I learned today about an interesting local girl…
The Nobel-winning German physicist, Max Born, had a daughter named Irene. His wife was part-Jewish, so they left Germany before the war to escape the Nazis.
Irene married a Welshman who worked (as an MI5 officer) on the Enigma project at Bletchley Park. An interesting blend of family backgrounds.
They in turn had a daughter, who was born here in Cambridge. Her name?
Olivia Newton-John
Hard disks, and the filing systems that run on them, occasionally get confused. This can happen for all sorts of reasons: bugs, power cuts, software crashes, hardware glitches, to name a few. The advent of journalled filesystems make these hiccups much less of a problem than they used to be, but they still occur.
As with checking your car tyres, it’s a very good idea to be proactive about checking and fixing any small issues. Often your computer will continue to run just fine, so you won’t know there’s anything amiss, and, indeed, they may never cause a problem, but it’s much better to fix them before they do… otherwise that one broken link might just cause you to lose something important in the future.
That’s why I have an entry in my to-do system for each Mac that we have in the house, reminding me to run a check-and-repair on its main hard disk. These entries reappear automatically 6 months after I check them off. (If your to-do system can’t do that, you might want to think about getting Omnifocus.)
Anyway, on the Mac, you don’t need any special software to keep things ticking over nicely: you can use the standard Disk Utility program to run these checks, which lives in the Utilities folder within Applications. It’ve very easy: just fire it up, and on the left you’ll see your disks, and the partitions on each disk. Select one, and you can check (verify) or repair the disk layout itself, and the permissions of key files within the partition.
I never actually bother with the ‘Verify’ buttons: I just hit ‘Repair’, since that will also do a check, and it won’t change anything if the disk or partition doesn’t need repairing. I start with Repair Disk, and then follow it with Repair Disk Permissions.
However, there’s a trick to this…
The system normally can’t do much in the way of repairs on the filesystem from which you’re actually running. So you’ll probably find that the ‘Repair Disk’ button is greyed out, as in the image above, and you’ll need to boot your Mac from another disk or partition in order to run them. Ah.
Fortunately, however, on recent versions of Mac OS X, this is trivial to do, because you also have a hidden ‘Recovery Partition’ on the disk, from which you can boot in order to recover from serious problems, reinstall the operating system, restore from backups, etc. And Disk Utility is available there. What’s more, it’s a good idea to run it from the Recovery Partition anyway, because you’ll have nothing running in the background and trying to do backups, sync with Dropbox, or whatever, while you’re doing the check.
So, reboot your Mac. Normally, if you hold down the Option/Alt key while it starts up, you’ll see a list of places from which you can boot. On Yosemite, however, this probably won’t show you the Recovery Partition, so you need to know a new keystroke: Cmd-R. Hold that while booting, and you’ll get a menu from which you can run Disk Utility. Run your checks, which normally only take a few minutes, then quit the utility and the parent menu, and you can reboot back into your normal, happy, healthy world.
One last wrinkle. If you use FileVault to encrypt your disk, which I’d recommend at least on a laptop, then you’ll need to give your FileVault password before Disk Utility can open the partition and run any checks on it. Just select the partition and click the Unlock button in the toolbar, type in your password and you’ll be ready to go.
Regular, scheduled, proactive checks will help keep your Mac happy and healthy!
A doorway at my old college, Gonville & Caius.
Cambridge streets aren’t often this quiet.
(As with most of my photos, you can click for a larger version.)
A new look for the New Year?
We’re just taking the decorations down. We had them up for nearly two whole weeks this year! It’s been a fun Christmas: hope it was for you, too.
I’ve always liked fireworks. It seems delightful that, amidst our LED-illuminated high-tech world of lasers, giant displays and 3D computer graphics, the best way to make a large crowd of people all gasp in pleasure simultaneously is, still, to employ a Chinese technology more than a millennium old.
In my youth, Guy Fawkes’ Night was a treat, when we trudged across a couple of dark fields in our wellies to the local hill where, in the glow of an enormous bonfire, the town council put on a modest but very pleasing display; generally the one night of the year when fireworks would be seen.
Now, however, people seem to let them off on every conceivable occasion. There were some here last night, for New Year’s Eve, which is fair enough, and no doubt some of our neighbours will decide to pop some tonight to celebrate New Year’s Day. We had some near Christmas, too. And for this newfangled Halloween thing, now I come to think about it.
Then there are those who decide to let them off on some other night, perhaps the weekend closest to whatever date is being celebrated, so more people can attend. Since November 5th fell in the middle of the week last year, we had something going bang up above us most nights for a whole week. Random corporate, sporting or university events decide to include them occasionally throughout the year. And, of course, being in central Cambridge, where we are surrounded by the college May Balls, there is a week or so in mid-summer when there are fireworks going off every evening, usually from more than one venue at once.
All of this is exceedingly distressing for our rather nervous spaniel, and no doubt for most other animal life in the area. But it seems a bit sad to me, too. When they were something you could only see once a year at a special event – since very few people of our acquaintance would purchase them for a home display – it was, well, a bit more magical. Christmas comes but once a year, and rightly so. I can’t help feeling that Bonfire Night would benefit from the same self-restraint…
The hill behind Wimpole Hall farm was beautiful first thing this morning.
I used to think that I’d use my wide-angle lenses for landscape photography, but I’m finding that many of the best shots come from my telephoto.
And the more experience I get with my little Fuji X-Pro 1, the less I feel the need to carry my big heavy full-frame DSLR. I also took five lenses with me this morning on a casual dog-walk; something I’d never be likely to do with my Canon kit!
There are few services, I think, that give me quite so much enjoyment per shilling as Audible. For anyone not familiar with it, Audible is the biggest retailer of audiobooks. These are normally rather expensive things retailing for around £20-30 each, but if you like them enough you can take out a subscription which gets you a book each month for £7.99.
Since I spend about an hour a day walking the dog, or driving to and from dog-walking spots, I manage to ‘read’ a lot of books this way simply by tucking my phone into my shirt pocket – I don’t even bother with earphones. And then there’s shaving, and ironing, and train journeys and flights and… well, you get the idea. I read quite a bit more this way than I do when lying in bed, and remember it better, because I’m not half-asleep at the time! Also, since Rose and I have fairly similar tastes in reading, we both get to benefit from the subscription. Unabridged audiobooks are typically 10-20 hours long, but I have also listened to Scott Brick’s recording of Atlas Shrugged which runs to 63 hours and still only counts as a single credit. Now, that’s pretty good value for £7.99, I think!
How often have you thought, “I’d like to read that, if only I had the time”? Well, perhaps this is a good way to enhance your commuting time in the coming year?
Anyway, here are a few of my favourite books from 2014, in case you need some ideas:
The Martian by Andy Weir, read by R.C. Bray. Somebody described this as “Robinson Crusoe on Mars”, which tells you the basic plot, but it’s very nicely done, and has an interesting history: the author serialised it on his web site, then self-published it on the Kindle, and in about a year it’ll be a Ridley Scott film starring Matt Damon. I thoroughly enjoyed and was gripped by this – it’s a great plot – but it does come with one warning: don’t give it to anyone who’s likely to object to strong language!
Writing on the Wall by the ever-wonderful Tom Standage of The Economist, read by Simon Vance. Subtitled, “Social Media: The First 2,000 Years”, it examines many of the communication methods we consider novel today and finds their predecessors in the world of ancient Rome, the pamphlets of Martin Luther, the early days of radio. Very readable and educational stuff.
Your Deceptive Mind by Steven Novella is rather different. Novella is a clinical neurologist at Yale, and this is a set of 24 lectures on critical thinking published by The Great Courses. How can we know what is true? What are the different ways our brain deceives us? What are the strengths and limitations of the scientific method? Critical Thinking wasn’t a subject we had at school in my day; it should be compulsory now.
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian. O’Brian is, I think, the finest historical writer in recent decades, and, more importantly, this view is shared by Rose, who knows a great deal more than me about both writing and about the eighteenth century. We’ve read most of them in paper form. His books are loved around the world, so it’s not surprising that there are many different recordings, both abridged and unabridged, and, while I was tempted by those from Robert Hardy, or Tim Piggott-Smith, in the end I settled on these, which are beautifully read by Ric Jerrom. This was partly because he has recorded the entire, unabridged series, and to give you an idea of how much I’ve enjoyed them, I’m currently just starting book five, Desolation Island…Anyway, I hope these are recommendations are useful to somebody. It’s worth noting, by the way, that these are on the UK store: if you’re in another part of the world you may have a different selection available (and need to use different links).
Happy listening for 2015!
On the Fifth Day of Christmas, my true love baked for me…
There are many good reasons for marrying someone from a very different cultural background.
One of them is Armenian peda bread.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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