nick peelman

Make a bootable USB Drive from an ISO (On a Mac)

Evan Klitzke posted about The Cult of dd and essentially usurped this entire post.

Especially with the addition of pv into the mix, I am a convert.

Dell’s new XPS 15

For the first time in 10+ years, Dell has made a laptop I want more than a MacBook Pro. twitter.com/DamianEdwards/…

(me)

For starters, this is largely a theoretical exercise, or more like screaming into the void, because I am not in a position personally or professionally to ditch OS X right now.

But this just really makes me even more disappointed with what Apple did with the MacBook Pro in 2016.

Dell has built a better machine, from a technologist standpoint.  It won’t have the fit and finish of a MacBook Pro.  The trackpad will undoubtedly be buggy as hell, and require some weird ass driver that will misbehave constantly in Windows. Windows. Windows. Windows.  Windows. Windows. Windows.

But lets look at rest of the hardware:

• GeForce GTX 1050 Graphics
• 32GB of RAM (for those of us who actually need a “pro” machine)
• SD Card Slot (no dongles for camera users)
• (2) USB 3 A (no dongles for basic needs)
  
• HDMI (no dongles for basic hookups)
  
• Battery Gauge (why in the bloody hell this was removed from Macs is beyond me)
  
• Physical Escape Key
• Inverted-T Arrow Keys
• Function Keys
• The option for a Touch Display
  
• The option for a Thunderbolt 3 Dock

Its far from perfect.  Still nothing that resembles MagSafe.  Still Windows.  Still questionable build quality.  Still undoubtedly lacking the finish of a MacBook Pro.

But as Apple continues to slip further away from what professional needs really are, its going to be harder and harder to live with the compromises they keep forcing us to make.  

And after the fiasco I just went through with my iPhone 6S, my loyalty to Apple continues to become more and more questionable.

Baby Stuff - Part 1: The first two weeks

I have been active on twitter the past couple of months, but I have barely even looked at Tumblr. The reason for that arrived on December 12th. As my wife inched closer to her due date, I was focusing on work and baby prep.

Now that things have calmed down some (we are two weeks in), I wanted to make the almost-obligatory geek post about the cool baby stuff we received and/or found.

Car Seat

Britax B-Safe System

This one won the bid after a lot of research. Britax consistently ranks incredibly high in crash ratings. It is super-easy to install (especially if your vehicle has LATCH points), adjust, and get the kid in and out of. I have my complaints, but they are pretty miniscule. We went with the set after testing out the stroller in the store and my wife giving it her seal of approval. The stroller works with the car seat, then can be used without the car seat as a toddler stroller as well. We might eventually want a different stroller for one reason or another, but I think this one has a lot of miles in store for it.

Accessories

We use several add-ons to the B-Safe that are fantastically handy; here is the current favorite:

• B-Warm an insulated cover. If you are having a newborn in the cold-weather season where you live, this is an amazing cover that beats the crap off off “the blanket thing” you see many people do. We did that for the ride home from the hospital. The blanket and the handle do not get along. The blanket falls in the baby’s face. The blanket blows off if there is a light breeze. The blanket falls on the wet ground. The blanket sucks. The B-Warm attaches to the seat with elastic around the edge. It is zippered on the bottom half, and one top quarter is snapped into place, the other quarter flaps and overlaps, which lets you peek in, and provides ventilation without the aforementioned issues.

Baby Shusher

Forget the white noise machines. Forget the little crappy speaker that is on the pack-n-play. The Baby Shusher is the best thing ever. Like it says on the card inside, If your kid is fed, burped, and has a clean diaper, this thing will help lull them to sleep in no time flat. And if its not working, odds are something else is amiss. Our photographer had one while she was taking our newborn photos and it was so effective I had ordered it before we left the session. We learned the “shushing” method of calming a baby when my wife and I took an infant care class before her nephew was born (”my” nephews on are in high school, so it had been a while since I had done baby-stuff). Then we had it reiterated to us when we were doing pre-partum class stuff. It is very effective, but the Shusher is magic when you finally have to put the now-calm-or-sleeping baby down and need something to help them stay tired and sleepy. I decreed and the wife agreed that we are putting one of these in every baby shower gift we give from now until forever. The only word of caution I have is that it can put you to sleep just as easily as the baby, especially in those first two weeks when everybody is exhausted.

Baby Tracker (the app)

I spent more money than I will ever admit, just testing baby tracking apps. And they all suck. Some suck a little. Some suck a lot. But every bloody one I tried had some fatal flaw, except for Baby Tracker.

Many of them (well, most really) don’t sync. At all. In 2016, that is just unforgiveable. Some sync, but only over iCloud, or a proprietary server. The former means that you and your spouse have to use the same iCloud account. The latter means your baby’s data is in somebody else’s hands (though what somebody would do with a record of diaper timestamps and statuses is beyond me, it still was a put-off).

Baby Tracker syncs over Dropbox via their App API. It sucks a little because you have to use a single account and the app doesn’t use the Dropbox app to authenticate. Its great because I set up a dedicated account solely for the purpose, and Dropbox accounts are still free. So, not great, but tolerable. The syncing is fast, we haven’t had any issues with it since setting it up.

The tracking is insanely helpful for two stressed out parents who are both meticulous in different ways.  Kelly is a doctor (veterinarian) who is used to keeping detailed records. I’m a geek who is used to dealing with data and needs to see trends and graphs in order to spot patterns and make sense of life.  This app scratches oh so many itches for us.  There is no question on when the last dirty diaper was, or how many changes were made on a given day. Or when he ate last and whether it was formula or breastmilk.¹

If you are about to be new parents, give the app a look.  Its worth the 5 bucks and setup time to coordinate the efforts of two parents and not rely purely on memory.

Take care of Mom

If your about to be a dad for the first time, I have but one spot of advice that isn’t (strictly) gadget related: take care of your wife. You probably don’t yet know what she is about to go through.  Look up episiotomy and know that if your wife has one, she is going to need you a lot more in those first days than the kid will. The kid will need her, a lot; you? Just a little.  But she is going to be in a world of pain and hurt for several days.  If the hospital doesn’t send you home with one, next-day ship a donut. Buy a lot of Tucks.  Even if she has zero problems, don’t slouch. If you get a paternity leave, don’t treat it like a vacation. Take a little time for yourself as you can, but your “job” during that time is Her, then the Baby, then the house. In that order.

Don’t be a dick about breastfeeding or not; support her decision to do it or not do it.  You can’t, and it doesn’t matter what you read on the internet.  Its her call, its fucking hard, and there is almost nothing anybody else can do to help her. If she wants to do it, then pick up the slack and help in other ways.  If she doesn’t want to do it, then learn to how mix formula and become a pro at it so you can prep a bottle while she preps the baby (or vice-versa).

By the time our son was 12 hours old, I knew that the best path to being a rockstar dad started with being a rockstar husband those first few days.

That’s it for now

I will make followup posts as we get deeper in this parenting rabbit hole and my geeky self continues to seek out ways to make our kid’s life better and our life a little easier.

¹ Yes, we are supplementing.  Take your Le Leche League Nazi shit someplace else. Please.

Death by a thousand cuts and a couple of gaping wounds

So I have had multiple instances of people complaining to me recently about iOS.

My wife is struggling with Autocorrect and how dumb the corrections are these days. Im corrects to in instead of I’m or I am. Tangential problem is when messages displays an alternative keyboard instead of the primary one when attempting to send a message.

My brother and mother in law are both struggling with space issues. They purchased iCloud space upgrades thinking that would solve their “out of space” issues, because only nerds understand the difference between the space on their phone and the space they “rent” in the cloud. And even that doesn’t make sense given the way Apple markets iCloud storage.

iCloud photos had become a nightmare I can no longer recommend to anybody, because of the way iOS handles (or doesn’t handle) space management. Amazon Photos, combined with Prime, is a much better solution, offloading the pictures to the cloud, making them available on demand with a fixed local cache, and otherwise allowing them to be removed from the phone.

Had Apple not shafted users for the past 3-4 years and made 32GB the default standard, these complaints would be mollified, or at least delayed for a little while.

My brothers phone downloaded iOS 10, despite not having enough space for both the installer and for the installer to run. And when the phone started running out of space, why did the phone not ditch the installer immediately? Because the phone sucks at space management.

But let’s make sure we have shit like iMessage apps.