I have a pair of Salomon Smart Skate Chill LX inline skates. They’re pretty nifty — combining skates and shoes into one, so you have less to carry. Recently, one of the straps broke in half. As Salomon no longer makes skates, I had to shop around for replacement parts. Both Inline Warehouse and Roller …
Author Archives: paulschreiber
Eight ways to improve 401(k)s
Congress is working on the SECURE Act 2.0. It provides for automatic enrollment, increases the catch-up contribution limit and makes many other changes. Here are eight more ways to make 401(k)s fairer. Call it SECURE 2.0.1. Mandatory RothNot all 401(k) plans allow for Roth 401(k)s. Mandate that plans provide this as an option. Don’t punish …
On asking questions
John Sawatsky is an expert on interviewing and asking questions. Here is some coverage of his work. Tools of the Trade: The Question — Poynter The Question Man — American Journalism Review The Art of the Interview, ESPN-Style — NPR John Sawatsky and the power of simple questions — Signal v Noise Radio / The best …
HOWTO create a bootable USB installer for Mac OS X Lion
Here are instructions for doing this in the Terminal. (Other answers you find are out of date, as they change every time Disk Utility’s UI changes, which is a lot.) Before you begin, make sure to partition the USB drive as GPT and format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) (aka JHFS+). Make a copy …
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HOWTO update HP LaserJet Pro P1102w firmware on macOS
The current version of the firmware (20201023, as of January 22, 2022) for the HP LasterJet Pro P1102w only runs on macOS 10.14 or earlier. This is not great, as macOS 10.14 was released back 2018. If you try to run the (unsigned, sigh) updater, it crashes looking for a missing dylib (/usr/lib/libnetsnmp.15.dylib): The workaround …
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HP LaserJet Pro P1102w driver fails to install on macOS ≥ 12.0.1
Cross-posted from HP support forum. HP’s LaserJet Pro P1102w printer drivers (download) fail to install on macOS 12.0.1 or later. Attempting to install them displays the error: This update requires macOS 12.0 or earlier. Timeline macOS 12.0.1 was released on October 25, 2021. HP’s drivers (5.1) were were released on October 27, 2021. Previous thread (“Hp printer …
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Music booking and house concert notes
House concert information Concerts In Your Home (host and musician directory) Russ & Julie’s House Concerts (hosts in Oak Park, California) Brask House Concerts (Fremont, CA) Kathryn’s House Concerts (host in NYC) House Concert hosts on Undiscovered Music HomeRoutes Businesses that book small shows Artery (Artery takes 5%; host/musician decide split) Side Door (host/musician decide …
HOWTO change a theme slug in WordPress
If you rename a WordPress theme, you will lose customizations (theme mods). They’re stored in wp_options based on the theme’s slug. WP CLI makes it easy to quickly copy the theme options over:
State legislature websites, compared
Having recently spent some time with OpenStates data, I noticed the state government websites varied … a lot. Wanting to quantify this variation, I used the SSL Labs scanner, Lighthouse, and some Ruby scripts to compare the 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico’s legislature’s websites. The table below covers usability (is the hostname flexible), security …
Installing and updating Creative Suite 6
After upgrading from Mojave to Catalina and Big Sur, Adobe Creative Suite 6 Design Standard no longer worked (despite Illustrator and Photoshop being 64-bit apps). Not wanting to spend $60/month for occasional use, running these under Mojave in a VM was my next-best option. After repeatedly running into an error using a VirtualBox setup script, …