your favorite little computer program hoonja-doonja (mac version)

i just ran into my first serious spotlight problem. it can't find a few excel files i create a couple of years ago. i know where they are. i can open the finder window where they live. but if i search for them, using words that are in their files names, they just don't appear in the spotlight results.

it seems like some people use something called Arthur? anybody here use that? is it good? i had understood Spotlight to be kind of integral to the system, with it own way of indexing etc so frankly i'd rather it just worked properly but if Arthur is a good alternative i'll try it.

i have been a launchbar user for like 20 years. it's in the same category. lb/arthur, etc. are more general than spotlight (they can run "commands", control music, search emojis, insert the date at the cursor, etc.), and also less capable (e.g. they won't find anything in the *contents* of a file that spotlight can't also find). but if you just want a quick way to type a few chars from the name of a thing and open it then they are great.

they may not search the folders you want them to search by default btw. searching the names of every file on your disk is not a good default, so they probably only search a couple of folders OOTB and you'll need to teach them about your stash of cool files (or tell them to search subfolders or whatever).

Ugh

I’m rebuilding the Spotlight index so I’ll see if that helps

Content search is crucial

rebuilding Spotlight helped fix a similar problem for me a few months back

I had a similar thing with search on a previous iPhone where it just stopped finding App Store when I searched for it. Never managed to fix that.

corrupted search index on iPhone used to suck bad, but I think _there are ways_ to more easily address that now

I think eventually I just didn’t restore from backup and bought a new device, lol

it seems like some people use something called Arthur? anybody here use that? is it good? i had understood Spotlight to be kind of integral to the system, with it own way of indexing etc so frankly i'd rather it just worked properly but if Arthur is a good alternative i'll try it.

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 2 November 2021 21:14 bookmarkflaglink

i use Alfred (is this the same as Arthur??!), which still seems preferable to spotlight, and is quick and easy to use, but i've been using it for so long i don't know whether spotlight has caught up.

lol yes i meant Alfred

i use alfred as well, but i usually only use the bare, bare minimum functionality of it - typing the first letter or two of a commonly used app to open it up. that alone has saved me 1 second per use, several million times already.

Spotlight does that too. Alfred does a lot more. But spotlight does stuff too.

I've used EasyFind for forever – lightweight, free, and easy to use.

Do these alternatives search document contents though? Like what's in an email message or a Microsoft Word doc or a Notes file?

All the ones I’ve seen use Spotlight underneath the hood to do it. Apart from one (amazing looking) open source thing that you need to build from source to use.

re: Shortcuts

https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-monterey-the-macstories-review/5/#shortcuts

anyone ever see/use this?

whoops.

https://www.spikenow.com/

I saw that recommended this week and was also curious, but i'm so done with email apps that ingest all the email into their own sketchy servers for processing. It's a good way to get sacked (at work) or hacked (for personal) and I'm just not having it.

I do love the idea of shifting email to conversational, but the few clients I've used that try it make a massive mess of the emails for users on traditional clients so that also sucks.

Also saw this week a recommendation for https://superhuman.com/ but $30 a month(!) to also have the same email-on-our-servers thing is wild

yeah, looking at the same recc as you

i don't get emails from humans any more really.

does anyone have any experience installing windows via virtual machine on a M1 model? i have never used VMs before, so i have little direct experience. i understand that bootcamp doesn't work on M1s (the second comment here seemed informed, to me: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/future-of-boot-camp-on-apple-new-macbook-arm/52f63e5f-0aa4-4a90-89af-a6efe7ab30bc). the most mentioned alternative, Parallels, is $120/yr, jfc.

is Wine my best option?

Parallels is subcription now? Oof
VMWare Fusion is still an option too
If it's not too intensive you might as well go with Wine, it's just more steps to do what those other two will do for you

(i have no insight on the M1s, unfortunately)

I've been using the free version of VMWare Fusion and it works... OK? Running Linux VMs mostly and not Windows that much. Still waiting for the VirtualBox 7 beta for M1s to settle down.

try UTM https://docs.getutm.app/guest-support/windows/

the two approaches are either to use Windows-arm via commercial tools where the x86 translation, if needed, is done by Windows and you need to do the account jump to get the ARM version of Windows, or run something like UTM that is virtualizing x86 via qemu and then running that version

depending on whether you care about gpu or other device support, commercial license or not, pick your poison

I’ve been trying to do half-assed support for data scientists doing computey crap and trying to hand-wave at how you want to virtualize the command line

Surely the data scientists could just requisition second computers

oh like they don’t spend enough money already?

I think the ones doing stuff on their own laptop are probably in the minority judging from the zillion jupyter notebook nodes

Virtualbox?

VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org

(trigger warning: it's free, but VB has been an Oracle product since 2010)

I never thought of myself as needing a freeform brainstorm/collab/mind-map type of app, but after the latest OS updates I tried out Freeform and kinda like it
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/12/apple-launches-freeform-a-powerful-new-app-designed-for-creative-collaboration/

this is like... the giga-doonja

https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

yup, got that in a bundle a long time ago, it's great. but funny thing is when everything's running fine you just sorta forget about it...

Ran that for years. Replaced it with swiftbar because I didn’t need most of what it offered but it is indeed great.

It turns out it's easy to get on the beta for nvUltra. Recommended for Notational Velocity junkies.

I got into XRG years back, especially on full-time server Macs. Now with an M1 Pro and a fiber connection I'm pretty confident about things.

It turns out it's easy to get on the beta for nvUltra. Recommended for Notational Velocity junkies.

my experience was not as good (bloated, buggy), but at least it doesn't crash as soon as you open it on recent macos, unlike the original and nvalt. i gave up after a couple of days. it's been in beta for like 5 years. the author seems a bit nuts tbh and i'd be surprised if it ever ships.

I've never cottoned on to any of those note-bucket/offboard-brain type apps. I'd rather forget things.

nvUltra has been fine. I don't use any of the new features. seems just as fast as NV/nvAlt to me.

Torrent client Transmission finally hits v4.0.

Rewriting from C to C++ is a wild project to take on but I’m glad it worked out for them I guess

Is there a reliable way to update a 2013 MacBook to one of the newer OSs? Without destroying the computer?

Not sure but I have a 2015 Macbook that's running Monterey fine

i was pleasantly surprised at the (low) price of "mid-2015" macbooks like the one i use day-in and day-out at work and which copes with that fine. like £300. proper ports too, like usb and hdmi and sd card and actual earphone plug.

(^ running big sur, nagging me to install monterey)

Finally sold my 2014 mbp for $175 and bought an m1 air on sale for 800. Happy with the upgrade

proper ports too, like usb and hdmi and sd card and actual earphone plug.

they all have usb and earphone plugs? i can get behind complaining about missing sd card, but hdmi?

ports i have nothing to plug into are useless to me. all my external drives are usb2*, my tv and monitor both have hdmi.

(* when i sent this one back to get the battery fixed they sent me a newer mac to use for the two weeks it'd be away. i backed everything up before it arrived but the replacement only had usb3 inputs. it stayed in the box.)