problem posts

I don’t use npm often. When I do, I tend to be reminded of annoyances in using it. One such annoyance is that it doesn’t take into account the node version in use when installing new packages, as I posted about four years ago. It just goes with the latest if no version is specified, regardless of its ability to run in the available environment. So I have to manually step back versions until I find one that works. The alternative package manager yarn at least has the good grace to error out for incompatible versions, so I used that and just decremented the version of each package until it stopped erroring.

Some of us like to let our OS package manager manage our OS-wide software for security, stability, and simplicity, and that isn’t always the latest and greatest.


h5bp links

Earlier in my career, I looked to the HTML5 boilerplate for ideas on how to set up websites. I just grabbed bits I liked and modified them as needed. For a time they had shortened links off of the h5bp.com domain that redirected to descriptions of why certain choices were made. But eventually, the person maintaining that domain let it lapse and someone else bought it.

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Since MacOS 15.7.1, the touch ID (fingerprint reader) often takes a while to become available on the login screen after the computer has awakened. It takes like 15 seconds to become functional, in which the user circles do a jumpy little dance. I know it’s ready when the message about using the touch id or password to log in shows up. This definitely slows my roll, as I lock the screen every time I leave the computer, which happens frequently.


Openrsync issues resolved (I hope)

I think I have finally worked through and fixed the issues caused by Mac OS 15.4 switching from rsync to openrsync. With the switch, many of my backup and other rsync scripts broke, throwing errors and not finishing the sync. As of that last post, I had gotten things mostly working, but had to disable incremental snapshotting and still sometimes had failures that I had to deal with.

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Candle incident

Yesterday evening, I lit a candle while watching an episode of Columbo. It’s one of those fat kinds that develops a wall of wax around the outside. Previously, a hole had formed in the wall and some wax had dripped out. I had fixed the hole, but there were still some hunks of this wax left. So I put one in the candle wall yesterday, leaned up against it, hoping it would slowly melt away.

This morning, I woke up and thought to myself that I didn’t remember putting out the candle.

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Doing my federal (US) taxes this year, I was finding myself unable to create an account on the Free Fillable Forms site. I kept getting kicked back to the start after filling out and submitting my information. This Reddit thread led me to figure out that it was related to my T-Mobile Home Internet. I turned that off and turned on my phone hotspot and used that to get in. My phone is also T-Mobile, but apparently different enough to not have that issue. Later, I was able to get back in with my Home Internet, so it seems to be just related to something on that initial registration process.


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