Abandoning FileVault

As neat and secure as Apple’s FileVault feature (which encrypt’s one’s home directory) is, I’ve abandoned it. Last night I had brought my laptop to a grinding halt (doing too much, memory-hungry apps, etc) and rather than wait it out, I just rebooted it. It screwed up the filesystem on which my home drive resided, which with FileVault is in an encrypted sparse image file. I was unable to fsck it and repair it — apparently I would have needed a $90 program called DiskWarrior.

FileVault, I discovered last week, was also behind my inability to “grab” a bunch of items from Finder with Quicksilver — something I use probably 100 times per day or more at work.

Luckily, not much of my personal data ever resides in my home directory, and what’s there is always available elsewhere, so I just wiped that user account and started over. It’s too bad, because it was going pretty well. Apple’s early iterations of FileVault were kind of buggy, but this time around it was much more solid.

Just not quite solid enough.

Wikimapia: Let’s describe the world!

This past Friday, during a discussion of Google maps (while using it to find something on my phone), Feilim Mac Gabhann alerted me to a site called Wikimapia.

It’s Google Satellite, but you can draw a box and then describe what’s in the box. Which boxes are shown depends on your level of zoom, so it’s both scale-appropriate and manageable.

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while, except maybe the iPhone. You really should go check it out.

ADDENDUM: You can also load the information in Google Earth as discussed in this blog post. Even cooler!

Email Issues

I’m sorry if I haven’t been approving or responding to your comments. Apparently I’m not getting the emails for some reason. I’m looking into it now.

UPDATE: I recently switched to Tuffmail for my mail hosting, and they’ve been doing a good job, but apparently my webserver does not meet their exacting anti-spam qualifications. I’ve whitelisted the server, so hopefully I will get emails about comments now.

Iceboating on White Bear Lake

My father sent me a couple of movies of him iceboating on White Bear Lake. I YouTubed them at some loss of quality, but they’re still worth watching. The first one is first person, the second one is third person (point of view).

First Person:

Third Person: