It’s Tuesday, so we went shopping – first walking to Trader Joe’s for “light” shopping (chocolate mostly, but we did pick up some veggies and frozen fish), then driving to Lunardi’s for the “real” shopping for the week. We avoided acquiring any more bags at either store by having the cashiers put our food back into the cart and then packing it into our reusable bags out in the parking lot – I felt like I beat the system!

Between the shopping trips, we watched a “RED Talk” from Rensselaer about some of the work they are doing on COVID-19 research (much in cooperation with Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York). It was interesting and occasionally encouraging.

And now we’re watching some of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain ’s Ukulele Lockdown videos – some are just performances, others are live-streamed instructional playalongs – and all are a lot of fun. I almost wish I could play!

Diane upgraded her phone today from an iPhone SE to an iPhone SE – the new one has four times as much storage, so she should be able to stop thinking about running out of space on the phone for a while. It’s also slightly physically bigger, which was NOT a selling point, and it’s significantly faster and has a better camera (her photo of the day on Facebook was taken with the new phone).

I permanently retired my Apple Time Capsule today – it’s 9 years old and has never been terribly useful; periodically, Time Machine would say something like “I can’t verify your most recent backup so I’m going to throw away all of your backups – OK?”. And even when it was working, trying to do a restore over the network was painfully slow (I’m not a super fan of the Time Machine user interface, either).

I wanted to thoroughly erase the disk on the Time Capsule before getting rid of the device; Apple offered a choice of how many passes of writing random data I wanted to make: 1, 3, 7, or 35. I picked 35 (better to be safe, right?) and it’s been erasing itself for a week and a half.

Yesterday, I (finally) got curious about why there was a choice and found the Wikipedia article on the Gutmann Method (the 35-pass erasure algorithm, which clearly explained that I wasted a lot of time – one pass would probably suffice, and three would certainly have been enough!

In the meantime, I now have two computers without a backup strategy – one is this new laptop (which doesn’t have any “real” data yet that isn’t on one of the other machines) and the other is the Plex server. So I ordered a 4TB drive from Office Depot this morning and walked over to pick it up this afternoon; it’ll go on the Plex server. I’ll probably get another one for this laptop, but I need to figure out my cabling needs, too – the laptop only has two USB-C ports, and I’m beginning to think I need a dock for it!