I HATE APPLE

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)

There are full on tiling managers for macOS. Never used em. But I do use https://rectangleapp.com/ and it’s great.

Oh, that's interesting, koogs. I'm still on 10.14 because this is a work install Mac. I'll give it a try when I'm on my wife's Mac.

Caek, I feel like I've tried third-party solutions before and they've never stuck but I'll give Rectangle a go - thanks.

Part of the problem with relying on hoonja-doojas is my brain is just slightly too full with keyboard shortcuts (and I'm running out of ergonomic combinations too – like I've assigned Cmd-shift-S to Zoom window, which is preferable to me to actual full screen, and that's nice, but whenever I'm in Firefox it doesn't work as the app uses it for something else)

I need another combiner key on the bottom row! Or maybe windows management is an area where the Touchbar could actually be trained to be useful.

Yeah, the snap-left or snap-right dual screen thing was introduced in Catalina. At first I thought, "great! This is the only thing from W7+ I miss"... and then I almost immediately went back to tabbing through full-screen apps again.

xxp

The keyboard defaults in rectangle are pretty reasonable and didn’t clash with anything I already had fwiw.

i'm sure i've done split view before it updated to catalina though, and searching suggests that previously if you held down the green button until the window floated then you could drag it left or right and it'd tile.

(i don't think it's as nice an experience as the windows version, or the linux Mate version fwiw)

if you held down the green button until the window floated then you could drag it left or right and it'd tile.

Nope, this is not happening for me. Holding down the green button does nothing.

yeah, might be an 'after version x but before version y' thing. i think i was on sierra before this. our work builds only *slightly* newer than your work builds obv. (stackoverflow answer was from 2015, someone reported it working in 2019, but no OS mentioned either time)

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.

― stet

tiling window managers are the business

i like em on linux but the macos ones always felt like trying to make water run uphill. do you have one you like?

Rectangle is great and I use it all the time even if I only use like a handful of the commands. Keyboard shortcuts to move windows between multiple displays is something I got way into this year as I worked at home with a second display all the time.

my main (sole?) use of it is to put the browser on the left 2/3 of the window and my terminal on the right 1/3.

i like em on linux but the macos ones always felt like trying to make water run uphill. do you have one you like?

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek),

oh not for mac no, I've installed a Moom trial a few times but never got into it, I just stare at a small portion of my huge screen

I've always used SizeUp for simple window management. Throwing windows into corners/sides, between monitors. i've never taken to Spaces. I sometimes wish SizeUp had sticky/hot corners but I do it all with numeric keypad commands.

I can't remember why I chose it over the more feature-filled Moom. Maybe it was just more basic and I liked that.

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

is there any fix for that? install swiftkey i guess?

I agree with Apple on this one. Better to not include swear words in the dictionary than have them there and potentially surprise you autocorrecting to them in the worst possible places.

it’s only a ducking suggestion

Try going to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> text replacement and then just add swear words as shortcuts for themselves, ie fuck = fuck, fucking = fucking etc

(that’s iPhone - don’t know about OS X)

what kind of monster leaves autocorrect turned on on the computer

i tried that woof but it doesn't fix the problem of those words not working with swipe to type

14.8 is very uh oh

How so, uh oh

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/technology/apple-software-update-spyware-nso-group.html

Yup

No more third-party screen replacement.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/26/face-id-stops-working-if-you-replace-the-iphone-13-screen-with-third-party-repair-video/

Well, you can still have third-party replacements if you don't mind losing the Face ID, right?

Well, yes. I forgot some people turn that off.

Mac and iPhone on same wifi, both ten feet away from router. Sync can't start.

Wifi sync has never worked properly for me, ever.

I think for me it's worse that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Same devices, same network, same proximity to each other and the router, but a total crapshoot if it will work or not.