I thought this was unusually lucid, for a Quora post: https://www.quora.com/Should-I-use-Fink-MacPorts-Homebrew-or-something-else-for-MacOS-package-management

Here’s the part that got my attention:

• Homebrew does everything it can to act harmoniously with the software already present on Darwin, the BSD variant of Unix shipped by Apple. MacPorts, on the other hand, does everything it can to ensure you are running a pure version of the ported software independent of what may be already installed
• If you are porting everyday Unix tools to your Mac and care more about it “just working” and ease of integration, go with Homebrew. If you are porting things that require precise versioning of supporting software for performance or reliability reasons, you will likely have better results with MacPorts
• I don’t recommend using both on the same machine – they get confused about what versions of system software are already “installed”

This will install brew:

• ruby -e “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)”

Sometimes Google Maps will not allow me to drag-and-drop to manually change the route. It just pans the map around, instead of dragging the route from one road to another.

This happens when the written directions are expanded to show the details. To re-enable manual rerouting, get rid of the detailed directions. It won’t let you change the route because it is displaying the specific roads and it doesn’t want to re-draw that panel.

At the top of the written directions, there will be a (blue) panel which says something like “From to ". At the left side of this panel, will be a left-facing arrow. Click that left-facing arrow to go back to the summary written instructions. This will re-enable drag-and-drop rerouting.

For an explanation of all of the files, see my complete list of OpenVPN certificates, keys, and authorities.

Generating Your Keys and Certificates

Build keys and certificates per this story

Configuring the Router

Using Merlin 380.65_2. Open your router IP in a web browser (e.g. http://192.168.1.1)…

• VPN tab » OpenVPN Servers sub-tab » Server1 = On » VPN Details = Advanced Settings
• Interface Type = TUN
• Protocol = TCP (I don’t know why, but UDP performs poorly for me.)
• Server Port = 1194 (I’m using 1194 on the router. I have a router inside a ‘residential gateway.’ I’ll do port redirection from 443 on the RG to here.)
• Firewall = Auto
• Authorization Mode = TLS
• Content modification of Keys & Certification. Using files generated by easy-rsa per my Starbucks article (files in easy-rsa/keys_routervpn). For all keys/certs, copy just the “—- BEGIN” line through the “—-END” line.
  • Static Key: Paste contents of ~/Packages/keys_xxxx/ta.key
  • Certificate Authority: Paste contents of ~/Packages/keys_xxxx/ca.crt
  • Server Certificate: Paste contents of ~/Packages/keys_xxxx/server_xxxx.crt
  • Server Key: Paste contents of ~/Packages/keys_xxxx/server_xxxx.key
  • Diffie Hellman: Paste contents of ~/Packages/keys_xxxx/dh2048.pem
  • Certificate Revocation List: Paste contents of ~/Packages/keys_xxxx/crl.pem
  • Extra Chain Certificates: (empty)
  • Press Apply.
• Username/Password Authentication = No
• TLS control channel security = Incoming Auth(0)
• Auth digest = SHA256
• VPN Subnet/Netmask = 10.8.0.0, 255.255.255.0
• Poll interval = 0
• Push LAN to clients = Yes
• Direct clients to redirect Internet traffic = Yes
• Respond to DNS = Yes
• Advertise DNS to clients = Yes
• Cipher negotiation = Disabled
• Negotiable Ciphers = (doesn’t matter; don’t change it)
• Legacy/fallback cipher = AES-256-CBC
• Compression = LZO Adaptive
• TLS Renegotiation Time = -1
• Log level = 3
• Manage Client-Specific Options = No
• Custom Configuration =
  • tls-version-min 1.2
  • proto tcp4
  • push “dhcp-option DNS 192.168.x.1”
  • max-clients 40
  • port-share 192.168.1.9 443
• Notes:
  • I have a router one hop outside my VPN router, and I want it to do DNS, so I push its IP as the DNS server.
  • My incoming traffic first hits OpenVPN, and it OpenVPN doesn’t recognize the frame as being an OpenVPN frame, it forwards the traffic to a downstream https server. This allows me to run multiple services on a single external port.
• Press Apply.
• Go to the System Log tab and make sure it started.

Other:

If you are using another router as your internet gateway (e.g. you cable modem or your U-verse modem), don’t forget to forward ports 1194 (TCP+UDP) and 443 (TCP) to your VPN router.

Back to Surf Safe at Starbucks

I’m running XP in a VMware Fusion VM.

Spooler SubSystem App has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

This didn’t help:

• NET STOP SPOOLER and press Enter
• DEL %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32\SPOOL\PRINTERS*.* and press Enter
• NET START SPOOLER and press Enter

Deleting all existing printers didn’t help.

This seems to fix it: http://www.pchell.com/support/spoolersubsystem.shtml

• I think the problem is the Monitor for thinprint. That means I can’t use Thinprint printers.

Priorities from Low to High

• Very Important
• Strategically Important
• Strategically Important to the Entire Enterprise
• Astonishingly Important
• Incredibly, Stupendously Important
• Important Beyond Belief
• Ludicrously Important

So the next time you wonder why we haven’t gotten around to your very important task, it may be helpful to recall that there are 6 levels of importance to the enterprise ahead of you.

In Outlook VBA, one might code

• Private WithEvents olInboxItems As Items
• Set olInboxItems = objNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox).Items
• Private Sub olInboxItems_ItemAdd(byVal Item as Object)

and expect the ItemAdd routine to get called. Sometimes it will.

In an Exchange environment, if you also have a

• Private Sub Application_NewMailEx(ByVal EntryIDs As String)

then ItemAdd will not get called. You can have EITHER an Application_NewMailEx OR an ItemAdd.

I’m looking at CloudPull to back up my Google data. Yes, you should back up Google data. No, I don’t think my local hard drive is more reliable than a Google data center, but hardware failure is the least of my concerns. Consider what would happen if you lost access to your Google account. Um hmmm… Now see how many ways you can think of which would cause that to happen. Still think you don’t need a backup?

Oh, and when I search my files on my Mac, I expect to find all of my files – not all of my files except my Google Docs.

CloudPull has a genius trial version. You can back up one Google account (that’s all I want) and you can only run the app as a U.I. app (which I don’t want). I can thoroughly confirm that the app meets my needs and I can take as long as I want. But if I continue to use it, I’ll definitely register it because I want backup to run invisibly in the background.

Important things to know about CloudPull:

• Sign in to Google with your regular Google ID and password if you use 2-factor. You do not need an app-specific password because it does OAuth.
• “By default, CloudPull will keep an item for 90 days after it is deleted from your Google account.” “You can also check the “Show deleted items” checkbox.” When you purchase the app, you can change 90 to another number. It isn’t clear to me whether you can see those deleted items until you purchase.
• “To view your backups as of a certain point of time in the past, click on the camera icon in the main window”
• I opened a nominal support request, to see how quick they responded. I had an answer in about an hour. That’s promising.

More as I get experience with it…

VirtualBox is an adequate VM program. It runs Windows and Linux reasonably well. But I’m not using it on my Mac because I can’t double-click on a .docx file in OS X and have it open in Word on Windows in a VM. Both VMware Fusion and Parallels can do this.

Yeah, I could install Office 2016 for Mac. No, it doesn’t run all of my Word and Excel VBA code, and I have a lot of complex VBA code. (It will run some, but not all VBA.)

I started running el Capitan in a separate partition, to see if it is ready for me to upgrade from Yosemite. Since this is a leisurely upgrade, I’m carefully considering which software to put on it.

I looked at being done with Windows in a VM. I can’t do that because there really is nothing comparable to Quicken for Windows if you’re a comprehensive user. (If you just want a checkbook register, there are plenty of alternatives.) So I’m going to have Windows.

What to use for an office suite? I have a million Word files, a bunch of spreadsheets (one with epic VBA), a few PowerPoints, and a critical MS Access database with lots of VBA.

• I could use iWork. Whoops. They quickly drop support for old formats. I don’t want to have to update all of my office documents every time (or every other time) iWork comes out with a new version. I have some pretty serious VBA I’d have to convert, too. There’s nothing comparable to MS Access.
• I could use Office 2013 for Windows. I own a copy of that. It does Office compatibility well. ;-) But… I’d like to use VirtualBox for my VM, and you can’t click on a .doc file in Mac and have it open in Windows Word with VirtualBox. (You have to go to windows, browse to it with File Manager, and open it from Windows. Eeeew!) If I use Windows Office, I have to upgrade Fusion or Parallels. If I could get everything out of Windows except Access and Quicken, I could still use VirtualBox, because I could live with opening those two apps without click-in-Mac-open-in-Windows.
• I could use Office 2016 for Mac. It doesn’t have Access. The VBA editor in Excel is abysmal, but it reportedly runs most VBA. (I have lots of VBA.)
• I could use LibreOffice. I have some pretty serious VBA I’d have to convert, too. There’s nothing comparable to MS Access. (Don’t tell me Base is comparable. It is comparable, so long as you don’t actually have a complex application.)
• I could use Google Documents. Backing up Google Documents is a problem. Yeah, I know, you don’t back up a cloud app. I do. If a glitch/hack consumes all my files, I want to restore them. I have some pretty serious VBA I’d have to convert, too. There’s nothing comparable to MS Access. What if Google decides to lock out my account for some reason?
• I could migrate all of my Word documents to Markdown. But there’s still Excel and Access. And I really want to control page layout better than you can with Markdown. (This is important for printing cheat sheets and SOTA summit guides.) I could migrate Word to a combo of Markdown and TeX. But then I’d have to get serious about learning TeX. And I’ve got work samples from old jobs and the like, and I don’t want to convert them. (Maybe I could convert them to PDF/A.)

With my Access and Quicken need, I’m going to continue to have to support Windows. The big advantage to using something other than Windows Office is that I wouldn’t have to always have that VM running. Given my need for Quicken, I’m going to have to upgrade Windows periodically, because Quicken forces that. I’m not going to the cloud without an offline backup comparable to what I get with CrashPlan.

I don’t want to mess about with some obscure backup for Google Documents that backs them up to someone else’s server. I want a local copy. I could go the Google Takeout route, and download a copy of my document periodically, but if I have to do one more manual backup I feel as if I’m going to explode. (I already manually backup my to-do list and my passwords weekly, plus my employee laptop.)

OS X Preview does a pretty good job rendering most Word and Excel files. It doesn’t do VBA, of course, and it doesn’t handle OLE (particularly document fragment embedding) or complex Excel calculations, but I could recover most Office content, if I had to.

I really like the way Evernote works. When I set up a new machine, I install Evernote and then I have all that content on the new machine. Very handy.

I really like Spotlight searching everything. I don’t want to have to go to Google to search for Word/Excel files because I don’t want to have to know the document type in order to use the right search tool.

I think I’m going to have to use local files and let CrashPlan back them up. LibreOffice, Office Mac, Office Windows, or Markdown+TeX? Markdown+TeX won’t cover spreadsheets. Since I own a copy of Office, the only disadvantages are the complexity of having an active VM, upgrading VMware for el Capitan, and possible file obsolescence. So I think the sensible thing to do us to use the Windows Office I have. But… I hate the whole software activation thing. MS could lock me out of my files if I get the activation key over-used. They don’t seem to decrement the use count when I un-install Office from an old machine.