John Gruber does a deep dive on the current state of bootable Mac cloning software in 2025. It’s been a minute since I’ve had a bootable backup drive for any of my machines, and while he recommends SuperDuper, I was always a fan of Carbon Copy Cloner. I used to diligently keep a bootable backup of my primary laptop, and kept another drive handy for catastrophic recovery back in the days when I was a freelance Mac support guy. With the switch to Intel and then to the Apple Silicon architectures (not to mention various flavors of OS and file systems) it got hard to stay current with all the required flavors needed. Apparently the last update of Sequoia blew everything up, but this was a bug and has now been rectified.
- When someone pronounces et cetera (/et ˈsedərə/) as “eggseddera”. We are not making salad with mayonnaise; we are denoting the fact that there are more things in a list we aren’t mentioning. There’s a T in there, friends, let’s use it.
- The word trainings, e.g., “we’re having some trainings on proper use of company credit cards.” I know we talk about meetings, but trainings was never pluralized until I entered the NGO space. Now I’m going to go have a walkings with my dog.
- Corollary: Learnings. E.g.: What learnings have you taken away from this event?
- When someone talks about being orientated towards something. Especially when it’s a BBC reporter. I suppose this is a British English thing, but it still hits me like nails on a chalkboard. You’re oriented towards something. You attend an orientation.
What bastardizations of the English language have you heard lately?
Jeff Bezos’s $10bn philanthropic fund has stopped backing the world’s leading voluntary climate standard setter, following rising scrutiny over its influence on the body, in a move seen as the billionaire’s latest effort to curry favour with US President Donald Trump.
WRI has several large projects funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, which have done excellent work so far. We learned that Andrew Steer was stepping down from the Fund last week; several other colleagues who followed him have also left. Make your own inferences there.
I don’t remember where I stumbled across the link for this, but it’s a web-based reconstruction of Activision’s famous Pitfall. In the summer of 1982, I spent hours at my friend Mike’s house trading the Atari joystick playing this game; we didn’t have this for our Intellivision. Mike had spent long hours learning the game and thus knew which way to go, while I was still mastering the art of not being eaten by crocodiles. Be warned: you will lose hours on this site.
Here’s the latest YouTube video from the last two and a half weeks. It’s a bit overdue because of the weather, but it covers a bunch of different projects.
I walked out of the UPS store this afternoon with a paper slip in my hand and a feeling of melancholy. It didn’t help that the sky was gray and the wind was blowing. a few moments before, I walked in the store with a neatly taped box to mail off to a guy in Miami: inside a protective cocoon of Kraft paper lay my Steinberger bass guitar, something I’ve owned since college and carried with me since then. It’s been sitting in the corner for years, and every year I would take it out and play it, but after I bought the bargain Jazz bass and compared the two, I realized how much more I enjoyed playing the Fender. I’ve shopped it around to several stores in this area and gotten lowball cash offers for it, so I put it up on Reverb at a price that seemed to be reasonable for the market and waited. That was four years ago.
Last Thursday an offer popped up from this guy in Florida, and after some back and forth we settled on a price that I felt OK with. It’s lower than I was asking (after having reduced my initial price once) but still much more than I paid for it, and at this point in history I feel better about having cash in hand than a bass collecting dust in the corner. Strangely though, I’m not as bummed out as I thought I would be; I think I came to terms with selling it a few years ago, and was just waiting for circumstance to catch up with me.
So the bass will make its way to Florida, and when the buyer takes possession, I’ll get my payment from Reverb. I feel better about rolling the dice this way—eBay was never an option—and I’m hoping it all goes smoothly.