How I bought a hard drive that’s great for backups, but awful for my use case.

I’m surprised at how difficult it is to find good information about hard drive performance. If you can find any performance numbers at all, it’s usually just maximum transfer speed. It turns out that in my case, what I really cared about was something called IOPS. Here, I’ll discuss what IOPS are, when they matter, and how to measure them.

First, some background. I’m working on a project that involves storing and processing a fair amount of data. I do some of the work…

For the impatient, here’s the solution that worked for me:

mkdir ~/cdrom
sudo mount -t cd9660 /dev/disk2s1 ~/cdrom

I found an old CD from 2002 that had some files that I wanted to view. I was hopeful that when I inserted the disk that the drive would mount and the files would show up in Finder. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple.

The drive accepted the old CD, and I could hear some activity, but nothing showed up in Finder. The first thing I did was bring up the Disk Utility to see if the device was recognized at all.

Twitter helps hate groups reach new people, and profits in the process.

Yesterday, while I was writing an article about how Twitter is emailing me white supremacist propaganda, Twitter suggested that “I might like” the Federation for American Immigration Reform. They didn’t do it for free, it was a sponsored suggestion.

If Twitter wants to find the Nazis on their platform, they need look no further than the emails they’ve been sending me.

In November of 2019, I saw the Fred Rogers biopic, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” Full of nostalgia, I created a Twitter account, @mrrogerssays, that I intended to use to tweet out inspirational quotations of Fred Rogers.

I wound up sending only four tweets from the account, including one that said “Hello, neighbor,” before losing interest.

I mostly forgot about the account, but a couple of emails would show up in my Social tab every day to…

This article explains how to use wget to mirror a website that requires authentication by saving the necessary login cookies.

Before we get started, if you’re mirroring a site that doesn’t belong to you, always keep the following in mind, whether you’re using wget or another tool:

1. Always obey the site’s robots.txt file. If they have one, it will be located at www.example.com/robots.txt. wget will respect robots.txt automatically.
2. Read, and adhere to, the site’s terms and conditions. They may forbid crawling.
3. Be respectful. If you’re using wget, use the --wait option to specify a delay between requests so you’re not…

Hopefully this will save someone the frustration that I just went through trying to get wget --mirror --convert-links to function properly. TLDR; it will, when it’s done with the entire site.

wget is one of the common tools used to mirror websites. In my case, I wanted to mirror my website to my laptop, and then browse the content directly from the file system instead of using a web server.

There’s a small problem with browsing web content from a file system, which is that links to assets like images, JavaScript, and CSS will probably be broken. …

This is the process I went through to configure my single G Suite account to handle email for half a dozen different domains.

I manage a number of domains. My primary domain is where I get most of my email. I use G Suite for that. I have several less frequently used domains that I also use to send and receive email, but I don’t use them frequently enough to pay for G Suite for each of them. …

In 2019, I read over 100 books. I’d never read anywhere near that many books in a year before. I used to love reading books, but my attention had gotten so fragmented by technology that I found it difficult to finish even one book. Here are some tips, if you’re interested in reading more books this year.

Use Goodreads

This was one of the keys for me. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Goodreads has a “Reading Challenge” feature that makes it easy to keep track of how many books you’ve read. …