I HATE APPLE

ok i'll bite: why the mirror, the USB fan and what looks like a rolling shelf vs. a desk

The mirror: So I can see behind me without turning around; see what I look like before I go into a meeting.

The fan: Sometimes I get hot.

Shelf vs. Desk: On a shelf because I've got other stuff on the desk. Also, I haven't forgiven myself for spilling a drink all over the last Mac Mini in 2014.

where is the keyboard, and mouse and monitor?

do you sit on the other side of this desk? this picture confuses me.

I almost don't want to ruin the vision y'all had in your heads.

https://i.imgur.com/gJ3DcVN.jpg

hahaha oh my god.

needed that touch of HDR
https://i.imgur.com/KubHDDx.jpg

lmao

Makes my mug of blood a little more conspicuous, but ok.

My iPhone SE (2nd Gen) developed some cracks on the glass back after less than a year’s worth of dropping it, which was not a problem for my iPhone SE (1st Gen), which I dropped on the ground repeatedly with no major ill effects for 5 years or so. So I bought an Apple silicone case (I’ve never used an iPhone case) and I just put it on and I hate it!

Might replace the case with a piece of tape over the back of the phone

i've always done fine with cheapo silicone cases for ~$5 off eBay or Five Below. they go yellow pretty fast, though

Had the weirdest experience last night, thanks to Apple.

My wife stopped at the grocery store and sent me a text to FaceTime her so she could show me a few options rather than texting a bunch of photos, fine. I FaceTime her and get someone else's ceiling, not a ceiling I recognize in the least and a strange voice. I hang up and FaceTime again, this time my wife answers. She lost signal and called me, said to try FaceTime again. Did it again, same stranger. My wife texts me to ask a follow-up. I respond and get "sorry I think you have the wrong number", mind you this is the same ongoing text string I've had with my wife for at least 8 or 9 years now. I call my wife, thankfully she answers, tell her what's going on. She asks me to send a screenshot of the weird text. I send the screenshot and get another text saying, "please stop sending me things, you have a wrong number". My wife calls a few minutes later and says she never got any text, so I explain it again.

Now, my wife had literally JUST traded in an old phone at Verizon about a week ago and was literally a block from the Verizon store, so she stopped by, wondering if maybe somehow her old phone wasn't wiped or something got mixed up in the trade-in. They couldn't find anything wrong, so she heads home.

Meanwhile, I do some googling, and finally find the culprit. Apparently if you FaceTime a contact and they are NOT on WiFi and have their settings set to not use data for FaceTime, the iPhone (in Apple's infinite wisdom) will cycle through other numbers for that same contact instead. Turns out an old work phone under my wife's contact info on my phone is now reassigned to someone else with an iPhone and I was getting connected to that. The weird thing is that apparently once I made that initial "wrong" FaceTime connection, my iPhone automatically reverted to that number as the default for my wife's contact info - so any subsequent text, call or FaceTime was going to that old number. As soon as I deleted the old number from her contact, those errant texts shifted out of my wife's text thread and into it's own, associated with the now deleted number.

Everything is back to normal now, but that was an odd one.

Why I won't be falling for any 'dongles are good actually' messaging any time soon

https://i.imgur.com/Ff4VyWi.png

This, by the way, for the apparently onerous task of having a portable HD drive and an iPhone plugged in at once, so I can transfer photos from one to the other.

Apple solved the issue of ports by removing them

And I do love to see this helpful message come up when literally the only program I have running (and doing nothing as far as I can see) is Finder.

https://i.imgur.com/OfOQ19u.png

macOS is just a pile of crap these days, isn't it?

I have a feeling this happens when I commit the cardinal sin of forgetting to quit Photos before attempting to eject the external hard drive.

Even though Photos has now quit the HD is stuck in some limbo state.

I’ve seen that message before

My go to futile experience is trying to sync my phone . Finder just decides my phone doesn’t exist and ejects it despite it being unlocked and turned on and six feet away from a 5G router

eject! eject!

I have a feeling this happens when I commit the cardinal sin of forgetting to quit Photos before attempting to eject the external hard drive.

is the photo library on the external drive?

Yes

I get that I should remember to quit Photos before I try to eject the drive but you wouldn’t think it would send the disk management into such a tailspin if I forget.

Is the Photo library an iCloud one? It handles that setup quite badly, because there's a background process that uploads/downloads from iCloud Photo Library even when Photos isn't running. That will keep a lock on the drive and prevent you unmounting it/fuck up if the drive disappears

No, I steer well away from iCloud for my photos now

Time Machine started failing at the "preparing" stage. Googled the log messages, found one person who failed to get an answer. Reformatting with APFS, crossing fingers. Sigh.

yeeesh

a time machine backup has a half life of about 6-12 months in my experience

half that if the network is involved

on the bright side it is much much faster on big sur

Indeed. If anyone is on Big Sur/11.x right now, be sure to reformat your TimeMachine drive(s) as APFS volumes. MUCH faster improvement on speed.

I wonder if it does that by default if you let TM format the disk

figured out why Time Machine hates me / is enragingly slow - it just doesn't like my workflow. it wants to wait to back up until your Mac is idle, and since I have a laptop, rarely is the machine idle and the external backup drive attached at the same time.

of course, I figured this out after I shelled out for a dumb expensive solid state external drive.

Just plug it in once a week before you go to bed

yeah i never liked the automatic Time Machine backups. only downside of doing it manually is that sometimes the setup period can get very long

There’s a free plugin that lets you set your own interval. I think I have it going once in the middle of the night.

if you rarely run time machine because the disk is never connected then time machine will take a long time when it does run because it has a lot of work to do. it's not magic. once a week is not enough for it to feel fast.

the trick to fast backups is to backup often. this is easy with desktops, and there's no reason to mess with the defaults there. with laptops 1) have the backup drive on the network, e.g. attached to an ancient mac in clamshell mode, attached to your router (most support this), attached to one of these things https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/, or get an old time capsule from craigslit 2) allow time machine to run when the laptop is not plugged in. there is a setting for this somewhere.

don't you worry about external HDs being plugged in 24/7 and crapping out faster?

they're reading/writing 5 minutes/hour when my laptop is on so no.

if you rarely run time machine because the disk is never connected then time machine will take a long time when it does run because it has a lot of work to do. it's not magic. once a week is not enough for it to feel fast.

I plug it in daily, and it's just way faster when I put the display to sleep and walk away. I really think TM is just being too polite.

Those odroids look wicked cool though, I might get one.

ah right, yeah it runs as pretty low priority. you can confirm that's the problem for you with this https://osxdaily.com/2016/04/17/speed-up-time-machine-by-removing-low-process-priority-throttling/. i'd be a little surprised if it is if everything computer and disk are both APFS and computer is running big sur. but if there's any HFS or older macOS then yeah it can be a rough.

Yeah everything is SSD / APFS Encrypted on Big Sur, and Preparing can still take forever. Clearly a sign that I need a 16" M1 MBP.

Encrypted is optional, right?

yeah

It's take a long time for me to come to this simple truth but: I just don't like multi-window operating systems. 90% of the time I just want to work full screen in one app and when I don't, I want to put two app windows side by side so I can refer to, or paste from, one while I work in the other, and that involves such a pain-in-the-arse process of dragging them into a size and position I want. So I now use Spaces more strictly, which is good for the 90% but not much for the 10% (I'm probably still doing it wrong)

I feel like iPadOS probably does this in a more useful way but I don't do useful work on an iPad.

iPadOS is as bad, but from the other side. Trying to get two windows into the right place to do a drag-and-drop is infuriating. iOS 15 is meant to help a bit though.

The Linux "tiling" windowmanagers - you can always see all/most open windows, there's no overlaps and they're automatically arranged - are really interesting and might solve it, but I've never used one so they might also be bad.

> I want to put two app windows side by side so I can refer to, or paste from, one while I work in the other, and that involves such a pain-in-the-arse process of dragging them into a size and position I want

what happens if you mouseover the green window button?

i get a menu saying

Enter full screen
Tile window on left
Tile window on right

(running Catalina)