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I have been using uBlock Origin for many years on my Mac. Recently, I tried replacing my 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2018 MacBook Pro. There were a lot of things that I liked about the new MacBook Pro but what bothered me was that it had only 8GB of RAM whereas the older one had 16GB. I would listen to the fans howl and eventually I replaced it with a machine I described in The Perfect Mac. But as happy as I am with my Mac Mini, it’s not portable. So I added an iPad Pro to the mix. That’s been pretty good but the ad blocking on the iPad doesn’t seem anywhere as effective. ...

Gilbert Heights Elementary School Grade 6 1973-1974 Top row: unknown, John McIntosh, unknown, unknown, unknown, Liz Silva, unnknown 3rd row: unknown, Lisa Mullen, unknown, unknown, unknown, Ray Teuber?, unknown 2nd row: John Speck, unknown, me, Pat Dye, unknown, unknown, unknown, Mrs. Margeson first row: Denise Buckley, unknown, Charlotte Trapp, unknown, Debra Halvorsen?, Jim Greenslade We moved and changed school districts the year before. So I only had year at Gilbert Heights Elementary School before this photo and a year after. Still, I’m surprised I can’t remember more names. ...

Ran across a neat graphic that sums up what it’s felt like waiting for the results of the 2020 Presidential Election results felt like. Updating my old blog, I was surprised at how many links broke over the years. So I decided the image for posterity. When I went to download the GIF, it turned out that Twitter had converted it into an .mp4 video. When I used a website to convert it back, it grew from under 10k to just over 50k. ...

There’s an excellent article in Vox about vote by mail in Oregon, focusing on how it started and how it evolved. It’s difficult to forge someone’s signature on a ballot. Not impossible, not if you have access to something with their signature, but difficult. And it’s hard to see that scaling to any numbers. It’s pretty much impossible to insert fake ballots into the system. There are bar codes on the envelopes mailed out to voters and it’s pretty simple to reject any bar codes that don’t match what was sent out. ...

There’s an excellent article that goes deep into the specifics of refilling your tank versus just exchanging it for a different Blue Rhino[1] tank. The article was written in 2013 but pretty much everything holds up. The price of propane has actually gone down in 2020 to less than $2/gallon Basically it comes down to this: Do you want to refill your tank and save $8$11? or Would you rather go to a nearby store and just exchange tanks? ...

Something to think about… I have seen a lot of hate spewed in recent days about a man who is a constant winner and overachiever, and that’s what the people who support him like about him. Yes, he’s been caught in some lies and maybe twisted the truth a little but he’s still out there proving his haters wrong time after time. Some people are just jealous of someone who is successful and has money. Throw in a hot foreign underwear model at his side and they hate him even more. You may not have wanted him in his role, but he’s there now and there’s nothing you can do about it. I know it’s possibly just going to get worse over the next several days, but like him or not, Tom Brady is turning things around in Tampa. ...

I wrote an article talking about using iCloud to sync your Downloads folder. So I did that and I found out I didn’t like it. I’m running tight on disk space (I have to cull more photos from Photos, which is taking up the most disk space for me) so Apple is uploading the files in ~/Downloads, then replacing them with an .icloud version. That means that I need to download the file to use it. ...

It was both a sad and happy Halloween here in Portland. Our youngest teenager is almost 15 so we definitely didn’t have a lot of cute costumes. There were no worries about meeting up with friends to go trick-or-treating. In the end, we had two people come ring our bell so we could send candy down the chute. What made it happy was walking the dog leading up to Halloween and Halloween Eve and seeing the precautions people were taking: there were candy chutes, there were paper bags (didn’t rain here!) or plastic bags with candy inside set out, and more complicated measures for distributing candy in a socially distanced way. ...

Before we got married, my wife’s brothers and sister gave us a BBQ grill as a present. I also inherited two propane tanks from my dad. In doing some reading on re-filling propane tanks, it turns out that every tank has a date code on it. For example, this is the tank that came with the grill: Date Code of January 2001 We were married in July 2001 and the tank was made on January, 2001. ...

If you’re running a Mac with limited internal disk you’ll encounter this message: There’s a great article on how to manually delete Time Machine Snapshots Key steps: List available local snapshots “sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Volumes/Macintosh HD” Delete each snapshot “sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2020-11-01-002004” I’ve had to do this a lot when upgrading to a new beta release.