// do something here

If you are like me (and you know you are), I like to regularly sync my iPhone to my MacBook Pro. This is mainly just for tracking what music I listen to, as I do not do backups to my local computer any more.

Alas, there is a fly in the ointment. Lately I have been plugging my iPhone into my MBP, and then from Finder I click on the iPhone on the left and click the Sync button, and along the bottom it stays at “Syncing (Step 2 of 4) — Preparing to sync” and never moves. Here is an example of what it looks like: (You’ll forgive me if I redact some of the more sensitive bits here.)

By the way, this is an Apple Silicon MBP and it is on the latest Sonoma.

I have a solution that seems to work for me, but keep in mind that your mileage may vary, especially since the workaround that I am talking about involves terminating a system process.

So as it turns out, there is a system process running called “MDCrashReportTool” that is somehow interfering with this process. The way that I have been able to get this to complete is to launch the Activity Monitor, then from the CPU tab search for “crash”, and your window will then look something like this:

Double click on the MDCrashReportTool entry, and from the dialog that pops up click Quit, and then click Force Quit. Once you do this, your sync should go through without incident, even if it was hung on step 2 of 4 when you kill the MDCrashReportTool process.

You will have to do this every time you reboot the computer, as the MDCrashReportTool seems to reappear again for me.

I don’t really have anything new to put out there this month, so let me just put in another plug for guidebook.me, the site that I have been developing that lets you track your travel so that you can see where you have been, and plan out where you want to go next.

Please check out my new travel tracking site, Guidebook.me. I have put a lot of time and effort into it, and while it is not done yet, I do have some big plans for it going forward. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Just to recap from last month’s post, I have been given the chore of… Organizing a photo collection.

The files were on several computers and backups, so PowerShell on Windows 10 became the main vehicle with which I would try to bring this beast under control.

Plan for organizing a photo collection

1. Bring photos together from all sources into one place
2. Remove duplicate photos
3. Organize photos by month and year

Step 3

Here is the PowerShell script that I used to organize the photos into folders by month and year. (WARNING: Any time you set up any kind of automated file process, make sure that you have backups.)

function fmove($SourceDir,$DestinationDir)
{
	$files = Get-ChildItem $SourceDir
	foreach ($file in $files) 
	{
		$Directory = $DestinationDir + "" + $file.LastWriteTime.Date.ToString('yyyy') + " " + $file.LastWriteTime.Date.ToString('MM')
		if (!(Test-Path $Directory))
		{
			New-Item $directory -type directory -Verbose
		}
		Move-Item $file.fullname $Directory -Verbose
	}
}
 
fmove -SourceDir "C:\Users\Me\Desktop\IntermediateDestination\" -DestinationDir "C:\Users\Me\Desktop\FinalDestination\"

There is not much going on here. The scripts iterates through all files in the source directory. For each individual file, there is a check to see if a folder exists with the last write year and month, creating it if necessary. And finally, the individual file is moved to that folder.

Once this script finishes, you will have a bunch of folders with files in them corresponding (roughly) to their date. However, please keep in mind that this might not be accurate if the files have been processed by other software.

BTW, Happy Birthday to the two dollar bill, issued on this date in 1976 to correspond with Thomas Jefferson’s birthday.

So when I get into the office this morning, one of my Windows machines has rebooted and is happily waiting for me to log in, which interrupted a long running task that I had it working on when I left yesterday evening.

In my investigation to find out if this machine rebooted due to a power outage or due to a Windows Update, I filtered the system event log and found this entry:

I find it interesting that the computer picked that exact second to stop the event log service.

BTW, a posthumous Happy Birthday to John Belushi, who left us far too soon.

I have an idea for Apple on how to avoid the whole WWDC goat rodeo in terms of the tickets lottery. There are so many developers that do not get a chance to go to the event due to seats being taken up by people who only attend the keynote.

So here’s a thought, have separate tickets for the keynote and for the rest of the event. See, I’m an idea person.

BTW, a posthumous Happy Birthday to Denton “Cy” Young, one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball, born this date in 1867.

As I said before in my GPD Pocket review, I don’t usually do reviews, but I need a posting for September. So, here is my Chuwi Surbook review.

I have always liked the form factor of the Microsoft Surface, but certainly not the price. When I saw this on Indiegogo, while the specs were not up to Surface levels, the price was certainly enticing, and it looked like they were far enough along that I didn’t have to worry about a lengthy wait for delivery. (My Fusion Guitar finally showed up, so now I’m looking at you, Jamstack.)

The durability and build quality of this device seem good, as it has withstood lugging back and forth to work for a month or so now without incident.

The screen is 12 inches in diagonal, and the resolution is very good, on par with the retina MacBook Pro computers.

This device does have a 1.1 GHz processor, so in terms of computing power, it is not the speediest, especially since it only has 6 GB of RAM. However, so far it has performed well for me on my light and medium duty tasks. I even installed Visual Studio 2017 Community on it, and I am able to do development work on a .NET MVC site that I have been futzing around with. There is a little delay when trying to run the application, but overall not bad.

The one big beef I have with this device is that the trackpad on the keyboard cover is very finicky, which led me to disable that mouse in the Device Manager, and then I use either a Bluetooth mouse or the included pen.

Kudos to Chuwi for adding a Micro SD card slot on this device.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Pros:

• Solid build quality
• Great value for the cost

Cons:

• Keyboard case trackpad is very tempermental

BTW, I know I missed the actual date by a couple of days, but Happy 30th Birthday to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Well it has been over a week now since the Great American Eclipse, and I must say that despite the relative difficulty in witnessing it, it was well worth it.

We decided to make a western U.S. trip out of the eclipse, so on the morning of Monday, August 21, we found ourselves stopping in the little town of Guernsey, Wyoming. With just over 2 minutes of totality, this seemed like a good compromise between duration of totality and traffic.

So we found some street parking at the West River Park, settled in with our eclipse glasses, and were blown away when the the town slipped into the moon’s umbra. It was quite the rush.

Leaving the area was not a total disaster either, as I suspect that choosing to avoid the totality center line was a good decision. Our two hour drive back to Cheyenne only took about three hours, which is a lot better than some of the traffic jam horror stories we heard about.

We are already looking forward to April 8, 2024.

BTW, can it really be 20 years ago that Princess Diana was lost in a car crash?

No technology related news or views today, just wanted to wish Joe Bonamassa a Happy 40th Birthday!

Well folks, it is the holiday season once again. That only means one thing… Advent of Code 2016 is upon us!

Once again, I have decided to do this undertaking in Swift to help me get familiar with the language and the transition from Swift 2 (that I used in last year’s exercise) to Swift 3.

It seems harder this year than last, as I am struggling to keep up. If you want to check out my lame progress, please visit:

https://github.com/Wave39/AdventOfCode2016

BTW, Happy Holidays everyone!