The Verge: Best Printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine. I have a Brother printer in the same basic family; it scans, it prints. It’s a pain in the ass to connect to the wi-fi correctly. In the comment section of the post I found this on, a helpful user goes through the steps for setting up a fixed IP address and most crucially, setting up the printer correctly to pick that IP address up. I figured this out myself several years ago after wanting to throw the fucking thing out the window. Whatever happened to HP printers? they used to, um, just work.
I recently re-enabled Jetpack, WordPress’ do-it-all plugin for their publishing platform, here on idiotking, after a year or two without it. I had it working for a year or two and I liked the additional features it provided, but one day it brought my whole site down with no warning. Strangely, the Scout blog, which uses a forked version of the same homemade WordPress template, remained operational. I didn’t feel like chasing the problem down until recently, when I got a notice that the hosting provider for idiotking wanted me to update the version of PHP it was running. I did that without much fuss, and then let it sit for a while. Today in a meeting I downloaded the plugin and re-activated it, and it seems to be working smoothly. I’m going to fool around with some of the new features they’ve added, and hope it doesn’t break the whole thing again.
Interesting…
I’ve noticed Conway’s Law mentioned twice in different places this last week, and it has a lot of bearing on some current strategy I’m involved with at work: it basically states that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure—essentially organizations build things that mimic their own worldview. I saw this repeatedly when I was doing IA for higher education websites, and I see it now at the NGO.
Here’s a great recap of how Netscape begat Mozilla and Shepard Fairey created a dinosaur logo based on Russian Futurism with roots in the 1987 movie They Live. I look back on those wild days of the web with fondness.
When we were in New York before Christmas, one of the things we showed Finn on our way past Madison Square Garden was the big sign on the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd Street where I’d designed the billboard for Deutsche Bank back in the day. It was blocked by scaffolding when we walked past—we kind of had to point around all the construction to show her—but I think she understood the scale of the thing.
Over the weekend, while trying to replace a power strip behind our office cabinet, I found a couple of Addy programs from 2009 that had fallen behind other books. Figuring we’d saved it for one of Jen’s projects, I thumbed through it and suddenly remembered that we’d won Silver and Gold Addys for that campaign. I don’t see anyplace on my LinkedIn profile to add awards…
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In the meantime, I’m about 75 passwords in to a migration away from LastPass and into Keychain. I’m doing it manually because I don’t want to go through Chrome to convert everything, and also because I have to change all the passwords out anyway. And having used LastPass for 7+ years, I have a lot of old records that I haven’t used in years that I’m happy to delete. It’s a slog but I’m telling myself it’ll be worth it.
So apparently, LastPass, the password manager I’ve been using for 5+ years, got hacked for the second time; they’re now saying that encrypted user databases were stolen from company servers. LastPass has been declining in usefulness since Apple changed Safari’s extension architecture a couple of years ago—one of the best features was password autofill, and that was disabled with those changes. So I’m looking at updating and then moving 470+ passwords to Keychain, which has no easy import function; apparently I have to go from a CSV file -> import into Chrome -> import to Safari, which then adds everything to Keychain. The benefit here is that it’ll all be shared across my Apple devices the way God intended. I’ve resisted Keychain for decades because the interface blows and the sharing features were janky; we’ll see how this goes. In the meantime, I just updated the master password.
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Out with my girls for birthday dinner.
Some pictures of a rusty old truck.
I parked next to a fellow survivor from the 70’s this morning.
Had some friends over to get the Travelall started. We got it to catch but not completely turn over. Further investigation of the distributor is warranted. But, the aftermarket A/C, cruise control and some of the trailer brake system has been removed. And there was coffee, donuts, beer and pizza with great friends I haven’t seen in a long while. All in all, an excellent way to spend a chilly Saturday.