For many years I have used a retired (2006) iMac as a headless file server, iTunes music server, and Time Machine backups server. As more recent versions of OS X have dropped support for this line of iMacs (10.7.5 being the upper limit because the EFI is 32-bit; it also can't support Open CL), I chose this weekend to replace it with a 2012 Macbook Air with a broken screen.  

I ran into trouble when I switched the selected Time Machine volume on the three clients, getting the dreaded "<machine>.sparsebundle is already in use" error with the asinine  "try ejecting the server" recommendation. The volumes seemed to be mounting and unmounting normally and the clients had the appropriate credentials. The one thing that didn't look right was that the listed owner for the individual backups in the Time Machine server interface was "Unknown Owner." After a long and fruitless session of Google searches (most troubleshooting information is about Time Capsule, not Server) I finally came across this site about moving sparsebundles from a Time Capsule to Server—a process not unlike moving a sparsebundle from one server to another. Following the second method listed there—crucially the recursive chown on the sparsebundle image to the username on the Time Machine Server— I was able to correct the Unknown User to the correct one, with smooth sailing thereafter.

Other have pointed out that this ".sparsebundle already in use" error can result from a wide variety of different problems pertaining to AFP on both the server and the client. The above makes it seem yet worse—ownership and permissions issues can also result in the same error message. 

I wanted to use a local REPL on my macbook to run code on my remote giant research machine. After some fiddling, I figured out how to do it.

Prerequisites:
- working key-based authentication for SSH (Sublime can't prompt for a password)
- Working SublimeREPL installation

Then add the following as a menu item in Preferences -> Browse Packages... and then navigate to SublimeREPL/config/Python/Main.sublime-menu. Add a new menu option along the default ones:

{"command": "repl_open",
"caption": "Python - Remote",
"id": "repl_python_remote",
"mnemonic": "c",
"args": {
   "type": "subprocess",
   "encoding": "utf8",
   "cmd": ["ssh",  "username@ip_address", "/usr/bin/python",  "-i", "-u"],                        
   "cwd": "$file_path",
   "syntax": "Packages/Python/Python.tmLanguage",
   "external_id": "python",
   "extend_env": {"PYTHONIOENCODING": "utf-8"}
   }
}

A couple changes to the user settings for SublimeREPL make the REPL better:

{
        "show_transferred_text": true,
        "suppress_echo" : false
}

For R-like command-enter execution, add it in the default keymap file:

[{ "keys": ["super+enter"], 
  "command": "repl_transfer_current",
  "args": {"scope": "selection"}}]

I haven't tried wit Sublime Text 3 but it should be the same procedure. Code runs from the user directory (i.e. the cwd directive doesn't seem to do anything). 

Dear leader sure knows how to have fun.

 paste(sample(c('platz', 'spetzel','strasse', 'kinder','hund', 'geist','vasser','knodel'), rpois(1,2)+1, replace=F), collapse='') 

Look, I said it was concise.

I'm not sure which I like more, the ambitious combination of stripes or that it looks like Bolivian coca farmers endorse Monster energy drinks. 

Last week Facebook pissed me off one too many times.  After turning off their social plugin a second time and deleting all of the cookies, I was once more greeted by a selection of friends and their articles when I visited the website of a major national paper. The utility I receive from FB (largely nil these days— items in the news feed ranges from banal to depraved) does not justify the compromise of my privacy when I read items on the internet. Taking this pre-IPO behavior as a baseline, I expect even more aggressive behavior as the company struggles to increase revenue to support their massive overvaluation. As a consumer, I will have none of it.

I fully understand that companies like FB need to track users and maintain data about them in order to provide services. But I think that such user data collection must be limited to explicit, known engagement with the site. Facebook goes far beyond this. Beyond explicit integration with other sites through the platform, FB uses the Like button to accumulate a vast wealth of knowledge while users are from the site. The Like button isn't really about quantifying popular interest (the number of upvotes) for content but for gauging exposure to that content over all FB users. This gives FB unprecedented information both on the a) behavioral patterns of consumers b) wellbeing of other companies (i.e. they know how many people visited the WSJ and  the NYT). It's like Alexa on crack. Imagine if you could see from Google Analytics the Facebook pages of everyone who visited your site—that's what FB has, for every site with a like page. 

If you derive sufficient benefit from the use of FB that you what to stay on there, at least prevent it from collecting your behavior across the internet. This is easy to do in Chrome and Firefox by installing the AdBlock Plus extension and then adding the 'Antisocial' filter. This prevents your browser from loading social plugin content or sending information to FB's servers (G+ and Twitter too). 

If you want to leave FB, it's not too challenging (of course they keep all your data anyway):

https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

Interestingly, the Like button still works for collecting data about users who don't even have Facebook accounts; so even if you leave FB you should still block the ads.

Digital ephemera par excellence?