When I tried to enable FileVault on a new machine today, I got a message I didn’t like: A recovery key has been set by your company, school, or institution.

Turns out, it was a leftover from many laptop migrations ago. The clue was in an Apple support forum post.

I deleted the following two files, dated 2007, then rebooted, and the problem was gone:

• /Library/Keychains/FileVaultMaster.cer
• /Library/Keychains/FileVaultMaster.keychain

Note that this is very unlikely to work on a machine that actually does have an institutional recovery key set, but it works great when you have migration-cruft messing things up.

For reasons of Matt Mullenweg’s recent terrible behaviour, I wanted to get rid of Wordpress.

The site is now running on Hugo, the static site generator. I exported the Wordpress site using wp2hugo, and did some minor cleanup on the resulting files.

Source files are hosted on GitHub, and pushing a change to the repository causes the site to get rebuilt and synced up with the web host. Implementation details are the same as on my main site.

All the web stuff at polarweasel.org should be encrypted-only now. In other words, when you visit a page on the blog, or on the main site, you should see the little lock-icon thingy — or whatever your browser uses — in the address bar.

For my own future reference, and maybe yours too, here’s what I did.

These sites are hosted on Dreamhost, which makes it really easy (two clicks) to get a Let’s Encrypt certificate. So I did that for the various sites.

So, I read Let’s Play a Minimalism Game Together by The Minimalists, and sent it to my friend Anne this week.

No time like the present. November’s the month.

This ought to be interesting. My daily tally will be below the fold on this post.

Dr. Robert Ivker: ‘Love Your Nose’ - A Holistic Approach to Sinusitis Treatment is a pretty terrible title, but a pretty great resource. Just following one element of the strategy (the garlic pills) fixed up a sinus infection for me in record time last month. I was already eating Paleo, and I did also load up on the probiotics for immune support, but the garlic was the obvious kicker.

And when I say record time, I know whereof I speak. Last year’s sinus infection was four months long. I eventually gave up on the industrial-strength antibiotics, because they were mostly just killing off everything good in my gut. (And boy, was that fun.)

The BioLite CampStove is a brilliant idea. Burning some little sticks will cook your food and charge your phone (or other USB device) all in one shot. Nice.

I’d love to own one, but most of the time, I wouldn’t be able to use it here in Colorado (or New Mexico, or Utah, or all our other desert-type neighbors). Fire bans, and all. If we were move someplace wetter, though, I’d be all over this.

UPDATE A subsequent update fixed the problem. Or at least didn’t re-create the problem.

HP software update 2.10 came out recently for Lion and Mountain Lion, and causes apps to crash when you try to print. If this is happening to you, here’s what to do about it.

Delete this:

/Library/Printers/hp/PDEs/hpPostScriptPDE.plugin

(You’ll need to provide authorization, either with sudo or by giving an administrator password to Finder.)

There is no step 2.

Programmable Web just posted a really nice list of 10 reasons why your API sucks. Or doesn’t, depending on how good your documentation and developer experience (DX? Do we really need another bullshit acronym, people?) are. The post also links to their own list of 5 attributes of a great API. Definitely check out the presentation slides in that post.

Note that a number of the bad things (unexpected and undocumented releases, poor developer experience, inadequate support, and poor documentation) and good things (provide great developer support) are documentation-related. How surprising. Yet another bunch of reasons you should add a good writer to your development team.

User Interface of the Week: Adobe Acrobat:

ASCII checkboxes. A button labelled “UnCheck”.

link

(Via Daring Fireball)

I have nothing to add, other than this may be why Adobe products suck to use, like a lot.

I’ve had a few discussions recently about the value a technical writer can bring to an organization. Unsurprisingly, given what I do for a living, the discussions have centered around the value a very technical writer brings to the table.

Clearly, it’s time to write some of this down.