now connected successfully. Here’s how we are troubleshooting Windows connections now:

• Restart the workstation first, Roy
• Re-map the network drive using a different letter
• Use the full AD name (i.e. – domain.local\username)
• Delete local offline cache files

Dell/EMC sent me a notice this weekend that there is another update to the Unisphere OE (3.1.14.10199487), but I didn’t see anything relevant in the release notes. I did download the huge .gpg file anyways, but so far the health check is timing out and I can’t get it installed. Also forgot to mention that we rolled back two of the automatic Windows Server updates that installed in mid-February (and turned off automatic updates). That obviously isn’t a long-term strategy, so I’d like to get updated to Windows Server 2019 soon (VMware updates too). OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint and even Box/Dropbox for Business are all options that may come into play as well.

Serving files shouldn’t be rocket science. At least I felt a little better when the engineer said, “I’ve installed hundreds, if not a thousand, file servers like this and I’ve never seen one do what yours is doing.”

Trailblazing!

Fry’s Electronics is officially going out of business after 36 years

Experienced some weird technical glitches this week:

• The older of my two AWS instances just stopped running right after midnight one night. Uptime Robot notified me right away via email, but I didn’t see it until around 8am, so there was some significant downtime (relatively speaking). The instance restarted fine, but I don’t know what caused that (and Amazon didn’t notify me of any issues).
• I made one late night attempt earlier this week to move this site to my newer AWS instance, but had two issues: 1) my nginx virtual host config is apparently wrong, as it started sending requests to a different domain after I updated DNS and 2) creating a new Let’s Encrypt certificate failed (probably because the domain name didn’t match). Decided to just revert back for now and make another run at it later.
• The iOS WordPress app update this week seems to have now broken all functionality with this site. Before, I just had issues uploading featured images (they would upload to the media library successfully, but the app would never get a “finished” acknowledgement). Now it doesn’t even get that far. I’ll just post from macOS machines for now, but that’s a pain for mobile posting away from the house.
• My office workstation wasn’t set to automatically restart after a power outage, so it’s been off for a week. I have other machines to use at home, but that machine does my automated network share backups to the cloud, so I needed to get that issue resolved in person today. I went to check status when I returned home and initially couldn’t see it, but that turned out to be an issue with the DHCP lease expiring. All good now.
• Not a glitch, but decided to take a look at my Twitter settings tonight. Dropped some dead accounts (actually really surprised at how many accounts I follow that haven’t been active for 100 days or more), unmuted some people and started looking for a new profile picture. Twitter remains my last social media account – can’t decide if it stays or goes this year. Leaning towards keeping it, with a renewed focus on pruning and more active curation of what I mute and what I follow. Might go private too.

Thankful for a long weekend – stay warm, Minnesota peeps…

Might not stop after a year, but trying to at least that far

Speed test in NE Minneapolis today

Flexibility (and safety) is great, but nothing beats in person

…but a more organized mess

Welcome to the first Flash-free day of the rest of your life

These things are so finicky

Haven’t had much time to explore today, though

For most of my life, I’ve been a music hoarder. Visiting record stores all over the world, I’ve collected rare (and not so rare) records, tapes and CDs from a core group of artists that I like. I did vinyl the first time around, made mix tapes on cassette, fell in love with the “pure” sound of CDs and have spent countless hours ripping CDs to MP3/AAC files to be synched with laptops, iMacs, iPods and iPhones. Things I’ve never done: Napster, the resurgence of vinyl and streaming services. A week ago, I decided to do something about that last one.

My daughters are probably thinking “about damn time, old guy.” They are both big fans of Spotify and each gave me a few tutorials on how they use that service and what they like about it. It seems to me that the real competition in this space right now is between Spotify and Apple Music, so I decided to look at that option too. They both have family plans available for about $15 per month, so I signed up to try Apple Music first. They are different in some ways, but similar in most of the important areas. Apple Music probably gets the initial nod from me, just because I am so invested in the Apple ecosystem.

What do I like so far? I finally understand how the integration works with my current library, so it’s cool to have my existing files available in the cloud to be played across all devices automatically. I like the curated artist stations and themed playlists (even if they seem to be somewhat repetitive) and it’s nice to have real radio station feeds integrated again (hello, KROQ). I love that you can download up to 100,000 files locally, as I don’t always have a reliable network connection. It’s great to be able to just listen to things by anybody instantly, without having to risk money buying something you end up not liking (or only need to listen to once).

What are the bad things? The $180 I’ll pay annually to Apple is money I probably would’ve spent at places like the Electric Fetus. According to Jimmy Page, questions abound regarding the fairness of streaming royalty payments to artists and writers. I don’t like the general concept that I’m renting access to these songs and don’t really own them. I don’t have to worry about Apple going out of business any time soon (cough, cough, Zune), but once you start down this road, you are locked in to pay or your stuff goes away. And you can also have the Netflix issue of artists deciding to pull their stuff at any time.

Right now, though, Apple Music seems to be a nice middle road for me. I get the benefits of streaming services, but can still buy things the old way whenever I want. The price isn’t unreasonable and there is still a lot of functionality for me to learn (profiles, interacting with friends and family, music discovery, MusicKit, Apple Music APIs). Strangely, scrobbling via Last.fm only seems to work with the old files in my library, so it would nice to figure out how to integrate between this site and my Apple Music profile.

My head is still spinning after returning home from the last home game of a very strange 2020 season:

• Games with fewer people aren’t as stressful overall, but it still takes me several hours to wind down after the final whistle blows.
• Immensely thankful everyone on our team stayed healthy all season.
• I don’t walk nearly as many steps on game day since we got a Cushman for IT.
• Five regular seasons already? 2016: 5-3, 2017: 7-1, 2018: 5-3, 2019: 6-2, 2020: 3-5
• The people in the Vikings organization are extraordinary and it’s a pleasure to work with them year after year.
• Three stadiums are now newer than us in the NFL, but next year will feel like opening the building all over again.

Just a few things to clean up this week in the building, then on to 2021…

Best $20 purchase in a long time

The stability saga with my upgraded 2017 Retina 4K 21-inch iMac, MrJackpot, continues. The latest:

• All panics still involve IONVMeController.cpp in the crash report.
• Definitely caused by the Aura Pro X2 SSD from Other World Computing.
• Upgrading to Big Sur initially did not change the number of crashes (which were averaging about once a week while sleeping).
• The latest Big Sur update (11.1) has made things more unstable, causing multiple crashes a day (even during normal operations).
• I turned off screen sleep in Energy Saver and unchecked the following: Put hard disks to sleep when possible, Wake for network access, Start up automatically after a power failure and Enable Power Nap.
• Also ran this command from Terminal: sudo pmset -a standby 0 autopoweroff 0 hibernatemode 0 (which OWC support suggested in a July email). This initially seemed to slow down the number of crashes, but did not stop them completely.
• So far, the system starts back up with no noticeable file system damage (need to hold the power button for ten seconds, wait, then single press the power button to get the kernel panic multi-language message to appear (above), which then automatically starts the reboot process after a few seconds.

At this point, I don’t know what else to do until I can buy an M1-based iMac next year. I thought about buying an M1 Mac mini with an LG 4K display now, but that’s a pricy option. I sent a follow-up email to OWC support, but frankly I’ve been disappointed in how they’ve handled this issue (which seems to have impacted a large number of people). I’d been a happy customer of theirs since I started my Mac support career at NWA in 1996, so it’s sad and frustrating to be in this situation…

Once I found the right screwdriver, it wasn’t too bad (new battery on a Dell XPS 15)

The tweet I published earlier this week about old technology lead me down another rabbit hole the last few nights. All this started with a review of equipment at work, some of which have been running non-stop for more than four years without a reboot. We are in the process of reviewing maintenance contracts and it seems everyone needs to get creative these days when it comes to pandemic capital spending and the lifespan of various technologies.

This got me thinking about the many computers I’ve had over the years, long-departed applications and obsolete storage formats. I remember my dad having paper punchcards at his job when I was little and over the course of my career, I’ve managed tape drives, 5.25-inch floppies, 3.5-inch floppies, Zip and Jaz media, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, external spinning disk drives, SSD drives, thumb drives and various forms of cloud storage. The storage capacity on my current home workstation is insanely large compared to those earlier days, in physical form factors that are smaller, lighter and less expensive by unit than ever.

I’ve always tried to have multiple backups of my personal data in different formats, but it’s amazing how many files have made it this far in my life. Even for the weird, obsolete file formats, many of today’s applications have good importers and translators to open ancient files created with long-gone programs. Old video game ROM files from original arcade games can usually be emulated on current hardware (although I’m having trouble getting MAME to work on Big Sur). I came across this article talking about the shelf life of old game console cartridges from Atari, Mattel, Nintendo and others that still start up and run like the day they were first sold.

That article also talks about NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity and the software used to run multi-year, remote missions. What an amazing engineering and technology challenge! I look back to the multimedia CD-ROM golf guide that I produced in 1999 using the authoring tool mTropolis and old versions of Photoshop and Illustrator. While I still have a few copies of the CD laying around, I don’t think I have any machines that can actually run the guide. My current version of Photoshop (22.1), however, can open all of the original media files. I was also able to open my 1995 résumé file with a current version of Word (16.43) and rediscovered what was very likely my first email address:

• dkingsbu@vx.cis.umn.edu (check out the only match on Google)

Speaking of email, this is probably the only tool I’ve used over the years that I don’t really archive. I would hazard a guess that most of the work emails I’ve written or received in previous jobs are long gone. Even the latest version of Outlook at my current job doesn’t tell me how many messages I have in my inbox any more – it’s just one long, infinite scroll. I’ve been using Google with my personal email domain for years (7.37GB out of a 15GB quota), but I rarely go back more than a month or two to look for things.

My daughter asked me about JPEG and PNG tonight and it’s really nice that these formats have been around for a while now, working on many different platforms and with many different applications. Keeping these files organized is a seemingly endless task, but at least there is little concern about losing access (as long as my backups remain solid). I do occasionally run across old music files that have strange DRM tied to them, but it’s easy enough to replace those. I won’t get into the vinyl > cassette > CD or Beta/VHS > DVD > Blu-ray conversation here, as it’s depressing how many times I’ve purchased and re-purchased the same content over the years.

I’ve been publishing this site for almost 15 years now and would love to have it available to future generations of my family. Web publishing isn’t free, though, and even with the recent switch to AWS, it’s still something that requires time and money to keep online. I should be mirroring the site on my workstation (which I used to do), so that if the public site eventually goes dark, at least the family could run it locally. WordPress, PHP and AWS upgrades (not to mention the issues around things like the RedHat/CentOS dustup this week) mean that online sites can’t really be “frozen” without active maintenance.

Website durability might be my hardest nut to crack…

Disney and 7MM both know AWS is where it’s at

What’s next – cats and dogs, living together?

https://covidawaremn.com/

No postage returns @ Double Tree by Hilton, Saint Paul

Back to chillin’ on the iMac

I don’t really have a ton of comments on the new stuff this week:

• The upgrade file for Big Sur is huge, then it asks for even more free space to install.
• Happy it’s still free, but how exactly does that continue to work?
• Upgraded my work MacBook Air on the first day, then my home iMac the next day. No big issues so far on either one – there was one alert about the Cisco AnyConnect client, but version 4.9.00086 seems to work fine.
• Out of the gate, Big Sur seems very polished for a dot-0 release.
• Speaking of 11: while I like the Spinal Tap reference, the end of the “X” is a little sad too.
• Will the new Safari improvements get me to switch back from Chrome? Time will tell on that one…
• Hoping the AirPod tradeoff process between devices works as promised, since I switch a lot these days.
• Happy that Music and Photos survived the upgrade with no issues (and maybe even a little better performance?).
• All of my old crusty menubar apps seem to work so far (Last.fm Scrobbler, Backblaze).
• No issues with virtual desktops (i.e. – Mission Control), terminal sessions, Screen Sharing or iCloud Notes.
• The Apple Silicon stuff is impressive – guessing my first one will be an iMac next year.
• I would be clamoring for a new Air if they would’ve made the screen bezel smaller – that is the only thing I envy on our fleet of Dell XPS laptops.

In other Kingsbury Apple news, Colleen got her new Max on Friday and loves it. I’m still happy with my decision to get the smaller phone (and the iPad Pro for all of us to use as needed). Not really using the pencil, though (so far).