Happy Birthday shout out to Marcus Annius Verus, better known as Marcus Aurelius. Today he would be 1,899 years old were he still alive. I post this as I am now neck deep in the study of Stoicism as a philosophy, perhaps even with a hope to get my head screwed on straight again. Marcus Aurelius

This morning, though feeling sickly, I finally managed to finish the last mile of the Zeus virtual race on yes.fit. While not a mind-blowing achievement of any kind, it has been tough with all that is going on, coupled with the way I have felt lately, to get out and actually walk. Zeus Virtual Race Medal

A tale of two different kinds of customer support: @HistoryNet vs @Honeywell_Home. I have been a subscriber to HistoryNet’s Civil War Times magazine for a few years now. I don’t necessarily read it every month, but I usually download a few months and read those articles of interest to me. In November of this year, I decided to do some catching up so I downloaded the app onto my iPad Pro.

One of the biggest failings of Evernote as it stands is the inability to encrypt notes and/or notebooks. While Evernote does now offer the ability to encrypt the text of a note, any attached documents are not encrypted, so it cannot be used to store financial or tax documents (at least not securely). Note: The other failing (IMHO) is the overly simplistic editor. So while perusing the Evernote forums the other day, I came across an application called Saferoom which offers the ability to encrypt the entirety of a note.

Just a quickie note for any who might encounter this issue. After upgrading to MacOS Sierra, my Homebrew install of PHP 7.0 failed to update. ==> Upgrading homebrew/php/php70 ==> Downloading https://php.net/get/php-7.0.11.tar.bz2/from/this/mirror Already downloaded: /Users/swschulz/Library/Caches/Homebrew/php70-7.0.11 ==> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/php70/7.0.11_4 --localstatedir=/usr/l Last 15 lines from /Users/swschulz/Library/Logs/Homebrew/php70/01.configure: checking for OpenSSL support... yes <snippage> checking if the location of ZLIB install directory is defined... no configure: error: Cannot find libz Since I was on the beta version of Sierra, I waited for an automatic resolution to the issue once the final version was released.

A week or so ago my brother mentioned that one of the Mac podcasts had done an episode about application launchers and asked if I had seen it. I hadn’t, but having a few minutes of downtime, I decided to give it a listen. Said show is called Mac Power Users, and the hosts David and Katie do a good job of comparing the big three launchers (Spotlight, Alfred, and LaunchBar).

I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Amazon letting me know that Oliver Pötzsch will be releasing the fifth book in his Hangman’s Daughter series. Currently titled The Werewolf of Bamberg, Amazon lists the tentative release date as 29 September 2015, so it should be here in time for the fall reading pile. Hopefully the Audible version won’t be too far behind. If you haven’t read any of the previous four books in the series, and if you are a fan of historical fiction / mysteries set in 1600’s Germany, then this is for you.