Sobering

On the eighty-first anniversary of D-Day, This Day in Aviation has a special post.  The first image is the famous ramp-just-dropped photo from Normandy.  The rest show field upon field of stark white gravestones.

Watch vs. Warning

The National Hurricane Center defines this as follows:

A warning means conditions are expected whereas a watch means that conditions are possible.

However, I prefer a somewhat more graphic representation:

And with that, I bid you a hearty welcome to The Season.

Hurricane Season '25 Outlook

Meteorologist Levi Cowan gives the news behind the extended forecast for this year's season here.

TLDW: Above average, but not as bad as next year.

You can find his continuing coverage at his main site here.

Good luck, all.

Was that the last cool front?

A little thunderstorm just passed over, and here's the radar image:

65F by morning?  Yeah, I think that was a cool front.  Last one of this spring.  Pack it up 'til October.

Resolution to self for next fall: More camping trips.

In Which Apple Declares War On Its Customer Base

These last  few years, I've noticed my Mac Mini (Intel CPU, purchased late 2020) has been running hotter and hotter with every OS upgrade.  Sleep the machine at night, and then it's almost too hot to touch by the morning.  Digging around, it seems that Apple has installed some media-scanning software that runs in the background, categorizing faces, places, songs, etc.  I've spent a couple of hours trying to turn this stuff off and keep it off – it automatically turns back on within minutes – and digging for solutions.  It seems that there were work-arounds for all of this, but Apple reads the various relevant forums and has been diligently thwarting these efforts.  About the only thing left that seems to work is to launch your own search-and-kill job that wakes up every minute or so to hunt down the offending daemons and zap them.  You can read about how to do this here (search down to the large font "If you are on Big Sur (11) or newer, forget about all*the above solutions, none will work!" for how to deal).  I'll get around to doing just this later today, and I am reasonably sure that Apple will come up with a lock-out even for this in the next round of sidegrades.

Linux man, it's looking better by the day.  I don't need another hobby though.

ps, a few hours later: All seems to be working fine, with the computer's temp down to something reasonable.  The three minute cron cycle seems to be working well on my Mac.  Also, don't forget to make the script in the above link executable; you can see how to do this in item #3 at this link.  Which, by the way, contains some excellent general info on cron which makes it worth reading to both give you some confidence when running crontab and for your own knowledge base.

pps: Apple, fix this business ASAP.  If it's ticking off a die-hard like me, imagine what it's doing to more casual users.

Where the Hurricane Seasons Are All Above Average

The National Hurricane Center yesterday issued its pre-season extended forecast for 2025, and it's not great but not the end of the world either.  Here's a link to the NHC's announcement, but – spoiler alert – here are the main points:

and the main quote:

The season is expected to be above normal – due to a confluence of factors, including continued ENSO-neutral conditions, warmer than average ocean temperatures, forecasts for weak wind shear, and the potential for higher activity from the West African Monsoon, a primary starting point for Atlantic hurricanes. All of these elements tend to favor tropical storm formation. 

The high activity era continues in the Atlantic Basin, featuring high-heat content in the ocean and reduced trade winds. The higher-heat content provides more energy to fuel storm development, while weaker winds allow the storms to develop without disruption. 

This hurricane season also features the potential for a northward shift of the West African monsoon, producing tropical waves that seed some of the strongest and most long-lived Atlantic storms.

Eh, these extra-extended forecasts have a way of being about 40% correct too.  Check back next November.

Harsh Critics

A short cartoon about what various authors have said of others – and occasionally themselves – at SMBC.