CDs, I tell my younger colleagues, are what’s going to replace streaming music. Because that’s my idea of being funny.
I’ve been using Spotify a lot. It’s awful how much identikit music out there. Whether it’s modern pop or soul, or the pap I put on to fall asleep to, or the endless jazz playlists (The JazzUK one is a goodie though) that re-cycle the same tracks from the 1950’s and 60’s, or those playlists that promise one thing and descend into rap. Just how much rap is there in the world anyway?
Radio was and still is the ‘curated’ streaming medium. That’s what saves it from being a stream of new-age piano pieces with the same old major chords. The DJs and producers have to listen to it and don’t want to have to listen to bland twaddle.
A record collection has the same point is the same as a library or a film / DVD collection: it’s mine. Uniquely so. A friend has a vast number of DVDs, including lots of BBC series and classic British films. No such things (except the Smiley series) are to be found in my DVDs. We both have the French New Wave, and Robert Altman, and Sam Peckinpah. But I have Baise-Moi, Kids and Dogtown and Z-Boys which he would not allow in his house. We will pass over my collection of box sets featuring Eliza Dushku, and in my defence I can honestly say I only have S1 of BtVS (if I even have that).
I have a whole stack of Baroque music CDs, since discovering from reading a couple of histories of music that I like Baroque. And John Digweed. Also Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and obviously Bird and Robert Johnson. The CDs I buy are likely to be music that will stay with me. I’ve lost count of the music I have played out - that moment when suddenly you know exactly where the song is going all the time and it holds no more emotion for you. Unlike Flamenco Sketches which surprises every time.
Spotify has the functionality to build up a list of favourites, and tries to guess at what mine might be. It does as good a job as Amazon’s ‘people who bought this also bought that’ feature. I suppose I could spend a day adding every record and CD I can ever remember buying, but I don’t want to listen to a lot of them now. Anyway, once you list There Goes Concorde Again, aren’t you pretty much done?
Anyway, a list is not a collection, in the same way that a map is not the country. The point of a collection is that it is of things, and the thing-ness matters. Vinyl was more thing-y than CDs are way more thing-y than a Spotify playlist.
I miss 8Tracks. I used to discover music from those playlists. I’d be nodding along and suddenly look up and say what’s this because it had hooked me. This has yet to happen on a Spotify playlist. If anything I use Spotify to find things that I would not buy on CD, starting with Wagner operas. Which isn’t bad. There’s always been that music that falls between must-have-in-the-collection and can’t-remember-it-five-minutes-later. Caravan’s Nine Feet Underground is exactly that.
Monday 30 March 2020
Wednesday 25 March 2020
Corona- Panic: Wise Words
I've been watching these guys on and off for a while now. Most of the time they make a decent amount of sense. This time, they make more sense than almost anyone else I've read.
Happy Lockdown!
Monday 23 March 2020
Bessel van deer Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score,
Bessel van deer Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score, which I read recently, has confirmed my long-held suspicion that almost all of the crazy, spiteful, selfish, erratic behaviour described by so many men in the Sphere is the result of 3D - dysfunctional development disorder(*). 3D can be caused by anything from lousy parenting to criminal neglect and sexual abuse, and no doubt has sub-categories. The result is the same: an unstable personality, braoken or damaged character, and behaviour which nobody would want around them once the sex was over. The exact details of the damage and behaviours aren’t important and can range from a full-fledged DSM-V personality disorder, through defensive obesity, substance abuse, control freakery, non-stop hypergamy, chronic dissatisfaction, inability to trust, promiscuity, low self-esteem, wilfulness and lack of accountability.
3D-behaviour is for life. It’s a persistent, functional disorder that can be managed, if at all, only by extensive therapy, possibly drugs, and constant watchfulness and management. If those last two sound like a Red Pill Marriage, well, that’s what a lot of Red Pill Marriages are.
One of the problems I’ve had with Rollo’s theories has been the feeling that he’s really just describing 3D-crazy and then saying but crazy survives evolution, so crazy must be sane, if only we look at it right . Surviving unto the second generation is not a reason to think a behaviour is somehow effective or adaptive, let alone desirable and to be expected. It means that behaviour is not sufficiently shunned. The reason for that is simple: even Normie teenagers are slightly crazy and 3D crazy doesn’t begin to stand out from the background until all the Normies start calming down in their twenties. By then, it’s too late sucker, you went and knocked up or married crazy.
This is one reason men should not get married until at least thirty: it gives them time to learn to recognise 3D-crazy and it gives the 3D-crazy of their generation the time to ripen.
Quite simply, crazy or damaged should be shunned. At least for reproduction. If you see a Red Flag, don’t go in the water.
An older man who has retired from the fray can say that. Younger men - and at my age, under forty-five is ‘younger’ - are faced with the dreadful fact that a high proportion of the women they will meet will have Red Flag behaviour. What do they do?
Well, some of us ain’t no saints neither. Decent folk didn’t have much to do with me, unless they were fooled by my smile for a while. Some of us are 3D as well, and as a social service we should stay with our own kind, so we don’t spoil the decent folk. If you’re a pig, get down in the mud with the other pigs.
But don’t marry them. Don’t have children with them. Don’t co-habit with them. If you’re in the USA, don’t do anything that a Family Court anywhere has decreed implies your intention to support her. (That can be as little as saying “Let me get that” about a cup of coffee.)
If you’re a regular man, you won’t want a lifetime of fooling around. Racking up a spectacular notch count is for dysfunctionals. You’ll want to have a bit of fun, and then pair up with a Good Woman. You may not be able to find one of those, and may not want to move from where the jobs are to where the Good Women are. Understandable.
Regular men who missed the Good Women train, or 3D-men who should not be on it, need to accept that they’re going to be living the Bachelor Life: intermittent affairs with women who as the years go by are increasingly crazy and decreasingly attractive, until you decide that your dignity is more important than getting your dick wet. (Some men never do, and I guess they’re happy.)
If you’re a regular man, you will regard the lack of your own family as you would never getting that job at an FTSE 100 company, but winding up at some random but reasonable employer instead. It will cause a sigh every now and again, but won’t spoil your life. That’s the way Normies roll: they adapt to circumstances, don’t see those circumstances as being about them in any way, and consequently nothing matters so much to them that they will have emotional hangovers about it. They are pretty much fully-assembled when they come into adulthood and don’t need anything to complete them.
Someone who thinks they need a family, or a partner, or a job in a particular company, or a fast car, or any other damn thing, to complete them, give their life meaning or otherwise make them feel better about themselves, well, that’s a Red Flag right there. For one thing, treating partners and especially children, as a kind of therapy is abuse. Literally. Ab-use. Improper use. Children are not therapeutic tools, and neither are partners. Child-raising is twenty-one years of work that causes sixty years of expense for the taxpayer if it’s done badly. For another, fixing doesn’t work: nothing makes it all better again.
Although I’ve used the ‘damaged / broken’ metaphor, and it is widely used, it’s misleading. 3D people aren’t damaged and they aren’t broke. To be damaged or broke, we have to have been made, assembled, more or less correctly in the first place. Like Normies are. Normies can be damaged or broke and can try to mend themselves, because Normies were made whole at some point. 3D people were never assembled in the first place. 3D people are a bunch of parts put together into some Heath Robinson machine. They need putting together properly. What’s misleading about the idea of 3D’s being ‘damaged’ is that it implies there is a ‘whole’ version in there somewhere. There isn’t. The main task of a 3D’s life is to assemble themselves into a viable person. Sadly, the therapists and pop-culture mavens are still telling the 3D’s that the answer lies in connecting to people, and finding friends and relationships, when in fact, neither of those things will work. The only people who will connect with 3D’s are other 3D’s, and more crazy is not what they need.
Instead of hearing women do this and that, I now hear 3D-women do this and that. Crazy people gonna crazy. Nasty people gonna nasty. Spoiled brats gonna be spoiled. People who can’t trust gonna throw shit tests and run surveillance. Unstable people gonna get bored and file for divorce. None of that is news.
The news is the dismaying prevalence of 3D people. You want one estimate? Forty percent of sixteen-year-olds in the UK are not living with both biological parents. I know, kids are ‘resilient’ and if they aren’t, they should be. So it’s not on the parents, but the damn snowflake kids who can’t take a few missing hugs and the odd temper tantrum. Which is a darn convenient belief parents, relatives and teachers. So there you are. Forty per cent of any generation are not suited to theeternal combat utter bliss of domestic relationships.
I think it explains a lot.
(*) Not in the DSM-V. But you know it’s real.
3D-behaviour is for life. It’s a persistent, functional disorder that can be managed, if at all, only by extensive therapy, possibly drugs, and constant watchfulness and management. If those last two sound like a Red Pill Marriage, well, that’s what a lot of Red Pill Marriages are.
One of the problems I’ve had with Rollo’s theories has been the feeling that he’s really just describing 3D-crazy and then saying but crazy survives evolution, so crazy must be sane, if only we look at it right . Surviving unto the second generation is not a reason to think a behaviour is somehow effective or adaptive, let alone desirable and to be expected. It means that behaviour is not sufficiently shunned. The reason for that is simple: even Normie teenagers are slightly crazy and 3D crazy doesn’t begin to stand out from the background until all the Normies start calming down in their twenties. By then, it’s too late sucker, you went and knocked up or married crazy.
This is one reason men should not get married until at least thirty: it gives them time to learn to recognise 3D-crazy and it gives the 3D-crazy of their generation the time to ripen.
Quite simply, crazy or damaged should be shunned. At least for reproduction. If you see a Red Flag, don’t go in the water.
An older man who has retired from the fray can say that. Younger men - and at my age, under forty-five is ‘younger’ - are faced with the dreadful fact that a high proportion of the women they will meet will have Red Flag behaviour. What do they do?
Well, some of us ain’t no saints neither. Decent folk didn’t have much to do with me, unless they were fooled by my smile for a while. Some of us are 3D as well, and as a social service we should stay with our own kind, so we don’t spoil the decent folk. If you’re a pig, get down in the mud with the other pigs.
But don’t marry them. Don’t have children with them. Don’t co-habit with them. If you’re in the USA, don’t do anything that a Family Court anywhere has decreed implies your intention to support her. (That can be as little as saying “Let me get that” about a cup of coffee.)
If you’re a regular man, you won’t want a lifetime of fooling around. Racking up a spectacular notch count is for dysfunctionals. You’ll want to have a bit of fun, and then pair up with a Good Woman. You may not be able to find one of those, and may not want to move from where the jobs are to where the Good Women are. Understandable.
Regular men who missed the Good Women train, or 3D-men who should not be on it, need to accept that they’re going to be living the Bachelor Life: intermittent affairs with women who as the years go by are increasingly crazy and decreasingly attractive, until you decide that your dignity is more important than getting your dick wet. (Some men never do, and I guess they’re happy.)
If you’re a regular man, you will regard the lack of your own family as you would never getting that job at an FTSE 100 company, but winding up at some random but reasonable employer instead. It will cause a sigh every now and again, but won’t spoil your life. That’s the way Normies roll: they adapt to circumstances, don’t see those circumstances as being about them in any way, and consequently nothing matters so much to them that they will have emotional hangovers about it. They are pretty much fully-assembled when they come into adulthood and don’t need anything to complete them.
Someone who thinks they need a family, or a partner, or a job in a particular company, or a fast car, or any other damn thing, to complete them, give their life meaning or otherwise make them feel better about themselves, well, that’s a Red Flag right there. For one thing, treating partners and especially children, as a kind of therapy is abuse. Literally. Ab-use. Improper use. Children are not therapeutic tools, and neither are partners. Child-raising is twenty-one years of work that causes sixty years of expense for the taxpayer if it’s done badly. For another, fixing doesn’t work: nothing makes it all better again.
Although I’ve used the ‘damaged / broken’ metaphor, and it is widely used, it’s misleading. 3D people aren’t damaged and they aren’t broke. To be damaged or broke, we have to have been made, assembled, more or less correctly in the first place. Like Normies are. Normies can be damaged or broke and can try to mend themselves, because Normies were made whole at some point. 3D people were never assembled in the first place. 3D people are a bunch of parts put together into some Heath Robinson machine. They need putting together properly. What’s misleading about the idea of 3D’s being ‘damaged’ is that it implies there is a ‘whole’ version in there somewhere. There isn’t. The main task of a 3D’s life is to assemble themselves into a viable person. Sadly, the therapists and pop-culture mavens are still telling the 3D’s that the answer lies in connecting to people, and finding friends and relationships, when in fact, neither of those things will work. The only people who will connect with 3D’s are other 3D’s, and more crazy is not what they need.
Instead of hearing women do this and that, I now hear 3D-women do this and that. Crazy people gonna crazy. Nasty people gonna nasty. Spoiled brats gonna be spoiled. People who can’t trust gonna throw shit tests and run surveillance. Unstable people gonna get bored and file for divorce. None of that is news.
The news is the dismaying prevalence of 3D people. You want one estimate? Forty percent of sixteen-year-olds in the UK are not living with both biological parents. I know, kids are ‘resilient’ and if they aren’t, they should be. So it’s not on the parents, but the damn snowflake kids who can’t take a few missing hugs and the odd temper tantrum. Which is a darn convenient belief parents, relatives and teachers. So there you are. Forty per cent of any generation are not suited to the
I think it explains a lot.
(*) Not in the DSM-V. But you know it’s real.
Thursday 19 March 2020
Lending Libraries, Downloads and Bookshelves
Am I the only reader who now has more recently-read e-books in their Calibre catalog (or Kindle + iBooks) than they have recently-read paper-books?
I buy novels in paperback, since I think fiction writers and publishers need supporting and I prefer to read fiction on paper. Also because my local bookshop is Foyles. I download academic books, since academic publishing is a swindle on the public and the academics are not making a living from their textbooks on differential geometry. Best-selling pop-culture authors are also quite rich enough without needing me to trigger another 50p in royalties. I accept these are beliefs that fit my needs. Like I’m the only person who does that.
In the past there were things called Public Libraries, and there was one on your high street. It might not have the book you wanted on your shelves, but it could order that book from a library that did. The weekly visit to the library to get a couple of books to read was as fixed an occasion as the weekly shop or cleaning the bicycle chain. (You never cleaned your bicycle chain? What kind of person are you?) A lot of the books I read were from the public library, or from the Senate House Library which I could use as a graduate of the University of London.
It’s been a long time since I went into my local lending library, and it wasn’t very good back then. The academic books I want are postgraduate mathematics and philosophy textbooks and I have a feeling no-one would be able to get a copy of Jean-Pierre Serre’s Local Fields from a regular suburban lending library.
So the website I get my academic books from is like the local Lending Library, except of course authors don’t get royalties from it. But then they didn’t get a lot from Lending Libraries as I remember. Maybe a bit more than musicians do from Spotify, and certainly more than a £0.00 Kindle, but a writer who was more borrowed than bought back in the day needed to be frugal with the gas central heating.
And I have donated to Philip Tagg, author of Everyday Tonality. I’m going to write about that at some stage. If you want hardcore music theory, that’s your book. Because, you know, you’ve already read Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony. Right?
If you don’t have Calibre, you should definitely look into it.
About once a year I clear out books I realise I am never going to read again. Many of those are pop-culture best-sellers. Some are novels, and a few are academic books. So my limited bookshelf space doesn’t have a history of what I have read, but of what I have read that I think is worth keeping. The last clear-out was of books that made me think why did I buy that exactly?. I felt much better when I cleared those sources of regret off the shelves and away from my eyes. And if I’m prepared to do that to books, you can only imagine what I’m prepared to do with people. But I digress.
The bookshelf was the thing that spoke about you to yourself (I am he who has read all this), and to others (Jesus Christ, Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony?). But now part of me is hidden on my iPad or Calibre library. I don’t use Kindle as much, but when I do,I’m always surprised at how much I’ve read on it. Because it’s not there to remind me.
I buy novels in paperback, since I think fiction writers and publishers need supporting and I prefer to read fiction on paper. Also because my local bookshop is Foyles. I download academic books, since academic publishing is a swindle on the public and the academics are not making a living from their textbooks on differential geometry. Best-selling pop-culture authors are also quite rich enough without needing me to trigger another 50p in royalties. I accept these are beliefs that fit my needs. Like I’m the only person who does that.
In the past there were things called Public Libraries, and there was one on your high street. It might not have the book you wanted on your shelves, but it could order that book from a library that did. The weekly visit to the library to get a couple of books to read was as fixed an occasion as the weekly shop or cleaning the bicycle chain. (You never cleaned your bicycle chain? What kind of person are you?) A lot of the books I read were from the public library, or from the Senate House Library which I could use as a graduate of the University of London.
It’s been a long time since I went into my local lending library, and it wasn’t very good back then. The academic books I want are postgraduate mathematics and philosophy textbooks and I have a feeling no-one would be able to get a copy of Jean-Pierre Serre’s Local Fields from a regular suburban lending library.
So the website I get my academic books from is like the local Lending Library, except of course authors don’t get royalties from it. But then they didn’t get a lot from Lending Libraries as I remember. Maybe a bit more than musicians do from Spotify, and certainly more than a £0.00 Kindle, but a writer who was more borrowed than bought back in the day needed to be frugal with the gas central heating.
And I have donated to Philip Tagg, author of Everyday Tonality. I’m going to write about that at some stage. If you want hardcore music theory, that’s your book. Because, you know, you’ve already read Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony. Right?
If you don’t have Calibre, you should definitely look into it.
About once a year I clear out books I realise I am never going to read again. Many of those are pop-culture best-sellers. Some are novels, and a few are academic books. So my limited bookshelf space doesn’t have a history of what I have read, but of what I have read that I think is worth keeping. The last clear-out was of books that made me think why did I buy that exactly?. I felt much better when I cleared those sources of regret off the shelves and away from my eyes. And if I’m prepared to do that to books, you can only imagine what I’m prepared to do with people. But I digress.
The bookshelf was the thing that spoke about you to yourself (I am he who has read all this), and to others (Jesus Christ, Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony?). But now part of me is hidden on my iPad or Calibre library. I don’t use Kindle as much, but when I do,I’m always surprised at how much I’ve read on it. Because it’s not there to remind me.
Monday 16 March 2020
Cloud Drives, Backups and Time Machines
The things I over-think! How difficult is to store your digital files: photos, books, music, movies and documents?
In the old days we put books on shelves or in boxes; photographs in albums, or in boxes; records and CDs on shelves, or in boxes; and any documents we generated in files, or in boxes. How easy was that? Then computers came along and made everything simpler by making it more complicated. Everything was stored on the hard drive - passing over the days of floppy drives and diskettes - but what happened if the hard drive packed up? Hence backup which meant taking a copy of everything on another disk and storing that somewhere safe. Real Men did backups daily, weekly, and monthly. The daily and weekly ones were cycled, the monthly ones kept forever. On tape. Lots of people didn’t do backups, and every now and then they wrote to Jack Schofield at the Guardian about the disaster, and Uncle Jack scolded them lightly.
Backup is copies you make on a storage device and then leave alone unless disaster strikes, when you copy them back to wherever you copied them from. You never edit backup copies. Ever. You should keep at least two generations of backups.
Cloud drives in particular and synching services in general, are not backup. Do something dumb on one synched device, like delete everything, and all the other synched devices will lose everything as well. iCloud, One Drive, Google Drive and all the other services have this feature. To make up for it, some of them add a versioning, recovery or history feature that gets over this. When I tried using the versioning on Pages on my 4GB Mac Air, it choked so bad I had to turn it off.
A Cloud drive is what you use when you want to access, edit and save back your work-in-progress files from a number of different devices. Put your photos up in the iCloud and you can regale everyone with your holiday snaps on your iPhone, iPad, Macbook or even Windows device. Ditto music, though why you would when you can get it from a streaming service is another question. Unless it’s a recording of your band, or a track you’re working on. Same for videos.
Cloud drives offer you the assurance that even if your device gets lost, goes crazy or gets broken, you won’t lose your files, which will be there waiting for you to re-connect to them after you have bought a new device. But that’s not backup.
What to backup on? Storage is the physical medium on which you place the files. Internal hard drives, pen drives, external SSD’s, Network drives and NAS, cloud drives, tape, CD’s. You can also store files on a disk in some company’s cloud service, effectively renting a hard drive from them. You have to backup to a physically different device, which you should then keep somewhere else. (So if someone drops something on the computer, the backup is in another room.)
How to backup?
Both Apple and Microsoft offer a continuous backup service: Time Machine for Apple and File History for Windows 10. Setting these up requires an external drive that can be configured for Time Machine / File History: that’s not always a given. Note also that both those are complex pieces of software. If you take your Time Machine disk to someone else’s computer, good luck if that other computer is a Windows 7 device. Time Machine and File History are good insurance against something stupid happening to your files, but not against something stupid happening to your computer.
A good backup sits on a drive that any computer can read and copy from. Since every operating system can read Windows file system disks, put your backup on a NTFS drive, in other words, get an off-the-shelf external drive from Amazon, PC World or any other major retailer. I am not going to get involved in USB types at this point. Roughly, make sure the USB port on the drive looks like one of the USB ports on your computer. Or use a NAS, which plugs into the router so you connect over Wi-Fi.
How to get the files over? There are back-up programs available that have nice user interfaces, but there are also much simpler options. On Windows 10 (and any other version) look up the xcopy command. This is a thing of wonder. There seems to be an OS X version called rsync that does the same thing. Both these tools only copy new or updated files relative to the destination folder. So the first one is painful, but the following ones can be quite fast. At work I use a Powershell script to sync my local drive to a personal network drive at the end of each week, or whenever I’m taking the laptop to and from work.
What to backup? Your ‘data’ of course. You may want to backup the software you’ve downloaded (the files in your Download directory) so you can re-install it if need be: this may be sensible if the latest versions are not compatible with your machine or operating system (OS X users will understand).
So let’s take a work-in-progress document. It’s in my iCloud drive, and hence on my laptop, maybe another device, and on Apple’s servers. iCloud is a synching service, not a backup. So I need a backup in case I do something stupid on iCloud. The laptop drive is the first stop: I save from the iCloud drive to my Documents folder daily. I backup my Documents folder up to my NAS at least once a week. And I backup my NAS to an external drive every month, or straight after I add significant amounts of data to the NAS (by ripping a bunch of CDs). I have two external drives and rotate them.
A professional photographer, video-maker or musician may want to take archive copies of the original files before even thinking about importing to the editing software. In the future it will be those archives that scholars want, not the finished product, which will reflect the fashions of the moment.
Having reviewed all this, my shortcomings are not so bad. I’ve understood the correct role of cloud drives, and the limitation of the Time Machine / File History technology.
I need to backup my Mac Air Documents and Photos folders to the NAS more frequently than I do. I’ll do that with rsync. I need an external drive to backup my NAS, and I’ll do that with xcopy. I could do with tidying up the NAS and taking the plunge of doing a soft reset because I forgot its admin password (!).
(Later). I sorted out the NAS. The filesystem works fine, but the bit that runs diagnostic tests and sets up a Time Machine volume seems to have gone astray. Or it isn’t compatible with Catalina (I updated to Catalina after finding enough people who said it worked fine on their Early 2015 Air. It does.)
In the old days we put books on shelves or in boxes; photographs in albums, or in boxes; records and CDs on shelves, or in boxes; and any documents we generated in files, or in boxes. How easy was that? Then computers came along and made everything simpler by making it more complicated. Everything was stored on the hard drive - passing over the days of floppy drives and diskettes - but what happened if the hard drive packed up? Hence backup which meant taking a copy of everything on another disk and storing that somewhere safe. Real Men did backups daily, weekly, and monthly. The daily and weekly ones were cycled, the monthly ones kept forever. On tape. Lots of people didn’t do backups, and every now and then they wrote to Jack Schofield at the Guardian about the disaster, and Uncle Jack scolded them lightly.
Backup is copies you make on a storage device and then leave alone unless disaster strikes, when you copy them back to wherever you copied them from. You never edit backup copies. Ever. You should keep at least two generations of backups.
Cloud drives in particular and synching services in general, are not backup. Do something dumb on one synched device, like delete everything, and all the other synched devices will lose everything as well. iCloud, One Drive, Google Drive and all the other services have this feature. To make up for it, some of them add a versioning, recovery or history feature that gets over this. When I tried using the versioning on Pages on my 4GB Mac Air, it choked so bad I had to turn it off.
A Cloud drive is what you use when you want to access, edit and save back your work-in-progress files from a number of different devices. Put your photos up in the iCloud and you can regale everyone with your holiday snaps on your iPhone, iPad, Macbook or even Windows device. Ditto music, though why you would when you can get it from a streaming service is another question. Unless it’s a recording of your band, or a track you’re working on. Same for videos.
Cloud drives offer you the assurance that even if your device gets lost, goes crazy or gets broken, you won’t lose your files, which will be there waiting for you to re-connect to them after you have bought a new device. But that’s not backup.
What to backup on? Storage is the physical medium on which you place the files. Internal hard drives, pen drives, external SSD’s, Network drives and NAS, cloud drives, tape, CD’s. You can also store files on a disk in some company’s cloud service, effectively renting a hard drive from them. You have to backup to a physically different device, which you should then keep somewhere else. (So if someone drops something on the computer, the backup is in another room.)
How to backup?
Both Apple and Microsoft offer a continuous backup service: Time Machine for Apple and File History for Windows 10. Setting these up requires an external drive that can be configured for Time Machine / File History: that’s not always a given. Note also that both those are complex pieces of software. If you take your Time Machine disk to someone else’s computer, good luck if that other computer is a Windows 7 device. Time Machine and File History are good insurance against something stupid happening to your files, but not against something stupid happening to your computer.
A good backup sits on a drive that any computer can read and copy from. Since every operating system can read Windows file system disks, put your backup on a NTFS drive, in other words, get an off-the-shelf external drive from Amazon, PC World or any other major retailer. I am not going to get involved in USB types at this point. Roughly, make sure the USB port on the drive looks like one of the USB ports on your computer. Or use a NAS, which plugs into the router so you connect over Wi-Fi.
How to get the files over? There are back-up programs available that have nice user interfaces, but there are also much simpler options. On Windows 10 (and any other version) look up the xcopy command. This is a thing of wonder. There seems to be an OS X version called rsync that does the same thing. Both these tools only copy new or updated files relative to the destination folder. So the first one is painful, but the following ones can be quite fast. At work I use a Powershell script to sync my local drive to a personal network drive at the end of each week, or whenever I’m taking the laptop to and from work.
What to backup? Your ‘data’ of course. You may want to backup the software you’ve downloaded (the files in your Download directory) so you can re-install it if need be: this may be sensible if the latest versions are not compatible with your machine or operating system (OS X users will understand).
So let’s take a work-in-progress document. It’s in my iCloud drive, and hence on my laptop, maybe another device, and on Apple’s servers. iCloud is a synching service, not a backup. So I need a backup in case I do something stupid on iCloud. The laptop drive is the first stop: I save from the iCloud drive to my Documents folder daily. I backup my Documents folder up to my NAS at least once a week. And I backup my NAS to an external drive every month, or straight after I add significant amounts of data to the NAS (by ripping a bunch of CDs). I have two external drives and rotate them.
A professional photographer, video-maker or musician may want to take archive copies of the original files before even thinking about importing to the editing software. In the future it will be those archives that scholars want, not the finished product, which will reflect the fashions of the moment.
Having reviewed all this, my shortcomings are not so bad. I’ve understood the correct role of cloud drives, and the limitation of the Time Machine / File History technology.
I need to backup my Mac Air Documents and Photos folders to the NAS more frequently than I do. I’ll do that with rsync. I need an external drive to backup my NAS, and I’ll do that with xcopy. I could do with tidying up the NAS and taking the plunge of doing a soft reset because I forgot its admin password (!).
(Later). I sorted out the NAS. The filesystem works fine, but the bit that runs diagnostic tests and sets up a Time Machine volume seems to have gone astray. Or it isn’t compatible with Catalina (I updated to Catalina after finding enough people who said it worked fine on their Early 2015 Air. It does.)
Thursday 12 March 2020
Making a Pizza
I defy you to watch this all the way through and, at the end, not be whining like a hungry dog watching the humans eat. Next time, if there is one, I go to Rome, I am eating at his place.
Monday 9 March 2020
The Coronavirus (COVID-19 / Wu Flu) Hype
Every year there’s a new flu virus, and it kills a lot of people. Some years it’s mild, and some years it’s pretty darn vicious. 2020 is one of the years it’s pretty darn vicious. Cernovich makes the good point (hidden under a flurry of insults in all directions) that just because coronavirus is a flu, doesn’t mean we should ignore it, it means we should pay more attention to flu. There are reasons this doesn’t happen, none of which are edifying and all of which have solid cost-benefit figures, and is roughly the same reason the Brits don’t spend bajillions on snow ploughs and other winter equipment.
However, there’s something suspect about the hype. The last Big Flu was Bird Flu, and it was clear that Big Pharma was behind that. Big Pharma off-loaded millions of pounds worth of nearly-past-sell-by drugs on Health Services over the world. That’s a pretty clear motive. This time Big Pharma is very quiet, which means it doesn’t have any drugs to unload. Which is pretty much a first. Big Pharma claims to have drugs for everything, and a PR machine that shifts those drugs like hot dogs after a football match.
The Big Tell is that the victims are very rarely described. They are just “people”. Not one “We Lost Our Lovely Susan, 10, To Coronavirus” headline? Finding Susan, 10, thirty minutes after she dies is what Big Pharma PR firms do. There’s a muttering that the people who die have pre-existing medical conditions, but that’s it. If the majority were women, we would see headlines like “New Virus Targets Women”, but we’re not. Which tells you that most of the people who die from it are older men who are already in bad health and spending too much time in close conditions with others - like cruise liners and the Iranian Parliament.
Now look at who is reacting to it. Aside from the mainstream media, which stopped being a reliable guide to anything in 2016.
Panicky people are cancelling flights or not making reservations, which causes airlines to cancel entire flights in the future because the margins on most flights are tiny. The airlines are cancelling because profits, not because they know anything about viruses.
The University of London cancelled its graduation ceremony for the Class of 2019. Graduation ceremonies make losses. The James Bond movie delayed its release - because panicky people won’t go into packed cinema screens, so first-weekend takings will be down, and that ain’t a good look. Profits again, not viruses.
The markets are all over the place, as people sell on what they say is uncertainty and fear. The Coronavirus is benefitting short-sellers and people who want to get out of a position without other people asking why. Just say ‘Coronavirus’ and you can sell or buy anything and hide your real reasons.
Health services are using it as a funding pitch, but they use rainy days as a funding pitch. CEOs are using it as an excuse for their lousy trading results, but they use school holidays as an excuse for their lousy trading results. People who don’t want to do things are using it as an excuse not to do whatever it is they don’t want to do, and a virus sounds more plausible than global warming.
This is the never let a good crisis go to waste crowd.
Important things are still happening.
Commuter trains are still running. So are the metros. All full. Nobody is cancelling work. Odd how that never happens. (Except in the industrial powerhouses of northern China and Italy - those Southern Italians have been waiting forever to get back at the northerners.) All those International Women’s Day celebrations went ahead. St Patrick’s Day is going ahead, because are you going to tell the Irish they can’t? (Edit 10/3: OK, the Irish Government changed their mind. This does not mean it knows more than you do about how Covid-19 spreads and who is susceptible. It means they need to be seen to be doing something.)
I have no idea where the panic buyers are, but they don’t live near me. My supermarkets are full of Brits determined to prove that a panic is for taking calmly should it ever actually happen. (Edit 10/3: some of my colleagues at work have mentioned missing toilet paper and pasta. However, if the toilet paper thing doesn't turn out to be a guerrilla PR stunt, somebody's lying.)
There’s a real flu virus out there. It’s nasty. Some people in China got it, and so did some people on cruise liners, and the press covered that, because why wouldn’t you? If nobody’s interested, the media drops the story. But then the never-let-a-good-crisis-go-to-waste crowd got going and the media kept on running the story. It’s a good story behind which to hide all sorts of things. There’s a lot of things to hide.
Ten million people are not going to die of it. And, before anyone else calls it one, a ‘pandemic’ is not one hundred people in the whole of California. A ‘pandemic’ is when your neighbour has it, and the corner shop is closed, and half the people at work are off, and the hospitals are full and the nurses are dying of it. We haven’t had one of those for a long time.
However, there’s something suspect about the hype. The last Big Flu was Bird Flu, and it was clear that Big Pharma was behind that. Big Pharma off-loaded millions of pounds worth of nearly-past-sell-by drugs on Health Services over the world. That’s a pretty clear motive. This time Big Pharma is very quiet, which means it doesn’t have any drugs to unload. Which is pretty much a first. Big Pharma claims to have drugs for everything, and a PR machine that shifts those drugs like hot dogs after a football match.
The Big Tell is that the victims are very rarely described. They are just “people”. Not one “We Lost Our Lovely Susan, 10, To Coronavirus” headline? Finding Susan, 10, thirty minutes after she dies is what Big Pharma PR firms do. There’s a muttering that the people who die have pre-existing medical conditions, but that’s it. If the majority were women, we would see headlines like “New Virus Targets Women”, but we’re not. Which tells you that most of the people who die from it are older men who are already in bad health and spending too much time in close conditions with others - like cruise liners and the Iranian Parliament.
Now look at who is reacting to it. Aside from the mainstream media, which stopped being a reliable guide to anything in 2016.
Panicky people are cancelling flights or not making reservations, which causes airlines to cancel entire flights in the future because the margins on most flights are tiny. The airlines are cancelling because profits, not because they know anything about viruses.
The University of London cancelled its graduation ceremony for the Class of 2019. Graduation ceremonies make losses. The James Bond movie delayed its release - because panicky people won’t go into packed cinema screens, so first-weekend takings will be down, and that ain’t a good look. Profits again, not viruses.
The markets are all over the place, as people sell on what they say is uncertainty and fear. The Coronavirus is benefitting short-sellers and people who want to get out of a position without other people asking why. Just say ‘Coronavirus’ and you can sell or buy anything and hide your real reasons.
Health services are using it as a funding pitch, but they use rainy days as a funding pitch. CEOs are using it as an excuse for their lousy trading results, but they use school holidays as an excuse for their lousy trading results. People who don’t want to do things are using it as an excuse not to do whatever it is they don’t want to do, and a virus sounds more plausible than global warming.
This is the never let a good crisis go to waste crowd.
Important things are still happening.
Commuter trains are still running. So are the metros. All full. Nobody is cancelling work. Odd how that never happens. (Except in the industrial powerhouses of northern China and Italy - those Southern Italians have been waiting forever to get back at the northerners.) All those International Women’s Day celebrations went ahead. St Patrick’s Day is going ahead, because are you going to tell the Irish they can’t? (Edit 10/3: OK, the Irish Government changed their mind. This does not mean it knows more than you do about how Covid-19 spreads and who is susceptible. It means they need to be seen to be doing something.)
I have no idea where the panic buyers are, but they don’t live near me. My supermarkets are full of Brits determined to prove that a panic is for taking calmly should it ever actually happen. (Edit 10/3: some of my colleagues at work have mentioned missing toilet paper and pasta. However, if the toilet paper thing doesn't turn out to be a guerrilla PR stunt, somebody's lying.)
There’s a real flu virus out there. It’s nasty. Some people in China got it, and so did some people on cruise liners, and the press covered that, because why wouldn’t you? If nobody’s interested, the media drops the story. But then the never-let-a-good-crisis-go-to-waste crowd got going and the media kept on running the story. It’s a good story behind which to hide all sorts of things. There’s a lot of things to hide.
Ten million people are not going to die of it. And, before anyone else calls it one, a ‘pandemic’ is not one hundred people in the whole of California. A ‘pandemic’ is when your neighbour has it, and the corner shop is closed, and half the people at work are off, and the hospitals are full and the nurses are dying of it. We haven’t had one of those for a long time.
Thursday 5 March 2020
Sonos in the House
Finally I splashed out on some Sonos kit. I’ve had a Beam Soundbar for the TV a while now. I bought two SL1’s, because I did not want a bunch of offshore contract workers Alexa listening to my conversations. One SL1 went into my bedroom, to replace the Bose Colour II. The other went into the kitchen, to replace the little Roberts radio. And I got a Connect.
A lot of people complain about the cost of the Connect. If you have a CD-player (Marantz CD6005), radio tuner, turntable, tape deck or cassettes, which you play through a proper grown-up hi-fi amplifier (Maraztz PM 6003) through proper adult loudspeakers (B&W 686’s), or you have a headphone amp (Creek OBH-11) to power proper headphones (Sennhieser HD650), then the hi-fi is the centre of your listening life. What I really wanted to do is have what I’m playing on the CD also be played in the kitchen and maybe somewhere else, and for that, the Connect is compulsory.
The Connect also links my proper grown-up hi-fi to streaming music, which I did up to a couple of weeks ago by the very satisfactory iPod Touch and the Dragonfly + Jitterbug combination. Streaming the iPod Touch through the Connect blows the Dragonfly away. Nobody talks about how good the DAC on the Connect is.
Streaming through the Sonos app, all the speakers, even attached to the hi-fi, are in sync. Using Line-In, there is a small lag, about 200ms or so, between hi-fi speakers and the rest of the Sonos speakers. It’s only audible if you are close to both the hi-fi and a Sonos speaker.
I don’t know who developed the Sonos app, but they are among the very few proper developers designing apps and cutting code. It walked me through the set-up of each piece of equipment and detected everything. I can group rooms together, and remove rooms from a group, with a couple of taps at the screen. I can choose my Spotify, streaming radio, and Line-in (aka, the CD player). At some point I will add Bandcamp and Soundcloud to the Services. I really can play different music in each room at the same time.
Because I’m a late adopter, it took a while to discover how to add the files on my NAS to the app (Settings -> System -> Music Library -> Music Library Setup -> +Add Shared Music Folder and enter the "\\192.168.n.n\(root directory of your music files)”. Press Done and the app will tell you it will now scan that directory.) You won’t see anything happening, which confused me, until I went to Browse and found a big orange square with Music Library next to it, and the assurance it was scanning when I touched the icon. About twenty minutes later, all my digital music files were there. Why I’d do that when Spotify has (almost) everything, I’m not sure: I rip AAC, not WAV. Anyway, there it all is.
And if you really must stream from your Macbook, then you’ll need SonoAir I’ve installed it and tried it, and I’m sure it will be useful when I need it, but it’s not going to be a thing.
Is it worth it? Absolutely. Will I be adding any more? Such as a pair to complement the Beam? Maybe.
A lot of people complain about the cost of the Connect. If you have a CD-player (Marantz CD6005), radio tuner, turntable, tape deck or cassettes, which you play through a proper grown-up hi-fi amplifier (Maraztz PM 6003) through proper adult loudspeakers (B&W 686’s), or you have a headphone amp (Creek OBH-11) to power proper headphones (Sennhieser HD650), then the hi-fi is the centre of your listening life. What I really wanted to do is have what I’m playing on the CD also be played in the kitchen and maybe somewhere else, and for that, the Connect is compulsory.
The Connect also links my proper grown-up hi-fi to streaming music, which I did up to a couple of weeks ago by the very satisfactory iPod Touch and the Dragonfly + Jitterbug combination. Streaming the iPod Touch through the Connect blows the Dragonfly away. Nobody talks about how good the DAC on the Connect is.
Streaming through the Sonos app, all the speakers, even attached to the hi-fi, are in sync. Using Line-In, there is a small lag, about 200ms or so, between hi-fi speakers and the rest of the Sonos speakers. It’s only audible if you are close to both the hi-fi and a Sonos speaker.
I don’t know who developed the Sonos app, but they are among the very few proper developers designing apps and cutting code. It walked me through the set-up of each piece of equipment and detected everything. I can group rooms together, and remove rooms from a group, with a couple of taps at the screen. I can choose my Spotify, streaming radio, and Line-in (aka, the CD player). At some point I will add Bandcamp and Soundcloud to the Services. I really can play different music in each room at the same time.
Because I’m a late adopter, it took a while to discover how to add the files on my NAS to the app (Settings -> System -> Music Library -> Music Library Setup -> +Add Shared Music Folder and enter the "\\192.168.n.n\(root directory of your music files)”. Press Done and the app will tell you it will now scan that directory.) You won’t see anything happening, which confused me, until I went to Browse and found a big orange square with Music Library next to it, and the assurance it was scanning when I touched the icon. About twenty minutes later, all my digital music files were there. Why I’d do that when Spotify has (almost) everything, I’m not sure: I rip AAC, not WAV. Anyway, there it all is.
And if you really must stream from your Macbook, then you’ll need SonoAir I’ve installed it and tried it, and I’m sure it will be useful when I need it, but it’s not going to be a thing.
Is it worth it? Absolutely. Will I be adding any more? Such as a pair to complement the Beam? Maybe.
Monday 2 March 2020
Catch-Up
I’ve missed a lot of posts this month. It’s a darn good thing I don’t do this for a living.
One reason is that I’ve been working on a particular project, and that has taken a lot of the little spare time I have. (Said every blogger ever at least once.) No, I’m not telling you what it is.
Another is that my mother has been in and out of hospital, and that’s more time- and attention-consuming than one might think. It’s family stuff and therefore complicated and not for discussion as it happens.
I’ve been fighting off a cold as well for about a week, probably as a result of standing around too many cold, damp South West Trains stations so I can visit my mother in hospital. And go to work.It got the better of me this weekend.
I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything in the news. Too many You Tubers do that and listening to them after a while starts to feel echo-chamber-y. Reading the Guardian, which I did for a while to see what ‘They’ were thinking, is now painful. Even browsing the Financial Times makes me wince. Seems the Fifth Columnists are still alive, virtue-signalling and trying to spread despair. Understand that the majority of news articles are about raising money for some charity, cause or government agency or department, and you will see that the print media is not about news. News is something somebody it’s about doesn’t want you to read: everyone wants you to read about how they need more money or the sky will fall in.
I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything that’s going on in my life, or that I’ve been reading. I am leading the classic ‘figure-eight life’ as somebody described it, and once you’ve been round the figure-eight once, that’s all you’re going to see.
Yep, I went in and back-filled the missing posts on Blogger.
One reason is that I’ve been working on a particular project, and that has taken a lot of the little spare time I have. (Said every blogger ever at least once.) No, I’m not telling you what it is.
Another is that my mother has been in and out of hospital, and that’s more time- and attention-consuming than one might think. It’s family stuff and therefore complicated and not for discussion as it happens.
I’ve been fighting off a cold as well for about a week, probably as a result of standing around too many cold, damp South West Trains stations so I can visit my mother in hospital. And go to work.It got the better of me this weekend.
I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything in the news. Too many You Tubers do that and listening to them after a while starts to feel echo-chamber-y. Reading the Guardian, which I did for a while to see what ‘They’ were thinking, is now painful. Even browsing the Financial Times makes me wince. Seems the Fifth Columnists are still alive, virtue-signalling and trying to spread despair. Understand that the majority of news articles are about raising money for some charity, cause or government agency or department, and you will see that the print media is not about news. News is something somebody it’s about doesn’t want you to read: everyone wants you to read about how they need more money or the sky will fall in.
I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything that’s going on in my life, or that I’ve been reading. I am leading the classic ‘figure-eight life’ as somebody described it, and once you’ve been round the figure-eight once, that’s all you’re going to see.
Yep, I went in and back-filled the missing posts on Blogger.
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