Category: Apple

Black Friday

There was no repeat of the Christmas music incident last night, so I got a good night’s sleep (or at least as good as I can manage these days). So I may actually be in shape to do a few of the things that I was too frazzled to do yesterday. However, it’s still very cold out: 12° this morning. And Raritan Valley trains are running about 30 minutes behind schedule right now. So, combining those two factors, going into NYC today might be a bad idea. I’m not going to completely rule it out, but I’m definitely not heading out to the train station right now to stand outside in the cold for a half-hour, hoping the train eventually shows up. If I see the trains get back to normal, and if it gets up into the twenties, maybe I’ll go in later.

I started my online Black Friday shopping yesterday, and I think it might be amusing to list out some of the stuff I bought, yesterday and today.

  • I picked up some random comics on Comixology, from DC’s big Black Friday sale. I got Batman: White Knight, which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. And Tales of the Batman: Gene Colan Vol. 2. I really liked Colan’s run on Batman, back in the 80s, after he left Marvel for DC. And I got Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I generally like anything Morrison does, so I’m pretty sure I’ll like these. (These were $5 each.)
  • I bought Blade Runner 2049 and Isle of Dogs from Vudu. I hadn’t previously bought any digital movies from Vudu, but with the whole Movies Anywhere thing, I can buy from Apple, Amazon, or Vudu and the movies show up in all three libraries, so it makes sense to buy from whichever service is cheapest. (I was originally thinking about going out to see a movie today, but I think that, instead, I’ll likely stay in and watch one or both of those.)
  • I picked up Fantastical 2 for iPad for $3. (It’s regularly $10.) I’ve been using the iPhone version for years, but never got around to picking up the iPad version.
  • I bought a $100 iTunes gift card for $80 from Costco. It seemed like a good deal.
  • This morning, when I went into Lose It to log my breakfast, I got a popup offering a deal on a lifetime subscription. I’m always a bit leery of lifetime subscription deals, but I’ve been using Lose It for five years, and renewing my premium subscription every year, so I went ahead and paid $75 for a lifetime sub. Since I did that in-app, that came out of my iTunes account, nicely using up most of that gift card I bought last night. (Maybe I’ll pick up another $100 card today.)

And here are some things I’m looking at today:

  • Pluralsight has their usual Black Friday sale going on, where you can renew your subscription for $200 instead of $300. I’ll probably do that again this year. I don’t get a ton of use out of Pluralsight, but I guess I get enough that it’s worth the $200.
  • Jetpack has a 30% discount off all plans for Black Friday. I’m currently only using the free Jetpack services on this blog, but I could step up to their “personal” plan. About all that really gets me, beyond what’s in the free plan, is site backups, but that could be useful.
  • Apple’s Black Friday weekend event has started. As usual with Apple, it’s not that compelling. But it might be worthwhile for me, since I was looking at getting some new Apple stuff anyway. On the iPhone front, they only have deals on iPhone 7 & 8, and I was thinking about the XR, so I’ll probably skip those. Their Apple Watch deal is for a $50 Apple Store Gift Card when you buy a Series 3. That’s not much, but might be a good deal for me. My current watch is a “Series 0,” so a Series 3 would be a good step up. I can use the $50 towards my eventual iPhone purchase.
  • I’m thinking about picking up a second Sonos One speaker, either from Sonos directly, or from Amazon or Costco. I get a fair bit of use out of the one I bought earlier this year, and it would nice to have two, for stereo. I don’t know if I really need that, though.
  • It’s not exactly a Black Friday thing, but a friend of mine has a story in this anthology about… cannibalism. On the one hand, I’d like to support him, on the other hand, I don’t much like reading about cannibalism. But hey, it’s only $4 for Kindle.

Since I started writing this blog post, I see that the NJ Transit delays are now at almost an hour, so things on that front are definitely going in the wrong direction. And the temperature is up to 22°, so that’s going in the right direction, but maybe not far enough to motivate me to spend much time outdoors today.

Lazy Sunday

I had tentative plans to go in to NYC for the Frankenstein exhibit at the Morgan today, but it turned into one of those mornings where I couldn’t quite talk myself into getting all my stuff together and heading for the train station. Instead, I finished reading a big Avengers hardcover, then spent way too much time writing a review of it on Goodreads. I’m kind of in a mood to read some more Marvel stuff now, so I might spend the afternoon reading Avengers vs. X-Men, which I have in Comixology.

DC was really pushing their new DC Universe service at NYCC last weekend; every DC-related panel started with the DC Universe trailer, and the service got mentioned a lot in some of those panels. I’ve alternately been talking myself into and out of signing up for the service. On the one hand, I’m a long-time DC fanboy, so there’s probably lots of stuff there I’d like. On the other hand, I still have a huge pile of unread comics and graphic novels that I haven’t read yet, and DVDs and Blu-rays that I haven’t watched. And I haven’t watched the most recent season of any of the Marvel shows on Netflix. So I already have a lot of superhero content to consume, that I’ve already paid for. But at $75/year for the service, that comes out to $1.44 per week, which is less than the price of a single comic book. So… maybe.

I’ve been curious about the game Stardew Valley since I heard it discussed on an NPR podcast a couple of months ago. (Here’s the article that they mentioned on the podcast. And here’s another NPR article that makes me wonder what kind of Stardew player I’d be…) I was kind of hoping that the game would have been available for the Apple TV, since I have a game controller for my Apple TV that I never get to use for anything. But no. It’s available for most other platforms, including Mac, PC, PS 4, Switch, and XBox One. The only game console I currently own is a PS 3, so I’m out of luck there. I could buy it for Mac or PC, but I was looking for something I could play on the TV. I saw an article a few days ago announcing that it was coming out for iOS, so I had some hope that would include Apple TV. Still no; just iPhone and iPad. And I saw that Minecraft for Apple TV has been discontinued for lack of players. So if Apple TV can’t support something as popular as Minecraft, it probably can’t support any big, interesting, game. Oh well. Maybe I should buy one of the current-generation video game consoles, but I just don’t think I would use it enough to justify the price. (I was really hoping Apple TV gaming would take off at some point.)

I didn’t make it to the big Doctor Who panel at NYCC last weekend. I’m sure it would have been fun, but it sounded like it was going to be very crowded and I was too tired to deal with that. The full panel is up on YouTube now, on the official Doctor Who channel, so I’ll have to watch that later. I watched the first episode last week, and liked it enough that I’m looking forward to this week’s episode. I don’t get BBC America, so I get the episodes through iTunes, which means I don’t get it until tomorrow. I’m not liking this new Sunday night schedule for the show. When it was on a Saturday night schedule, I could watch the new episodes on Sunday afternoon. Now I have to wait until Monday after work. Well, at least it gives me something to look forward to after work on Monday.

OK, so this turned into a long rambling post, it’s almost noon, and I’ve killed my entire Sunday morning reading comics, listening to music, and writing pointless reviews and blog posts. Eh, there’s worse ways I could have spent the morning. Time for lunch.

WWDC round-up

Here’s a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post, based on what I picked up from the WWDC keynote today:

  1. No new hardware announcements. So I don’t feel like an idiot for buying a MacBook Air right before WWDC.
  2. iOS 12 will run on everything that runs iOS 11, so my iPhone SE should be able to run it, as well as my iPad Air. (Mind you, there’s not much in iOS 12 that I’m terribly excited about.)
  3. macOS Mojave will run on my new MacBook Air (of course) and would likely have run on my old MacBook, though I think it was the oldest supported model, if I read the compatibility note correctly. It looks like there will be a few nifty things in Mojave, but nothing earth-shattering.
  4. watchOS 5 is not compatible with my “Series 0” watch. So if I really want to keep current with watchOS, I’ll have to get a new watch. I’ve been thinking about doing that anyway, even though I’m not actually having any problems with my Series 0 watch.

I’ve been getting interested in doing more automation stuff on my Mac (and maybe on iOS too). I started reading Joe Kissel’s Take Control of Automating Your Mac today, and I’m hoping to get some ideas from that. This article on Sal Soghoian from Wired is pretty interesting. He’s the guy who used to be in charge of automation at Apple, until his position was eliminated a while back. They didn’t talk much about automation at the WWDC keynote, though the new Siri Shortcuts feature is somewhat promising. I guess it’s what they’ve had the Workflow team working on since they acquired Workflow. Meanwhile, on the Mac, they’re still supporting Automator and AppleScript, as far as I can tell, though they don’t talk about them much.

MacBook Air and WWDC

Here’s one more post on my new MacBook Air and other Apple-related thoughts.

When the old MacBook went south, I was initially considering dropping macOS entirely, just getting a new Windows laptop, and simplifying my life a bit. I opted not to do that for a few reasons, including my realization of how hard it would be to switch away from macOS without a working macOS computer. I would have wanted to copy some files from the old MacBook to my Windows machine. I had an external Time Machine backup, and an SSD in the old MacBook that might or might not have been damaged. The external drive was probably formatted with HFS+, while the internal drive would have been APFS, encrypted.

There are Windows tools that let you read HFS+ drives, like Paragon’s HFS+ for Windows and Mediafour’s MacDrive. Both of those tools are adding APFS support, but it looks like they’re both in preview/beta right now. And it looks like neither would be able to read a FileVault encrypted drive. As for Time Machine, Paragon doesn’t support it, but MacDrive says it does. So, overall, I think that getting files off the Time Machine backup and/or the internal SSD might have been a little dicey, if it was even possible.

And if I was giving up on macOS, I’d really need to give up on Day One, since there’s no Windows client for that, and it wouldn’t be worth it to me if I could only use it on iOS. If I did that, I’d want to migrate my old journal entries into Evernote, but it would be hard to do that without a Mac.

Likewise, migrating my contacts and calendar data to a new solution without a Mac would probably have been possible but annoying. So I guess the lesson here is that, if I decide to give up on macOS, I should do it while I have a working Mac and not when I don’t.

On a related topic, WWDC is next week. A number of people have chided me for buying a new MacBook Air when there’s probably new hardware announcements coming at WWDC. My response has generally been that (1) I’m not sure that’s true, (2) even if there is new hardware, it probably won’t be available until fall, and I can’t wait that long, and (3) given the direction Apple has been going in, I’m probably better off with the older MacBook Air than any newer hardware.

This article from Ars Technica indicates that there probably won’t be any big MacBook-related hardware announcements next week. And this article from The Verge questions whether or not Apple might address their MacBook keyboard issues at WWDC. (Answer: probably not.) So I think I’m still better off with this old-style MacBook Air, with it’s familiar and usable keyboard, it’s two USB ports, one SDXC port, and good old MagSafe power connector. (And a Thunderbolt 2 port, but I probably won’t have much use for that.)

sorting photos with Python

As part of my MacBook replacement project, I wanted to get a good new backup of my photo library. Photos.app stores photos in a database, not individual files, so if you want a “plain old JPEG” backup of your library, you need to export the photos from Photos.app. There are various ways to do this, but the way I chose left me with a folder full of subfolders organized by “moment name,” so a typical subfolder would be named “Somerville, NJ, May 27, 2018” for instance. That’s kind of a mess, since the folder names sort alphabetically. (And the folder dates are all set to today. Setting the folder dates to the date the photos were taken would solve some problems, but let’s ignore that for now.)

To impose some rudimentary organization on this, I wanted to make a top-level folder for each year, and move all the subfolders for that year into that folder. Not perfect, but at least it gets me from having one folder with 2000 subfolders to 10 folders with 200 subfolders each (approximately), which is a bit more manageable.

I looked around at various ways to do this, and settled on writing a quick Python script, which is shown below. I haven’t written a Python program in years, so this probably isn’t elegant Python. But it works. I’m posting it here in case it’s useful for anyone else. (I first learned Python back in 2003, and have used it on and off since, but never regularly.)

I had also looked for third-party utility programs that would allow me to export from Photos with more options than Photos itself allows. I found an old MacStories article from 2012 that talked about exporting from iPhoto to Dropbox using a tool called Phoshare. I had hoped that maybe Phoshare had been kept up to date, and worked with Photos, but nope. It was last updated in 2012.

I feel like there’s probably some interesting stuff I could do with Hazel too, and/or ExifTool, but I didn’t want to over-complicate things. And I also feel like there’s probably a third-party app out there that would make this much easier, but I didn’t find one that did exactly what I was looking for.

# sort_photo_bu.py
# ajh 2018-05-27
# sort Photos app export into folders by year.
# Export from Photos with subfolder format "moment name". 
# We assume the moment name always ends with the year.
# (Note that this may throw a "destination path already exists" error at some point, but that's probably fine.)

import os, shutil, sys

bupath = "/Users/andrew/Pictures/backup20180527"
for (root, dirs, files) in os.walk(bupath):
    for dirname in dirs:
        if len(dirname) > 4:
            year = dirname[-4:]
            yearpath = bupath + "/" + year
            if not os.path.isdir(yearpath):
                print "Making folder for " + year + "..."
                os.mkdir(yearpath)
            origpath = bupath + "/" + dirname
            #print "moving %s to %s..." % (origpath, yearpath)
            shutil.move(origpath, yearpath)
            #sys.exit()
print "All done."

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…)

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.)