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I recently signed up for Amazon One Medical, largely because I saw a $49 price for a video visit. It seemed like a reasonable, inexpensive alternative to going to my regular doctor.

My experience was very different.

After having what I thought was a $49 video visit, I received notice that One Medical had billed my insurance $335. Because I hadn't met my deductible, I was then responsible for $120 of that amount.

Recently, my automatic Malwarebytes scan on my Windows 11 laptop came back with 21 detections. Not the kind of number you want to see!

What actually works when your Apple‑silicon Mac refuses to boot

Apple’s official guide, How to revive or restore Mac firmware, explains how to recover an Apple‑silicon Mac that’s stuck on the support.apple.com/mac/restore screen. Surprisingly, a few critical details are missing and just plain wrong. Even the screenshots are don't look like the current version of macOS.

Chrome recently changed how it handles installing sites like Google Voice as standalone apps, which looked like the feature had disappeared. In earlier versions, you could use the “Install app” icon directly in the address bar, but that option may no longer appear even though the underlying capability is still there. Thankfully, Chrome has just moved it into a different part of the browser menu rather than removing it entirely.

Here is a random selection of useful things I've found on the macOS that make development easier.  Enjoy!

1. memory clean
2. activity monitor
3. monosnap screen & vidcaps
4. disk utilities - repair permissions.

Various
 

CMD + H to hide the current app

echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

multi-select in PHPStorm: cmd-Opt-Shift-A

option (or alt) click on the speaker icon top right to control sound source & dest
 

One of the most fun things you can do in Austin in Spring every year, is go to HonkTX.  This free music festival celebrating brass bands spans 4 days and a range of venues in Austin.  I always have a rip-roaring great time listening and shaking my booty to their amazing tunes. This year my son Noah and I attended the Saturday festivities at Mueller Lake park. 

Here are some of my photos from this year's event:

I'm pretty pleased with this find. It suits my need for low overhead, low learning curve, easy install, stable and predictable. I asked Bing Copilot to write a few things about it:

Pinta is a free and open-source program designed for drawing and image editing. Its primary goal is to provide users with a straightforward yet powerful way to create and manipulate images across various platforms, including *Linux, Mac, Windows, and BSD1. Let’s delve into some of its notable features:

The newest views chapter, delves into one of Drupal’s most powerful and enduring modules. Views allow you to create, manage, and display dynamic lists of content on your site. Whether you’re building a blog, an e-commerce platform, or a portfolio website, Views can be your trusty companion. 

You can access the “Views” chapter directly on the Drupal at Your Fingertips website

I recently put this Drupal 10 version of my site up (December 2023) and I've been browsing through my content on the old Drupal 7 site.  I came across some information that seemed worth sharing.

Here are some tech products that I use frequently and have for many years:

Image

I did a little experimenting with Copilot in

Thanks to the efforts of a member of the community supporting this project, I'm delighted to share that there is a a new theme for Drupal at Your Fingertips

I've been toying with the idea of writing a Drupal book for a few years now but with Drupal 10 on the Horizon, I decided it was finally time. So: 

TADAH!!! I present:  Drupal at your fingertips - a Modern Drupal developers' quick reference guide.

I hope folks enjoy my effort.  I really love Drupal,  the whole idea of the project, as well as the open source movement.  It is such an elegant way to create amazing software.

I'm struggling with a peculiar little problem.  My old faithful windows 10 computer will never eject the USB thumb drive.  It doesn't ever show any errors.  Its quite puzzling.  I have several usb devices currently working including a 4TB usb hard drive, usb keyboard and mouse and a Fujitsu USB scanner.  When I plug in the usb thumb drive, Windows makes the familiar boing noise and I can view the contents of the drive, but when I click the bottom right icon to eject, all goes well but explorer still sees the drive.  I can manually remove the thumb drive from th

I have to often issue commands like: vagrant up, or vagrant reload and OSX wants to be sure that I know what I am doing so it cleverly asks for my password.  Thanks to the efforts of a very smart coworker, there is a workaround to this problem.

First do:
which sed

and replace the /usr/bin/sed below with your path to sed)

These go under cmd alias specification section

Use this command to edit /etc/sudoers (don't do it directly):
sudo visudo

Here are a selection of useful resources for learning more about Drupal 8.  I've found them useful.

Good Features presentation from Drupalcon LA 2015 by Mike Potter of Phase 2
https://events.drupal.org/losangeles2015/sessions/features-drupal-8

Matt Cheney video on Configuration Management CMI - Drupalcon Los Angeles 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl7-978oKNw