2020 wasn’t meant to be this way. I have distinct memories of working in government when up-beat policy visions with ambitious names like Towards 2020 and 2020: A Forecast of our Future were being pumped out1. These reports all had a commonality in that 2020 was guaranteed to be great! As long as we did whatever the document was promoting, from its publish date to 2020, things would be brilliant.
We must have failed miserably because 2020 is a shit show. On this I think we can all agree.
It is within this environment, that today I celebrate(?) my 43rd birthday. Honestly though, I’m happy enough to simply celebrate being alive. There have been more worthy souls than I that have had the fortune that I’ve experienced to avoid the range of ways that 2020 is trying to rain death upon us.
Actually, that’s unfair to a poor defenceless year. 2020 has nothing against us specifically. Rather we are the architects of our own doom. Whether it be through improper health controls allowing coronavirus to gain a foothold in China, or countries demonstrating a lack of leadership and coordination to corral a community towards effective COVID-19 transmission prevention, or racist hatred leading to people being killed for the skin they’re born with, we have created this 2020. This is our reality - not the one that was promoted in the glossy policy brochures in 2003.
And I haven’t even mentioned climate change. That doozy is still out there and I don’t see our humanity rising to face that challenge in a coordinated way anytime soon. The worst is yet to come.
A good thing about the past year has been that I have figured out who I am. No more am I self-conscious about the person I am or the way I think and perceive the world. I’m sure this realisation comes to others sooner but for me it has been this 42nd year that has provided me with the answers to my own universe2. This discovery has unlocked confidence in my approach to the world around me. I’ve overcome most vestiges of introversion shyness (except phone calls, I still hate them). Now at 43 years old I feel fully-formed with the confidence to deal with and respond to things I understand, the wisdom to learn about things I don’t, and the confidence to defer to experts without fear of appearing incompetent.
In turning 43 it’s not about me anymore. More importantly I’ve got two kids - aged 8 and 4 - and they are growing into a world that needs changing. I’ve been unsuccessful in making that change happen. Life is a lottery and I didn’t win the “become a leader of a country” prize. Look at who did and it appears obvious that it often relies on luck ahead of competence, intelligence or desire.
So this final statement I address to my children, and all the others in generations younger than my own. I wish that when you reach your own 43rd birthdays that you have the opportunity to look over the history of your own lives and the society you’re in that you can see positive world change.
Just remember that as you’re working on all of your Towards 2050 vision statements, that it doesn’t mean shit if you don’t take the hard steps towards enacting the change. Learn from us.
Does micro.blog support footnotes? I’ve drafted a post and they don’t seem to work? cc: @help
A public thank you to @manton for creating micro.blog. This service allows me to easily activate my creativity whether it be written word, photography, video or audio. All wrapped up around a social fabric. I love it.
Once you have the theme, you can start prompting just by hitting the ‘s’ key in a Marked preview. That will start autoscroll at the slowest speed. Use left and right arrows to speed up/slow down the scroll speed. (You can also click and drag on the meter that appears in the lower left of the screen.) That’s all there is to it.
So this is amazing. Love it.
I don’t needHindenburg Journalist PRO but I want it. For my hobbyist needs though, price puts me right off.
I am joined by special guest Joe, host of the NBL Pocket Podcast. We talk about Joe’s experience making the podcast that is focused on the Australian National Basketball League.
We discuss favourite players and coaches, his best interviews, the NBL product today, and how the league engages with its fan base.
We also consider what makes for a quality NBL TV experience.
This is me.
I signed on as a Patreon of The Unmade Podcast. As I disassociate from big social media I recognise that direct financial relationships between creators and their audience is the best model.
Racing cars.
I had to visit the dentist today because of a sore gum. Anaesthetic injection and some digging around saw the job done. Now it hurts more than when I went in!
It was brilliant to be welcomed as a guest by @martinfeld on his Lounge Ruminator podcast. We dived into our respective histories of computing. So much fun. feldnotes.com
I feel sad for my American friends, who are experiencing so many civic challenges. Change the leader; change the country.
The latest Lounge Ruminator podcast by @martinfeld is a good one. I agree that being still does result in strange looks from others.
My son David’s eyes lit up when he heard his own voice introduce this podcast. I’m proud to be a patr(e)on of the Like You: Mindfulness for Kids podcast.
The developers of Civilization 6 - and specifically Aspyr who are responsible for the Mac port - have cost me time and money, but have provided me with a sense of satisfaction from being able to complete a new IT project.
The latest update to the Civ franchise was deployed to the PC version of the game but not macOS (or Linux). As a result when I tried to play an online game with my friends, no dice. The two versions are now incompatible with one another. Aspyr has said nothing about an ETA for a Mac update.
Proof of Concept
I enjoy playing online games with my friends. I enjoy it enough that I was willing to use Boot Camp on my iMac to create a native Windows partition. Boot Camp is annoying in that it only works with internal drives. This had me kicking myself that I saved myself some money when I customised my iMac build - selecting just a 256Gb internal SSD. Ah, hindsight. I definitely should have paid the excessive money for the bigger drive.
Anyway, I pared down my files, offloading some to my ThunderBay RAID enclosure, and deleting some others so I had enough to create a Windows partition. The Boot Camp system worked well enough, and I was able to install Steam on it, then the PC version of Civ and have a good gaming night with my friends.
External and Better
In the cold light of the next day, though, I knew this was an unsustainable solution. By partitioning my internal SSD I had two Operating Systems neither of which had enough breathing space on their respective drives to be happy.
For the past eight days or so, I’ve been using my iMac booted into Windows 10 in the Boot Camp installation I managed to perform on an external SSD.
Hang on. That’s what I want to do. How did he do it? I fired off a tweet:
@morrick In relation to your latest blog, how did you install Boot Camp Windows on an external drive? I was battling with this issue yesterday, and was forced to partition my too small internal SSD. If there’s a guide you used, I’d appreciate a link. Thanks!
It’s a bit of a convoluted process I suggest not to carry out in a hurry. In this post I talk about the guide I followed, with several annotations of my own. I hope it helps: https://t.co/xRh4c6erU8
Note that he provided a link to a previous article of his that provides insight into how to fool Boot Camp into thinking it’s installing to an internal drive, when it’s actually an external SSD in use.
I trucked off to my local Officeworks store and bought myself a 500Gb USB-C connected SSD drive.
I followed along with the steps outlined by Riccardo and the other source material - a slightly out-of-date article written by OWC (incidentally the manufacturers of my aforementioned ThunderBay drive array).
You’re Not Successful Yet, Mate
Things went well, until they didn’t. I was on the home stretch as Windows was doing the first part of the install onto the SSD. I forgot the next step though - which was to stop the installation at its reboot point (part of the ‘fooling BootCamp’ process). I realised too late, and so I had to quit the installation and start over.
That created a new problem. The SSD now had a number of NTFS partitions on it, but macOS apparently cannot reinitialise a drive with a very small boot partition such as the one that Windows 10 puts on the drive. Turns out the resolution, as is often the case, is found from the command line. I give credit to Priyank Sharma for detailing precisely how to eliminate this partition problem and get the drive back to a point where I could start over by reinitialising it. Before finding his post, I was worried I had turned my new SSD drive into a small and inelegant paperweight.
Drive restored, I started over, this time remembering to follow all the steps.
Success, With Thanks to the Open Web
I now have an iMac that has its full 256Gb internal SSD to itself for macOS, and a 500Gb external SSD with Windows 10 - what I can now refer to as my ‘gaming rig’.
The thing that amazes me is that USB-C appears essentially fast enough to facilitate an operating system’s data throughput requirements.
It’s also so great that people document their experiences on blogs across the internet. Without the three articles I have referenced, none of this would have happened. This is what the open web is all about, and why it is so much better than Facebook, et al.
The last step in this process is to now wait for a time when my friends want to play Civ again. Come on guys, I’m ready!
