I HATE APPLE

I guess I can see it if a laptop is your only computer and you’re often mobile. Would then suggest a NAS if in the budget.

my initial backup to backblaze took forever. Since then I haven't noticed. I like that for a fee they'll just send you a hard-drive.

nearline is slow (it's what i use with arq), but if i'm recovering a single file (which is by far my most common use of backups) it's still faster for me than finding the right disk drive and a usb cable.

http://youtu.be/zPptSPVYnQQ?t=121

Ooops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPptSPVYnQQ&t=121

Shout out to @TaikaWaititi for using his post-win interview to bag on those garbage Apple keyboards. He continues to be a hero of the people. pic.twitter.com/nVaAtLpNoN

— Anthony Carboni (@acarboni) February 10, 2020

he's right!

they're decent again now, I swear

only on the larger pro model, though :(

and they're better but still nowhere near as good as they used to be

I have no idea why I'm acting defensive about a zillion dollar company. Maybe my brain's partially in the late 90s

my message to every company other than Apple (and maybe Microsoft?) is to make a touchpad that freaking works well, though. apple did win the touchpad wars

Some still swear by the clit TrackPoint

that is a relatively good device, especially on ThinkPads of yore

ok you guys sold me on backblaze, currently doing the first upload that will take an eternity even on my ~~fibre~~ mega fast connection.

but, a question: from what I can tell this is cheaper than dropbox and gives me the same functionality: my files will be gettable on my phone when I'm out. what reason would there be to pay more for dropbox? I don't get it?

oh, duh, this doesn't automatically sync on another computer.

Found a MacBook on sale today and was so tempted apart from that keyboard.

Pity there isn't a tiny Thinkpad tbh

are there any modern laptops with good keyboards? they've all seem to have taken a cue from apple and decided worse keyboards are the way to go.

all the non-apple ones

which ones though? even thinkpads went rubbery garbage.

no one is putting high travel cherry switches in laptops, it's true. but dell XPS keybaords are fine IMO (perhaps not for you if you think thinkpads are no good).

i've even tried razer's opto-mechanical laptop keyboard -- like typing on corn flakes. what a world!

I like my new 16" macbook pro keyboard better than the one in my workplace dell latitude but I may be a fringe case

i don't really have a stance on this issue, but what are you guys pining for, the clackety-clack of PS/2-era keyboards?

I am pining for the X60-era thinkpad keyboard, that was a gem.

i guess i type hard because i have a recent gen macbook pro and my wife says it sounds like a telegraph office

aside from the whole "they don't work" thing, the usual complaint is that travel is so low/bounce so small that they are painful to use (and very loud!)

I'm pining for a keyboard where the f and j keys haven't broken off completely

Nhex - I think the issue is that a certain amount of travel or tactile feedback is necessary to both trigger the "I've pressed the key" muscle memory along with stopping the motion without it feeling like your fingers slamming into something

I'm a light touch on keyboards and actually have the opposite issue where I'll just barely tap

A couple of years ago I bought a Unicomp replica of the IBM Model M keyboard, which is easily heavy enough to serve as a murder weapon, and I love the huge noisy full-travel keys. It works beautifully with my new iMac.

I do get a cool nostalgia trip with a big old ibm keyboard or replica that reminds me of the green screened card catalog computers the library had when I was a kid

Because time machine is not an off-site backup. Don’t know how much I’d trust anybody who just says use Time Machine! I use Time Machine and backblaze and have lots of stuff in Dropbox and google docs. Used to also use super super to clone my system drive for an even easier way to back up and restore system drive without having to deal with time machine.

― dan selzer, Sunday, 2 February 2020 00:33 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

the thing is happening again which caused me to take the laptop to be looked at (i.e. to the guy who said "just use time machine") -- viz the laptop tending to hang and the spinny disc, bcz backblaze seems to use a lot of memory? is there something else i can be doing to sidestep this? it's not the worst thing in the world but it's mildly annoying when i have 12-odd GB available and still getting intermittent memory-pressure red in the activity monitor?

in the incremental os updates lately some beachball spinning began to occur where it formerly had not, may not be in your control

maybe -- it just really reminds me of how it was behaving two years ago and i wondered if there's a thing i can do

are you sure it's backblaze that's lagging? i can tell that safari in particular has gotten worse, whether it's because of its own code or an os subsystem it depends on, so that it's obviously a side effect of upgrades.

mark how big is your HD? 12GB isn’t much free space on a, say, 500GB drive. rule of thumb is 10% free at a minimum iirc

tracer it's 120GB

xp to j.
well i don't use safari so it's not safari -- what i generally use in a working day are:
chrome: could be chrome! massive memory suck i believe!
scrivener: unsure, it now has a fvckton of docs in it tho most of them aren't in daily use
mail: lol i have unfiled emails going back 12 yrs in my inbox alone

plus spotify for when the wifi signal to my headphones isn't buggy which is not never :(

i wasn't getting problems before i turned backblaze back on but this exactly coincided with upgrading to catalina 10.15.2 so

if you know how to use activity monitor then watching cpu percentages when there is an obvious lag is a good index to what the actual cause might be. sometimes it's a surprise, though what you're doing when the beachball appears is a pretty good bet.

i use scrivener, probably not with the nightmare kind of projects you probably have stuffed into yours, and i have found it to be extremely well-behaved.

I would free up like 10GB more HD space and restart.

^ mr tech support here

a fair bet for the cpu to jump into the yellow if not the red (and the lag to be in effect) is when backblaze is backing up! it doesn't register on the monitor tho

lol the guy that dan deplores is the guy tracer (ages ago) suggested i go to

What the guy on Hackney Road? No if so I agree, he’s a jackass

Backblaze may be needing some disk space to do its copying operations is my hunch mark. Try giving it more room to maneuver.

i need a new guy tracer (not for this problem)

maybe i shd delete some of my [checks notes] roughly two million old emails what do you think

some of them go back to 2002, it's a resource

i have some from doomie

That’s important historical material!

There are better ways, large files and caches lurking back there. CleanMyMac is great but expensive. You can try CCleaner for MacOS which has a free version. You can also try doing an advanced Spotlight search yourself and see what files you’ve got that are larger than, say, 200MB

when backblaze is backing up! it doesn't register on the monitor tho

mark s, I have the same laggy issues with my MBP and Backblaze. I've got a fairly new SSD with plenty of free disc space (around 500gb), so it's not that that's the issue. I think simply it's that BB is resource hungry when doing its thing comparing the back-up files to the latest version of files on the MBP, and that it maybe gets more so as the size of the back-up increases over time. I got so frustrated at the slowing down I just changed the backup schedule in preferences to 'only when i click <back up now>', and I'll turn it back on every week or so and leave it running overnight to do the back-up.

that's weird tho - I have an old (2011) Mac mini and have been using Backblaze for years - and literally never noticed when it's doing its thing