Backblaze Could Not Create a Read-writable '.bzvol' Directory on That Hard Drive.

I fabricated the pilgrimage to B&H. Don't want to leave! @jack @alexjj

I don't understand how to apply blocks vs. pages vs. documents in Arts and crafts. I may just need to use information technology more, merely right now it's not clicking, and is making Roam and org-roam look simpler in comparison. Will proceed trying, though!

Well, thanks a lot @jack - At present I've opened the Pandora's box of Craft. ;)

I'm l and have been typing "incorrectly" for 38 years, always since I got a TI-99/4a computer. All this time I've been using nine of my ten fingers. When I pay attending, I tin can go up to around 65 WPM. Is it worth learning to touch-blazon at present?

Wow, @jack – I can't believe I waited this long to get a fountain pen! Bought a reddish Lamy Safari (and a Rhodia Reverse Book) today and I beloved it. Thank you lot for the button. 😊

A Palm Zire 72 time-capsule has lessons for today

I dug my 2004-era Palm Zire 72 out of a drawer the other mean solar day for the offset time in years. I thought I'd lost all the information on it until I remembered that I ever used to back it up to the SD card which was still sitting in it. I restored the entire contents from that carte du jour and everything came back within a few minutes. DateBk5 agenda and to-do data, months of DayNotez journal entries, Pocket Quicken ledgers, blurry 1.2-megapixel photos, and all the varied other projection plans and shopping lists that lived in the stock apps and databases. So many tasks that never got washed. It was a complete snapshot of where I put the bulk of my day-to-24-hour interval data for a couple of years.

I noticed that the congenital-in global search in Palm Os works way, manner amend than the one on iOS. The Palm having much less data to sift through is probably an advantage here, but it's still much faster and more elegant at surfacing what matches the matter you're looking for and its context, and then taking you lot through a worm-hole directly to the tape you tapped on.

As I paged through DayNotez and the cute footling post-it annotation icons that meant "more details here" in and so many stock apps, I saw names of people I'd since forgotten. I wished I'd written more than periodical entries. I wished I'd made more art and worked on more music projects. And for all the fixating I do on note-taking now, for the first fourth dimension I did not wish I had taken more than notes back so on things similar trivia, politics, media, news, quotes, apps, etc.

Now this looks fun, and an excuse to buy a not-that-expensive photograph printer:

The Shoebox Project — laROQUE

Why do it myself instead of using a printing service? That paper, for one. I've never constitute a unmarried shop that offers paper I similar for small prints. Merely also because, as I said earlier, for me, the joy comes from creating these, slowly, on my own fourth dimension. It feels like craftwork and connects me to the printed images.

Thank you to @tgray for sharing his presets and knowledge most how to make photos from the Ricoh GR look even more astonishing in Lightroom. The camera arrived yesterday and information technology is definitely the correct one for me.

Ane matter I don't know how to accost in Johnny.Decimal: Where to put things along the spectrum of widely available/low security <—> reduced access/high security. Oh, and also the small chapters <—> large capacity continuum. Like, I accept a small pile of non-sensitive random files in Google Drive that are mostly in that location to share with people, a bunch more less-random stuff in Dropbox that stays in that location because it'south easy to sync with and edit on mobile and I pay for lots of space, and a ton of more than sensitive documents just on my MacBook and an external drive where I accept gobs of space and certain tools merely available on the laptop. I don't think I'm supposed to duplicate all of the aforementioned folders across all these storage platforms, just I guess whatsoever categories + IDs that practice make it to those platforms are supposed to stay consistent, even if the platforms hold different pieces of the entire J.D universe of files?

To retrieve nearly something other than the news for a infinitesimal, this thread from The Museum of English Rural Life is delightful and right upwardly some Grand.b-ers' alley: twitter.com/TheMERL/due south…

This looks like loads of fun. Just wish I had seen it a few days ago!

Alan Roe'due south Guide to 2020 Holiday Broadcasts on Shortwave (Version 5 Final) | The SWLing Post

Ok FINE. I'll pronounce it "soo-doo", since the dude that invented it (Bob Coggeshall) says information technology that way. youtu.be/LaAwl3HN5…

Using iOS Shortcuts to horizontally combine photos

Sometimes today's notes in the Field Notes bullet journal are split beyond pages and it takes more than one shot to get them in the iPhone. Depending on where the twenty-four hour period starts and ends on whichever paper pages, I might end up with two foursquare images to capture the twenty-four hour period's scribbles. I'd rather run across those in Roam side-by-side instead of as images stacked on top of each other. I made a Combine Images Horizontally iOS Shortcut to accept one or more selected images in the Photos app, combine them horizontally, save them every bit a new photo, and so go to the most recent photos in the camera gyre to get out of the "image selection" style. Here's what it looks like:

I'd love a periodical app with congenital-in limitations on the number of lines per day, the way Tot is limited in its total number of notes. Requite me 10–12 lines/mean solar day and I'll fit all the "this happened today" bullets in. Roam is nifty for notes, but it gives me about too much freedom.

An email to Andrew about Roam
My friend Andrew emailed me the other day to ask how I was liking Roam Research now that I've gone all-in on it. It turns out, I had some thoughts. :) He gave me permission to share my lengthy reply to him. It helped me call back through some stuff, and I hope it'southward useful to others!

Hi Andrew! Showtime of all, cheers for taking the time to wade through my Roam! Yes, I simply scrolled through the past few days of my stuff and it does plough out to be quite a lot. I should write a proper blog mail service about where all the content originates. A lot of it—probably more than half—starts in Drafts on my phone. Each morning, I commencement a yyyy-mm-dd daily notes draft in Drafts and that's where I lob links and quotes and random thoughts in Markdown format. (I never add stuff to Roam on the telephone. I may exist superstitious, but I think that's asking for syncing trouble.) I paste that Daily Notes draft into Roam once or twice each day on my MacBook and clean up formatting and add wiki links where they're needed. The remainder of the notes I just write straight in Roam while thinking out loud when I'thou processing that stuff or grabbing a few extra links from Safari.
I was on org-roam (in Doom Emacs) for a nice trivial flake, and it'south still just amazing and I miss the tactility of it, simply the mental overhead with Emacs was too great. Org-roam was the all-time at dealing with filenames and aliases, though. It's so smart almost removing the worry near filesystem-condom characters, and its method of item aliasing makes it and then easy to refer to i thing by many names.

Then I went with Obsidian for a long fourth dimension for a few reasons:
- There was zero "how do I use this" overhead with information technology compared to Emacs + org-roam. It's just a Markdown editor, and Markdown is in my bones. I kept having to wrestle with org-style formatting to make stuff readable.
- There was a time a few months agone when Roam kept losing peoples' data and I'd hear horror story later horror story virtually it. I recall they've upgraded their infrastructure enough now that I don't encounter that happen anymore. At to the lowest degree I don't think it's bitten me yet.
- I really wanted to continue my files local, partially because I'm old and I nonetheless retrieve in files and folders, and also because I thought that having them all in Dropbox would be the merely way I'd be able to reliably search and access them from my phone. I likewise thought I'd edit them on my telephone more often (which I haven't felt the need to practise, actually). And in that location'south the geek factor of existence able to practise a Spotlight search on the Mac that pulls up whatsoever files stored on it.
- I however prefer how Obsidian properly handles Markdown blockquotes. That kept me in Obsidian probably more than anything. I don't know why Roam doesn't obey the > character and treat it like a blockquote like every other Markdown-based app in the globe.
What finally pushed me over the edge and back to Roam was that:
- They seemed to have fixed the data syncing problems.
- Jack jumped back in 1000%.
- I fifty-fifty heard David Sparks of Mac Power Users getting excited about it.
- The Roam owners increased their staff (I guess because they got that circular of VC funding) and felt like the service was robust enough to charge for it. I really dearest paying for things I apply at lot, so that made it feel like it wasn't going anywhere.
- The more I saw new people bound on the bandwagon, the more I just felt like I was missing out.
Also, that button from Jack and Kevin on Micro.blog to make a public Roam DB helped. :)

At present that I'm back in it, here's what I think:
- Having to recollect well-nigh what to name a file about a note sucks. With Roam, I don't fifty-fifty accept to create "pages". Every bullet is addressable and if you focus on a item bullet, it acts like a page anyhow.
- Obsidian does a calorie-free version of transclusion/embedding, but it's nowhere near equally adept or seamless every bit Roam's.
- Roam's automatic backlinks are only the best. So nicely presented and easy to jump dorsum and forth with.
Roam is so skilful at everything else that I don't care that information technology'south stored in the cloud, I don't care that much anymore nigh the blockquotes, and I can alive with how it isn't good at aliases at all. Once I really started using it for everything, I merely got addicted to the lack of friction. I don't create many "pages" anymore. I merely add stuff to Daily Notes and nest it under whatsoever page-like tag, or add a hashtag to the end. It makes Obsidian experience primitive and information technology makes my dear TiddlyWiki feel impuissant (where yous have to worry about opening and closing tiddlers and making certain you don't lose a draft of a tiddler).

Roam is even practiced enough that I have a whole separate individual database that everything goes into start. 95% of what'southward in there ends upwardly copied to the public database, merely because it's all Roam, I don't accept to reformat annihilation to get information technology from individual to public.

I'm still brand new to Readwise, and so I'thousand figuring it out every bit I go and oasis't pasted those pages into the public DB. I like what I've seen other people employ it for, though.

The biggest things that make me believe that Roam is the right app for me now are:
1. I never retrieve most using anything else.
2. I never recollect well-nigh the $15 USD/calendar month. It's worth it.
I'll admit that when the Roam dudes were tossing around the idea of charging $thirty/mo for it, I was seriously doubtful that I'd hang in there for that. I still don't know if I'd be using it if it were that expensive. When they appear $xv/mo, our cadger brains were so collectively relieved that that seemed similar a bargain in comparison.

I suspected for a while that I'd probably end up back in Roam anyway, and I also knew that I couldn't think my way through it without trying it again. And here I am!

I wish my wife and I could become to the library once more and just hang out and browse and read, without masks or worry.

When calculation a new bulldoze to Backblaze in Mojave, you may demand to revoke and re-grant Full Disk Admission

While trying to add the new Samsung T5 SSD (formatted with APFS) to the Backblaze Backup preference pane on macOS Mojave, I got this fault message:

Backblaze could not create a read-writable '.bzvol' directory on that hard drive.

Permissions on that bulldoze are 774, and for that .bzvol folder they're 777. Also, the drive is prepare to "Ignore ownership on this volume" anyhow, so I didn't call up information technology was permissions.

Hmm. A Backblaze rep answered a Reddit question and their answer had all kinds of terrible-looking workarounds that I didn't want to try withal. But this responder had the same symptom I have:

I have this verbal same circumstance. Claims it can't create it, but when I examine the disk there is a folder named .bzvol present with permissions set to 777 owned by me. I should note that the drive does have the Ignore ownership on this volume prepare (which macOS seems to exercise past default when you init a new drive or partition). Perhaps that'due south the trouble?

Your External Bulldoze Is No Longer Backed Up – Backblaze
Zippo helpful in that location.

ERROR: Backblaze could not create a read-writable '.bzvol' directory on that difficult drive – Backblaze Assistance
That page was from 2015, and I'd already done some work on files moved to the drive, so I wasn't going to change it to HFS+. Plus, you lot're supposed to apply APFS on SSDs anyway.

Allowing Backblaze to Back Up External Drives - MacOS Catalina – Backblaze Help
Well, I'm non on Catalina however, and I didn't see a bzbmenu app or preference pane to give access to.

Merely I did of class see Backblaze in the Security & Privacy window with Full Disk Admission already:

So I wondered what would happen if I removed Backblaze from the list, locked the preference pane, unlocked the preference pane, re-added Backblaze, and locked the preference pane once more.

I did all that and went back into the Backblaze Backup preference pane > Settings > Select Hard Drives to Backup, clicked the new SSD drive, and it worked.

How do normal people bargain with this?

For me, turntables are the Emacs of sound: effort + research to empathize what at first looks uncomplicated, endless tweaking, lots of variables and settings, inefficient, crave transmission work, glorious in one case they're tuned, easy to obsess virtually, and more fun than any other similar tool.

Keychron K2 keyboard
V days into the Keychron K2 and here'southward what I call up. Information technology'south definitely a good "starter" keyboard for someone who has only used membrane keyboards, or final used a mechanical 30 years ago (me).

The skillful:
- It's very squeamish looking, and I got the white LED version with the plastic instance and ABS keys.
- The orange ESC fundamental is beautiful, but just when the LEDs are off. (When they're on, you can see how thin the keycaps are because the light shines through the orange.)
- The Windows/MacOS switch is so, and then handy.
- It does Bluetooth which is great for hooking information technology to a phone or iPad, but I hardly ever use that. When it's connected to a PC or Mac, I use the USB cable because I don't want to worry virtually whatsoever latency.
- The Gateron Dark-brown switches are squeamish. I don't know how shut they are to Blood-red MX Brown switches. The Browns take very subtle tactility. Whatsoever more subtle and they would experience linear.
- The instance doesn't flex even though it's plastic.
- It's $75!
The not and so good:
- Non programmable. (But information technology'due south $75!)
- The bottoming-out is loud and not for me.
- Every bit mentioned higher up, the keycaps are very thin, which is apparent when you pull one off and plow information technology over.
- I'grand pretty sure the keycaps are (shudder) painted. One of the priorities of my life is to have as petty painted plastic effectually as possible. To have it on something I'm typing on all day is gross, even if the pigment is kind of nice paint.
- The case is loftier enough that information technology volition savage your wrists if you don't use a wrist rest.
- All the wasted space in the instance is like a tiny cavern for the bottoming-out to reverberate in.
- A few keys are squeaky and I can feel them scraping the switch housing when pressed (e.g. Backspace). But I don't believe these are meant to be lubed past the customer, so I'yard not going there.
- The right column of Page Up, Page Downwards, Home, and End is in a weird order and I can't get used to it. I don't really accept a choice, though.
- The Delete key is in a weird spot.
Tweaks:
- I added clear o-rings to all the keys except Return, Backspace, and the Shift keys. All the ones with stabilizers I left equally-is (except for Space) considering I didn't want to make them experience mushier. For all the no-stabilizer keys, the o-rings actually help, just you lot can't just slap them on there and expect the keyboard to feel ok. You have to utilize the keycap puller tool and printing the o-band effectually the stem all the way down, and then press the key firmly back onto the lath when the ring is seated. If you don't do this, the keys will feel inconsistent relative to each other. And because the bottoming-out is still a little bit loud, I ordered two more sets of different o-rings today (WASD red and blueish) to see how they practice. I'd exist ok with giving upward a fraction of space in travel for quieter keys. UPDATE: The WASD reds are corking (haven't gotten the blues however) and an improvement on the articulate no-proper noun ones. As well, just printing them onto the finish of the stem (don't push them all the style down like I wrote earlier) and so button each keycap firmly down to seat the o-ring. If you press the o-rings all the way down on the stem they don't work as well.
- I opened the case up and stuck two to three layers of scraps from a yoga mat and a rubber shelf liner in all the voids (with more layers towards the back where the case is higher), beingness conscientious to leave space on the left for the switches, USB-C port, and what looks like a small electrolytic capacitor jutting down. This improves the keyboard massively, making it a little heavier, more than solid, and much quieter and more than expensive-sounding.
- The Keychron wrist residuum (sold separately) is solid wood and the perfect height and width for the keyboard, merely at least in our humid summertime, it warps enough that it becomes a tiny bit convex and the left and right safe pads/feet don't sit apartment on the desk. Subsequently about 3 minutes of utilise, I learned how much I lean the ball of my left hand on the wrist residue, considering the right side kept popping up when I would move to take hold of the mouse. That's a bargain-killer. I stock-still that by cutting some 5mm strips from an quondam neoprene mouse pad and sticking them to the bottom of the wood with the agglutinative from a record runner. The mouse pad pieces are simply a pilus thicker than the OEM rubber anxiety pads, then now it doesn't move at all, e'er. Information technology's such a pleasure to not have information technology knocking around all the time.
- I'm very excited about the PBT keycaps I ordered today. They're opaque, so that's a little deplorable, and they accept no multimedia legends on them, but they look thick and non painted and the colors are fantastic. Supposedly they'll audio unlike/quieter.
I know I could avoid a lot of these tweaks by just getting a Happy Hacking Keyboard or a Leopold FC660C, but the onetime has no arrow keys, and the latter is e'er out of stock. And to scratch the crawling of needing one.) a new toy to play with and 2.) stuff to research and obsess over, the K2 is doing the job well!

When your MacBook Roon endpoint shows up as a green dot

This post is for Kevin on Micro.blog, who is having issues where his MacBook endpoint in Roon shows upward as a green dot.

This Roon folio well-nigh betoken paths explains what the green dot means:

While the Mac software mixer does not do annihilation too gross, information technology might be performing software-based volume adjustments or sample charge per unit conversion before playing the sound. As such, we can't guarantee that the output quality is lossless, so nosotros label information technology equally "High Quality".

So, it might be lossless or it might not. Roon can't exist sure. The solution is in this Roon community postal service: Os mixer problem with new Mac mini

You accept used System Output rather than Congenital-In Output under Settings > Sound.

To fix it, disable the "System Output" device on your Mac in your Roon settings (under "Settings > Audio" as the mail service describes). You want to enable the "Built-in Output" (which I renamed to "MacBook Built-in Output" in my Roon settings).

And so in the Device Setup for that output, be sure to set up Exclusive Style to Yeah.

Now when you lot use your new "Built-in Output" device to play music, yous should see purple (lossless) all the way.

Last weekend we were cleaning out and rearranging. I collected all the journals I could observe and managed to fit every i in that blue tub. I love that these are all sprawled out on the kitchen floor in this decidedly unsexy, un-minimal photo. What a glorious mess!

I can't believe I didn't care most seeing "Hamilton" sooner. I watched information technology (for the showtime fourth dimension) forth with the rest of the world on Disney+ on Friday night. I didn't expect historical accurateness or the full context of everything else going on at the time, so I'grand ok with it existence an incomplete pic of Hamilton'due south virtues and flaws, and a rosy, shallow pic of the American Revolution. But as an artistic feat of vision, acting, singing, craft, composition, lyrics, dance, and set pattern, it'southward utterly perfect. Overwhelming, fifty-fifty. I just don't know enough near theatre to have any idea of how all those facets of a production can come together so perfectly and in the right sequence to pull off a testify like this, only watching it gave me a sense of what's it'south like to experience a bunch of Broadway luminaries at the height of their powers. Wow!

Well, that'south done! @canion

As long equally I've been on here, I'g yet delighted every fourth dimension I brand it far enough in the timeline to go to the "Evidence More than" push button, and I call up information technology's up to me whether I keep going.

I demand to remember this: Fifty-fifty though I'm not what we regard as an essential worker, I can still try to exercise my job in a way that makes it as essential as possible.