ChrisC

Time Machine

Apple’s Time Machine is a neat little utility to automate onsite backups. However its machinations are, like so many of Apple’s products, completely opaque to the end user using the standard user interface and so troubleshooting can be rather difficult. Fortunately for us, this is one of those circumstances where Terminal commands can come to the rescue.

Our first magic spell is…

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info

This will show logged message from the past and can be useful if you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue that’s already in progress. Run this command and macOS will display the last few weeks of Time Machine logs before exiting

The second magic spell is…

log stream --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info

This command will run – and will remain running until you explicitly exit it – and will display any log messages that Time Machine writes out to the system log.

Photography

Yet another set of photographs moved away from Flickr. This time it’s two sets of shots from Donna Nook Nature Reserve – the first taken in 2016, the second from 2018.

And with that I am now fully migrated from Flickr and I can start looking at the rest of my photography backlog – I have loads of nice images from many enjoyable trips and it seems a shame to leave them hidden away in my Lightroom Library.

Degree Stats

Finally something useful from the Government – the Department of Education now produce a document called ‘The relative labour market returns to different degrees’ or, in layman’s terms, a breakdown of average salaries for graduates after 5 years by general subject area and institution.

It’s certainly something I wish I’d have had access to when I picked my course back in the early 00s.

Raspberry Pi with PCIe

The Raspberry Pi 4 is out! And I’m not going to buy one because A) revision zero is buggered, B) the load this site produces on it’s current 3B+ host is functionally zero (so there’s very little point in upgrading it) and C) I’m currently far too busy to do any pottering around with one outside of that.

However other people have and they’ve started playing around with the new PCIe bus – even going as far as desoldering the USB controller and adding a PCIe riser.

Which is very neat indeed.

A Terrible Mistake

Look what I found in a West Midlands charity shop window…

I think I may have made a terrible mistake when I sold my old games. Who knew that a bunch of fairly mainstream titles would end up being worth so much?

Recent Films

Notes on films I’ve recently watched.

28 Days Later

See here

Contagion

A medical drama with clear roots in The War Game, Threads and The Day After. Well filmed and well cast, it seems to loose confidence in the story it’s trying to tell when it diverges into a Chinese kidnap plot that neither explores the desperation that a village in China might feel or ratchets up the overall tension.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Rubbish! A mish-mash of ideas and themes and – quite possibly – scripts makes this a terrible sequel. The first – though a little wooden in places – understood the concept of the slow reveal and that, while human drama was a traditional element of a Godzilla movie, the drama was always wrapped around the actions of the monsters rather than the other way around.

Oddly enough, I think there was actually the hint of a good idea hidden under the layers of mess. The eco-terrorism angle had potential legs and could have led to a very nice Night Moves-with-giant-monsters concept. Perhaps that’s an idea who’s time has yet to come?

For All Time

194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:54:49 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 47 "-" "bl.uk_lddc_bot/3.3.0-LBS-2016-02 (+http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:02 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1851 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:11 +0100] "GET /assets/main.css HTTP/1.1" 200 9924 "https://www.chrisrcook.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:11 +0100] "GET /resources/images/home.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 382760 "https://www.chrisrcook.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"

This is kinda cool – this site seems to have made it as far as the UK Web Archive’s crawlers! Apparently I will now taint the web long after I’m gone.

There are also a couple of snapshots on Archive.org but they only exist because I was playing with their Wayback Machine website – alas, I have not yet to made it far enough up the list for them to visit of their own accord.

Come Feel the Noise

Oasis covering Slade’s ‘Cum On Feel the Noize”. I think it works rather well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aYGbsg5egc

The Old Ways

“In early versions of the Mouse program, you could enter the call sign of the AP bureau to which you wanted to connect.”

This is a funky little tale of a cub reporter and his TRS-80 back in the early days of computerised journalism.

16 Years Later: An (almost) review of ’28 Days Later’

Sorting through an old box of crap, I accidentally came across my ancient DVD of ‘28 Days Later’.

Ever-happy to put aside something I should actually be doing and procrastinate, I popped it on and spent the next two hours (ish) rewatching a film I’d not seen since I first bought the DVD back in autumn 2003 – some 16 long years ago.