Last night my daughter and I went for a walk to get funnel cake at the carnival. We do this every year at least once and sit down on a bench nearby and share it. The carnival is set up exactly the same way every year. I have pictures going back 15+ years and they look just like what I see today. Once in awhile a ride changes but things like the stand with the funnel cake is always in the same place, with the same woman running the show with new faces around her. It got me thinking about how the passing of time gets marked by these patterns in our lives.

Sometimes they’re directly tied to events, like the yearly Community Days festival that happens in my town every year around the 4th of July. Sometimes they’re tied to the seasons. My local grocery store reminds me that Summer is fast approaching when I see mulch stacked, and flowers lined up on the sidewalk outside in the late Spring. We move into Summer and those things eventually disappear and soon items for Fall will take their place.

New Years Eve. The Spring Equinox. Summer festivals. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Leaves falling off the trees. The holidays at the end of the year…then the pattern starts again. People come and go from our lives but these patterns keep going, over and over again, marking time.

So I’ve been experimenting a bit with what has been called “curtain mode” on the Mac when doing a remote desktop session. I use Jump Desktop because they also have a version of the client for Windows (not just the agent piece) but I believe this feature is available on the built-in Mac remote desktop solution (VNC) as well as the popular Screens app (which I believe uses VNC).

Jump Desktop has a superior non-VNC mode called Fluid that also has a “curtain mode” hack. These steps assume two things:

1. You have more than one account on the Mac to be able to turn on fast user switching.
2. You have the Jump Desktop agent installed on the Mac you want to control.

Steps

1. Make sure you have fast user switching enabled on your Mac.
   1. Go to System Preferences->Users and Groups
   2. Select your user login then click Login Options
   3. Check Show fast user switching...
2. Log in to the machine remotely via a Fluid connection.
3. Click the icon in the menu bar that is there for fast user switching (it looks like a person’s head and shoulders inside a circle) to bring up the switching menu.
4. Click Login Window...
5. Enjoy your now-private remote desktop connection.

Caveats

1. I did notice is that audio will stop working if you work this way. I had the settings set to send audio over the connection and had the Music app playing something on my iMac when testing this. Initially it started playing on my laptop but as soon as I did this trick to hide the remote screen the audio stopped playing and wouldn’t start again even if I clicked the play button in Music.
2. Depending on the display settings you choose for the connection in the Jump Desktop client it could leave your remote computer display settings pretty jacked up when you disconnect. From a Retina MacBook Pro to a Retina M1 iMac I found if you choose a resolution of “Match Display with Retina” it leaves everything in a good state. Other settings required me to go into the display settings in System Preferences and reselect Default for Display to get things back to normal.

Interesting (and relevant to a recent discussion on micro.blog about storing all of your notes in a text format) article on Eclectic Light about archiving data. No, archiving and backing up aren’t the same thing. Archiving is making sure important data (financial records, important photos, etc.) is retrievable far into the future.

Looking forward to future articles promised. Howard is always ridiculously thorough.

Have decided to keep any politics out of my posts moving forward, unless I’m going to give some space between something happening and writing anything about it. I have a tendency to respond first and think later and that doesn’t move the discourse forward.

We certainly have been having some challenging times and it’s easy to see why people are upset, but if I can’t add anything of value I’d rather not post at all. This isn’t Twitter.

This is why I loathe politics… Mike Pence in a speech yesterday said pretty much everything going on right now can be blamed on one person, Joe Biden. So Biden is at fault for COVID-19? The Russian invasion of Ukraine? Oil companies shutting down refineries? China’s ridiculous “zero COVID” policy that is still causing supply chain issues 2 years later? No doubt the administration has made some blunders. But stop with the bullshit Pence.

Michael Tsai:

Forums have always been somewhat hit-or-miss, hilariously bad advice mixed in with really insightful stuff that you wouldn’t get from an official source. From my perspective, what has been getting worse lately is that it’s harder to find solutions via general Web searches. I keep running into outdated advice and pages that are filler/SEO content that doesn’t answer the question, even incorrectly.

This is a real problem. Often I get answers that are 3+ years old when searching on things in Google. Google does have a timeframe option in which to restrict search results but the default, at least for many technical topics, is a non-starter. It would be nice if the results were restricted to the last year and have a section for older, but potentially relevant, results. If the relevance of results are still based on links to the result, etc. I would think this would be doable without killing search results too much. After all, the in-result ads aren’t years old…

Arturia FX Collection 3

Forgot to mention the release of FX Collection 3 from Arturia.

Intro pricing of $299 through 7/7, or, if you already own FX Collection 1 or 2 log in and check your price. I ended up paying $69 since I already own FX Collection 2.

The collection includes four new plugins:

• Dist TUBE-CULUTRE, a distortion plugin based on a modeled vacuum tube hardware unit.
• Dist OPAMP-21, another distortion plugin, this time using op-amps, based on a modeled guitar pedal.
• Efx FRAGMENTS - granular processing effects for stutters, stereo ambiance, effects, etc.
• Tape MELLO-FI - a lo-fi tape effect based on the Mellotron.

The collection also includes updates for the older plugins in the collection including UI updates and faster loading times.

Wow. Talk about a surprise. Yesterday Roland announced the release of a software version of the rare Jupiter-4 synthesizer from 1978 along with the new Analog Polysynth Collection.

It looks like ACB modeling isn't quite dead yet as the Jupiter-4 was modeled using ACB and much like other members of the ACB club the software version adds features not found on the original like velocity sensitivity, extended range on the oscillator, and additional effects.

Long given up as dead by members of the Gearspace music forums, the Roland System-8 hardware synthesizer gets a new plug-out in the Jupiter-4. Now if only the System-8 had more plug-out slots available...

Pretty pricey at one-time charge of $199. The pricing of the Jupiter-4 lifetime key is a bit odd to say the least at $50 more than the Jupiter-8 or Juno instruments which arguably are more iconic and sought after in the real world. It's hard to argue that the price is fair for what is essentially a single-VCO instrument. At these prices it's clear that Roland is really pushing people to the subscriptions for Roland Cloud.

Analog Polysynth Collection

Also announced was the Roland Analog Polysynth Collection of which the Jupiter-4 is a member. The collection also includes the software versions of the iconic Jupiter-8, Juno-60, JX-3P and Juno-106. Cost: $499.

The Analog Polysynth Collection isn't cheap but it definitely saves a lot of money for those not interested in a Roland Cloud subscription as the lifetime keys if purchased separately would cost $775.

Just learned about the setfile command on the Mac. I wanted to change the create date on a file:

setfile -d MM/DD/YYYY <filename>

Can also set the modification time:

setfile -m MM/DD/YYYY <filename>

Also takes a timestamp if you want to also update the time. Can either be 12/24 hr. If you use 12 hours you need to also use AM/PM.

Very handy.

Added a second line to my iPhone as AT&T told me it would be $10 a month extra and no activation fee. Last month I was charged an activation fee and $30 for the second line. Got a $30 refund from the agent I talked to at the time but could not get a refund of the activation fee. Of course they promised everything would be sorted out this month. Look at my latest bill and they’re still charging me $30 for the second line istead of $10.

So I did something very stupid a bit ago. I let a user here on micro.blog get into my head enough that I went and deleted everything here with the intent of running away. But fuck that guy. I am back. He made some comment about parts of this place being “toxic as fuck” but he is part of the problem. My comment was not toxic. It challenged his thought on the subject of Twitter but it was not rude, nor toxic. He is the one who made it toxic. He is the one who brought the civility level down. You know who you are. Welcome to my mute list. I don’t have time for your type anymore and I won’t let you ruin my experience.