Author: Andrew Huey

MacBook Air migration

I’m just about done setting up my new MacBook Air. I hit a few bumps, but I think everything has worked out in the end. My initial plan was to restore from my most recent Time Machine backup with Migration Assistant. But that didn’t work out, for a variety of reasons. So instead I just dragged and dropped the files I needed from Time Machine to the new Mac. That took a while, but went smoothly enough.

Buying this MacBook Air was a bit of a compromise. For the most part, it’s at least as good as my old MacBook Pro (and better in some ways), but it only has a 256 GB drive. (The Pro had 512 GB.) I could have gone with a 512 GB drive on the Air, but it would have added about $300 to the cost, which I couldn’t really justify.

After getting rid of all the movies and TV shows I had on the old laptop, I’ve managed to fit everything else from the old drive onto the new one, with about 40 GB free. I have some other old files I can get rid of too, so I should be fine for the time being.

I’m trying to avoid the option in macOS to store documents in iCloud Drive. First, I don’t want to pay for iCloud Drive storage. And second, I don’t really trust it. There are other things you can do to free up space on a Mac, and I’ve reviewed those.

I’m currently syncing my entire OneDrive account to the Mac. That’s about 40 GB. I could probably turn off a few folders there to save some space.

I’m also toying with the idea of throwing a 256 GB SDXC card into the card slot, for additional storage. Those can be had for about $100. I really don’t need one yet, but it’s something I’m considering.

I’m a little annoyed that I don’t have a CD/DVD drive on this thing. I wasn’t really using the drive on the old MacBook that often, but I did get some use out of it. I’m going to have to do all my disc burning on my desktop PC from now on.

There’s one cool feature that works on the Air but never worked on the old Pro: unlocking it with my Apple Watch. (I was never sure if it was supposed to work on the Pro, but it definitely didn’t.) It’s a pretty minor thing, but it’s nice.

I still have a few minor things on my setup checklist, but the machine is functional now. I want to make a full backup with Carbon Copy Cloner soon, then set up a new Time Machine backup. And I need to pull the SSD from the old MacBook, recycle the machine, and repurpose the SSD, assuming it’s still good. (I may actually use it as a new boot drive for my desktop PC, since I only have an old-fashioned hard drive in there. That’s a project for another day.)

new MacBook Air

I have now officially given up on my old MacBook Pro and bought a MacBook Air. I’m not entirely happy about this, but it seemed like the path of least resistance. Giving up on macOS altogether was somewhat tempting, but the more I thought about all the stuff I’d have to do to accomplish that, the less enthusiastic I was. And replacing the MacBook with a Mac Mini was also somewhat tempting, and would have been cheaper than the Air, but then I started looking at KVMs and thinking about other factors, and decided against that too.

When I saw that B&H had the MacBook Air marked down to $999 ($200 off), I decided to go with that. It’s an imperfect solution, since it’s only got a 250 GB drive (vs 500 GB in the old MacBook), but it’s better (for my needs) than the current crop of MacBooks and MacBook Pros. The keyboard is the old-style one (same as my old MacBook) and it has a few useful ports (unlike the newer MacBooks). Here’s the specific model that I bought. (One improvement over my old machine is that it has 8 GB of RAM vs. 4 GB on the old one, so that’s good.)

I’m currently setting it up, which is going to be a slow process, I think. I want to restore it from Time Machine, using Migration Assistant. But it won’t let me do that until I’ve updated it to the latest version of macOS. Which is apparently won’t let me do until I install some other updates first. So that’s going to take a while. The Time Machine backup is from May 9, which is probably ok. Most of the data on the Mac that changes frequently is in OneDrive, so that will get pulled down from there.

Once that’s done, it should be smooth sailing, I hope. (And if Apple announces new MacBook models at WWDC in June, I’m going to be really annoyed. Unless they’re new models that I wouldn’t be interested in anyway.)

probably giving up on my MacBook

I think I’ve gone from worried about my MacBook to “almost ready to consign it to the scrap heap.” I’m pretty sure the hard drive cable has gone bad again, and that’s fixable, but it would be a pain, and the laptop is five years old.

I just spent some time poking around on Reddit and other sites looking at options for a new MacBook. The MacRumors Buyer’s Guide page for Macs is not looking good right now. (Everything I’m interested in gets a “don’t buy” rating.) WWDC is only a few weeks away, but there probably won’t be any hardware announcements there (at least not for Macs).

Since I’m leaving on a business trip today, I’m going to put off making any big decisions on it, but I think I have a few options, none of them perfect:

  1. Go ahead and buy a new or refurb MacBook or MacBook Pro, and take my chances with the butterfly keyboard. (Or find a refurb with the previous keyboard.)
  2. Get a refurb Mac Mini, so I have a working MacOS machine, at least. Then, over time, figure out if I want to move all my stuff over to Windows so I don’t need MacOS anymore, or if I want to get a good new Mac at some point in the future (after they’ve gotten past the butterfly keyboard issues and/or finally updated the Mac Mini line).
  3. Just “rip the band-aid off,” as it were, and give up on MacOS entirely. Buy myself a Surface Book or a new ThinkPad or something like that.

Like I said, none of those options are perfect. My current Windows laptop is still my ThinkPad from 2011. (Which has been solid as a rock, for the most part.) It’s starting to show it’s age now though. The battery life isn’t great. It’s running Windows 10 reasonably well, but I feel like it’s going to hit a wall on that at some point.

Worried about my MacBook

My MacBook has done a fair bit of random crashing today. I’ve had it since 2013, and I’ve had problems with it before, so it wouldn’t be surprising if something serious has actually gone wrong with it. I just reset the NVRAM/PRAM and ran OnyX on it, and it’s been OK since. (I’m using it to write this blog post, so we’ll see if it holds together or crashes again…)

I’m not opposed to the idea of buying a new one, if there was a new MacBook model that I was actually interested in, but there’s not. I really don’t want to buy one of the ones with the questionable keyboards, since I use the keyboard a lot, and really need a good one. So I guess that rules out… all of the current MacBook and MacBook Pro lineup? Maybe the MacBook Air still has a good keyboard? I’m not even sure. I’d be willing to give up on portable Macs entirely and just get a Mac Mini, but that thing hasn’t been updated since 2014 and isn’t really a good deal, compared to, say a nice Intel NUC.

I’d hate to give up on Macs entirely, but I’m starting to think about it seriously. I guess my “punt on the Mac” plan would probably be to get a low-end refurb Mac Mini and keep it around just for stuff that I can’t do on a PC, while gradually trying to get off the platform entirely. Or maybe just use the Mac Mini to tide me over until Apple gets their act together and releases a good MacBook and/or new Mac Mini.

I’m going to be at Microsoft HQ in Redmond next week for a training workshop, so I may start drinking the Microsoft kool-aid even more that I already am. Which could lead me into an unplanned Surface Book purchase. (This is assuming that their keyboards are better than Apple’s. I’ll need to do some research on that…)

Learning Statistics

I’m starting to read a book on statistics, and this is from the beginning of the chapter on probability:

If you are reading this book as part of a course in statistics, then you are likely pursuing a degree in higher education. On the other hand, if you are reading this book simply out of enjoyment, then you are crazy. That is one thing we can be certain about.

I guess I’m crazy. Oh well. It’s a pretty good book so far, though I think I’m going to need more to really get going.

I started thinking about learning more about statistics and data analysis recently. It ties in a bit with my attempt to learn how to use Power BI. I have all the basics of Power BI down now, meaning that I can import data and make fancy-looking pie charts and bar graphs, and now I’m poking at the edges of more meaningful data analysis.

It’s kind of hard to figure out where to start with statistics and data analysis. I never took a course in statistics when I was in college, so I don’t really know much to begin with. I did read Larry Gonick’s Cartoon Guide to Statistics years ago, back in the 90s I think. I don’t really remember much about it; maybe I should reread it now.

The book I’m currently reading is meant as a college textbook (per the quote above), and isn’t really meant to stand alone. It purposely doesn’t talk about software tools at all; just the background concepts and a little math. I’m thinking about reading this book along with it, which includes some more practical stuff, using Excel as the tool of choice. (Both books are on Safari, so I can read them for free.)

Of course, as a programmer, I’d eventually like to get to a book that talks about statistics and uses a real programming language for the examples. So maybe Think Stats would be good; it uses Python, which I’ve used before (though I’m probably a bit rusty).

I see a lot of references to R when looking into data analysis and statistics. I know almost nothing about R, so maybe I should look at something like this book.

This is all sort of leading me into data science, which is apparently the sexiest job of the 21st century, according to Harvard Business Review. I’m not really looking for a new job, and definitely not a “sexy” one, but hey, it can’t hurt to learn a bit.

Day One outage

It might be time to stop using Day One. I last blogged about Day One in 2016, when they had released a new version and switched to their own proprietary sync system. I expressed some concern about that sync system at the time, but I did pay for the new version, and I’ve kept using it.

Well, they just recovered from a multi-day outage of that sync system, and part of their restore procedure accidentally assigned some journals to the wrong users. They’ve written a postmortem that’s fairly straightforward and transparent, so kudos to them for that. But that’s a pretty big issue, regardless, in a system that’s supposed to be used for private journaling. I still mostly use Day One for fairly boring stuff, so it wouldn’t be too embarrassing if someone else saw my journal, but I can imagine a lot of people keep some really personal stuff in there.

For anyone using their premium service, with end-to-end encryption turned on, this wouldn’t be a problem. (The accidentally shared data would be encrypted and unreadable.) But I’m still on their old “paid for the software” plan and haven’t switched over to the subscription plan. And, of course, a multi-day outage and security snafu like this makes me a little less likely to do so at any point in the future.

I may switch back to using an old-fashioned five-year journal next year. I filled up two of these, starting in 2007 and going through to about 2016, before switching to Day One. The main issue with the hard copy journals is that you can’t do a full-text search. Also, my handwriting is atrocious. (This Levenger one looks nice though.)

two funny Batman comics

A couple of recent Batman-related comics:

  1. Uncle Batman’s Vengeance Juice from Diesel Sweeties (also coffee-related, so covering my two main interests in life)
  2. Robins from SMBC (not coffee-related, but still good)

I think both of these are making a good point, but about half my “to be read” comic book pile right now is Batman-related, and I’m not ashamed of that.

Speaking of which, I might be reading the Batman and the Signal mini-series this weekend, since the last issue came out this week.

Digg is probably done

I just found out that Digg has been bought by a company named “BuySellAds.” So… that doesn’t sound good. The previous owner, Betaworks, used it as a kind of “curated” news site, and it was interesting to check on once in a while. (But not interesting enough to check regularly.) The original Digg was pretty cool, but lost out to Reddit in the war of, umm…, sites that allow users to upvote and downvote stuff. (There’s probably a name for that category, though I guess Reddit is the only site left in that specific category?)

I guess the pending acquisition is why they shut down Digg Reader recently.

Betaworks also used to own Instapaper, which is a service I still use a lot. Instapaper is now owned by Pinterest, which worried me at first, but they seem to have mostly left it alone. (The Ten Years of Instapaper post on the Instapaper blog is interesting.)

Meanwhile, Facebook is still kind of horrible, but I’m still checking it every day. I have decided to delete the Facebook share button on this website though. Nobody was ever using it, and I assume it was pulling in some Facebook tracking code, so it seemed like a good idea to turn it off.

Amazon is kind of horrible too, but I placed two orders with them this week already, and of course just bought a new Kindle. Much like Facebook, they’re too convenient to just stop using them. (I mean, if Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos actually teamed up, super-villain style, and went on a mad killing spree, I’d reconsider. Until then, though, I need my cheap USB cables and Bloom County comics.)

Learning Azure

I have a project going at work that might (or might not) eventually have something to do with Azure. So I’m using this as an excuse to finally learn a bit about it. I looked at a few ebooks and videos that weren’t that helpful, then I stumbled upon a free ebook from Microsoft titled Fundamentals of Azure. It was last revised in 2016, so it’s a little out of date, but still mostly relevant. It does a good job of walking you through all (well, most) of the services offered on Azure, without getting too deep. (But it does get deep enough to actually be useful to a working admin or programmer.) I wrote a short review of it on Goodreads.

I’m using the $50 monthly Azure credit that comes with my Visual Studio subscription, which is more than enough to play around with (assuming that you remember to delete everything you do after you’re done). I’m glad that my company (finally) decided to pay for VS subscriptions for us. There are a few nice benefits that come with that.

If I really needed to get serious about Azure, I’d look at the Microsoft Professional Program in Cloud Admin at EdX or something like that. (Of course, I’m more of a developer than an admin, myself, so that wouldn’t be right for me either way.)

I’d love to be able to do a big project that uses a mix of Azure services, but that’s probably not in the cards. Still, it’s good to be familiar with all this fancy cloud stuff!