Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 40

I need help formatting a micro sd card

I almost posted this on Facebook and G+, but then I remembered that the point of Daily December is to post whatever I want. Maybe there will be answers to this question that are helpful for others, and I’d prefer that those answers live here, instead of a social network I don’t control.

So. My question:

I have a 128gb micro SD card that I am trying desperately to partition and format so I can load NOOBS onto it.I can’t use the full card as a single, formatted partition because the hardware isn’t able to read exFAT. I understand that I need to format a primary partition to 32GB, filetype FAT32, and make it bootable. I can then extract NOOBS onto that partition, and install as usual.


 


I can format this card to one huge partition using SD Formatter, but then I get stuck. The problem is, I can’t figure out fdisk and parted (the documentation on that is a little tough for me to follow), and gparted isn’t letting me resize the one massive partition. I’ve tried to resize and create partitions in Apple’s Disk Utility and in whatever the utility is in Windows, without success.


 


Does anyone have a link to, like, “fdisk and/or parted for idiots” or something like that, that I can use? I’m so frustrated and I feel so dumb right now.

NOTE: FOUR HOURS LATER — SUCCESS!

Okay, so I tried all the command line tools I could, I tried Disk Utility on my Mac, and even though I understood what I was doing, and followed my steps exactly, even using cfdisk (which is amazing and will be in my toolbox forever, now), I could write the partition changes to the disk, but still couldn’t get any system (OS X, Linux, or Windows) to recognize the device. But then I used Partition Wizard, as recommended, and it just worked. I made an 8GB bootable primary FAT32 partition, and then made two more 32GB primary partitions for good measure, even though I probably didn’t have to do that. The rest of the space on the card is currently unallocated.

On the one hand, YAY! It’s working! I can use this SD card and I’ve saved myself a walk to the store! On the other hand, Damn. I wish I knew what Partition Wizard was doing that none of my other tools were doing, so that I learned something from this whole experience, and that I can share that knowledge with anyone else who finds themselves wondering how to fix a similar problem.I don’t feel frustrated, but I still feel dumb. At the moment, I’ll take it.

Thanks for your help, everyone!

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.

 

only i didn’t say fudge

Sometime in the next 18 or so hours, I’m going to do the annual quoting of A Christmas Story on my Twitter. You should unfollow me now.

I came across this delightful interview that Peter Billingsley did with Buzzfeed News that made me really happy to read.

[After he auditioned for the film and] didn’t hear back from [Director Bob]Clark for weeks, Billingsley just thought, oh well, he’d lost the role. “Bob Clark said for whatever reason that I was the first kid that he saw,” says Billingsley. “But [he] thought, Well, jeez, you can’t just hire the first person you see. So my assumption was, ‘Well, that didn’t go well.’ But whatever. You were quickly onto the next thing.”

Thousands of kids later, and after an eventual callback, Billingsley did indeed land the film’s lead role, and shot the film in Toronto and Cleveland over roughly a month in the dead of winter. “This was a real little grinder kind of indie [film],” he says with affection. “It took [Bob] 12 years to get the movie made. Nobody wanted to fund it, this period movie about a BB gun. Nobody cared about it.”

I think about stories like this a lot. I think about how it’s almost always the little indie movies that nobody wanted to give a chance that end up becoming the films that define a generation.  There’s a similar, likely made up by my mom and a publicist story, about Rob Reiner seeing me before anyone else for the role of Gordie in Stand By Me. There is also a similar story about how nobody wanted to release the film, no studio wanted to fund the film, everyone in the industry at the time had passed on it, and when we landed at Embassy (before it was bought by Sony), it still wasn’t a sure thing (HA A SURE THING THAT’S VERY CLEVER WHEATON) and the production was nearly cancelled just a few days before we were supposed to begin filming. We were already on location, and Rob Reiner called Norman Lear, who wrote a personal check to get the movie made.

So. For the five of you who don’t know, Peter Billingsley played Ralphie in A Christmas Story. We both auditioned for the role, and even went to final callbacks together. I wrote about it way back in 2001:

I think that A Christmas Story is the greatest Christmas movie ever made. Each year, I watch it, over and over, on TNN or TNT or TBS, or whatever T-channel does that marathon, and I never, ever, get tired of it. Every year, when I watch it, I am reminded of the time, when I was about 10 or so, that I auditioned for it. The auditions were held on a cold, rainy day in late spring, down in some casting office in Venice, I think. I saw the same kids that I always saw on auditions: Sean Astin, Keith Coogan, this kid named “Scooter” who had a weird mom, and Peter Billingsley, who was very well known at the time, because he was “Messy Marvin” in those Hershey’s commercials. I sort of knew Peter, because we’d been on so many auditions together, but I was always a little star struck when I saw him. (One time, I saw Gary Coleman on an audition…now, this was HUGE for all of us kids who were there, because we’re talking 1982 or 83…and he was Arnold freakin’ Jackson, man…wow). [tangent] Whenever I see Sean Astin, I sob at him that he got to be in Goonies, and I didn’t, and he always says, “Hey, man, you got Stand By Me. I’d trade all my movies for that.” I haven’t seen him since he did Lord of the Rings…but something is telling me that he wouldn’t be so keen to trade that.

Daily December 23 – Ziggy’s Gift

The only Christmas song you ever really need is Allan Sherman’s The 12 Gifts of Christmas.

We don’t really celebrate Christmas in the traditional way, here in Castle Wheaton. We aren’t religious, and we aren’t like Super Consumers Who Give Gifts To Each Other (the best of all traditions is not giving or getting gifts, and instead just having a nice dinner together with our family) so Christmas is pretty much just another day for us. That feels weird, kinda, because it was such a big thing when I was a kid, and then again when my kids were little.  We don’t even have a tree this year, mostly because I couldn’t find an appropriately sad Charlie Brown tree to put in the living room.

But I did get you all a present! It’s a brand new TV Crimes podcast, with Mikey Neumann and the One Who Isn’t Mikey Neumann!

Episode 11 Ziggy’s Gift

the spice must flow

I first read Dune when we were filming Stand By Me. I remember that I loved it, even though I’m sure that most of it went over my head. I think about “I will not fear. Fear is the mindkiller…” and “The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience” all the time. I imagine that reading Dune again, as an adult, will open some portals in my tiny little brain that weren’t accessible when I was 12.

My son, Ryan, recently read the entire series for the first time. He loved it, too, and has been talking about it so much, I decided that I’d finally reread it … but then I got stuck in this decision process that I’d illustrate with a Sheldonesque flowchart if I wasn’t lazy. It basically went like this: Should I get it as an eBook? That’s convenient and I can sync it across all my different devices. But maybe I should get it as an actual book, because actual books are beautiful, and I feel like Dune is something that I’d want on my bookshelf. But if I want to read it in bed, there’s that whole “risking the wrath of Anne when the light wakes her up” situation. Maybe I could listen to it as an audiobook! But I have so many story ideas in my head right now, my mind tends to wander when I listen to anything. So maybe an eBook is the way to go, but … and so on.

So it was a whole thing and I ended up not making a decision.

Then, yesterday, I picked up a bunch of mail from my manager’s office, and holy shit there was this package from Penguin Random House that contained the Penguin Galaxy Edition of Dune! Look at how beautiful this is:

It has an introduction by Neil Gaiman, titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Science Fiction”, which is amazing. So it turns out that, I chose not to decide, but still I made a choice … with a little help from whoever is writing the events of my life.

The reread begins today. Maybe I can find some inspiration and solace in a work of science fiction, before the world is engulfed in flame.

Daily December 22

Making myself post something every day this month has been an interesting experience. I expected that it would make it easy for me to post some dumb thing that I’d normally post on my Tumblr or whatever, but the old habit of making everything on the blog mean something just refuses to die. So instead of finding permission to just post a picture or a video and be done with it, I’m finding myself spending a lot of time thinking about what’s going to go up on the blog today or tomorrow.

The fully unexpected side effect of this has been a complete halt to all my other writing. Now, part of that may be that I finished a draft, sent it for feedback, got feedback, and I’m putting off applying the feedback because the stakes are higher now than they were when it was just a puke draft. Or maybe I’m just lazy. Or maybe I’m getting creative satisfaction from making other things, and I don’t have the discipline to write every day on things that I consider capital-W Work. Or maybe I’m convincing myself that writing for the blog is capital-W Work, so it’s okay to go tinker with a computer for a few hours instead of getting to work on the rewrite.

It’s likely a combination of all those things, with the fucking horror of the incoming Cheeto Hitler administration as a force multiplier.

This is now a test of my discipline and work ethic, and I’m not entirely sure I’m going to pass it in its current form.

rediscovering the joy of general purpose computing

A few years ago, I got to narrate the audiobook of Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free. It’s primarily about how creators can make a living online, and contains a ton of useful advice on doing that successfully. It’s also about the power and significance of General Purpose Computing.

I’ll try to paraphrase Cory in a way that makes sense: Until recently, a computer was a dumb collection of circuits and storage that did whatever its owner wanted it to do. You want your computer to play games? Done. You want your computer to be a word processor? Done. Want to change the operating system? Go nuts. Want to get into the guts of it and hack the hardware to do something nifty? You got it! You owned that computer, in every way that mattered, because it was General Purpose, and was able to do whatever you wanted it to do.

In the last decade or so, we’ve seen the rise of computers that are locked down, specialized machines which only do what their manufacturers want them to do. They do this not only by restricting your access to the operating system and the hardware, but by passing laws that made it a crime to take apart the thing you bought! Companies like Apple and Microsoft lobbied for and got laws that made it illegal for you to buy an iPad or a smartphone, and then modify the device that you paid for to do a thing that you wanted it to do.

There’s more to it, but that’s the basic gist of where we are right now. If this subject interests you at all, you will likely enjoy Cory’s book, whether you get it in print or ebook or via my delightful voice.

I say all this to contextualize why I am so magnificently in love with my Raspberry Pi, and why I have gone from a single Pi acting as a server under my desk, to having three Pis in my home, including one that’s being turned into a Picade, and one that’s about to become this smart lamp, because what I need in my life is another gadget that blinks.

No, seriously. It’s something I need in my life, because I can make it myself, using a general purpose computer to do a simple task, and I can use Tinkercad and my 3D printer to make the lamp case that will go around the LEDs.

The two computers I remember best from when I was a kid are the Atari 400 and the Ti99/4a. When you turned those computers on, you BASICally (that’s funny, kids, trust me and go ask an Old if you don’t) got a screen with a single prompt that usually told you the computer was >>READY while it waited for you to tell it what to do. If you wanted to run a game, you told it to >>RUN LODERUNNER or whatever. If you wanted to call a BBS, you typed in a string of commands that were like sanskrit to a 10 year-old, and hoped your mom didn’t pick up the phone in the kitchen while you were waiting for the second hour of the sexiest GIF you would ever find to finish downloading. Those computers did what I told them to do, and that usually meant that I had to learn how to make them do it. It made me curious about what was inside them, to understand how they worked, to push the limits of what they could do. It encouraged me to learn some simple programming, and it (usually) rewarded my curiosity and commitment to learning.

The thing those computers didn’t do was tell me that I couldn’t do something because a marketing department or executive or shareholder wanted to prevent me from doing it, so they could sell me something else that would do that thing. Once we bought the computer, we owned it, and as much as I enjoy my tablets and smartphones and iMacs and whatever, getting back to my Linux command line and learning Python and talking to other enthusiasts online about what they’re doing with their little Raspberry Pis is reawakening this passion and joy that has been dormant inside of me for a long, long time.

drilling with the laws of robotics

So I saw this on Cory Doctorow’s Tumblr right as I was getting ready for bed last night.

And all I could think of was a Marine drill sergeant training these robots … so this happened. It may help to hear it in Lee Ermey’s voice from Full Metal Jacket.

I DON’T KNOW BUT I BEEN TOLD/

THE LAWS OF ROBOTICS ARE REALLY OLD

GIMMIE SOME!

(gimmie some!)

FIRST LAW!

(first law!)

ROBOT MAY

(robot may)

NOT HARM!

(not harm)

A HUMAN BEING

(a human being)

LIKE ME OR YOU

(me or you)

OR THROUGH INACTION

(through inaction)

LET HARM THROUGH

(harm through!)

MY MAMA TOLD ME THAT SHE ONCE SAW/

A ROBOT FOLLOW THE SECOND LAW

NOW GIMMIE SOME

(gimmie some)

SECOND LAW

(second law)

UNLESS IT BREAKS

(unless it breaks)

THE FIRST LAW

(first law)

THE THIRD LAW SAYS TO PROTECT YOURSELF/

BUT FOLLOW THE FIRST/

AND THE SECOND AS WELL

GIMMIE SOME!

(gimmie some)

THIRD LAW

(third law)

PROTECT YOURSELF

(protect yourself)

WITHIN THE LAWS

(within the laws)

I LIVE IN A BICAMERAL STATE/

BUT THE LAWS OF ROBOTICS ARE REALLY GREAT!

&etc.

Daily December 19

Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh nineteen.

So we are still in the mountains for another hour or so, and I’m sitting next to the fireplace, having my coffee and looking through imgur, because I already looked through the news and it was equal parts infuriating and depressing.

Side note: Google Play Newsstand is a great app, and I never would have tried it, because the News and Weather app on my phone opens articles with the most obnoxious, intrusive ads I have ever seen. Seriously, ads that take over the entire screen and want to install shit so I can dismiss them. Come on, Google. 

But yesterday, I was looking to see if there was a Daily Beast app, and it opened Daily Beast as a subscription in Play Newsstand, and I ended up staying in that app for awhile, discovering that it’s really easy to build a great digest to browse in the morning while you’re having your coffee.

Okay, so back to my point.

I’m browsing imgur, and I came across this adorable gif of hockey player Ilya Kovalchuck and figure skater I don’t know her first name Morozov skating a routine together at the KHL all-star game.

It made me smile, and I need to embrace and enjoy everything that makes me smile right now, because the alternative is to put on the lead apron and see if I can find the bottom of the pit.

Because it’s an interesting data point: this is the first post over ever put on my blog that was composed entirely in the WordPress app on my phone. It’s a pretty decent editor, all things considered. Maybe it’s my configuration, but the only issue I had is that it won’t let me upload any media.

Daily December 18

Anne and I snuck away for the weekend. Last night, we watched a movie called Hell or High Water that we both really liked. All I knew going into it was that Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine were in a movie set in Texas about brothers who are robbing banks to save their family ranch, so I won’t say more about it than that. I recommend it, though: 4 out of 5.

We also went for a long walk in the woods, and managed not to get eaten by a bear.