If I had been thinking ahead, I would have dug out my “I was a Mac user before Apple was doomed” t-shirt to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh.
#MyFirstMac was a Performa 6115CD I got at the Tulane University bookstore when my wife was in law school.
My Personal de-Google-fication Continues
Google Photos is no more for me. I deleted all the photos in that account, then cancelled my Google One subscription. I removed the app from my iOS devices.
I’m not totally killing my Google account and Gmail address, however, as much as I might want to. There is still stuff with Docs and Drive for podcasting collaboration I need to maintain an account for. I do have to think about others in that particular situation. But the Gmail app is coming off devices, too.
I believe this means the only Google apps I’m left with are Translate and Waze. I’m sure I could find a replacement for the former, but no other app gives me what I need for dealing with Dallas/Fort Worth traffic like Waze does. I’d like to be Google-free, but it’s just not in the cards as things currently stand. I’ll settle for now with this being the best I can do.
This weekend's positive Apple Store experience
We hear a lot in the tech press and on personal blogs about bad experiences with Apple’s support of it’s products, so I thought I would offer a positive experience my family had this past weekend.
A couple of days ago, our teenager’s iPhone 7—my old iPhone, and more on that another time—started losing its cellular connection. We could restart the phone, and after a couple of restarts, it would come back up for a few hours before disappearing again. It worked fine on Wi-Fi. When it became apparent that no amount of restarting and resetting networks was going to fix the issue, I made a Genius Bar appointment at one of the DFW metroplex Apple Stores, Willow Bend in Plano. I arrived on time for the appointment, and was seen within about three minutes of my arrival by the technician.
I explained to her all the troubleshooting steps we had taken. She ran diagnostics on the phone, then checked the model and serial numbers. This is when she informed me that Apple had become aware of an issue with this particular model of the iPhone 7 a couple of months ago. She shared there was a specific batch from a specific factory that suffered from the cellular modem failing.
Our iPhone 7 is still covered under AppleCare through May. The way she talked about it, however, led me to believe this would be a free repair even if it was not. A $319 repair Apple was eating the cost of for a new logic board, plus labor. When I had the opportunity to ask, I verified this was indeed the case. No matter when one bought the iPhone 7, if it was within this particular batch from that particular factory, you could get a new logic board installed, gratis. The only hitch is that it gets send to one of the repair depots, it’s not done in store.
So we were given a loaner iPhone 7. The SIM card was swapped from ours to the loaner, we started an iCloud backup there in the store on Apple’s wifi, and that was it. I will get emails about the repair status, plus a call when our iPhone 7 arrives back in the store and is available for pickup. All in all, we were in the Apple Store 45 minutes, and over half of that was spent waiting on the iCloud backup restoration. Kudos to Apple for a job well done in this particular situation.
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I’d rather have 80% of Google’s features along with 100% of Apple’s interest in protecting my privacy than 100% of Google’s features with 0% of that privacy protection.
AdwareMedic
“Removes all known adware from your Mac. It is very simple to use, and should clean up your system in less than a minute, from start to finish. Just open the app, click the Scan for Adware button, and remove anything that is detected. That’s it!”
Should we be concerned that in China they have developed a shape-shifting liquid metal?
Between the shape-shifting liquid metal in China, and the robots in Japan, it’s probably easy odds in Vegas that our robot overlords will be the fault of our Far East brothers and sisters.
Privacy Badger
“Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser, it’s like you suddenly disappeared.”
Unfortunately, not currently available for Safari.
HTTPS Everywhere
“HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure.”
How to ditch Google for more privacy and fewer ads
How to ditch Google for more privacy and fewer ads
Nice workup on getting off the Google train. I still have a Gmail account, but never use it. If I didn’t have my own domains, and e-mail to go with them, I would be on FastMail. I have heard nothing but good things about the service, and US $40/year for 15GB of storage, plus all their other features, is a great deal.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo exclusively as my search engine for quite a while now. The service has gotten much better from its early days, when I still had to go back to Google some times to find the link I was looking for. My backup these days is Bing. Microsoft is slightly less scary than Google only because they are not interested (yet) in selling my search data to advertisers.
ifo Apple Store shutting down
The site isn’t going away, but Gary Allen is ceasing new updates on the best tracking site of Apple retail sites outside (and possibly inside) Apple itself:
After following Apple retail for 14 years, I’ve reached a happy ending, and am gracefully backing away from the crazy world of following the company and its stores. No more stories or analysis, or flying out to far-flung locations to join overnight crowds,waiting for the excitement of new store opening (NSO). I began this Web site as simply a way of celebrating the fun of grand openings and the close friendship of the people I met when I arrived in a new country or city.
Gary was kind enough to include this shot of mine, of the original Knox Street (Dallas) storefront, on the store’s original page on the site.
Gary still links to my full photo album of the Knox Street opening in the store’s listing (#52), and for that, I remain humbled and grateful for the inclusion of my photos in his grand work.
The Smartest Things Ever Said About Facebook
The Smartest Things Ever Said About Facebook
I really want to spend less time on Facebook. I really need to cull the people I’m following (not necessarily whom I’m friends with; see what I did there?) so as to tidy up the timeline. At least I’m still mostly reactive to Facebook. My posting of any original content has dropped dramatically, especially since I severed the auto-posting tether from Twitter.To commemorate the demise of my Facebook account, and the myriad of questions people usually have about why, here’s some of my favorite quotes on Facebook:
“Facebook seems like a terrific way to stay in touch with people who don’t have the sense to quit dicking around on Facebook.” - Merlin…
Unfortunately, there are people I truly care about scattered about the land, and Facebook remains, for all its ills and evils, the only place to interact with some of them.
Somewhere in a dresser drawer, I have one of these watches…
PSA: How to do good backups
Since a friend of mine had a data loss incident and is now struggling without a good backup, I thought I’d remind everyone how important good backups are:
There are many schools of thought on this, and many levels of paranoia concerning your data. You don’t have to take all my advice to have a…
Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology — The Message — Medium
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag2vk6coBpI?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141])
SOMEONE PLEASE TELL THE JAPANESE ABOUT SKYNET.
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fcisGr7iUI?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141])
Look Birdy, An iPhone App That Flashes and Chirps to Help Get Kids to Pay Attention for a Photo
[vimeo 89298972 w=250 h=141]
Quick 4, A Workout App Based on the Tabata Regimen Originally Used by Japanese Olympic Athletes
Your 7-minute workout takes too long.
Opt out of Dropbox's arbitration clause
Opt out of Dropbox's arbitration clause
If you’re a Dropbox user, you probably got an email in the last few days about an update to their TOS that basically puts all disputes into arbitration rather than litigation.
If you’re like me, you probably glossed over this update because gah, legalese.
Allow me to summarize what it means when a company wants to handle all disputes in arbitration:
No matter what they do (delete your data, privacy breach, overcharging, whatever), you don’t get to sue. Instead, THEY get to choose the arbitrator according to whatever criteria they want, and thus any dispute is decided by someone they’re paying.
Also, you can’t join a class-action suit against them. Which sounds like no big deal, but when a company takes advantage of a bunch of people all in the same small way (incorrectly assessing a service charge, for example), class action is how companies are made to clean up their act en masse, instead of waiting for thousands of people to call them up and demand their $20 back or whatever.
I love Dropbox and use/recommend it enthusiastically. But this is a company that we entrust with some of our most important data- the kind of data we need to have access to wherever we are. Family photos, portfolios, projects representing years of work, etc. And as we’ve seen with Google buying Nest, even if we trust the management team in charge of our data right now, that’s not guaranteed in the future. Founders move on to other things. Companies with great products get acquired. Business decisions get made that change the direction of the company.
The agreement we make with Dropbox is too important to be enforced only by an arbitrator of their choosing. You have 30 days from the date of notification to opt out of the arbitration clause. Do it now.
Fellow Dropbox users, Tiffany does a wonderful job summing things up on this. Follow that link and opt out.
PEBKAC: Protecting the Memory Hub
This column originally appeared in the April 2012 issue of About This Particular Macintosh.
Beginning in 2004, I’ve made a calendar for the coming year featuring our children. For four years, it was just our oldest son. Then we adopted Boy #2, and for three years it was the two of them. The calendar for 2012 now features all three of our sons. I’ve always bought copies for our extended family: the boys’ grandparents, great-grandmothers, aunts and uncle. The calendars are given as gifts at Christmas time, and after the first three years, it became an expectation on the part of the extended family.
My habit has been to curate, throughout the year, an album in iPhoto of possible calendar photo candidates. Often, this is no small task, as we try to take many shots of our three sons. Just after Thanksgiving, I’ll sit down and start sifting through the curated folder. Once I’ve done the initial purge, my wife will sit in and we’ll go through it again, knocking out the ones she doesn’t care for. Then it’s calendar-creating time.
I’ve been pretty happy with the calendar layout and purchasing options Apple offers within iPhoto, and that’s what we’ve used each year.
The 2012 calendar was delayed, due to the nearly three weeks my wife and I spent in Africa at the end of November and beginning of December, as we adopted Boy #3. There were a few “But what about the calendars?” from the extended family at Christmas; like I said, it’s become a pleasant expectation. Rest assured, they arrived the second week of January and have been in full use at the respective households (and places of work) since.
Steve Jobs once famously held up the Mac as the “digital hub”. It was to be the machine you plugged your cameras, iPods, musical instruments, whatever, into so you could work with photos, videos, and music. iCloud seeks to replace the Mac as the hub, and I’m tentatively dipping my toe into using iCloud more, but for me, the Mac still remains my hub. For a Type-A control freak like myself, having something that’s under my control for keeping memories is key. I run my own backups on the Mac, even having backups of the backups. But I’m learning to let go a little more, for the convenience iCloud is supposed to offer.
Whether the Mac or iCloud, what has become apparent is that this simply isn’t a case of being one’s digital hub, it’s become our memory hub. Most everyone’s photos are digital now, and all of my digital photos, most of which never make it to my Flickr feed reside in Apple’s digital shoebox, iPhoto. All of my videos, most of which never end up on Vimeo are stored on there. There’s good reason for having backups of backups. My Mac is where all of my memories are, and I look to secure them as much as possible.
Like many, you’re probably in the same boat, and if you don’t have a comprehensive backup system in place, you need to get one going as soon as possible, lest you take a chance at losing precious memories. Here’s mine:
- nightly backup of the entire Mac to an external hard drive via SuperDuper; after the initial full backup, the script “Smart Updates” the backup drive, only adding or subtracting what’s changed that particular day
- ongoing backup of the entire Mac via Time Machine to a different external hard drive
- weekly backup of SuperDuper-cloned drive to another hard drive
- ongoing backup of the entire Mac via CrashPlan
The only thing I’m not doing that I should is rotating a backup drive off-site. (In case of a fire or some such event.) For now, my CrashPlan backup serves as my off-site protection for the memory hub.
We all have memories on our computers which are important to us: photos of our family; music from our formative years which defined us (child of the 1980s here); that e-mail from a world-famous author that was so encouraging. These things are worth protecting, and while companies like Apple, Shirt Pocket, and CrashPlan are doing what they can to make it as simple as possible, it’s up to us users to get it going in the first place.
My friends often get tired of hearing it from me, but the mantra won’t change: backup, backup, backup!
Post-publication addendum: Since this column was originally published, I have discontinued my use of Time Machine. I use CrashPlan to not only serve as my off-site backup, but now an external drive uses the CrashPlan software to back up a local copy as well.
WTHR is a pretty nice simple weather app for iPhone that was inspired by Dieter Rams 10 Principles of Good Design.
I’ve been using WTHR, and have it on my home screen. I keep the Weather Channel app on my iPhone, too, but it’s on another screen, and only used now for more in-depth weather research. If I just want to know how scorching it is outside here in Texas, WTHR tells me, and does so beautifully.
Recent Bounciness And When It Will Stop (Pinboard Blog)
Recent Bounciness And When It Will Stop (Pinboard Blog)
Openness like this is why I’m pleased to support Maciej.
PEBKAC: The Normals' View of Apple and the iPhone
This column originally appeared in the February 2012 issue of About This Particular Macintosh.
The last Macworld Expo I attended was in January 2009. This also happened to be the last Macworld Expo Apple attended. While in the Bay Area, I and some friends took advantage of the location and made the short trip to Cupertino, and the Apple Company Store. For those who’ve never been, the Company Store differs from your average Apple retail store in that it offers a variety of Apple-branded items such as clothing, hats, and paper and office products, in addition to the hardware and software you’d expect to see. I left with a black fleece pullover with a silver Apple logo on the left breast (on clearance, no less).
By now you’re wondering why this is at all important, and after all, aren’t I simply bragging? The Apple fleece has become my go-to sweatshirt. It’s comfortable and as we fashionistas all know, black goes with everything. So it’s not uncommon during the two or three days of winter we have here in north Texas to see me sporting the Apple fleece. It’s also a mainstay when I take our oldest son to the rink for hockey.
At a recent practice, a pair of fellow hockey dads were standing by the glass a few feet from me, discussing the iPhone, Apple the company, and Steve Jobs. One of them had obviously recently finished Walter Isaacson’s biography on Jobs, given some of the material he was regurgitating. This led to more material on Apple as a company, both under Jobs and without him at the helm, and about the iPhone and iPad. As I watched our sons practice and half-listened to their conversation, I was struck yet again at how differently I view the technology world, and specifically Apple and its products, than normal people.
Please understand when I say “normal” people, it is not a term of derision, like, say, muggle. I worked in IT for a decade and a half, nearly ten of those years exclusively on Macs. You wanted to know why Mac OS 8 wasn’t behaving properly once the Finder appeared on screen after boot? Why, you may well have a rogue extension or control panel installed, let’s take a look. What’s this, Mac OS X is actually based on UNIX and there’s now a command line? Oh, goody, something new to learn so we can better exploit the ease with which things can get done and we can get back to our game of Doom 3. Or Modern Warfare 3. Or whatever game’s the latest and greatest. (Because that last part is what normal people think IT people are really doing when we’re not actually working on a computer.)
As I said, I see these sort of things differently, as do many of my friends, including colleagues on this very publication. Normal people don’t buy black Apple fleece sweatshirts. And if they happen to, normal people usually don’t make a special trip out of their way to do so.
What I have noticed about wearing the fleece in the three years I’ve had it, is that fewer and fewer people will ask if I work for Apple. Or used to, if they know what my current occupation is. The why is easy to answer: today, more than ever, Apple is such an important part of people’s daily lives, it’s not an oddity any more. Apple is no longer the alternative-to-Windows company. Apple is now the iPhone company. And it seems every where I look, someone’s using an iPhone.
And interacting with normal people who use iPhones, I’ve quickly learned they use their iPhone much differently than we more-plugged-in techie types do. For instance, they usually only have one Twitter client, the official one from Twitter–if they have a Twitter client at all!
I realize that a lot of this sounds like common sense, but it’s hard for us techie types to sometimes understand how differently we see the technology world versus normal folks. Those people who just want stuff to work, just want to get stuff done so they can get on with their lives. For us, the tech stuff is our life. Those who can make the transition back and forth easily are the ones who do very well in the IT consulting arena. And normal folks, it’s always great to have someone like that in your corner.