This weekend: rear brakes and rotors on the Subaru WRX.

Manytricks release a cool $3 utility called Menuwhere. It’s just like MenuMate, but it obscures any grayed-out (inactive) menus. (MenuMate is long in the tooth, its last update coming four years ago. It still works, though.)

My more food-motivated son noted the name of the Mexican food truck I mentioned in my recent post that we frequent at the local flea market, and it’s called San Jose. We stopped by for lunch today, after a quick toy haul¹ at Target and the Cumberland Mall

.

We tried fried bananas (the girl working the stand called them bananas) with a block of fried cheese and a salami-type meat that chewed and tasted quite like pepperoni; what I think was a gordita, stuffed with mashed beans, chicharrones, lettuce, cheese, sour cream, and maybe the hotest hot sauce I’ve ever tried; and the best surprise of all: tamales. My older son, who is growing ever more adventurous, got chicken taquitos. Also: passion fruit aqua fresca. So good.

They have tacos, so we’re definately going back.

Soon.

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¹ Today’s finds:

• Transformers Studio Series Dino (Mirage) and B-127
• MK11 Shao Khan
• John Stewart
• Yet another Deku

I’ve been testing Arq for backing up my files from my Mac at home to Amazon’s S3 Glacier service. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time now, but finally got around to trying it out. I created a backup set that archives:

• Desktop
• Documents
• Movies
• Music
• Pictures

Arq is set to incrementally back up the files in each of these locations at 1:00 am every morning. It looks like it takes Arq anywhere from 10 to 17 minutes to process the changes and upload.

iCloud, which I pay for for the whole family, does a nice job already of handling Desktop, Documents, and my Photos library. I also have a Samsung T3 drive plugged into my Mac for Time Machine backups. I do occassionally make vidoes and store other files and projects in Movies and Music, so I thought having an offsite backup would be smart. It’s backing up about 36 GB of data, much of which (22 GB) is my Photos library.

Arq Activity Log

The upide of Glacier is that it’s cheap to store data there. The downsides are slowness of downloading your files, and cost of doing so. Arq has an older but informative post on the matter. I don’t expect to have to need to restore files from Glacier. If I have to, though, it’s good to know that I can.

Alaina Yee, writing for PC World, about making a digital backup of your CDC vax card:

You should have a digital copy as backup. And make it a good one: It should be clear, sharp, and easy to read. You may need it as proof of vaccination or as a way to recall appointment details when trying to replace a lost card. And because your vaccination card displays sensitive personal information that can be used for identity theft, a digital version should also be kept secure.

Just did this:

• Scanned using Readdle’s excellent Scanner Pro
• Saved to iCloud
• Dragged into DEVONThink

How to protect your COVID vaccination card digitally: Dos and don’ts

Clever name use for Postbox licensees:

This is twice funny:

1. Suzy Greenberg is a Phish song, and
2. Phishing is an email-based attempt at fraud.

Postbox, however, is nothing other than a great email client.

Defective Pole Tags

A “fun” project I took upon myself was to convert all of the old WordPerfect files I had on my Mac. I’ve been pretty careful about keeping everything I’ve ever written, and that includes papers from college. I had WordPerfect back then, and I sorely missed it when it was gone. (My master’s degree thesis was written in Microsoft Word, and a great many of my psychological reports were, too, until I decided to change things up and move to LaTeX and Nisus Writer Pro).

These old files presented themselves in the Finder as Unix Executable files; they were created back in the day when file extensions on the Mac were verboten. (Smug Mac users from this era surely remember gloating about this affordance.) I used A Better Finder Rename to add the .wpd file extension to all such files on my Mac. This would prove to be painting with too broad a brush… or smashing with too large a hammer. Not all of these files were WordPerfect docs (many were html, text, and saved emails). The most egregious overuse of ABFR was renaming three unix files in Blizzazrd’s Battle.net application–which I have yet to launch to see if I adequately repaired.

Renaming the files wasn’t enough, because none of the apps (not even Nisus Writer Pro) on my Mac would open the .wpd files. I looked into some solutions, including Pandoc, but I found WP Converter on the Mac App Store for five bucks. Sold.

I learned by trying to drop some of my converted files into WPD Converter that they were not, in fact, WordPerfect files. Maddenly, WPD Converter doesn’t report this to you; dragging the file into the conversion window just yields and empty menu, with no error message. If you’re dragging a file or two over, you might notice this omission, but if you are pulling two dozen files in, you might not.

I went with .rtf for most of the WordPerfect conversions. Once I realized that I was dealing with all manner of other legacy files, I just had to slog through each folder, removinng the .wpd extentsion I’d added and seeing what application would correctly (or approximately) open the file. I added .txt, .html, and .eml and most of the time had a useful file. I converted a few things to PDF as well. The packrat in me kept the old WordPerfect files, for what reason I don’t know.

Some fun finds:

• A assignment for my Education 202 class, which were lesson lesson plans on checking email for a class called “Introduction to Computer Networking.”
• Another sizzler: “Pavlovian Conditioning and Extinction Trials in Simulated Dogs.”
• Concert tickets for “MTV Presents the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wspec.Guest Foo Fighters, Entertainment Cntr,Camden, Rain Or Shine*no Refexch, Tue Jul 11, 2000 7:00pm
• Invocations to get a frames-capable browser

What I didn’t expect was how much of a Swiss Army knife LibreOffice would become; this is the only word processor I had that would open up just about anything I threw at it. I could have easily converted all of the files using just LibreOffice, but that one-by-one processing of files is for the birds. It really is quite an accomplishment, though, and that team should be proud of themselves.

I’ve been making omelettes for some time now, and both of my sons ask for them from time to time as well. The product is somewhere between a classic French and a country omelette; I strive for the former but often find myself producing the latter. This is partly due to my resistance to using nonstick cookware for the task (I have a nice aluminum Calephon pan).

I got hung up for a while trying to figure out why I couldn’t upload media to my Bluehost WordPress install from the Photos app when using iA Writer (or even the WordPress app)… it’s because the file size is currently limited to 512k. The complete lack of helpful details in the failure messages is annoying. But the other side of that is that I don’t need to upload 4 MB egg sandwich pictures, so I’m glad that at least I understand the issue.

To this end, this shortcut is tremendously useful.

Easily Resize Your Photos with this Simple iOS Shortcut

Child No. 2 asked for one, and I was happy to oblige:

• one egg plus the yolk of another egg
• Cooper Sharp American cheese
• Bacon
• Croissant

The New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association send this email to members today:

Earlier today, the US Department of Education sent a letter stating that New Jersey’s proposal to replace this spring’s NJ-SLA exams with a series of alternative assessment tools is in compliance with federal requirements under ESSA

Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona, has held the line on the testing requirement required under the Every Student Succeeds Act. The US Department of Education, however, did accept waiver applications from the state departments of education, of which New Jersey was one. The NJDOE asked districts to provide data on assessments that were administered during a late winter-early spring timeframe, which turned out to be related to the waiver application.

Questions remain about the ACCESS and WIDA assessments for special education and English language learners, but we should have answers soon.

Full memo here.