The chair now goes quite a lot higher at full extension. This was deliberate as previously it had to be set to full height to be just high enough.
May 9, 2015
May 8, 2015
New Tassimo
This is our third Tassimo machine. It was on sale at Amazon for £49.99 and the second Tassimo machine was a bit worn.
Stuff
Amazon parcel including new gas lift for office chair, rubber mallet for removing old gas lift, pyrex bowl and Tassimo descaling tablets. The minimum order for free delivery went up from £10 to £20 as I was assembling this order which explains the odd mixture of stuff. I also am switching from using ecto for blogging to using MacJournal as ecto hasn’t been updated to support the change from iPhoto to Photo and so I can’t easily post photos from it anymore. MacJournal does support Photo. On the other hand it doesn’t seem to allow me to write html directly so I’ll need to look into that. I actually got MacJournal as part of a large software bundle I bought for another piece of software and hadn’t intended to use it – and now it’s turned out useful!
New gas lift
Got a new gas lift for the office chair. Fitting it was slightly harder than the youtube videos made it look and as well as a rubber mallet I needed a mole wrench, hex key and needle-nose pliers. Still, it only took about twenty minutes and I had a seat that went up higher than before and shouldn’t randomly collapse on me 🙂
April 1, 2015
Speculations before season five of Game of Thrones
I just finished watching the blu-ray of season 4 and have of course been reading the rumours and such. As I mentioned in a previous post the stuff that Benioff and Weiss are leaving out is a huge clue itself since that can be taken to mean that those plot lines don’t really matter to the culmination of the story (which we assume is the same as planned for the books). Not every character who dies before the end has to die at the same time and place or way but (presumably) every character who survives to play some role in the ending of the story has to live and get there somehow.
Then we have characters who don’t appear to be crucially important but whose story lines have been kept alive in the TV series indicating that they must be after all (although maybe one such story line is a red herring several would be too much).
Sansa Stark
Theon Greyjoy
Brienne
Jorah Mormont
Characters who might die in season five
Brienne of Tarth
Samwell Tarly
Littlefinger
Jorah Mormont
March 27, 2015
March 21, 2015
Doorbell
The old doorbell finally expired so I got a replacement wireless doorbell. One mains powered ringer and one battery powered ringer.
rsync on external drives with OS X sparse bundle images
If you use (encrypted) sparse bundle disk images on Mac OS X and want to be able to keep backups of the images on a different external drive you can use the rsync command to copy/delete only the changed bands making the process very quick.
Assuming you have a sparse bundle disk image called IMAGE at
/Volumes/DRIVE1/images/IMAGE.sparsebundle and you want to back it up to
/Volumes/DRIVE2/backups/IMAGE.sparsebundle
Unmount the images if they are mounted. You will not need the password if the drives are encrypted as the drives are not mounted during the backup.
In the terminal use the following command
rsync -vaE –inplace –delete –progress /Volumes/DRIVE1/images/IMAGE.sparsebundle /Volumes/DRIVE2/backups
editing the command to match your paths and filenames. Note that you do not enter the filename of the destination sparse image, just the folder it is in. (Without trailing ‘/‘). If the destination doesn’t already exist then it will be created but since this involves copying the entire image it will take time. Once the destination image exists only changes are copied across and will be quick.
If the process is interrupted before it completes the destination image may be corrupted. Simply rerunning the command to completion should resolve this.
If you use the hdiutil compact command to free unused space on the source disk image then unused bands will be deleted on the destination image when you sync.
DISCLAIMER. I have successfully used these commands to back up and synchronise several encrypted sparse bundle images between various Firewire and USB3 external drives but if you choose to try this yourself it is your responsibility to ensure that it works correctly for your requirements.