October 2019 Posts

Release Announcements
petfeedd, the software for pet feeders, has a new release. 0.2.2 is a maintenance release that add support for new Raspberry Pi Hardware. There are no breaking changes in this release.
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Python
I’ve been on the Internet a long time, since the early to mid 1990s. And when you are on the Internet that long, you tend to leave a pretty long trail behind you. But over the years that trail gets overgrown as sites close, lists vanish, and machines crash. There is precious little left from those early years. One thing that has persisted to this time, despite being pretty heavily neglected over the years, is Yahoo Groups. Those who remember the first dot-com boom may remember that Yahoo Groups was not originally Yahoo Groups. It was eGroups, which Yahoo bought and merged into their own sprawling empire. eGroups basically made it possible for anyone to set up a mailing list without needing access to a listserv service. Well, it looks like the end has finally come for Yahoo Groups. Verizon, the new owner of the rotting corpse of Yahoo, has announced that all groups will disappear on December 14th. I was on tons of mailing lists during my early Internet years, and I would really like to archive and preserve those messages if I could. But how could I get them out of Yahoo?
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macOS
I have an old iMac that has been sitting unused upstairs for awhile, that I decided to finally get rid of. Before putting it on Craigslist, like any good computer owner, I wiped the drives and went to reinstall the most recent version of OS X/macOS that this old machine would support. In this case, this was El Capitan. But when I went to install, I kept getting an error about the OS not being able to install. Popping the log window open, I found an entry called CSSMERR_TP_CERT_EXPIRED. This would seem to be a prime suspect.
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