I forgot that ecosia existed, but I recently learned it uses google’s search index. I’ve been giving it a try and like the results better than duckduckgo. Feels like using google without all the junk they clutter the page with.
System Data and OmniDiskSweeper
Recently when checking my Mac’s storage usage, I noticed that the System Data category had ballooned to over 250GBs. Even with 1TB of storage, this seemed excessive and I wanted to get the the bottom of what was taking up so much space.
After some research online, I learned that I had many prior versions of Xcode simulators sitting around that were no longer available to be used. These were easily pruned, and doing so freed up a dozen or so gigabytes of space, but not nearly enough to make much of a difference in the reported amount of of disk space belonging to System Data.
Next, I took a look at local Time Machine snapshots. I didn’t really want to mess with these, but I did find that deleting some large and no longer needed files that were sitting on my drive also helped reduce the size of these snapshots. Nevertheless, I still had over 200GB devoted to System Data.
I continued by looking through my ~/Library folder and its many subdirectories, convinced that the reason for the bloat must be found there, but the numbers just weren’t adding up. Finally, I tried installing OmniDiskSweeper after seeing it recommended a few times during my online searches. I ran it and within a few minutes it had indexed all of my directories and organized them more or less by size.
At first I wasn’t sure what to do with this information, because I still didn’t know what was safe to delete. But soon I saw something that I hadn’t before—OmniDiskSweeper was showing a hidden com.apple.podcasts directory within my ~/Library folder. That directory in turn had a tmp folder with many snippets of previously-streamed podcast episodes. Over 100GB worth of snippets, in fact.
I know enough about stream buffering to know that generally speaking, the way it works is that small 15 second or so pieces of a larger stream are downloaded ahead of time. The snippets I found were undoubtably of this nature, which is why they were found in such an obscure location. What still isn’t clear to me, however, is why over a year's worth of these segments were kept on my disk well after the episodes they belonged to had been listened to, deleted from the podcasts app, and otherwise forgotten.
I deleted all 100GB of these old podcast snippets and restarted my Mac. I’m happy to report that after doing so, I'm now consistently only seeing ~90GB devoted to System Data. That still feels like more than necessary, but it’s a major improvement.
Finished reading: Apple in China by Patrick McGee 📚Every bit as fascinating as I’d been led to believe.
Ken Burns, on Face The Nation:
The pursuit of happiness is not the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. That’s what the founders said. To be virtuous, to live a virtuous life, to continually educate yourself is what was required to sustain this republic. And I think that’s what we’ve gotten away from. Everything is sort of all individualized. We’re all free agents. We don’t realize that freedom, the thing that we tout is not just what I want, but also that’s in tension with what we need. And I think what happens is that when we study these words, we can go back to the sense of newness and freshness that they represented and rededicate ourselves. And that means me for me and you for you to this idea that the pursuit of happiness is about lifelong learning. It’s about becoming ever more educated to the responsibility of citizenship. And that’s a huge, huge responsibility.
I see the GOP finished robbing the American public just in time to leave for their holiday break. 👍🇺🇸
Change
Recently one of my favorite restaurants changed ownership and made some capricious (read: bad) changes to their menu. I felt pretty upset about it, which sounds silly given the things that are actually wrong in the world, but I’d been going to that restaurant for nearly two decades and had grown pretty attached to it being there in the specific way that it existed up until now.
Upon moving back to the city I grew up in a couple years ago, I noticed that a lot of the people who’d never left liked to complain about how much everything here has changed over the years. I’ve always appreciated the balance of old vs. new that exists here—If nothing had changed over the years, it would likely feel stale and I probably wouldn’t have even wanted to live here again. Instead, despite having lived here for the better part of the first twenty years of my life, I have a long list of new places to check out that I’m nowhere near completing. In fact, it seems to be more often the case that I’m adding things to that list than removing them.
I started thinking about some of the new places I’d been to recently, which didn’t exist before I moved back here. A brewery with delicious wood-fired pizza. An orchard & cider distillery where on a summer evening one can sit outside and look at rolling green hills, and feel a cool breeze embrace them as an accordion inhales and exhales the melody to a song played by a local band.
I still love the used book sales, affordable bagel sandwiches, and botanic gardens of old. I really do, however, appreciate the importance of the dynamism of where I live. I suppose it’s a good lesson in embracing change and learning to love new things.
Now if only I could find a new place to get a good burrito.
Finished reading: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle 📚Being the first Sherlock Holmes story, I was surprised that nearly half of it ended up being about Mormons in Utah. Coincidentally there were many parallels with Riders of the Purple Sage, which I happened to have read earlier this year.
Finished reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond 📚In college I minored in anthropology, so naturally I enjoyed this one. I found the discussion of oligarchy and big man theory in this context to be especially interesting.
It's happening here
California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault right before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball, a wrecking ball to our founding fathers’ historic project: three coequal branches of independent government.
There are no longer any checks and balances. Congress is nowhere to be found. Speaker Johnson has completely abdicated that responsibility. The rule of law has increasingly been given way to the rule of Don.
The founding fathers didn’t live and die to see this kind of moment. It’s time for all of us to stand up.
Along with comments I seem to remember Governor Pritzker making a month or so back, by my count this is now two Governors speaking frankly and honestly about the United State’s decline into authoritarianism. I’d like to hear others in positions of power do the same.
The clip of Joanna Stern’s interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak was a bit hard to watch. I agree with their points about the reductiveness of associating ML solely with chatbots, but their defensiveness around aggressively marketing what has so far amounted to vaporware was palpable.
After weeks of rain it finally feels like spring.
What time is it?
Tony (or possibly his brother Dan) Gilroy, writing for the character Mon Mothma on Andor:
I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
In an interview, Gilroy notes that across human history, times of peace are the exception and sentiments like these could be equally relatable to people in virtually any time period. It sure does feel relatable to this moment though.
The series this quote comes from is, obviously, a work of fiction. But its prescience is a testament to how fiction often acts as a mirror for reality. The resonance of the quote instructs us that the hour is later than is easy to admit, and that the loud, hungry, greedy, malevolent monster is here, now.
Carl Sagan, in Cosmos:
If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.
I continue to struggle with prioritizing what books to read. My list is longer than I care to count, and I’m always trying to balance the tension between reading things that I feel I “should” read vs. reading what I want to read. I certainly read more, and more quickly, if I’m reading a book that I’m genuinely compelled toward. Maybe as long as I’m working in little bits of the stuff that’s good for me, like vegetables, then whatever else keeps me reading is good enough.
Happy 4th birthday to this pup! It was too cold to go to the dog park, but he at least got a sheep toy, the stuffing from which is now spread all through the house.
My favorite part of Porchfest 2024 (oh, sure, the music was good too). Ithaca’s is the original, and probably the best.
New door day! Which is also my way of saying, after all the work we’ve done for the last several months, we finally moved into our new house three weeks ago! Big projects are done (for now), but there will still be plenty of small ones.
New fence, same dog.
We’re done finishing our floors. Now we’re just reattaching (and in some cases repairing) the trim, painting some smaller spots, and cleaning up before we finally start moving in!
While we’ve started finishing our floors, the fence builders we hired removed our old chain link fence and have begun installing a new wooden one. The old fence was 2.5 feet high, and our dog has jumped it to chase rabbits. The new one will keep him in and help make our side yard feel like an oasis.
The walls are all painted and we’ve nearly finished sanding the floors. The lighter look of the wood brings a greater sense of light and spaciousness to the rooms in our house that was lacking before, so we’re going to forgo staining and get right on to finishing once we clean everything up.
