Rubenerd

You can legally run macOS 10.12 in a virtual machine, provided the hypervisor is itself a Mac. The suggested approach is to use the Recovery Partition on your Mac as the basis for a new macOS virtual machine in VMware Fusion, but this never worked for me.

VMware lists these steps for installing macOS using the app package downloaded from the Mac App Store:

1. Start VMware Fusion.
2. Select File > New.
3. Drag Install macOS Sierra.app and drop it into the Create a Virtual Machine window.
4. Click Continue.
5. Follow the prompts to complete the installation.
6. Install VMware Tools.

I’d tried Sierra and High Sierra on my 27-inch iMac, but the macOS installer doesn’t let me progress beyond the initial menu. I’m going to try Mojave on my new MacBook Pro and report back.

If I could get OS/2 going, surely I can get macOS!

I watch a lot of YouTube thesedays, albeit in private mode and logged out of The Goog. It doesn’t render following channels any trickier, just add their feed to your RSS aggregator of choice, and you can stop some of the more insidious forms of tracking.

This caution does have the side effect of generating some random video recommendations. There’s certainly a lot of vapid, boring stuff. Or if I’m in a less judgemental mood, stuff that doesn’t interest me! And then there’s stuff I would have never watched had it not been on the front page; who’d have thunk it?

For example, take this video about Overwatch by A_Seagull. I’ve never cared about first person shooters, and only tangentially know of the popular Korean character D.Va from endless amounts of anime/weeb site fanart.

I was hooked watching this for a solid ten minutes. Not for a long time have I watched something and had absolutely no clue about what was being said. I mean it, the terminology was made of sounds I recognised as an English speaker as being words, but beyond that… nada.

I wonder if talking to IT people is like that? Network engineers are the worst, but we all have our internal lingo we internalise and regurgitate amongst ourselves. I suppose every major industry does.

The Wikimedia Foundation and its sites are strictly non-commercial, with a mission to spread knowledge under free licences. But if you wanted a personal wiki, or one targeting a specific niche or industry, you could create one on Wikia, the commercial offshot also co-created by Jimmy Wales.

I didn’t like their heavy UI changes. For example, the self-hosted Grand Order Wiki, and the late Whole Wheat Radio, benefit and benefited from being closer to stock MediaWiki. But Wikia was still usable enough to develop an ecosystem of wikis, and reached critical mass with editors.

In 2016 Wikia was renamed Fandom, owing to a preponderence of its wikis being fansites. But the URL remained wikia.com, so sites for topics like cancer support would still be respectful and make sense.

I missed this back in August, but as part of their continuing rebrand the site will be redirecting to fandom.com in 2019. This seems misguided, for the reason stated above. The comment thread on the announcement is eleven pages long, with people saying as much.

Legally, Fandom have every right to change their site. But it doesn’t seem respectful to all those people who poured their hearts and time into their sites, and thereby ensuring their commercial success.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

30:11 – Recording on a terrible mic, so taking the opportunity to produce at a ludicrously low bitrate for some nostalgic fun. Topics include Zip drives, work phones, mobiles without cameras, inadvertent box smashing, eschewing (gesundheit) plastic, middle class life qualms needing perspective, Nespresso, regions of Sydney and Los Angeles, difficulty photographing anime figures, nostalgia for my 2004 job while listening to The Overnightscape and Whole Wheat Radio, the fate of internet communities, and coffee shop sounds. Special guest appearance by 1990s Iomega.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released November 2018 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:40:40 – Doc Sleaze, Rubenerd, Chad Bowers, and Frank Edward Nora combine monological superpowers to form an audio alliance of great virtue!! PQ Ribber masters the ceremonies!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

Here’s some fun spam:

How to Communicate With Overly Sensitive Employees

I was expecting a discussion on pollen allergies. But it’s something far more fundamental.

How to effectively communicate with colleagues who take criticism personally? How to communicate your attitude without sounding defensive, annoyed, sloppy, or rushed?

Imagine being someone who lives their professional lives assuming they don’t need to worry about that. It’s why I thought House MD was such an agonising show; clue train: bedside manner is a part of your job!

In order to be effective in getting what you want and need, how you communicate both verbally and non-verbally will matter a great deal.

No kidding. It floors me that even selfishly-minded managers don’t understand that respected employees are happier, and will perform better for a company. So isn’t it in their interests to do so?

In this webinar, you will learn about ways to read emotional cues and signals and how to demonstrate empathy and transform problems. This webinar also discusses how to anticipate and handle responses to change.

I guess if you can’t have genuine empathy, demonstrating it from what you learned in a lecture is better than nothing. But wow.

Our local council have been drawing these dad joke memes everywhere around North Sydney. The one above was taken at the corner of Miller Street and the Pacific Highway, near that giant blue gem.

There’s enough cynicism in the world, I thought this was delightful!

We have a new winner in the unsubscribe stakes. Prepare your iTelephone LED torches and join me in this dark, meandering tunnel of redundancy and glory.

I clicked the unsubscribe link in the footer of a well known password manager email and got this:

Tell us what you want to hear about! Update your $SERVICE communication preferences by visiting your Account’s Email Notification Settings.

This is a pet peeve of mine; you shouldn’t need to log into an account to unsubscribe from newsletters. But they also offer this helpful box:

If you want to unsubscribe from all $SERVICE email notifications, please enter your email below.

By now we’re at strike one. Clicking an email unsubscribe link should be sufficient to register your intent. You should not need to confirm your email address, or worse, be asked to enter it. But it gets better:

We have sent ‘$EMAIL’ an email to authorize your unsubscribe request. Please check your email to confirm your unsubscription request.

Getting email to get rid of email? What kind of bizarre, tospy turvy world are we living in? I swear that smoke I got a whiff of was tobacco as I walked into this cafe, nothing more trippy or fabulous. Though I did trip physically on the uneven pavement.

But we’re not done yet! Click that third unsubscribe link, and you get this:

Sorry to have bothered you. To never receive any further unsolicited informational or marketing emails from $SERVICE, please click UNSUBSCRIBE.

You know we must be reaching the end based on ALL THOSE CAPITALS! And hold on, didn’t first page above say this was for all email? I didn’t add the emphasis in these, they’re explicitly calling these out themselves. Fortunately, clicking unsubscribe again gets us this:

Thank you $EMAIL. You have unsubscribed from all emails from $SERVICE.

That’s a relief. And all it took was clicking unsubscribe four times, in four different places. I guess this means they’re now super duper definitely sure I don’t want their email!

The unfolding drama around Brexit is utterly bewildering to watch. As these famous political scientists sang:

EU: So tell us what you want, what you really really want
GB: I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want
EU: So tell us what you want, what you really really want
UK: I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want
EU: So tell us what you want, what you really really want…

The Guardian published an extract from Heroic Failures: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O’Toole yesterday. It’s the most beautiful summary of what’s going on right now, particularly in the context of British and European identity.

As someone with German ancestry and a keen interest in the centre of the continent post-World War II, this struck a chord:

In retrospect, German reunification is perhaps the greatest missed opportunity for the English finally to have done with the war. Had there been a capacity to generate new narratives of Europe, this could have been shaped as a moment of British vindication – the final working-out of the consequences of nazism. As Anthony Barnett puts it, “the triumph and relief of the unification of Germany could and should have belonged to us in Britain, as well as to Germany itself. It was the final liberation from nazism, the end of that country’s punishment, a time to welcome a great culture back into our arms.”

Everyone I’ve met from my dad’s side of the family tell me they cried when the wall fell. It represented the final end of a bitter and sad part of history, and optimism for future cooperation. The French were on board with open arms, but I can’t say I was surprised by Thatcher:

Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984?

My Cantonese in-laws may have an idea. But back to Fintan:

Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality, but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. “Europe,” Barnett writes, “moved on from the second world war and Britain didn’t.” One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.

This is a fascinating observation. The reason behind the UKIPs name wasn’t just cynical political bluster against perceived foreign interference, it was at least partly informed by fear.

(The first irony is any British business that wants EU trade will still require the same regulatory compliance, only now they won’t have a say in how it’s all drafted).

One could dismiss this as a case of Godwin’s law, but the pro-Brexiters were the ones who invited the comparison:

The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,” Boris Johnson told the Telegraph on 14 May 2016.

It’s like witnessing someone purposely riding their bike into a wall.

(And the second irony is the real threats to western hegemony are amused and emboldened by these dummy spits, from Mr Orange to the Brexiters. No need to interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake and fighting among themselves)

0/10, for spamming us when we’re urgently trying to access something.