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I rode over to the library with Rowan on Saturday to return some books. Just before we were finishing up, the heavens opened up and a torrent of water started to fall. In any other situation, I probably would have waited it out but I needed to get home so that I could pick John up from his programming class. Not feeling there was any alternative, I left Rowan at the entrance, ran out into the downpour, grabbed the bicycle and brought it back to collect Rowan. He got in the (fortunately) covered child-seat and, after making sure he was secure, I took off into the rain. The ride from the library to our house is about 5 minutes and I think the only time I’ve been as wet is when they made us practise swimming fully clothed at primary school.
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On Sunday, I got a haircut and then took Rowan over to the Edion in Yokohama I mentioned back in June. When we went last time, we found their toy department had Lego catalogues and while I’m sure they can’t be the only retailer who has copies, I have to admit that I’ve yet to find them anywhere else. The one we got in June was for the January to June ‘releases’ (I’m not sure of the jargon) and I figured that, given it’s almost the end of August, they should have the July to December catalogue. Sure enough, they did and Rowan has been asking me repeatedly which combination of sets he can get for Christmas.
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I bought SuperDuper! 4 for some reason and then got a bit stuck trying to work out how I was meant to replicate the way I do my back-ups with SuperDuper! 3. There, I back up to a sparse disk image (Wikipedia) that sits on my external hard disk. I don’t know if this is an especially good idea but it means that I can use my external disk as an external disk for storage. Surprisingly, SuperDuper! 4 didn’t offer any apparent mode to ‘import’ my existing workflow. I tried to replicate it myself but couldn’t work out for the life of me how to set the disk image as a destination. Then I remembered what John Siracusa had said in a recent episode of Accidental Tech Podcast about trying to drag and drop in situations where you want to indicate something to the application and—sure enough—it worked. I dragged the disk image onto the app and it made it a destination. (The disk image itself failed because the disk images that SuperDuper! 3 use aren’t compatible with SuperDuper! 4 apparently but once I created a new disk image, I was able to get it all sorted.)
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Emma asked me if I posted to Instagram or YouTube and when I told her that I post things to my own website, she asked me if she could create her own website. I probably should have done more to cultivate this desire but I instead found myself warning that it was quite difficult to make your own website (at least unless you want to host it at Squarespace). I did find an app called Sitely that I thought looked interesting. I loaded it onto her iPad and and told her that she can try to create things with it but that I could only offer limited help. We’ll see how that goes.
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Casey Muratori has another keynote from the Better Software Conference in the vein of last year’s ‘The Big Oops’. This one is called ‘The Root of the Root of All Evil’ and if the idea of a two-hour lecture on the history of optimising computer programs gets your heart racing, he delivers the goods once again.
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Speaking of longer pieces of media, I can’t believe I’ve yet to recommend the Stone Roses’ practically-10-minute 1989 banger, ‘Fools Gold’ (Apple Music). That oversight is corrected.
