Mac OS Sierra Not Cleanly Unmounting USB Drives

They always warn you about upgrading to the first release. “Let them fix the bugs in the .1 before you upgrade,” they say.

I never listen.

In Sierra, I’ve run into an interesting problem where the first time I mount my Time Machine USB backup drive post-launch, it mounts and works just fine. I can then tell the OS to eject the disk, which it seems to. Except, in Disk Utility, it still thinks it’s there. And now this phantom disk prevents it from ever being mounted again, until I reboot.

I’ve tried command line mojo (diskutil and hdiutil), and both will say they’ve unmounted the drive, but it still shows up. Eventually, diskutil stops responding.

Reading online, there’s lots of folks reporting similar issues, but no one seems to have found a particularly good solution, other than “reboot.”

We’ll see if it gets fixed up in the .1 release. Until then, off to reboot.

Yeah, That's About Right

Sometimes you feel like the forgotten man ...

30 Days of Running

Last year, I got reinvested in running. I’ve always been an ok runner, but never particularly great. I’d go out and run 2–3 miles at a decent pace, consider it a good workout, and be done. Then it’d get cold out, or rainy, and I’d go a few weeks (or months) without really running, and I’d lose a lot of my progress.

But, last year, as I mentioned, I got reinvested. I asked for cold weather running clothes, I bought new running shoes, and really started working with the Runkeeper app on my phone. I was trying to run at least 4–5 days a week, and then working up to a decent 4–5 mile run on the weekends. I felt pretty good about things, but I wasn’t really getting in better shape or improving my endurance or times.

Then I got sick. I traveled abroad, came back, traveled some more, and then traveled some more. I was sick for almost two months. After a couple doctor’s visits, I had finally kicked the lingering cold. It was time to get back out running.

I could barely run a mile; a slow mile.

I assumed something was wrong with me, so I went back to the doctor and had them check me out. They didn’t find anything.

Over the course of a couple of months, I’d regressed back to basically square one.

I remembered reading about Matt Cutt’s 30 day challenges where you do something every day for 30 days. Could I run every day for 30 days? A friend of mine had gone running every day for years, so I knew it was possible.

I started out slow—moderately paced 1–2 miles runs. I built up to faster paced runs. Then I built up to 3–4 miles. And that’s where I left it, because that felt comfortable.

My wife (who’s run multiple marathons) put it all in perspective one day: “Why do you stop at 4 miles? Why don’t you stop when you’re done? Why don’t you finish?”

It sounds stupid, but it really was a perspective shift for me. The next day, I did 6 miles. I took my 4 mile route and just kept going until my legs hurt.

I started aiming for longer runs on weekends. I signed up for a half marathon.

Towards the end of my 30 days, I aimed for a 10 mile run. It sucked, but I finished it. Since I’d been running every day, my pace for longer runs was close to my pace for shorter runs. For the first time ever, I was able to keep pace with my wife on a long run.

Why am I sharing this? Honestly, it’s to keep myself motivated to keep running. And, if anyone comes across it, maybe they won’t feel so daunted about getting started running.

There were a handful days I didn’t run more than .25 miles. Those were days when I didn’t run in the morning, got home, and just needed to get out to keep the streak going. I threw on my shoes and ran around the block. I think I averaged about 2.5 miles/day over the month.

The key: just get going. Don’t push yourself too hard[1]. Just try to run a little one week, then run a little more the next week. Mix up city running with country running. Do whatever you need to just check off that day.

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1. Pretty much on day 31 (or 32), I had to stop running because my knees and feet hurt. So, after 30 days, I’m moving to trying to workout every day, but maybe not put the pounding on my body that running every day will. I’ll mix in light jogging and some other physical workouts.  ↩

Changes to the SSH keys and Keychain in macOS Sierra →

If you were used to storing your ssh keys in your Keychain, you may have noticed that your ssh agent forwarding wasn’t working when you updated to macOS Sierra.

According to jirsbek on GitHub:

ssh-add -K in macOS Sierra no longer saves SSH keys in OS’s keychain. As Apple Developer stated: “That’s expected. We re-aligned our behavior with the mainstream OpenSSH in this area.”

I’m actually ok with the change in behavior. To resolve it, call ssh-add -A to add your identities into your ssh-agent. I’m doing that as part of my .bashrc (though I haven’t rebooted yet, I assume it’ll work).

(Via jirsbek on GitHub.)

The 50 Best Indie Rock Albums of the Pacific Northwest | Pitchfork →

Sean Nelson, talking about Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love:

“The shadow Nevermind of post-boom NW indie rock was unquestionably Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, which came out September 13, 1994—not so very long after a certain tragic event—and soon became the North Star to a great many bands that came along after. The songs were exuberant and melodic, but they were also, somehow, intensely private. Even the artwork—a white and gray cloud floating over a muted palette of cream and yellow—was a masterpiece of understatement. You might not even see it the first time, but when you caught it at just the right moment, just the right angle, you could recognize the solitary statement that you had been let in on, and you treasured it all the more.”

I discovered this album in college, my gateway the 1998 B-sides album Naked Baby Photos by Ben Folds Five, which had a cover of "Twin Falls, leading me to buy a copy of TNWWL at the Record Exchange in Blacksburg.

And then I was that guy coming back and putting Built to Spill songs on mixtapes (and CDs, because I was ahead of the times) for everyone.

Sean Nelson also, humbly, left at least one album by his own band off his list.

(Via Pitchfork.)

Two Recent Articles Worth Reading

Two articles I’ve come across recently that are worth reading:

I Spent 5 Years With Some Of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You. (Mother Jones)

But something else seemed at play. Many blue-collar white men now face the same grim economic fate long endured by blacks. With jobs lost to automation or offshored to China, they have less security, lower wages, reduced benefits, more erratic work, and fewer jobs with full-time hours than before. Having been recruited to cheer on the contraction of government benefits and services—a trend that is particularly pronounced in Louisiana—many are unable to make ends meet without them.

This is one of those counter intuitive issues that neither political party seems ready to solve. How do you convince workers, whose jobs are evaporating due to technology (whether that’s technology replacing a worker, or technology lowering the barriers for others to do that job less expensively), to rely on the government for job training and benefits while transitioning into a new career?

Neither party wants to solve that (and certainly not during an election cycle).

How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media. (NY Mag)

Her first assignment was to go down to the newsstand and fetch him the latest issue of Maxim. When she returned with the magazine, Ailes asked her to stay with him in his office. He flipped through the pages. The woman told the Washington Post that Ailes said, “You look like the women in here. You have great legs. If you sleep with me, you could be a model or a newscaster.” She cut short her internship. (Laterza did not respond to a request for comment.)

This was not even close to the worst offense. Jesus.

Still Think It's a Level Playing Field? →

The Washington Post’s article on the creation of the North Carolina bill intended to disenfranchise minority voters is eye opening for how brazen the attempt was.[1]

“Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?” he said, explaining that Republicans, like any political party, want to protect their majority. While GOP lawmakers might have passed the law to suppress some voters, Wrenn said, that does not mean it was racist.

“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”

Wow.

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1. The “rationale” for this law? Voting fraud. Which happens at incredibly low rates, except when done systemically, i.e. through electronic means. None of which would be impacted by this law. There are moments I can see both sides of arguments, even if I don’t agree with them. This is not one of those times. This is detestable.  ↩

The Olympics and Blaming Millenials

(Note: I’m not sure why these two articles bugged me so much. But they did.)

There was a somewhat poorly written (or, at least, poorly titled) article on Bloomberg (shocker) about the down ratings for the Olympics on NBC. In typical Bloomberg fashion, it’s a clickbait title (who can resist blaming millenials), as the article itself points out that it’s the 18–49 demographic that saw ratings down (with no breakdown inside that demo to determine where the real drop was).

And in the 18-to–49-year-old age group coveted by advertisers, it’s been even worse. That audience has been 25 percent smaller, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

In response, a millenial (presumably) attempted to defend his peers and lash out at NBC (though, really, it was more about the cable industry) and the inability for the cable/broadcast industry to meet the needs of cord cutters.

The issue I have with the article isn’t so much the argument. I agree that the cable and TV industries are going to have to change the way they think about the broadcast model. And, while it may not be changing as fast as we’d want, it’s changing incredibly fast!

Think about that ten years ago, being a cord cutter meant using an antenna, borrowing DVDs from the library, and maybe downloading a show from iTunes.

Today, you could conceivably use Hulu, Netflix, HBO, Sling TV, and iTunes, and probably cover everything except live sports. And ESPN may be going over the top in the next year. That’s progress.

The article, however, takes almost 1800 words to complain about how difficult it was to watch the Olympics online without a cable subscription and then complains about too many advertisements and the lowest common denominator announcing during the opening ceremonies, as if these are new things. And, while cord cutters are a growing audience, it’s still something like 80% of households who have cable. Cord cutters alone didn’t cause the audience to drop.

No, it’s not until the last segment of the article, which mostly hits on what I believe to be part of the real reason for the ratings being down:

It opened with Simone Biles and Co., but then, despite being filmed earlier in the day, inexplicably goes from the earlier rounds of Gymnastics to Swimming. Hours pass before we finally get to see the resolution to those Gymnastics rounds

The ratings were down because NBC couldn’t figure out how to show events in real time to both the East and West Coasts. With clips showing up online, on ESPN, on Twitter, the audience&emdash;millenials or not&emdash;couldn’t be bothered to stay up until 11:30pm ET to watch the gymnastics finals that had already happened that day. Or worse, for the half of the country on the West Coast, that had happened many hours before.

NBC’s real crime is not figuring out how to get more of the core live events in front of the audience when it was live. Live sports are the only thing left that really can keep audiences from cutting the cord, and NBC (while well intentioned with their wall-to-wall online coverage) forgot that.

In the end, Bloomberg incorrectly blamed millenials, and, in turn, millenials (or this millenial responded in the stereotypically myopic millenial way.

Apple TV on the Eve of tvOS 10

It’s been almost a year since I got the new Apple TV. We’ve been using it a ton lately, since network TV is in mostly reruns, and it’s a good opportunity to catch up on some shows and movies. When I got the Apple TV back in November, I mentioned three things that I thought would make a huge difference: an Amazon Prime app, a Comcast X1 app, and support for the iCloud Keychain. Well, none of those things have come true. But the last is almost coming true in tvOS 10.

iCloud Keychain support would make entering all the TV provider passwords easy. In tvOS 10, you’ll only need to enter the provider password once, and it’ll activate all of the TV apps you have access to. That’ll be surprisingly helpful and will reduce the number of times a password needs to be entered (or you hit one of those stupid activation screens) considerably.

Almost a year in, apps are starting to take advantage of the capabilities of tvOS. I plan to write about some of the apps that I’ve found really nice (and some that aren’t great) in the near future. If you want a preview, check out Fox Sports Go. It’s multiscreen live feature is pretty fantastic, and a perfect use of the Apple TV.

Improvements to Siri and the Apple remote have made the Apple TV much nicer to use since the launch. I find myself using Siri more frequently now, since it has a pretty high success rate of finding the show that I’m looking for, and dumping me one click from opening it. That’s useful, given that some of the interfaces (I’m looking at you, HBO Go) are pretty horrific for navigating around.

We use the Apple TV pretty regularly at this point, and I find new useful apps every week (Last weekend I discovered the awesomeness of the ABC app, if you can believe it. Schoolhouse Rock and Sports Night.). If it had Prime and Xfinity X1 support (which, in both cases, isn’t crazy, since I’m paying for subscriptions for both), we’d probably have the Apple TV on the first input of the TV.

Evernote to Apple Notes

I’ve been an Evernote user for about 8 years now. The earliest note I have in Evernote is from May of 2008. I’m not an uber-power user, but I’ve used Evernote for a lot of things over the years and have about 1400 notes in Evernote. It has been a big part of my move to go paperless.

I store manuals for devices and equipment in the house in a notebook, recipes, articles, receipts. However, over the years, the app got bigger and bulkier and my usage got more refined. There are loads of stories about where Evernote went wrong. In their defense, they’ve been trying to refine the product over the past year.

My issues are reasonably simple: the app got too complicated for a note taking/archiving.

With the convenience of Apple Notes (it’s syncs on all my devices, is reasonably lightweight), I’ve been toying with the idea of dumping Evernote (and saving myself a little money) and moving my notes into Apple Notes. I think, by and large, it does an ok job of replacing Evernote.

Except it’s missing the Web Clipper.

There’s a Web Clipper for Apple Notes for iOS via Workflow (warning: I haven’t tried it yet).

But there’s not one for the Mac that I’ve found yet.

While I search for one (anyone found a solution?), I’m going to slowly test moving different notebooks over to Apple Notes and see if I can simplify my paperless workflows and make life a bit more convenient.

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