Author Archives: Mike O'Connor

A blog post from Fargo – a new gizmo

Dave Winer has a cool new gizmo (Fargo) that I’ve been messing around with for the last week or so (don’t get me all wrapped up in a time warp here).

Why I loves Fargo

  • I loves this gizmo because I’m addicted to outlining and I’m always on the hunt for simpler, more approachable ways to do it (and recruit other addicts). For the most part, I’ve gotten pretty solidly into the “mind mapping” groove, but that’s just a habit. When you boil my use of mind-mapping software down you find that all I’m really doing is outlining. Enough about why Fargo attracts me.

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Repainting the SC430

sc430 wallpaper 1OK, I admit it.  I’m kindof a lame car guy.  I love cars, but I am old and tired and hate being uncomfortable.  So about 5 years ago I bought a year-1 (2002) Lexus SC430 that had been rode hard and put away wet for the princely sum of $17000.  I’ve been bringing it back from an early grave ever since.  The first few years were devoted to repairing the driving stuff — replacing bent wheels, struts, etc. Continue reading →

Migrating from Snow Leopard Server to OSX Server (Mountain Lion)

Back in late 2011 I wrote this scratchpad post to document my efforts to move from Snow Leopard Server to Lion Server.  I ran into some configuration problems that stumped the 2nd-level folks at Apple and eventually I abandoned the project and stayed on Snow Leopard.

When Mountain Lion came out, and went through an update or two to iron the kinks out, I decided to have another go at it.  I’m crossing my fingers here, but I’ve been on OSX Server (the new/old name under Mountain Lion) for about a month now and things look pretty stable.  So here’s another scratchpad post to document what I did to put back a few things that were removed from the standard OSX Server environment. Continue reading →

Loading a Comodo free email cert into the Mac OSX Mail.app and iOS

The previous post was all about self-signed certs on my Mac.  Worked fine until I tried to export the cert to my iPhone.  Then I ran into the dreaded “no valid certificates” problem when trying to authorize the profile to sign and encrypt outbound mail.  My homebrew cert worked fine for enabling s/MIME on the device, but it was crippled.  So I ran off and got me a Comodo free email cert and pounded that in. Continue reading →

Notes: adding and using a self-signed s/MIME email certificate to OSX Mail in Mountain Lion

This is just a scratchpad post to remind myself what I did to get a self-signed cert into Mail under OSX Mountain Lion.

This first post is all about using a self-generated cert — which will work fine unless you ALSO want to use it on an iOS device.  In which case, skip to the NEXT post, where I cracked the code of getting a Comodo cert installed on my Mac and my iPhone.  Sheesh, this is harder than it needs to be. Continue reading →

Paul O'Connor bead double weave

Test shots from my new camera (Sony HX30V)

Hi all.  This is partly a test of the new photo-uploader in WordPress 3.5 — along with a chance to show off pictures from the new camera.  Click through the photos if you want to pixel-peep the ginormous originals.

This first one is a test of the panorama feature…  This shot is looking from the point behind the house down Pat’s Prairie towards Highway 88 (south).  The nice thing is how it’s picking up the two valleys that form the point I’m standing on.

Indian Grass Panorama

Indian Grass Panorama

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Logic Pro runs lots better on my new MacBook Pro

This is mostly a post that only Logic Pro music-software users will like.  But hey.

I just went through an agonized decision-making process to upgrade my MBP.  I knew that the cool new CPUs were coming this summer, but then Apple threw the “Retina” curve-ball at me.  I chewed and chewed on that and finally went with the old-style machine because:

  • It’s cheaper (I saved enough to buy a Thunderbolt display)
  • It’s just as fast (how fast?  see below)
  • It’s got lotsa ports (btw, my Axiom Pro keyboard works fine on the USB 3.0 port)
  • My aging eyes don’t benefit from the Retina display
  • It’s easier to upgrade and repair

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Grinnell Reunion 2012 — a life of happy accidents

I gave a talk at my Grinnell College reunion last weekend and decided to build this post to share a bunch of links to things that I talked about.  This ain’t a’gonna make any sense to the rest of you.  But the stuff is interesting.  🙂

This is a story of rivers of geeks.  I described the rivers that I swam in during my career, but these are by no means all of the species of geeks that ultimately built the Internet.  I was lucky to be a part of a gang of 10’s maybe 100’s of thousands of geeks that came together in the giant happy accident that resulted in this cool thing that we all use today.  But don’t be confused — it was a complete accident, at least for me and probably for all of us.  Here’s a diagram…

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Frac sand mining

Pore old Haven2.  ‘lil old blog’s being neglected.  I was going to blog about frac sand mining here but the issue kinda exploded into such a big deal that it needed a URL all its own and I forgot to cross-post a link to the new site back here at the ranch.

So here’s a link for those of you that follow me on this blog.  Sorry about that.  Things got a little crazy there for a while and I’m just now circling back to do the housekeeping.

www.FracSandFrisbee.com Continue reading →

Adding capabilities to Mac OS X Lion Server

UPDATE:

I never converted to Lion Server.  You can sortof see things unraveling in the middle of this post.  I’m taking another run at it now that Mountain Lion Server (now renamed back to OSX Server) is getting stable.  I sympathize with what Apple is trying to do.  If you’re kindof the power user in the office, the newer version of Server is much better for you.  But for those of us who were using the server to do slightly more complicated stuff, it’s been a long hard road.

I’ll write another post pretty soon that summarizes how I put stuff back into Mountain Lion Server.  It’s still not easy, but it’s going better — at least so far.  For now, just ignore the rest of this post.  It’s out of date, and it didn’t result in a working server. Continue reading →

omni

Omnisphere and Omni TR in Logic Pro 9 — notes to myself

To introduce Omnisphere into a project — just instantiate it the regular way (forget all the Environment stuff, not required).  So 1) create a software track, 2) select Omnisphere (way down at the bottom of the list of software instruments is “all instruments”, Omnisphere is in there).  I’ve been using the “stereo” version rather than “multi output” because I like to freeze the tracks, can’t do that with multi-output version. Continue reading →