Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
Hit F12 and no Dashboard appeared. Had to run Dashboard.app manually to get it to exist, and then F12 worked again. Added it to my Login Items, dunno if that's needed but shouldn't hurt.
The total neglect of this incredibly useful widget screen is baffling to me. I have weather, Deliveries tracking, stocks, Organized calendar/appointments list, PCalc, and iStat on a single screen. Used to have a nice meditation/tea timer, but it got broken a couple OS updates ago.
Took forever to convert my drive, but seems functional in a single pass.
Dark Mode is kind of comically simplistic, especially the grey border around everything. It's better than the previous white room/transparency theme, but it shows that Apple designers don't understand how dark themes work yet. BBEdit's dark theme and Atom with Material UI look far more professional.
Apple's decided to nag me about disk space (about 60GB free):
Stack Overflow has some solutions.
TunesArt is crashing, and there's no update yet. Irritating. I miss Sophie's Coversutra.
Fucking Safari. In pursuing somewhat more secure extensions, they just blindly uninstalled all the extensions I used, including uBlock Origin. The only uBlock in the Mac App Store is ancient, tracks you, and sells whitelisting to fucking marketers. Criminal scumbag. I have Aral Balkan's Better Blocker installed, but that mostly attacks trackers, doesn't let me grab blocks of HTML per site to delete. FUUUUUCK.
Guess I should find out which mission-critical software I use isn't compatible now. And at some point rebuild MacPorts, that'll be fun/contribute to global warming.
Backed up. Mojave install started. Going from Sierra, skipping High-as-in-420 Sierra entirely because it didn't support Fusion Drive. Let's see if Apple got it right this time. Excited for Dark Mode to match my Atom theme, clothes, coffee, and outlook.
TES: Legends finally gets its new-developer update! It might be playable now!
Update on Steam … update again because that update needed an update … binary not found. OK, look in the local files, it's renamed "app.app", which is stupid. Click, error.
Current Status: TES Legends is currently undergoing maintenance.
I mean, it's Bethesda, so I'm lucky it didn't clip thru the floor and fall out of the world.
Maybe tomorrow.
And more from the same channel. A few tracks rock out, a few are too much jazz or disco for my taste, but mostly pretty great light JPop. I ain't always gotta be blasting industrial noise, you know?
Oh, look, there's a new American Horror Story season on Netflix! Oh, fuck, it's about politics and that fucking election. AHS is supposed to be tacky, campy parody horror, not literally the scariest story of the last 30 years. Hard nope.
If you think "a dumb cartoon about a horse?", no. This is maybe the best dramedy about depression, success, and failure ever made, live-action or animated (the other contender is Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is about the crushing weight of parental expectations told with giant mecha and alien angels at the end of the world).
Finally finished S4 and now all of S5.
S1 was a funny show about depression. Not all that coherent, still wandering between Simpsons gag format and long series drama.
S2 tries to cover up depression with work and success, and has an epic meltdown. The most coherent season so far, but the least fun. The one that hits closest to me.
S3 is the hangover after success, and then gets real fucking dark. But E4, "Fish Out of Water", is something everyone should see; you don't need a lot of context for it.
S4 spends a lot of time in flashbacks, especially to BoJack's mother who is awful. E7 "Underground", E8 "The Judge", and E12 "What Time Is It Right Now" are fantastic, though.
S5 has been more like S1, dramedy with no real point, Princess Carolyn's flashback and the eulogy both dragged on forever, but E8 "Mr Peanutbutter's Boos" 25 years of Halloween parties was perfect. The meta-show Philbert is a dead ringer for many of the crime dramas I watch.
There's long stretches of BoJack that I find almost intolerably dull, and start zipping ahead 30s at a time to see if the plot advances. I have my own family hangups, I can't be expected to care about BoJack's shitty family.
There's other times when it's the only show that's ever talked honestly about this stuff.
★☆☆☆☆ to ★★★★★ but averaging around ★★★★☆
One of the few things I liked in the latest Nintendo Direct was "NES controller for Switch! Though there are good 3rd-party ones, but sweet."
Turns out this is a complete bullshit product: ArsTechnica says they only work with online, emulated NES. There's the Dick Nintendo I know and barely tolerate because they hate their players.
So, 8BitDo is still the best option.
I don't generally recommend doing iOS updates on release day, but the betas have been out for a while (and nagging people aggressively!), so I'm less nervous. Do a backup and let 'er rip!
… Hours later … let 'er rip … download … ugh …
And then I come back to a white screen, saying "Attempting data recovery". FUCK. Dialog says "installing iOS" and stuck at 99% progress.
At present the screen's stuck, white with an Apple logo. Finally found HT201412 which has the extra-secret hard reset keys of Vol Up, Vol Down, hold Power.
And then I was able to log in and it's supposedly on iOS 12. But what's broken? Did it install completely? Who the fuck knows! SHIT. So now I'm restoring backup, because this is unsafe, and in maybe 2 hours when that's done, I'll try the update again. Did I say "FUCK"? Because FUCK!
So today's lesson is that nothing works, you should fear change, and never install anything until other victims have tried it. Also, backups are the most important thing ever, make sure you have them.
Most bizarre thing ever: Cells at Work. Your body as a city with every cell as a person. Paramilitary white blood cells and hapless red blood cells delivering oxygen, protecting their world (you) from horrible tentacled monsters (germs).
I've been watching some dull horror movies (The Strangers, among others) which I haven't blogged, and this is better paced and has better characters than all of them combined.
The world is a little too generic with street & industrial scenes, lazy animation, but overall a neat trick.
★★★★☆