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“Fear leads to anger… Anger leads to hate… Hate leads to suffering.” Jedi Master Yoda On Saturday, my wife Julie, son Max, and I attended church. This was a very special mass as it was the mass at which Max was being baptized. Julie’s family was present as were friends of ours. As a lot of my friends know, I’m not religious. My stance on religion is that I choose complete freedom over being beholden to humans interpreting what they believe to be the word of God. I have seen religion twisted to a few extremes in my days on this earth therefore I choose not to be a follower. However, I am not going to sway people to see things my way. I wholeheartedly support my Catholic wife and family in their choices. ...

On June 1, 2016, Microsoft released an update to it’s Remote Desktop client for Mac OS X via the Mac App Store. The update to version 8.0.32 broke some functionality for people. The most commonly reported error I have seen is “Connection reset to peer” before authentication. Sadly, unless you have a Time Machine backup to grab the old version from you are likely going to have to find an alternative. If you do happen to have an older version that isn’t broken let me know and I will gladly host it for all to get here. ...

I happen to be someone that finds themselves setting up new systems for myself often. I have to remind myself there are tools that I need installed before the scenario in which I need to use them (on an airplane, during a crisis, etc.). I use a Mac so this list of software and setup is going to be very Mac OS X centric. From the web: Google Chrome Evernote - My brain lives here Google Drive - I keep some .files (dot files) here iTerm - My Terminal of choice Shuttle - Super awesome ssh config menu creator Little Snitch - I don’t trust any one or any code Shimo - Need to use more than one VPN? Shimo is for you GPG Tools MySQL Workbench - When you login to a MySQL server and say, “WTF?!?” you might want a GUI as a safety Witch - CMD + TAB will never be the same Rectangle - Position your windows where you want them Skitch - Screeenshot tool that saves to Evernote Dropbox CleanMyMac - I use this to uninstall software and clear caches (among other things) DaisyDisk - Find wasted disk Wireshark Postman Mercurial VirtualBox Vagrant SourceTree - I am using this less and less these days but still want it around Firefox Chrome Canary Firefox Developer Edition Safari Technology Preview Telegram VLC From the Mac App Store: ...

Like a lot of systems folks I use sed, a lot. It is probably an unhealthy amount of sed use but so be it. I operate on a lot of Linux servers but my desktop environment of choice is Mac OS X which means BSD tools (not the Linux-y GNU tools). The differences are relatively subtle between BSD sed and GNU sed. However, most of my work is done through iTerm (a literal black box). I frequently find myself diving down rabbit holes and I really do not want to have to remember the differences between BSD and GNU sed. I want the same sed everywhere so I compile GNU sed on Mac OS X: ...

Few things irritate me more than poorly documented dependencies. If your tool or software documentation states you can install your widget with one command and it does not work you are probably annoying people. Consider this a running list of tools and their often not well documented dependency chains. Feel free to chime in with your examples in the comments. Ansible Ansible is one of my favorite tools has many installation options. I tend to need the latest features so I end up using pip to install Ansible. On CentOS 7 and Red Hat 7 the Ansible dependency chain has been growing lately: ...