How to Disable DropboxMacUpdate

Dropbox has added an odious mandatory updater, because of course they have, and aside from dialing home a whole hell of a lot, it masquerades itself in a way that makes Little Snitch (and presumably like tools) go nuts and alert with every outreach. This is probably the beginning of the end for Dropbox, it’s an overtly anti-consumer move, but until we identify the next company willing to subsidize massive online storage with dumb VC cash, there’s this simple fix!

Here’s how to say “no” to DropboxMacUpdate:

Open terminal, and run this simple command:

sudo chmod 000 ~/Library/Dropbox/DropboxMacUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS/DropboxMacUpdate

If prompted, enter your admin password.

The Simpsons Marathon is Coming to FXX: Set your DVRs for these 25 episodes

FXX starts their Simpsons marathon this Thursday, 8/21 at 10am. 25 seasons, 552 episodes. A metric fuckton of Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart, Selma, Patti, Flanders, Kang, Kodos, Dr. Hibert, Sideshow Bob, Krusty, Milhouse, Nelson’s “Ha-Has!” and even Cletus and Brandine. R.I.P. Troy McClure.

Many near the tail end are barely worth watching, but who cares, the first 10 seasons or so were golden. Many will argue the “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” episode jumped the shark but it continued to be great for many years, and even today, an occasional episode does good and doesn’t make you pine for the good ol’ days. (Admittedly rare.)

The Simpsons might be the greatest thing ever put on TV. Conservatives hated it (of course, because they hate everything) and it was considered crude trash by the cultured gentry of yesteryear.

Today, it’s a cultural cornerstone to a whole generation (X?) and the episodes have not only aged well but somehow remain eerily relevant. (See The Cartridge Family.)

Let’s say you’re a happenin’ person with a life and will only have time for 25 episodes. Set your DVRs for these 25 — whether seeing them for the first time or revisiting, they embody what The Simpsons did best: snark, humor, commentary, and cultural criticism. (Too lazy to put them in particular order.)

1. Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire (S1E1!)
2. The Cartridge Family
3. Homer the Great (the Stonecutters episode)
4. City of New York vs. Homer Simpson
5. Homer’s Phobia
6. Marge vs. The Monorail
7. King Size Homer
8. Bart after Dark
9. Lisa the Vegetarian
10. Mr. Plow
11. Two Dozen and One Greyhounds
12. Bart gets an Elephant
13. Homer Badman
14. $pringfield
15. Treehouse of Horror I-X
16. Dog of Death
17. Colonel Homer
18. Bart vs. Australia
19. A Fish Called Selma
20. Itchy & Scratchy Land
21. Marge Be Not Proud
22. One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish
23. Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish
24. The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular
25. Deep Space Homer
26. The Last Temptation of Krusty
27. The Springfield Files

Yeah, a couple bonus episodes, and will likely add more.

Two Days, Two Compromised Introductions

Sony PS4: it seems like it’ll be a nice machine, albeit much less unique than the PS3. Console gaming over the last two decades has been amazing, but we’re in the twilight years. (See Wii U.) Mobile is clearly where the business is going and handheld devices are rivaling in terms of power. Sony also completely hosed the intro by holding journos hostage for 140 minutes then offering no price, pictures, or dates. But we did get to see a new DualShock…. so, there’s that.

Google Chromebook Pixel: Not completely sure why this thing exists, other than because it can. It’s gunning for the MacBook Pro, in a way that threatens Apple sales exactly zero.

1. The non-LTE version is a bit of a mystery as Google’s cloud-based Chrome OS depends on, you know, the cloud and thus internet connectivity.
2. It costs entirely too much. A 13″ Retina MacBook Pro is only $50 more.
3. Being a “hybrid” it does neither tablet nor notebook well. It’s too bulky to hold for any extended period of time and the smaller screen and keyboard don’t lend itself well to extended work sessions. Having an i5, battery life is disappointing. A clear compromise that satisfies exactly what?

Rather amazing Google is seldom penalized on the stock market for clear missteps of which I think this probably one. It’s up 13% in the last month. Anyone remember the Nexus Q?

iTunes 11 now lets you know why you should “Encrypt iPhone backup”

Bugged me for years. iTunes has always allowed you to encrypt your iPhone backup done through iTunes but it never had explanatory text that this was the only way to keep passwords stored with the backup. Otherwise you’d be re-entering passwords like mad after a restore. All of them. Wi-fi, screen lock, mail, etc. etc.

In iTunes 11:

Finally! 🙂

Massive #FAIL: Gawker is still down.

So Gawker and it’s family of sites (Jalopnik, Jezebel, io9, Lifehacker, etc) has been down since Monday. This is a site that does between 30-40MM uniques a month. They’ve since shifted to a bunch of tumblr blogs and I even saw a former Gawker writer praise them for monetizing their new tumblr existence with State Farm ads. This is all sorts of crazy and more importantly, it just didn’t need to happen.

(Disclaimer: I don’t work for Gawker, never have had any involvement with them, and have only been following this with some interest because it was so avoidable. Some of my clients were in the direct path of Sandy and while we didn’t experience any downtime, we were prepared.)

Apparently they’re hosted in a data center in downtown Manhattan, which still lacks power, the lower floors flooded, and their pipes might even be cut. BuzzFeed, HuffPo and even Fog Creek all experienced some amount of outage as well, yet it was brief.

Rather obviously, Gawker lacks failover. I’m sure some sort of local redundancy exists, multiple webservers, dB boxes and the like. Maybe even switches. These are more likely in place for load reasons than redundancy given that they’re still down today.

Now, Gawker was hacked back in 2010 which resulted in the release of their source code and database. I’ve not looked at it personally (nor should you ever admit to doing so) but I’ve seen some analysis and it’s a fairly straight-forward set up of PHP and MySQL. This provides some valuable insight. There’s no one-of-a-kind appliances or ornate setups in the mix. It’s basically code + dB, like most sites.

There’s a million mitigation strategies one could use to allow geographic failover without any downtime or data loss. Database clusters, for example. I won’t go into those details here. I’d argue a site as large as Gawker should be using them, but they do increase hosting costs (obviously) but that’d be marginal for the cash-cow that is Gawker. But of course such a plan wasn’t in place. I think it’s rather obvious they didn’t have a fucking clue as even what to do given the days of warnings about what was to happen. The news didn’t overplay this one.

What they should of done (and this is the “they didn’t prepare shit until the skies went grey out the window” scenario):

• When the shit started getting real, put the site into real-only mode.
• Dump the DB and anything else associated that might be user/editor-generated content. (Images, for example.)
• Move the critical data off-site into something safer, say S3.
• Have EC2 instances (or similar) ready to become your backup webservers and databases boxes. This costs almost nothing if they’re not actively running. They’re simply sitting around as AMIs ready to be launched. (And considering we’re 5 days out, they could of even started from scratch and accomplished this on Monday night.)
• I believe most of the data centers warned when they were about to go caput, given their generators were flooding. Spin up your backup instances now. (Better yet, move to them before the inevitable happens as everything below 39th is rapidly becoming part of the east river.)
• Bring your code up to date by pulling from your code repository or using the backup from your primary boxes.
• Load in the latest dB snapshot.
• Change IPs to point to the new site.
• Resume Lohan updates and snark funnel.

So shall we call it incompetence? Probably. That’s completely fair 5 days out. That didn’t bother State Farm apparently but I’d guess advertisers and even employees are wondering why they deal with a place that treats their core product with such lax concern.

Remember Josh Barro is a conservative

Sane gay Republicans?

Nixeus 27″ S-IPS 2560 x 1440 pixel WQHD Monitor (Same panel as Apple Thunderbolt display for $430)

I’m on day two with one of these cheap ($430) Korean monitors which feature a LG S-IPS panel inside a less-than-Apple package. Expect updates to these initial impressions.

TL;DR: It’s an awesome monitor. A little annoyance makes up for the savings.

This Nixeus (“Nexus” with an extra vowel? who knows) features the same LG S-IPS panel found in the Apple Thunderbolt display. Allegedly. Not sure how to verify without pulling the thing apart, but my eyes tell me it’s a high-quality display.

I won’t go into why you might want a quality display. If you’re serious about color and accuracy and have a relatively unlimited budget you’re already ignoring this on your EIZO monitor.

So a quick comparo to the Apple Thunderbolt Display:

What it does have:

• It’s $570 cheaper
• LG S-IPS panel
• 8-bit color
• DVI / DisplayPort / HDMI 1.4
• Portrait tilting
• Screws that you need to use to assemble the base to the monitor and finally to the stand. It’s a bit flimsy.

What it doesn’t have:

• Thunderbolt
• The ability to charge your MacBook
• Clean, fancy Apple packaging
• Accurate color out of the box. You will struggle a bit with this.

A great example of what Apple would never allow: the bezel and screen were protected by sticky plastic wrap, a good thing as it protects the shiny bits during shipping. However, the plastic was applied before final assembly meaning when you peal it off bits were stuck behind the bezel and required some surgical precision to remove. Not fatal, but annoying and tedious.

These monitors have just entered the US on official channels so there’s a bit of a rush on them. Right now, I can’t find them for much under $500 and delivery dates seem a bit hinky.

Here’s where you can grab them with defined delivery dates.

Selling: Canon EF 16-35mm F/2.8 L USM Lens

Tried to sell this through eBay but of course it’s nothing but a hive of scum and villainy over there and my winning bidder was bogus.

Here’s my “winning bidder” backing out:

In text form:

ebay name: abogloye, email: v_7777@hotmail, “listed” address:

Hello
Really shocked when he came Email benefit of winning a commodity
Where I did not enter any auctions and the reason
The use of children and tampering with my computer
You apologized strongly and I hope the withdrawal of Bid that have not done
With all appreciation

eBay never changes. Of course my options to report this loser are nil until after 4 days of trying to “collect payment” which will never come. Some will tell me it’s my responsibility to stay on top of the auction and cancel bogus bidders (0 feedback) and what not but eBay has never made any serious efforts to clean up the sea of fuckery that flows over it on a daily basis. They ran the numbers and it just didn’t jive.

Remember when former eBay CEO Meg Whitman ran for Governor of California? That was fun. Now she’s slashing and burning Hewlett-Packard in an attempt to eek out a few quarters of shareholder profit before she throws a once great company into the dustbin of history. We should be thankful she didn’t get ahold of the state.

I digressed.

If you want a great, barely used, fantastically beautiful Canon L lens shoot me a note. It’s fairly unmolested, I tend to keep longer zooms attached to my camera and it’s just not seen much use.

Date code  UU0717. (That means it was built in 2006)

Some thoughts on the Nexus 7

In no particular order:

• At $200, it’s a steal.
• On a 8GB model, you get about 5 1/2 of “free” space left when you receive the device.
• Out of the box, it’s tightly integrated with Google’s services and Google Play. You have no obligation to use them.
• If you have a problem with the big Goog, remember they loose money every time you buy one. (More so on the 16GB model, the price difference between the 16GB and 32GB in raw parts is only ~$5)
• Do not expect iPad Retina crispness, but the display is bright, vibrant and holds up well in bright ambient sunlight. (I’ve not tested in direct sunlight, tablets don’t tend to like that as they quickly absorb heat anyway.)
• Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” is the best yet.
• Scrolling/swiping still doesn’t come close to iOS’s buttery smoothness. I’m not sure why Android can’t get this right.
• The mix of a “welcome” screen (when you first swipe to unlock), various widget pages and navigation to get to apps will still confuse the uninitiated. Not so much that people won’t find what they’re looking for, but there will be many who only know “Oh, I unlock, then I this screen (that I don’t want) and then click this button to get to my stuff.”
• Almost nothing orients to portrait. Some apps force it for necessity, such as Netflix.
• Annoyance: The soft keyboard does not pop in all cases when text input is expected.
• Annoyance: If I sleep the device, then click it back on, it doesn’t return to the app I was in but rather Google’s “cards,” which while neat, I would really like to turn off save a home screen widget.