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Author: rgetter

  • The Woke vs. The Sleepers

    The Woke vs. The Sleepers

    Man sleeping on street
    Makes Me Grateful for My Bed 1972 Daniel D. Teoli Jr
    By: Daniel D. Teoli Jr. via Wikimedia Commons

    “Woke” is a beautifully designed term of derision. Aiming a verb misused as an adjective at a well-educated, generally grammatically correct population is uniquely irritating. Then again, it is very hard for those of us to whom it can be applied to categorically deny it. This is especially true for me, a woke Boomer. I can easily look back and see the arc of the transformations that have been happening over the past two decades, having lived through the before and after. 

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  • Back up a YouTube channel with JDownloader2

    Back up a YouTube channel with JDownloader2

    Overview

    Did you know if that if YouTube deletes your channel, even if they do it in error and it’s “restored,” the content is gone forever–unless you have a backup? I found that using Google Takeout can be really cumbersome with large channels and the collection of files and data it gives you aren’t in a form that is very helpful for restoring things. After searching around (like, a lot), I found a great video on YouTube from GSheets with a whole different approach.

    Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    This tutorial may gloss over some of the Google Sheets aspects he specializes in, so check out his video for that. But I’ll go a lot deeper into how to use JDownloader2 in the process. This is something I originally wrote as part of my job at Portland Community College, but I thought it’s worth making available to the world at large.

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  • Hello! (again)

    Portland Waterfront cherry blossoms

    Decades ago, I built a website by stumbling around Adobe Dreamweaver. It wasn’t half bad and got a few viewers. After the initial flush of success, it lay dormant and became embarrassingly outdated. Five years ago, I gave WordPress a try in a subdomain (go.rgetter.com–the “go” part is the subdomain). After the initial flush of success, it lay dormant for five years.

    Now, I quietly disposed of the old site and am embarking on fleshing out this new one. Here’s what I have planned, levels of self-motivation permitting:

    • This modest post
    • Migrating various content I created elsewhere that should be useful to the general public
    • Moving the once-popular Journey to Japan pages here
    • Creating a gallery where I can show off my pictures and videos
    • Links to some of my better MacDirectory Magazine articles
    • Nagging myself to create some new content here

    This little ice-breaker complete, if I have successfully fixed the file permission problem and it posts correctly, I may have the confidence to continue. Someday maybe I’ll even get good at it

  • Journey to Japan

  • What I think about when I think about updating

    updates_screen_webUpdating an operating system used to be a lot more exciting than it is now.   Put simply, things would break. And for a time in Apple’s checkered past, it wasn’t as much “if” as it was “what.” Even if there was a change sheltered behind a couple of dots in the version number, there were very good reasons to be cautious.

    Things are a whole lot better now, but it can save you a lot of grief down the road if you still treat these updates with a little care and preparation. Rolling back a Mac OS to an earlier version is not necessarily easy if you’re not ready. (more…)

  • Inauspicious beginnings

    At the gate
    At the gate

    For reasons I can’t quite explain (and not being willing to admit to simple procrastination), we put of actually booking our trip to Japan to less than six weeks before we were planning to leave in mid-June. Simply put: big mistake. The number of flights that were available were limited, the ticket prices where sky-high and the remaining seats were in that center row purgatory created by twin aisle jets. The thought of flying across the Pacific without a window was maddening.

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  • To Make a Long Story short

    Japan2015_0620_075

    As I wrote about my travels in the past, brevity was never one of the first things on my mind. In fact, being free of the usual 300, 800, 1200, and 1600 word targets of my magazine articles, I rejoiced in the freedom of writing without out boundaries.

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  • OMG, my first post!

    OMG, my first post!

    cropped-Japan2015_0621_0771.jpg

    Getting started in blogging, particularly being new to running a content management system is incredibly intimidating.

    Getting the blog set up was like the first time I put on ice skates. I had read everything I needed to and acquired all the necessities. Instead of skates, socks and a hockey stick, it was a sub-domain, a book or two and a bunch of how-to sites. Then I spent an evening trying to get it right, performing all the necessary tasks, except for remembering to write down the new passwords.

    But the first time I put on ice skates, I was standing up on the carpet on my parents’ living room and it was pretty easy.

    But this is like the filling of getting out on the actual ice for the first time. It is very slippery, it feels pretty strange, and if I fall on my butt, a lot of people will know.

    Welcome to the blogsphere, I guess.