Longest. Progress Bar. Ever?

I've been using a MacBook Pro for a few years, which I’ve been quite happy with except for some annoying behavior when resuming from hibernation. Being Security Guy by habit, I’ve unsurprisingly been using FileVault disc encryption; after typing a password to unlock the volume, I’d often been waiting for a minute or so, sometimes spanning a screen blank and reset button tap, before being presented with another password entry prompt and the chance to enter a useful system. (Deceptive UI indication aside: please don’t provide a blinking cursor in a text box before it’s ready to accept input!) Accumulated impatience having eventually spurred me into action, a web crawl yielded references like this article, suggesting that OS X Yosemite was intolerant of at least some earlier FileVault configurations and recommending decryption and reencryption. I started the decryption on a disk with about 140 Gb in use; though it changed before I got to screenshot the display, the progress bar started out with a caption estimating 43 days to complete the task. That proved conservatively pessimistic, with the operation taking about 10 hours in the actual event. I’m used to symmetric crypto being quick, often invisible inline at human scale; 43 days read more like what I’d expect if a fairly substantial exhaustive search had been required.

My spelling corrector knows me too well

I was trying to text that "We're having lunch" and it proposed that I meant to say "We're having Linux" instead.  I'm guessing that I fat-fingered an "i" instead of the adjacent "u" on the keyboard and it took it from there, but I could easily be spending some time doing either.

Taking refuge in accumulated snowfall

Within the last few weeks, the greater Boston area has received a record-breaking amount of snowfall from a series of storms. As part of a larger ongoing project, I've been collecting pictures from the observation tower at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Concord, MA around the seasons.  I thought this series, showing the effect as the snow continued to accumulate, was interesting to observe.  First, on 21 January before the series of storms began:

Next, on 26 January following about 8 inches of snow around the 24th:

And on 1 February, after perhaps over 30 more inches on the 26th-27th of January:

On 6 February, following about another 13 inches on the 2nd and 2 more on the 5th:

On 11 February, after about another 14 inches on the 9th:

On 18 February, a few days after still another fall of about 14 inches on the 14th-15th:

Once it starts to thaw, I expect it'll take quite a while to unwind the accumulation.  Hat tip to the NWS Boston Significant Weather Archive page for convenient access to records; I've applied some guesswork in response to some apparent notable differences appearing between values recorded among nearby towns. In any case, it's been quite a transition to observe over less than a month.

Counting nostalgically ... in octal

I hadn't touched homebuilt electronics extensively since the 1970s, when I'd built a microprogrammed central processor named Irving among other projects, and was intrigued with the idea of wiring together some newer components.  I thought a Raspberry Pi kit would be a good basis for experiments, and am now exploring its possibilities. I was pleased to be able to hook it up to a numeric display module that I'd had in a box for nearly 40 years, to see the display illuminate, patch 8 bits' worth of output connections, and write and download the Python code to make its numbers count.  And, yes, 377 wraps around to 000; I waited to watch that.  There's nothing like a table sprawled with wires and pieces that, collectively, do something.

Snow and a Pileated bonus

New England received a major blizzard this week (though it largely bypassed NYC despite forecasts as models diverged), and we found ourselves in the 30"+ zone.  I dutifully excavated a path through the waist-high white expanse to refill the bird feeder:

I got a nice view of a non-feeder bird today, hard at work during a smaller snowfall:

I've always found the sight of a Pileated Woodpecker impressive, though they've often been easier to hear than see.  From the appearance, though, this tree seems to be a motivating target, so maybe there will be more chances upcoming. 

December is bittersweet

Not much natural color left at this point in the season, and some of what remains is also invasive, an example here grasping around the branches of the tree that it's occupying.

Fall color in microcosm

People travel regionally and from far away to see and photograph fall foliage colors in New England, and it's always a season and opportunity that I look forward to.  I'm used to thinking of the variety mostly at the level of trees or between leaves within a tree, though, which made me find the set of colors within this single hobblebush leaf particularly striking.  My wife thought that it looked like a miniature patchwork quilt.