bruce texted me this morning, asking if i like some italian beans, lentils, and cabbage. i said sure, and after a few minutes he brought over some soup he'd made. i can't wait to try it but it won't be until tuesday afternoon at the earliest, as i'm all set for food until then.

i decided to do a side-by-side comparison video between the gopro hero9 vs the dbpower EX7000 pro. i had both mounted to my motorcycle handlebar with clamp mounts and shooting 1sec interval time lapse videos. i thought my little experiment was going well until i arrived at my parents' place and discovered the dbpower had stopped recording. the vibration from the motorcycle had jostled the battery so much that the camera crashed. the gopro had no such problems, it was designed with vibration in mind. but without the corresponding dbpower video, the gopro video was kind of useless.

i found my father in the backyard with his tent stove setup, burning some backyard firewood, a combination of pine and cherry, had a fragrant sweet smell to it. it got really smokey at one point, the smoke falling instead of rising, until my father closed the damper, at which point the smoke subsided. i tried practicing my woodchopping skills using the estwing axe, but i only managed to split a few pieces of wood. once more i tried to get a side-by-side comparison video between the gopro and dbpower, and even though vibration wasn't an issue this time, the dbpower continued to crash on me and stopping recording. i'm left to just assume the gopro has the better image at this point.

my mother made my some freshly cut noodles my father had prepared for lunch before she went out for a walk. today's weather was in the upper 40's with a clear blue sky, a little windy.

i reconnected the 100W flexible solar panel to our basement marine battery. that's when i noticed the power analyzer dongle wasn't lit. this only happens if the solar panel wasn't producing any electricity, which wouldn't be the case since it was out in the bright sunlight. so i told my father and we ended up replacing the 100W panel with the spare 50W panel. that worked but later when my father retested the 100W panel, it started working again. i also sanded down the prongs of a very tight MC4 solar cable connector.

while checking out the daikon radishes that are still growing in our raised beds, i noticed some of the leaves look like they were chewed up by insects. sure enough, when i took a closer look, i found a green caterpillar going to town on the leaves. there's probably more but i only saw that one caterpillar, which i picked off.

my sister stopped by briefly in the afternoon to drop off her mid-2012 13" retina macbook pro so i could install her new 1TB SSD drive . first i had to back up her data, she hadn't done it since may. time machine couldn't recognize the external drive until i explicitly redirected it to the drive. the backup file was also weird, it stored it inside of an img file that was restricted access. i had to fiddle with the security setting so i could unlock the file and look inside, just to make sure it actually backed up. i think it's in this weird format because a long time ago this drive was connected to the router so it could do remote backup, but that never really worked very well, so now it's just manual backups.

anyway, once the old drive was backed up, it was time to swap out the SSD. i didn't think i could do it because my tools were back at home, until i remembered i brought them here that time i swapped out the memory on that old malfunctioning macbook pro. with a pentalobe screwdriver, i removed the back of the macbook pro. inside was filled with dust and dog hair. i spent some time outside on the back stairs with a bottle of compressed air, blowing clean the inside of the laptop.

replacing the SSD was pretty easy, it sat in an empty space directly below the trackpad. it took a while to disconnect the battery (for safety reasons), but only because i'd never done it before; if i were to do it again, it'd just take a few seconds. out went the old 128GB, in went the new 1TB.

once the macbook pro was reassembled, it came the moment of truth, as i restarted the machine. it booted up fine, went into a fresh copy of macos high sierra that the seller had pre-installed. i checked the "about this mac" dialogue to make sure it was indeed a 1TB drive.

my parents made some fried spring rolls around 4:30pm. afterwards i wasn't hungry when my mother brought out some meat buns around 5:30pm. i only ate them after i installed the new SSD and reassembled the macbook pro.

i didn't go home until i finished watching the bills-bucs game. originally i was rooting for brady (a rare occasion), because a buffalo lose would help the patriots secure the AFC east conference. but the score was so lopsided - 24-3 going into halftime - that i found myself rooting for the bills. i said this before, but if i wasn't rooting for the patriots, i'd probably root for the bills, they're an easy team to like. the game turned interesting when josh allen mounted a comeback and managed to tie the game to send it into overtime. unfortunately tom brady was just too much to handle, and tampa bay won the game with a touchdown.

i left by 8pm. i shot a timewarp at 1080p with the gopro, the camera mounted near-center of my handlebar. from that angle, at night, the video looked confusing. nighttime motorcycle footage is a lot better when using the chest harness.

so one thing i was concerned about was that the new 1TB had high sierra, but my sister's old drive and backed up data is using mojave. so i wanted to install a fresh version of mojave onto the new SSD before migrating her data. i tried to find an old mojave installer but there must be a glitch with apple's server because i couldn't find a copy anywhere. at most i could get a copy of monterey, but that OS wouldn't even run on my sister's machine. i found a copy using a mojave patcher app, but the app was buggy and kept crashing mid-download.

i finally had to resort to finding a copy of mojave installer using torrent. the first one i tried, when it finally finished downloading, i uncompressed it onto a 16GB flash drive. when i rebooted the machine with the drive though, it crashed. the second version i downloaded, it took about midnight before i finally managed to get all 6GB of the installer. i ran this "spell" (sudo /Volumes/macOS\ 10.14.5\ Mojave/Install\ macOS\ Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Install\ macOS\ Mojave) to create a bootable USB drive from the disk image.

this bootable USB drive worked, but that's when i realized when booting from an external source other than the hard drive, i can do a time machine restore where it restores everything including whichever macos was backed up. so it didn't matter that i had high sierra on the 1TB, the restoration would bring back mojave. so i restored from time machine, which seemed to be going well, until i went to reboot from the restored hard drive and it wouldn't boot. it tried to boot, but after a few seconds of the apple screen, it'd go to black and nothing more.

i opted for a different option, which was to install a fresh copy of mojave onto the 1TB drive, then migrated over the data afterwards via time machine backup. however when i went to go install mojave, it told me the recovery server couldn't be found. i ran a few lines of code via the terminal but they didn't seem to do anything, however when i tried to install again, this time it worked.

after 20 minutes of waiting, i finally managed to reboot from the 1TB drive again. by then it was already 3am, to be continued tomorrow.