Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Let Elon Musk Run TSA

    This is rich. One of the Thousands Standing Around who do security theater in airports says that they need a raise. People tend to take our jobs for granted. You’re more likely to hear about long wait times or annoyance about taking off your shoes than you are about the important work we do. What…

  • Raspberry Pi maintenance

    I hadn’t done any system maintenance in quite a while: $ sudo pacman -Syu And when I did, I got this message: error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)rpi4-post-install: /etc/udev/rules.d/99-vcio-rewrite.rules exists in filesystemErrors occurred, no packages were upgraded. Which means (I’m told) Previously we added this file to fix a few issues, but it was…

  • Some Useful Tools

    renamer – rename multiple files at once rnr – likewise anyascii – transliterate non-ascii strings (various implementations including ruby)

  • tidyview

    tidy-viewer (tv) format json into table view N.B. there’s another program (tv-cli) that installs the ‘tv‘ table viewer for json that can wind up in your .cargo/bin – if that happens, then you’ll need to set up aliases or something so you can use the one you want.

  • iMovie files

    Apparently it’s safe to throw away the ‘Render Files’ (and sub-folders) from iMovie projects: Yes, and iMovie can even delete (all) of them for you. Go to iMovie > Preferences and click “Delete” next to Render Files (last item on the bottom for me).

  • CSV from the command line

    There’s a whole bunch of tools out there: miller seems to be the most versitile (that I could install without effort) xsv also looks good. dasel appears to be similar, but I haven’t tried it yet. pspg looks very good. The instructions to install csvtk are out of date (go get instead of go install)…

  • Scatological Humor

    You’ve heard the expression, “poop rolls downhill.” (Perhaps using a different word.) I found out where it winds up. This is the restroom in Death Valley.

  • Psych 4.0 is broken

    That’s what I hear, anyway, that Psych 4.0 quit working. The toolchain I’ve constructed to publish my podcast quit working after a recent upgrade I’ve been trying to get it working. Unfortunately, while I’ve been using ruby since 2001, I’ve never had to figure out how rubygems work. I program for a hobby. It’s not…

  • Unicode on the Mac’s APFS is Insane

    That’s what I hear, anyway. I inherited a bunch of files created on a Mac that have Korean names. On a Mac they look like this: ’13 주문 MIROTIC.m4a’ and ’01 Hook가 HookGA (feat. 화사).m4a’ But on my Linux backup system, they look like this: ’13 주문 MIROTIC.m4a’ and ’01 Hook가 HookGA (feat. 화사).m4a’ .…

  • OpenSSL problem on (older?) Macs

    I had a whole bunch of problems break my podcast all at once, and I’m slowly figuring them out, one by one. One of the problems is keeping both ruby 2.7.4 and 3.0.2 from building: Because I’m the next thing to a Normie, I never discover a new problem. This one has been observed since…

Got any book recommendations?