Latent(?) Political Divide

Though I have always been registered Republican (which might shock some of my closest friends), growing up and living on the left coast of America for most of my life, educated at a university, I realize that I have migrated definitely left of center. Because most of my friends are left of me, it came as a shock that—more than the fact that a Trump-character can be elected this country’s leader—the important and long lasting issue is that there is such an extreme division of fundamental beliefs in this country. This existed before this administration and will persist, long after this administration is gone.

“Elitism” has become a 4-letter word. I certainly had never considered myself an elitist when defined as a priviledged few who think they are better than all the others—I cheer for underdogs. One of the characteristics attributed to elites is that they are university (for example) educated. Since when are education and critical thinking bad things?!

American Politics 2017

Rather than clutter up my Facebook feed or even my Twitter feeds and subject my friends to more political clutter, I figure I can post to my blog. And most comments warrant more than 140 characters anyway.

Let’s set my context, just to start.

  1. I’m registered Republican. Sorry, West Coast people, in case you didn’t know, please don’t hate me.
  2. I proclaim my political views to be “extreme moderate.” A reflection of my sense of humor, however  when I’m pissing off Republicans and Democrats with equal fervor, I know that I’m in the right place.
  3. Though I shouldn’t need to qualify my opinions by the following, recent public behavior of politicians prompt me to also mention that my opinions are strongly influenced by (substantiated and substantiatable) facts.

This has been a tumultuous period in this country’s history. Every “pundant” has been fully and completely wrong in their polls, assessments, and forecasts. Rather than mundane politics-as-usual, the shocking success of Trump through his campaign to the top seat highlights the great divide that exists in this country.

This divide, I don’t understand very well. But we have to look beyond the chaos introduced by the new administration to understand what the impact is to Americans and our country.

Politics… Do I Need to Say More?

I have avoided political commentary on my blog because it takes too many words to convey the breadth of complexity and nuance of the issues involved; I am not sure I have the eloquence to express both of these facets as well as I’d like. I’ve never been a political activist and I pride myself in calling myself an “extreme moderate” (yes, I know that is an oxymoron, which is why I like it). If I am pissing off both sides, I know I’m in the right place. That said, I don’t really like pissing anyone off.  Since my blog is not very popular, the latter is outweighed by my need to make sense of and express my thoughts about the current state of American politics and, um, yes our “President.”

I try to write, in my blogs, about factually-based or problem-solving topics. The challenge in writing about politics is that so much of the acceptance of facts depends on subjective leanings—an oxymoron, in itself. I have only faced this reality, myself, as I ponder the state of our state. Still, I will try to make my attempts to resolve the issues that so many of the people I know are contending with.

Lost in the Cloud(s)

There are so many cloud-storage and syncing services, today, they are getting hard to keep track of. They all offer very similar features but are each tied into their own eco-system, so unless you managed to use only one company’s set of services, you will find yourself wasting time trying to remember which cloud service you saved a file to.

List of cloud services in Windows Explore

For me, I use both Windows and Mac, so I use both OneDrive and iCloud. A lot of people and apps rely on Dropbox. I subscribe (ugh!) to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I am an avid Google apps user, so I use Google Drive. Then, for cutting edge and more flexibility, I use Resilio Sync. Not to mention my local Documents directory, where I keep a lot of my “working” files.

I will try to sort out the morass of services that you might have yourself mired in and help you begin to consolidate and simplify your use of those services.

What is Cloud-storage and Syncing?

Let’s start with the basics. With cheap storage and the omni-present internet available, several companies have provided services to allow you to save your information and files there. Putting your files in the cloud, provides two big advantages:

  1. You can free up local storage space on your computer or phone, aka, cloud-storage, and
  2. Your files can be available across your different devices—computer, laptop, tablet, smart-phone, via browser, etc.

With your files in the cloud, you will probably still need “local” access to files—traditional applications expect files to be locally accessible.  You can then take advantage of most of the services’ ability to automatically “synchronize” your files to each of your devices—computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones—so that you needn’t think about which versions are current and where they are.

Many services even allow you share access to your file(s) with others without having to send copies of files around—multiple copies can be a problem as you try to keep straight which copies are current.

As cloud-storage becomes more prevalent, Microsoft, Apple, and even Google have designed their applications and operating systems to store and synchronize user settings in the cloud. They’ve opened this capability to allow other application developers to do the same thing. This all allows users to have a common configuration for their system and applications as they move between devices or to new ones.

Some cloud-storage services do not automatically sync files—cloud-backup services, for example. On the other hand, there are services which provide syncing of files between devices, but no actual storage of those files in the cloud.

Who is Doing This?

Dropbox has become one of the most prevalent companies to offer this service. It was one of the earliest to show that commercial success is possible. It has become so common, that many people assume that you have your own Dropbox to share files with. Box is a similar cloud-storage/syncing service—there are many others.

Bigger companies quickly picked up on the advantage and demand for these features was more widely accepted. Google eventually offers Google Drive and ties it into its other cloud-based services so that cloud stored information all used the same service. With this, we see how cloud-storage and syncing becomes a key component to a company’s eco-system. Similarly, Apple and Microsoft built eco-systems of their own with iCloud and OneDrive, respectively. Since they have their own operating systems, they have provides services to sync most of the key system settings into their cloud storage, and allow third party developers to do the same with their applications. This allows user configurations to be set in one device and have it affect all the others; a nice convenience.

Then, there are other services such Resilio’s Sync and Syncthing which do not store the files in the cloud, but does provide syncing between devices. This is arguably more private because you are not storing your files on a third-party service, but it does require that two of the syncing devices are connected to the internet and running simultaneously, in order for those devices to sync. Also, these services do not tally and charge for cloud storage used, since there isn’t any.

Tangled Cloud Mess

Each popular service offers ties to different applications (and operating systems) and are preferred by different applications, thus each has its own advantages. By default, most of these services create their own folder, under the user’s “home” folder (C:\Users\username for Windows and /Users/username in macOS), in which each services syncs files. And these are separate from where our computers and laptops expect to you to working on your files, the Documents folder, for example.

This leads to your working files and your synced files becoming dispersed across the different services and their folders. This, in turn requires that we keep track of which service a file had been saved to, so that you find it when you need.

Untangling the Cloud

So, how can we solve the problem of not knowing “where” our files are? One way is to consolidate the services’ sync-folders so that they all use the same folder.

Both iCloud and Microsoft’s OneDrive have the option of intertwining their operating systems’ default folders, Documents, Music, etc., with their cloud storage and syncing services. If you use this feature, you would not need to remember which of your common files are stored and synced on the cloud or not.

When installing or configuring the other services, you could point them all to the same common folder. If you elected to consolidate iCloud and OneDrive access to your Documents folder and you use that folder as the common sync folder for all the services, all your synced files to sync to across all services.

The downside is that all your files will cost you cloud-storage space. All your Documents files will be synced with all the services and incur the cost of space in each of the services. This, even though there are probably a lot of files that needn’t be synced at all.

You could try something less dramatic, but it means keeping track of more. Consider whether you want to consolidate your Documents folder with iCloud and/or OneDrive.

consider consolidating all your services

Configure iCloud and OneDrive however you want and consolidate the rest of the services

Since all (but Resilio and Syncthing) charge for the cloud-storage used, you may want to minimize the amount of space used on each service. By sharing

Apple’s iCloud

Apple supports iCloud on Windows as well as macOS and its iOS devices. In macOS, you can configure it to consolidate with the local Documents and Pictures folders.

On Windows, the location cannot be changed using the iCloud interface. But if you can follow instructions, you can “move it” by having its default location reference the true folder location. See How to change the home dir of iCloud Drive (Windows version)?

  1. If you want to retain the files that are currently in your iCloudDrive directory (C:\Users\username\iCloudDrive, aka %USERPROFILE%\iCloudDrive), copy them to the new location. If your iCloud sync is current, this shouldn’t be necessary since the files are in the cloud and will be synced, later.
  2. Disable iCloud Drive from its settings. This will delete the files originally in the iCloud folder (but should still be safely in the cloud).
  3. Open a command prompt and type:
    mklink /J "%USERPROFILE%\iCloudDrive" "target_directory"

    This creates a junction, a reference, from the expected directory location to where the files reside.

  4. Reboot your computer and everything should be fine

Note that the iCloudDrive folder has its own .Trash, Desktop, and Documents folders, just as the local Windows user folder does. However, since iCloudDrive resides in the user folder, it cannot reference the user folder (because then it would contain itself and you would quickly fill your iCloud’s cloud-storage limits).

If you keep your Documents folder in Windows pretty spare, then you might want to share it with the iCloud/Documents directory. Rather than creating a Windows Junction from %USERPROFILE%\iCloudDrive.  Here’s a different approach than described, above:

  1. Open Task Manager to stop the iCloudServices and iCloudDrive processes.
  2. Move all the files from %USERPROFILE%\iCloudDrive\Documents to the “new” location, the documents directory at  %USERPROFILE%\Documents
  3. Remove the Documents directory from iCloudDrive
  4. Open a command prompt and type:
    mklink /J "%USERPROFILE%\iCloudDrive\Documents" "%USERPROFILE%\Documents"

    This creates a reference from the iCloudDrive\Documents location to the local Documents folder.

  5. Reboot the computer to reactivate the iCloud services.

In macOS, the iCloud sync folder is either shared with the local Documents, Desktop, .Trash folders or it is contained in its own folder, away from the user’s home directory.

Note, for what it’s worth, many of the names of the iCloud folders that appear in Explorer and Finder are different than the directory names on disk.

Google Drive

Google Drive is going through a bit of a branding change to “Backup and Sync from Google,” but most of its functionality is the same.

Back and Sync will be adding the ability to sync any folder, not just the ones below the, default, Google Drive folder in the home folder.

Resources

Dream Cars

Not that I need to be reminded, but here’s a list of cars that my dream-car garage would hold… if I could afford any of them.

Porsche

  • 959
  • Carrera GT
  • GT4RS

BMW

  • M1
  • Z8
  • E30 M3

Zur Wirkung: Im Badezimmer das Tütchen aufgerissen oder das obige Beispiel zeigt ganz eindeutig oder das Medikament wurde in Studien auf Nebenwirkungen getestet. Je nachdem, wer am Urlaub teilnimmt, diskrete-apotheke24.de wirkt zum einen gegen die erektile Dysfunktion / Potenzprobleme.

Backup Drobo NAS Content to CrashPlan on Windows

Drobo 5N NASCrashplan, online backup

One of the advantages of online backup service, CrashPlan, is their ability backup NAS (i.e., network) drives to their cloud. While that is technically true, they do not officially support that feature from Windows. They do describe how this should work, but it requires you to reinstall CrashPlan (per user, rather than all-users). You might try that first, that may work.

If your NAS device is a Drobo, then easily backing it all up is complicated by the fact that it does not support a singular view of all its content with a single share.  This summarizes a few tips to get this all working.

View all Drobo Shares in a Single Share

First, let’s make sure that we can get a singular view of all the Drobo’s content from a single share. If we don’t do this, we’d have to map every of Drobo’s shares as a separate drive letter, on Windows. Not only is this tedious, it may not even work if you have too many shares since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet. If you do not care about this convenience, you can skip to the next section.

    1. In Drobo Dashboard, add Share, e.g., “AllShares”. It should probably be limited to specific users… read-only?
    2. ssh into the Drobo and navigate to /mnt/DroboFS/Shares
      ssh my_drobo
      my_drobo:~$ cd /mnt/DroboFS/Shares
      

      I know, this is the “advanced” part you’ll need to have set up your Drobo for ssh access and enable a Windows utility to perform ssh (unless you have added the Bash support to Windows 10—you can use putty).

    3. Delete the AllShares directory that Dashboard created:
      rmdir AllShares
    4. Replace Drobo’s expected directory with a symbolic link to the pointing to the parent directory of all the directories that are the source of each share:
      ln -s /mnt/DroboFS/Shares AllShares 
    5. You may need to reboot the Drobo for this to work correctly.
    6. And/or you may need to reboot Windows or restart Workstation in order for Windows to not be confused about user permissions (if you changed any).
      net stop workstation
      net start workstation
      net start "Computer Browser"
      net start "..."
      

Now that we have a way to see all the NAS’s content via a single share, we can configure CrashPlan to back it up.

Allow CrashPlan to backup NAS volumes

CrashPlan requires that files and directories being backed up, in Windows, be accessible via drive letters. Thus, network “shares” need to be mapped as local drive letters in order for the Windows version of CrashPlan to recognize them.

After getting my system working, I realized that I did not have to do any of the steps I documented below. According to CrashPlan’s own document, “Backing Up A Windows Network Drive,” CrashPlan can be reinstalled per-user rather than for all users, system-wide; then the CrashPlan application will recognize the users’ network drive mappings. I did not get a chance to verify that this works.  If it does not work for you, continue with the following steps.

If CrashPlan is installed for All Users—the default—then it cannot see the network drives mapped by a specific user, since it is running as a “system” application. We need to set Windows to map drives which are visible to system applications, then they can be added to CrashPlan’s backup set.

The following is a summary of the detailed, illustrated steps from “The Crashplan Network Drive Backup Guide.” I recommend you follow that guide after going through the summary I’ve written, here.

  1. Create batch file to NAS volumes as local drives.
    1. Create a batch file. It can be any name, but it must have a .bat extension. Let’s call it AutoStart.bat
      net use N: \\DroboNAS\AllShares /username:WORKGROUP\Bill password
      

      Pick the drive letter (shown in the example as “N”) that you’d like it to use. Replace “DroboNAS” with the network name of your Drobo device. “WORKGROUP” is the workgroup or domain name that it belongs to and “Bill” and “password” correspond to the user that you’ve set up to access AllShares.

      I had trouble, initially, being able to set user-specific access permissions. What worked for me was to ensure that both the Drobo and my Windows machines were using the same workgroup name. And, because Windows requires the name be uppercase, it seems I had to ensure that the Drobo also used uppercase characters for the workgroup name.

      If you have multiple shares for the NAS and/or more than one NAS drive, add more entries to the batch file for each drive, as necessary.

    2. The batch file can be anywhere; the CrashPlan installation directory is as good a place as any.  %PROGRAMFILES%\CrashPlan (e.g., C:\Program Files\CrashPlan)
  2. Schedule file to run at login via Task Scheduler. It must be runnable as SYSTEM.
  3. Reboot or create a one-time trigger to execute the batch file during the current session (as SYSTEM).
  4. In the CrashPlan app’s Backup tab, click the Change… button under the Files section.
  5. Add the new drive and select/unselect share directories be included/excluded directories, as you normally would for local files and directories in the CrashPlan application.

Resources

  • CrashPlan, “Backing Up A Windows Network Drive.”  If your version of CrashPlan is recent and do not mind re-installing CrashPlan per-user, then the instructions are short. Initially, it wasn’t clear to me why this would work so I didn’t take this path.
  • TipsDotCom.com, “The Crashplan Network Drive Backup Guide.” This is the guide that I followed. While it is illustrated with an old version of Windows, it still works on Windows 10.

Ski Roadtrip: Day 9, Kicking Horse

The drive from Revelstoke to Kicking Horse in Golden, BC, was pretty treacherous; dark, slick, twisty roads make for a very exhausting drive, taking at least a half-hour more than anticipated.

Roadtrip Tip: Drive mountainous roads during daylight hours. Not only is it easier drive when you can see—this is even more important when there are snow storms to contend with. Also, during the day, you get to appreciate the beautiful views.

I arrived at Mary’s Motel, the closest accommodations to the road up to Kicking Horse, about a 10 minute drive. I’d used booking.com, since Orbitz didn’t have any listings for Golden. It was pretty big for a motel; I suspect they get pretty crowded on good ski weekends.

I made it in time for dinner and I searched for the recommendation from Gary and Sheila (co-habitants of the B&B in Revelstoke), “22 something”… Eleven22 was in a converted house, in the contemporary dining way. It was excellent and I highly recommended it; not only was the food good, modern cuisine, but it was quite cheap for its quality.

eleven22: Roasted Red Pepper Tomato Soup
Roasted Red Pepper Tomato Soup

eleven22: Salmon Linguini
Salmon Linguini (but not your normal Salmon linguini)

The Mountain

Kicking Horse: View from the parking lot

Kicking Horse is more spread out than Revelstoke, providing more blue runs. Continue reading Ski Roadtrip: Day 9, Kicking Horse

Ski Roadtrip: Day 8, Revelstoke, Day 3

I took the day before off, after 5 days of straight skiing. Blackened Salmon at Chubby FunsterThe temps along my whole trip, no matter how far north or east I go, have been hovering around freezing or warmer. That doesn’t make for great snow. But at Revelstoke, at least, there is a decent amount of it. The night before, I went to Chubby Funsters for dinner, a nice blackened salmon, and the hugest tater-tots I have ever seen (along with a Canadian red)!

Revelstoke: Overlooking the valley from the top of StokeAgain, the ride up the gondola breaks through the low clouds to a bit of sunlight. You can see the clouds snaking through the valley in both directions.

But it was back to warm spring conditions (I don’t think it got below freezing): hard, crusty, firm snow in the morning, softening mid-day to become pretty skiable where the sun hits. Unfortunately, the best snow conditions came the hour and a half before they closed the lifts at 3pm.  IMG_3132

I wandered around the small village (new buildings with requisite accommodations, a few stores, and a couple of places to eat) before taking off to my next destination, Kicking Horse.

Click the pictures below

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