A Recovering Physicist

[Update 2010-07-07] I got automatic TM backups working again, thanks to help from the Twitterverse, two private mailing lists, and an Apple discussion forum. Click the “more…” link below. Updates are at the bottom.

[Update 2010-07-14] Not completely working as it turns out.

[Update 2010-07-15] The timing (if not the cause) of the vanishing Automatic setting is determined.

Time Machine stopped doing automatic backups on my MacBook Pro, apparently when I updated to 10.6.4 on 2010-06-16.

Each time I enter System Preferences > Time Machine, the switch on the left says TM is OFF and the Next Backup time reads: Automatic backups off. I can turn the switch to ON (the word “ON” does not turn blue, as it should, and Next Backup does not change), but when I exit and re-enter, it shows OFF again.

Automatic backups do not happen. Backup only runs when I initiate it manually, or when the machine reconnects to the home network, after time away or upon reboot.

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist when opened in Property List Editor says “AutoBackup, Boolean, [checkmark].”

I have dragged /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist out of its folder and restarted, letting TM recreate it, then re-connected to the backup volume and re-created my list of items to omit from backup. It didn’t change anything about the above behavior.    ‣ more…

Sometimes, especially when traveling, I just want to know what will be falling from the sky in the next day or so. Weather.com provides regional maps of how much precipitation (and what sort) to expect over the next 24 hours. I have stitched together nine of these maps to produce a US precipitation forecast graphic (about 1420 x 800 pixels; link opens in a new window). The images are pulled directly from weather.com's image server, where they are updated hourly at around the quarter-hour mark.

Weather.com may store regional images at different sizes; they almost certainly have forecasts for areas outside of the US. All this remains to be explored.

Click the link for details of how to capture a screenshot of this map every hour to produce an animation of the developing and anticipated US weather.    ‣ more…

Yes, I mean you. That’s 7 years. Multiply it out. If you must, say “24 x 7 x 52.” Or better yet, what’s wrong with “24 x 7?”

I just recently learned that soft hyphens are now usable and effective in HTML markup, as they are finally supported in a sensible way by most modern browsers. (Pity Jukka Korpela, author of the preceding link: he has been writing that document for twelve years.) The soft hyphen — which has the entity code ­ or ­ or ­ — can be interpreted as a hyphenation hint, letting the browser or rendering engine know where are the ideal places to break up a long word, leaving a hyphen behind, should it encroach on the margin. The soft hyphen is not displayed if the word is not broken upon rendering.

I have tested the below and verified that it works as intended in Safari 3 and 4 on a Mac; IE 5, 6, 7, and 8 on Windows; and Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 anywhere. (Firefox 2.0 ignores soft hyphens.) Opera on Vista and OS X render perfectly, according to readers.

On July 2, 2009 I got stent #2 implanted in my heart at the Mass General hospital in Boston (the first was in October 2006, at the Lahey Clinic). This incident developed way faster than last time. At the first sign of pain in my left arm I was pretty sure what was going on; saw my doctor for an EKG that same afternoon (Wednesday). Last time it had taken me two weeks to twig to it. He strongly suggested I to see my cardiologist real soon. I went the next day, Thursday, and after a stress EKG (treadmill) he brought me a little card of four Plavix tablets and a cup of water, and I knew beyond a doubt what was coming.    ‣ more…

Most existing Firewire devices — outboard disks, cameras, scanners — are interfaced using Firewire 400. You’ll need an adaptor like this one to use them with your shiny new MacBook Pro, which is equipped with Firewire 800 only. I bought mine, made by Sonnet Tech, from Cesell; if you prefer to do your own research, here’s Google’s page of shopping results for “firewire 800 to 400 adaptor.”

According to this expert’s page, the diacritical mark that font developers call the “caron” is known as the “háček” to linguists, and (among other names) in the languages in which it is used: Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, and Slovenian, among others. Wikipedia advances the theory that the name “caron” was made up by combining “caret” and “macron,” and lets that theory stand in the absense of any other compelling explanation. The mark is called “caron” in the context of Unicode.

Firefox has a constellation of bugs where it behaves differently depending on whether or not a <p> is explicitly terminated, inside a <div> which is enclosed in a link. The <p> need not be the final object in the <div>. The bug is present in Firefox 2.0.0.14 and 3.0.1 (tested on a Mac); it’s still there in Firefox 3.5.7. Safari on Mac and IE6, IE7, & IE8 on Windows behave as one would expect. Here is a self-contained demonstration (opens in a new window). Filed as Firefox bug #436600.

This year the First Parish Church of Groton’s Coming of Age program collectively took on the project of gathering 150 bags of donated food and household necessities to deliver to Loaves and Fishes, the local food pantry — the amount of food that the pantry distributes in a single day. This got us all to thinking about food, what we eat, and what it means to us. Here is a page I put together on what the world eats (link opens in a new window).

I stumbled across a very cool effect caused by CSS and the ability of a browser (in this case, Firefox) to do text layout in realtime. The original link was http://valleywag.com/tech/numa-numa/ but it has come & gone out of 404-land for a while now. I have attempted, with mixed success, to reproduce in the continuation of the post the weird behavior as I first saw it.    ‣ more...