mdlbear: (technonerdmonster)

I've been using the same software for doing my taxes for somewhere around 30 years. It was called TaxCut back then; the company that made it was bought by H&R Block in 1993, though they didn't rename the software until 2008. For much, if not all, of that time I've been doing it on a Mac of some sort.

Last year I looked at the system requirements and discovered that it would no longer run on my ageing Mac Mini. It also wouldn't run on Windows 7. It needed either NacOS High Sierra or Windows 8.1. So I used their web version, which I remember as rather slow, and enough different from the offline version of previous years to be annoying.

So for this year (which is to say tax year 2021), my options would appear to be:

  1. Use the web version again. Ugh, but at least it would import 2020 without trouble. Maybe. It didn't let me upload a 2019 data file; I had to feed it a PDF and do a lot of fixing up.
  2. Run it on the laptop that has Win 8.1, or put the Win 10 disk that came with (new) Sable back in and use that. Ugh.
  3. Buy a newer Mac Mini. I could get a minimal one for about $100-150, or a more recent one (running Mojave) for around $200-250. (Those are eBay prices, of course.)

(Note that cost of the software is the same for all three options.)

I'm really leaning toward #3. But really that would just be an excuse to buy another computer, and would leave me with two Mac Minis that I'd hardly ever use. More likely I'll dither about it until the end of March and then break down and go use the web version again.

Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
Donation buttons in profile.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

This marks the first week for which, at N's suggestion, Colleen and I prepared a weekly menu in advance. It came out fairly well -- you can see it at the end of the notes. There were a couple of substitutions, but on the whole it was a success. We did the same this week.

I got a fair amount done. Unfortunately, very little of it was my taxes; that's the top project for this week. I did, however, get the Mac set up and the program I still think of as TaxCut (currently called "H&R Block at Home" or something like that) updated. The Mac, Whitewood, is set up on my desk, with (ThinkPad) Raven next to it on a tray table. There's a little story about that...

You see, sometime Friday morning I managed to spill some coffee onto my little ThinkPad, Cygnus. I shut it down and left it to dry out. An hour or so later, it booted, but some of the keys on the lower right-hand corner were flaky, and I couldn't get it to accept my hard drive password. That's when I set up Whitewood and Raven. Fortunately I had pushed recently, so Raven was able to sync right up and be productive.

Then, since I had a Linux laptop and a Mac mini with a nice large monitor, the obvious next step was to install x2vnc and share the Mac's keyboard (a ThinkPad keyboard, of course -- I'd had it at work), trackball, and mouse. I put those all on a KVM switch (which I don't use for monitors, only for USB, because switching a VGA monitor confuses my computers). Win. It took altogether too much time to figure out that the reason x2vnc didn't seem to be connecting was that Apple's implementation puts up a lock screen when you first connect. :P

x2vnc is pretty cool -- it lets you share a keyboard and mouse between two computers, using VNC's screen-sharing in the input direction, but not actually viewing the screen. Instead, you just move the cursor onto the other machine's screen, across whichever edge you specify.

The other tech-related failure Friday was that my attempt to replace the charging port on Colleen's old tablet was unsuccessful. Quite possibly the flat cable isn't seated correctly. It was a bit of a long shot, though I would have liked to be able to at least do a factory reset.

I spent quite a lot of time Friday looking up ways of unlocking a password-protected hard drive when one doesn't have a working computer to enter the password into. Apparently Lenovo changes their password hashing algorithm every so often, so you have to get a ThinkPad that was made close enough to the time your dead one was. Ouch! I didn't really care too much about the data, since it was all backed up, but that was a comparatively new SSD and I wanted to at least make it usable even if that included wiping it.

Around 9:30 Friday evening I turned Cygnus on again and it booted. Not wanting to push my luck I turned it off again almost immediately, but not before I'd removed the password on the hard drive.

It turns out that password-locking a drive is a massively bad idea. Among other things it means that you can't use it in an external enclosure, and might not even be able to use it in another computer. It's better to use your OS's "whole-disk" encryption, because that actually encrypts everything but the boot partition, and it does so in a standardized way so that you can use it anywhere as long as you have the password. You can use a variant on the same encryption technique to encrypt a single home directory, or even a single subdirectory.

Also Sunday, I discovered when I went to post last week's summary that my client, ljupdate.el, doesn't work any more because Dreamwidth has gone to SSL everywhere. I made several attempts to fix it, but so far no joy. I'll probably have to cut-and-paste again. After I get my taxes in, the first thing I want to do is write a new -- and more general -- posting client and integrate it with my build system (see MakeStuff).

This Saturday, though, N went to the Seattle Home Show and found a company that was having a 2-for-1 deal on some pretty awesome scooters. They're not exactly travel scooters -- they fold a little but don't come apart, and they're pretty heavy, but they're designed to be roadworthy. 18mph with a 25-mile range. We'll probably have to replace the seat on one for Colleen to be comfortable, but... She can definitely ride to Freeland and back in one.

In all, a rather frustrating week, but it could have been a lot worse.

Notes & links, as usual )

mdlbear: (audacity)

Anyone out there know how to get Audacity's VST bridge working on a Mac? [livejournal.com profile] catsittingstill's inquiring mind needs to know. Alternatively, is there a Mac-native reverb plug-in that Audacity can use?

mdlbear: (hacker glider)

Yet another reason, if any were needed, not to like Macs. I pulled out my shiny new Lenovo thinkpad keyboard, which works like a dream. Nice touch, no errors. Trackpoint far enough down so that I don't touch it accidently. Three buttons. I've typed this entire paragraph with no errors due to missed or doubled keys. Perfect.

...but there doesn't seem to be an Apple key. Blerg. At least, if I use it for text, I won't go hitting Apple-W when I want to delete a word and end up deleting the window I was typing into.

There's a Thinkpad in my future, I suspect.

mdlbear: "Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness" - Terry Pratchett (flamethrower)

Stupid goddamn Mac filesystem is secretly case insensitive. If you have a directory called Tracks and a file called tracks, rsync complains about not being able to delete the directory when it goes to transfer the file. THIS IS JUST FSCKING WRONG!

The Mac may have Unix in its distant ancestry, but it is not Unix. When I get back from this trip I'm ordering a real computer.

Given a strong desire to be able to collaborate cross-platform, I'm probably going to have to make an ugly hack to work around this stupidity. That doesn't mean I have to like it, and it doesn't mean I'm not going to get bitten in the arse by it somewhere else.

In other news, the ribbons we had overnighted seem to have gone astray; it was apparently delivered to a nonexistant address in another city. Their tracking site doesn't say what address it was actually addressed to, so it's impossible to tell why it went astray. Remind me never to have things shipped by FedEx.

mdlbear: (lemming)
20% Apple addicted )

Would have been less if I hadn't counted the laptop I have from work.

mdlbear: (hacker glider)
flyback - Google Code
Apple's Time Machine is a great feature in their OS, and Linux has almost all of the required technology already built in to recreate it. This is a simple GUI to make it easy to use.
(from this post on slashdot.)

I just upgraded my work laptop to Leopard yesterday, and fired up Time Machine because, well, automatic incremental backups are a Good Thing. I was intrigued to find, though, that it's not really doing anything special: behind that pretty interface is a directory tree with pathnames like nodename/yyyy-mm-dd-hhmmss. Whee! It keeps hourly backups for 24 hours, daily backups for a month, and weekly backups until you run out of space on your backup disk, at which point it presumably throws up its hands and begs for more storage.

Apart from the naming conventions and intervals, that's pretty close to what I've been doing with rsync for the last couple of years on Linux. What took them so long?

(eta: Other, similar packages for Win$ and Linux include BackupPC and Dirvish. What are you using?)
mdlbear: (kill bill)
Vista: Worthy, Largely Unexciting - WSJ.com (By WALTER S. MOSSBERG)
After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced. However, while navigation has been improved, Vista isn't a breakthrough in ease of use. Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP. Windows hasn't been given nearly as radical an overhaul as Microsoft just applied to its other big product, Office.

Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple's operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.
In other words, it's the best Windows yet, but that's not saying much. Especially when you consider that many of the features of MacOS X came from the Unix of a decade ago.
mdlbear: (tux)

Good article by Eric Raymond and Rob Landley about why 2008 is a hard limit by which the dominant OS for the next 30-50 years will be chosen, and what Linux has to do to be the one.

The industry-wide switch to 64-bit hardware is opening a critical transition window during which the new dominant operating system will be determined. This window will close at the end of 2008, a hard deadline. The last such transition completed in 1990, the next one cannot be expected before 2050.

The three contenders for the new 64-bit standard are Windows-64, MacOS X, and Linux. The winner will be determined by desktop market share, the bulk of which consists of non-technical end users.

This paper tries to answer a number of questions: Why is 2008 is a hard deadline? What is the current state of the three major contenders trying to become the new 64-bit standard? What are the major blocking issues to to each platform's desktop acceptance? What specific strategies and tactics can Linux use to cope with its most pressing problems? We close with a sober consideration of the costs of failure.

(From slashdot.)

mdlbear: (fandom)

After spending much of Sunday afternoon trying unsuccessfully to get my DeMuDi laptop (Debian-derived, sort of Sarge-and-a-half) to recognize my new Edirol UA25 audio interface (ALSA recognized it but Audacity, which uses OSS, didn't), I tried it on the Mac laptop I "borrow" from work. Audacity hung -- this is not a good sign. Finally I downloaded the beta for Audacity 1.3, and it worked like a charm. OK.

I've loaded up the Mac with a fresh copy of my working set. Really need to automate that sometime -- it's just a bunch of cd and rsync commands.

My underwear, socks, and shirts are in the drier even as I type, the rolly has been packed, I've practiced the dicey songs from my concert set tomorrow, and I've printed pre-preorder fliers (see next post downwhen from here), my set pages, a clean new songbook, and business cards.

As of this morning I was seriously doubting that I'd be ready. Still need to sort the laundry, pack the suitcase, package up my meds (tomorrow), and pick CDs for the trip.

I love it when a plan comes together!

Shiny!

2006-08-29 09:37 pm
mdlbear: (hacker glider)

Just transferred about 1.3GB of concert data (two Audacity projects) from my MacTel laptop to my fileserver. Took under 5 minutes over gigabit ethernet. Yay for shiny new network hardware. (Had to sit the lappy on top of the laser printer because all I have in Cat6 or Cat5e at the moment are a couple of 1m patch cables.) Split-up concert pieces Real Soon Now.

The Mac has been a distinctly mixed bag. Sure, everything "just works", provided you drink the Apple KoolAid and haven't had over 20 years' worth of Unix experience setting your expectations. And we'll ignore the fact that I had to discharge the battery and leave the thing turned off and charging overnight to convince the power applet that it had anything other than an 83%-charged battery. I expect it'll make a nice Linux machine.

Meanwhile, the departure two weeks ago of our group's summer intern has freed up a lovely Dell widescreen (1920x1200) monitor, which is now sitting on my desk. I wasn't expecting to be able to get one until next fiscal year, having burned up this year's hardware budget on the Mac. It remains to be seen whether my desktop machine will drive it, but I'm hopeful. (Update: just added 1920x1200 to all the mode lists in xorg.conf, and it worked. You wouldn't think 320 pixels would make that much difference, but it does.)

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
Had dinner at a local restaurant called "Red Robin" - obviously a chain. The clam strips looked good, but more breading than clam. I'll try someplace else tomorrow.

The hotel advertises free wireless, but I wasn't able to connect either in my room or in the lobby. Apparently on different access points; I'll try again later.

Stupid goddamned Mac crashed on me! I thought OSX wasn't supposed to do that! Fortunately, LJ saves drafts! I'm not complaining.

Anybody know how to set up groups on this stupid thing? On a real unix I'd just add a line to /etc/group, but it has a comment saying that it's not used. Something called lookupd is, but there's no /etc/lookupd/ (mentioned in the man page for lookupd). Foo.
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Yesterday was hot. Luckily our house has AC; [livejournal.com profile] ciarhwyfar, her daughter, and [livejournal.com profile] kshandra were using it as a refuge from the heat. We'll be open today, too. Then we wonder why our power bills are so damned high. Yet another thing to blame on global warming... Luckily I had gone for my walk fairly early, though it was already hot at 9:30.

Went to the Golden Bough concert in Pacifica; it was significantly cooler there by the ocean. Fantastic, as usual. It was still warm when we got home at 11:30.

Also did a little shopping for laptop accessories. Found a sleeve-type case by Case Logic that's about 3" too wide, but since it's soft it can fold over to fit in my rollie. After considerable searching, found a very small BlueTooth mouse by Macally. Nobody makes a BT trackball, or even a small trackball. Closest I've seen is a Targus "presenter" which not only has a trackball but a couple of keys for controlling a presentation program, and even a laser pointer. Also fairly expensive, and not BT; on reflection, the fact that it doesn't have to be paired could be an advantage.

mdlbear: (hacker glider)

Here's an interesting exchange of blog posts on open formats and why they matter. I found it through a reference in this post on O'Reilly Radar, which is interesting in its own right; it's about the fact that Flikr and Picasa are opening their APIs to allow users to transfer their pictures between them.

That leads to "When the bough breaks" by long-time Mac guru Mark Pilgrim, explaining why he's just switched to Linux on a new Lenovo ThinkCentre after 22 years on Macs.

In fact, I spend the vast majority of my time using these and other open source applications (Carbon Emacs, Colloquy, Audacity, Seashore, Python, and a variety of command-line tools). Why keep running them on an operating system that costs money and restricts my rights and my usage?

...

I'm creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch, search, and filter 50 years from now. Despite all their emphasis on content creators, Apple has made it clear that they do not share this goal. Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don't. Apple doesn't.

It's all about lock-in due to closed, undocumented, proprietary, binary file formats. As we'll see later, he was bitten one too many times. The next post is And Oranges by John Gruber, which is mostly an excellent discussion of the difference between the high-quality Mac user interface and the others, which are "good, but not great" -- and how that wasn't the main factor in Mark's decision.

Telling Pilgrim that he's making a mistake because Ubuntu doesn't have as refined or cohesive a UI as Mac OS X is like telling someone who is switching from a Chevy Tahoe to a Toyota Prius that he's not going to have as much cargo room. He knows it.

... but then he goes on to say that

Admitting that he has a point, or several points, or that he may well be correct that he's going to be more satisfied with Ubuntu than he was with Mac OS X, does not imply that Mac users are wrong or stupid or foolish.

And the truth is I'm not entirely sure he's making the right decision, even for himself. Forget all the niggling details he cites, and focus only on his central beef -- that Apple is a company that does not "get" openness, and that this deficiency is going to hinder Pilgrim's long-term access to the data he's creating. But if that's the case, and Pilgrim has been using Apple computers for 22 years, why hasn't it happened already?

This is what Mark takes issue with in the last post of our series, Juggling Oranges:

It has happened already, John. Over and over again.

He then goes on to list the occasions, dating back to the years he spent between 1983 and 1989, writing software for the Apple //e, "a platform that doesn't exist and can only be emulated with the help of ROMs which are illegal to redistribute."

And then came Tiger, and Mail.app 2.0. In Mac OS X 10.4, Apple deliberately changed Mail.app to use their proprietary .emlx data format, apparently to work around the limitations of Spotlight. Mail.app 2.0 helpfully auto-converted all my wonderful mbox files into Apple's shitty undocumented format. I'm now in the process of undoing the damage. I tried an emlx-to-mbox converter program, but it has bugs that ruin certain mail messages and corrupt the resulting mbox file. (Specifically, mail messages that contain a line that starts with the word "from".) Perhaps JWZ's emlx.pl script will fare better. JWZ knows mail.

He ends with:

Which brings us back to John Gruber's oranges. His counter-argument -- that lock-in hasn't been a problem for me yet, so why all the fuss now -- could not be further from the truth. It's been a constant problem for 22 years. Much of the data I've spent my life creating has been lost or seriously degraded through a series of proprietary formats and forced migrations. This is why I felt so betrayed, in particular, by Mail.app "upgrading" me away from mbox format. It took a lot of forethought on my part, not to mention actual time and effort, to convert all my disparate mail archives from all those different mail programs. I finally got everything into a single archive in an open, stable format... and just 3 short years later, Apple found a way to screw me one last time. It'll be the last time they get the chance.

And that, children, is why open formats are important, and why neither Microsoft nor Apple -- nor, ultimately, any proprietary software -- can be trusted to use them: it's all about lock-in. The greatest superiority of open-source software is that by construction it uses open formats. I have email and Usenet archives dating back to the mid-1980's that I can still read and search. My filksong lyrics date back to 1982, with only a single format transition (from plain text to LaTeX). I have programs and Makefile's that I wrote for long-obsolete Apollo workstations and the original 8086 PC that I can simply recompile and run two decades later. I have 15-year-old configuration files for X and Emacs that I'm still using.

I'm a proud, happy user of open-source software and open data formats, and when they pry my keyboard from under my cold, dead fingers, my children will still be able to read my files.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Well, after some four hours of [edit disk-grinding, clicking, and] downloading, Tiger finally got installed on my Mac laptop at work, at least to the point where it will run [livejournal.com profile] finagler and [livejournal.com profile] mr_kurt's software that we for the demo on Monday. Spent a couple of hours debugging the demo with Brad (it's peer-to-peer stuff; so the final version of the demo will involve four laptops and a USB keychain drive). We'll beat on it some more tomorrow.

Still not particularly impressed with MacOS X.

Meanwhile, my ancient Roland HS-60 keyboard, which has been gathering dust for most of the last two decades, has been misbehaving -- we hauled it out of semi-retirement so the [livejournal.com profile] chaoswolf, who's taking beginning piano this quarter, would have something to practice on. Problem is that in a lot of the patches the notes just don't cut off properly. I suspect a bad envelope generator or VCA.

So I'm now in the market for a keyboard, preferably 88 keys, with good feel, and not particularly bulky (since it may get lent to visiting keyboard players at local cons). Preferably on the low end of the $500-1000 range. A pure MIDI controller is a possibility, since I have an old but still functional computer with a MIDI soundcard that I can probably figure out how to hack into a sound module. Any suggestions?

mdlbear: (debian)

... and of course it doesn't bother to check for software updates after you install the upgrade. It's already connected... how hard can it be? Debian, as usual, has been doing this all along. And I had to check for updates yet again in order to get Java 1.5.

The Bear is not impressed.

mdlbear: (debian)

Apparently the Mac installer is too stupid to actually look at what's on your disk and upgrade what's there, even if you tell it you're doing an upgrade and not a reinstall from scratch. Good grief! RedHat was doing that ten years ago. Admittedly it wasn't doing it very well -- it didn't remove obsolete stuff -- but at least it was trying. For that matter, Tiger probably isn't removing the stuff you don't need, either. And if it was, how could you tell?

Did I mention that I started this process before noon? Grumble.

What right does anybody have to claim that Linux is hard to install, and the Mac is a model of simplicity and user-friendly design? And how can it possibly be user-friendly without a package for xteddy?

mdlbear: (debian)

I'm most of the way through the process of upgrading my (work) mac laptop to Tiger, which I had to do because it's needed for a demo on Monday. It's a lot like watching a snail crawl across your screen, with only a little dramatic tension added by the knowledge that, if it falls off, it will explode messily and get little bits of snail pulp all over your hard drive.

Right now I'm installing "xcode", which is what they call the development package. It's been telling me "Time remaining: less than 1 minute" for about 10 minutes now.

It's times like this that remind me why I use Debian as my desktop OS.

update: 14:31 ... and why does it take a fscking reboot and a fscking hour to install X11?? And how do I know it's not leaving little bits of snail pulp all over while it's doing it??? And why did I have to agree to their stupid licence for the fourth time in order to install software that's under the MIT license????

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