I work with a woman whose husband was an employee of Hodinkee, an oddly named horology website which many credit for raising the visibility of luxury wristwatches to America. She’d mentioned recently that things were a little funky with the company, and recently he left to pursue a different opportunity. Hodinkee just announced they’ve been sold to a British watch retailer, and the article explains the troubles she was hinting at; pandemic-era acquisition and market contraction left them in a dicey financial position. John Gruber writes:
There is a name for a publication that is owned by a retailer: catalog.
I would never be able to buy any of the watches featured on the site then or now, but it was pretty to look at.
It’s been quiet around here lately, mostly because the entire East Coast, for those who haven’t been watching the news, has been under a giant raincloud for the past two weeks. We didn’t suffer any of the horror Appalachia did, and for that I am forever grateful, but it sure was nice to feel warm sun on my pale, shriveled skin walking the dog this morning.
I had, with my cereal this morning, some of the best blueberries I’ve eaten in the last 10 years. In September. Modern civilization may be crumbling but I appreciate the small things.
The Check Engine light on the OG-V (164,000 miles and counting!) has been intermittently coming on and then shutting itself off for no discernible reason. I had the knock sensor replaced a few months ago at the behest of the computer, and immediately after that the light came back on and the computer threw the same code, so clearly the squirrels have been down in the engine munching on wires, or there’s a ghost in the machine. The clutch is definitely on its last legs, so we have to make a decision as to when that’s going to be addressed.
I was in New York last week for the briefest of moments to shoot video for a work event, and it reminded me both how much I love to visit that city and how much I could never stand to live there at this age. And for that matter, how much I dislike dragging video equipment through a train station. I think my remote shooting days are mostly over, unless they offer to send me someplace really cool; it’s cheaper to hire a local crew in most cases anyway.
Hazel found a way to wedge herself in between Finn’s fort and the raised bed sometime last night after 8PM; She backed herself out of the tac harness and went on the lam. I wasn’t aware until I went outside to collect her and found the evidence at 10:30. Jen and I suited up and prepared to canvas the neighborhood, but she came trotting back up to Jen in the backyard, panting, and immediately went inside to drink all of the available water. This is progress; her usual M.O. is to follow her nose to the Mississippi River and points west until someone can grab her and read her chip. I’m going to order a simple collar for her tags in preparation for the next time she slips the harness.
It’s important to note that all of the local media channels characterized the murder as “a confrontation between armed protestors and an armed homeowner,” all of which is not true: All of the women were unarmed and trying to de-escalate the situation; the shooter instigated the attack, was known to the FBI as an extremist dating back to 2006, and was renting an apartment down the street. He was shot by an armed bystander who arrived moments later and is now serving life in prison. He’s actually responsible for two murders that day: a second volunteer, who was paralyzed in the attack, requested to be taken off a ventilator and died in 2024.
I set up another account for the Travelall on Instagram last night, wrote an entirely new post, picked a completely different picture, and added completely different links to the profile. It wouldn’t let me use the account name from my first try, so I used a slightly different one. I wrote a long description for my second post and put it up with a new picture this afternoon. Checking the account later, I got an ominous notice from the app that said they noticed suspicious activity on my account that may have come from a bot, or something. So I’m fully expecting to have the fucking thing shut down a second time.
I mean, fuck’s sake, I’m not selling meth or boner pills; I’m posting pictures of a rusty truck. What the hell?
I had the opportunity to buy a piece of hardware for the office that I’ve been looking at for a long time and figured I’d write up an initial review of it here. We’re on a Microsoft tech stack at work, and most of it works well enough. However, we’ve been fighting against Sharepoint’s inexplicable habit of corrupting media files larger than 1GB, which makes any kind of file sharing useless for my team. I’ve been a Dropbox advocate for as long as I remember, and I’ve threatened to quit if they took it away from my team. But Dropbox is a cloud-based service and relies on your local hard drive for local storage; when you have ~10TB of working video files, you can’t fit that all on a laptop.
Because my team is half-remote, I need to have a central local file server with media files available for people to check in and out when they get to the office, backed up to Dropbox seamlessly. So I bought a Synology Diskstation DS1522+, which is basically a box with four hard drive sleds and an operating system. With five 8TB drives the whole bundle came to about $2,300, which is not cheap, and which is why I don’t already have one of these sitting in the basement.
Setup was easy. I’m used to pulling/swapping hard drives, so the new units went into the box pretty quickly, and after I buttoned it up I found an out-of-the-way counter to hide it on with power and a network drop. Once it booted up I followed the quick start instructions to find a web interface and stepped through account creation and basic configuration of the box. Within about 10 minutes I had it formatting the drives into a hybrid RAID configuration, allowing for 2-drive fault tolerance and netting 20TB in total storage. It was easy to set up SMB and AFP services for sharing, build out user profiles, and add a cloud services package to connect to Dropbox. From there I set it up to sync with our huge video folder overnight.
This morning I logged into the box as a network drive and all of our stuff is right where it’s supposed to be. Instead of dealing with hours-long download times via the cloud, our files now take minutes via the local network, and it’s much easier to dump folders back to the local drive instead of uploading via a web browser and bogging down a working machine for hours at a time.
Overall I’m really impressed with it so far, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it over the next year to see how well it holds up. Eventually my ancient Mac Pro towers will need to be replaced, and a simple box like this looks like a great option. I’m glad to be able to test-drive it here.
Well, I suppose this was inevitable. Then She Did… was the song they were playing the other day when the show blew up, and I was thinking to myself as I watched the footage, “damn, that sounds good.” And then it got stuck in my head. Long ago, when the album first came out, I used to play along to the second side under the influence and this was one of my favorite grooves.
This is a reasonably good live recording from 1990 when the full band was still together and playing tight. What I would give to have seen them at their peak.
An article on a completely different website brought me to this one, and I could not have been happier last night. This is a reconstruction of the history of the Millennium Falcon, from the earliest days of Lucas’ scripts through Ralph McQuarrie’s original sketches, a pivot in the “Space Pirate” design after Space: 1999 hit TV in 1975, and the birth of the now iconic shape. The author sources multiple books, articles, websites, and photos to piece together how it evolved. I remember seeing some of these paintings over the years in different books and magazines, and now I know why they were different than what we saw on screen.
Saturday morning I drove down to Lexington Park with the OG-V packed to the gunwales with tools; we’re in the middle of a long-term project at the FiL’s house to replace the garage door original to the house with a modern mechanized version. This began two weeks ago with the drywall project, and after we got the go-ahead from the installers, it was time to move to the next phase: moving the Chrysler out of the way.
When last I left the Chrysler, I was looking at the brake system. Because it had been parked in the garage with the emergency brake on, three of the four drums were frozen to the pads. I’d put the front passenger wheel up on a stand and commenced to whacking it with a sledgehammer, but couldn’t get it to release. This was after several heating and cooling cycles, and at the end I’d actually taken a chunk out of the edge of the drum. So I bought and brought a set of four heavy-duty wheel dollies on Saturday, figuring they would be better than nothing. After hoisting the broken door up and out of the way, I moved stuff around and swept around the car. I had all four wheels up on the dollies within an hour, and moved a bunch of stuff out of the way before breaking out the tow strap.
I was a little nervous about using the OG-V to pull with, but the Scout is down with some unknown leakage (more info on that to come) and the new CR-V doesn’t have a trailer hitch yet. I had Jen’s sister come out and keep an eye on things, and after a lot of starting and stopping we got it out of the garage and onto the uneven pavement where it began to jump off the dollies when they got bogged down in divots and sand. The Honda did fantastic pulling the heavy beast; I never should have doubted it. The Chrysler is now far enough away from the door that there should be room to make a mess without coming near it. Then we used leverage and gravity to move his other disabled car, the Escort, down to the bottom and up behind the Chrysler, leaving a wide lane on the left side.
Humorously, I brought a car cover I was using for the Travelall, which fits with room to spare. It will not fit the Chrysler. It’s not long enough. So I rigged it up with a tarp in back and a box in front (to keep the radio antenna from poking a hole in the cover). With that done, I moved everything in the front of the garage to the back, clearing out the space for the installers to do their thing, and closed the door. After taking care of some other housekeeping, I hit the road for home.
In two weeks, I’ve got to head back down with another car full of tools, put the Chrysler up on jack stands, and beat the shit out of the three bad drums with a sledgehammer. At this point I don’t care if they split in half; I need them off to free up the wheels, because the dollies will not work going back into the garage—it needs to be on its own wheels. Beyond that, I’m going to have to buy a winch and anchor it to the floor with some beefy bolts to get the car back inside.
By all accounts, the recent Jane’s Addiction tour has been canceled after Perry Farrell attacked Dave Navarro in the middle of a song, and had to be dragged off the stage. Reading some first-hand accounts from fans who posted video of that show, the consensus is that the band sounded fantastic but he sounded like shit, was drinking heavily through the whole show, and was dropping verses in the middle of songs. His wife immediately went on social media to attack the band, and today they announced the tour was dead.
Having read about him and his treatment of the rest of the band I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’m bummed out for them. I would love nothing more than (and would, frankly, be more interested in) the three musicians touring together with a guest vocalist, just to hear them play live together.
Wow, I didn’t see this one coming. Oasis are reuniting for a tour after splitting up and throwing chainsaws at each other for fifteen years. I think I’ve always been Team Noel but I haven’t followed all of the drama that closely. This would be a great show to see live, I think; I just can’t rationalize $200 in Ticketmaster surcharges and battling for a 5% chance to actually be able to buy a ticket.
In America, no one is above the law. In America, the people rule.
Super. Apparently AT&T left all of their customer phone numbers, calling and text records, and location data out on a cloud server somewhere, and “criminals” downloaded it. The timespan is from May—October 2022. Guess whose network is AT&T? I submit: the true criminals are the fuckheads at AT&T who continually leave this shit out on cloud servers for anyone to stumble across and download.
Countdown to useless, lawyer-enriching class action lawsuit: 10, 9, 8…
File this under It’s About Fucking Time: the Baltimore County School system will allow cellphone bans in their classrooms starting this coming year. Our daughter wasn’t allowed to bring her phone to school last year for various reasons, but I’ll be glad to have the rest of the students hang theirs up too. I’d link to some of the appropriate local news channels here, but they’re all behind paywalls or not even reporting on this.
