Really, really loving this collaboration between BT and Christian Burns, which just hit Spotify today but has been available on vinyl for a while. The only negative is that it’s not enough and I want more.
Category: In Brief
A quick look at what’s going on.
Jason Fried in Signal v. Noise:
Hours are never the differentiator–it’s never about working more hours than someone else. It’s about the decisions you make. How you spend your time, what you do and don’t do. Especially what you don’t do.
Jason Fried and the Basecamp crew have a way of speaking to me at just the right time.
Hyper 1.0.0
Hyper: HTML/CSS/JS (React)-based terminal emulator
Hyper seems interesting: it’s an Electron and React-based terminal emulator. It’s totally open source, totally powered by JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
It’s going to take a whole hell of a lot to pry me away from my meticulously-crafted iTerm2 setup, but this is at least worth experimenting with if only for the easy extensibility using the technologies I’m immersed in every day. It is fascinating just how good JS/HTML/CSS apps are getting.
The only downside: It doesn’t run on Windows 95. Going to have to settle for this instead…

Teen Vogue: Donald Trump is Gaslighting America
This is a must-read, teen or otherwise.
2016 was good for something
2016 sucked in many ways, but at least we got new Metallica out of the deal. Can pretty safely say that after listening to it for a few weeks straight, Hardwired…To Self Destruct is one of their strongest efforts in the last couple decades (and has a really face-melting title track that really nails this year). “Now That We’re Dead” and “Spit Out the Bone” in particular are incredible, and I would love to see Alice in Chains cover “Dream No More.”
Crow for Breakfast
I’m very glad to say that I was very wrong about this. Gov. Haley has handled disaster response in South Carolina exceedingly well during two crippling ice storms and Hurricane Matthew, and I still have free credit monitoring.
When Gov. Haley is confirmed by the Senate as our ambassador to the United Nations, I think SC is going to really miss her. Nothing about Gov. Henry McMaster sounds appealing in any way.
More like the Glenns, please.
Great Annie Glenn story in the Washington Post yesterday. America is richer to have had John and Annie Glenn.
Linode, where I have hosted jaredwsmith.com for many years now, has been under some sort of extremely gnarly and persistent DoS attack since Christmas. This has caused some downtime here as well as at chswx.com. This would also have impacts on weather data ingest on the LDM; fortunately, the server was reachable and relaying products when there was active weather. Sysadmin life is tough; hoping that there is some relief on the horizon for the great people at Linode.
iTerm2 3.0 Beta is a must-have
If you spend any reasonable amount of time within terminals on Mac OS X, you need iTerm2. It’s been a constant in my Mac life since I switched. The 3.0 betas are ridiculously good and fit in so well on Yosemite and El Capitan. There are some outstanding tweaks in the latest betas that make me fall for this software all over again.
Going to Extremes
Blue Screen of Dumb. pic.twitter.com/qlyoZmBDGf
— Jared Smith (@jaredwsmith) July 30, 2015
Microsoft’s error messages may have been rather cryptic and full of techno-babble in the past, but you could at least find a Knowledge Base article based on the message and get a good handle on what’s going on. “Something happened” is still cryptic with the added detriment of being completely useless. Unfortunate, too, because Windows 10 — if it installs, anyway — is a really strong OS, as strong as Windows has been in recent years.