Ron Guest

Ten years ago today this guy joined our family. We never expected to be blessed with such an intelligent and thoughtful son. Being his parents feels like a privilege. 📷 👶🏼 ❤️ 🧠

I’ve asked Flickr for a zip file with all my content. Next step is to cull ~700 photos. After a week of thought I have no issue with them cutting back on 1TB of free space but the way they’re doing Pro engenders my distrust. It’s another “we own you” social service.

I’ve signed up at mastodon.technology and set up cross-posting from micro.blog. Not sure how I feel about having two timelines to read but I’m going to give it a try.

Make a wish! 🌸 📷

We had a heavy rain overnight and it remains a gloomy and chilly afternoon. One benefit: the trail was deserted and I could loudly sing along to my workout music without public embarrassment. 🎶 ☁️ 🏃

The start of this review pretty well states my feelings. It’s like the hardware team worked like crazy to deliver a powerful Pro tablet but the software team took a year off and added nothing to its future. Maybe the laptop team vetoed it.

2018 iPad Pro review: “What’s a computer?”

So far my at-home election watch party has consisted of 1 🥃 1 Reese’s and a bowl of Tostitos. I suspect this will be a rinse and repeat scenario. I’m avoiding 📺 reports though and checking the 📰 sites every 30 minutes.

I thought I’d post a quick summary of the journey to getting Windows 10 to boot on my iMac using an external SSD drive.

I first tried this approach using VirtualBox. There are several posts that document similar approaches. This quickly - for anything that involves installing Windows - produced an external SSD that would boot on my 2013 MBP. But in spite of trying several variations of this process I was never able to get it to boot up on my 2013 iMac (Fusion drive model). I’ve found Fusion drives to be very fussy so I’m not totally surprised but had been hopeful because I was using an external disk and so the fusion drive shouldn’t really have been a factor. Last year I created a Boot Camp partition on the Fusion drive and that required some serious shell level disk hacking. Since getting the external SSD to work for Windows would enable me to extend the life of the iMac quite a bit I was motivated to find a solution so I kept digging.

I eventually tumbled on a completely different approach which is based on a Microsoft technology called Windows To Go. Even with this it took me several tries to get it to work and even then there were some oddities. I only had a Windows Home license and the approach documented here wouldn’t work with that version (at least not for me, Windows To Go is stated as not supporting the Home edition but I had given it a try anyway). Having already fussed with this for more than half a day I coughed up the $100 to upgrade to a Pro license. Once that was done I started from scratch once again and ended up with a Windows install that successfully booted my iMac. It performs pretty well i.e. much much faster than the Fusion boot camp partition. One of the resulting oddities is I can’t use the Boot Camp tool in Windows to boot into Mac OS X. I have to do a restart, hold the Option key, then pick the macOS boot disk. The second oddity is similar: the SSD no longer shows up as a bootable option in System Preferences on the iMac. It’s necessary to hold do the Option key when restarting and then pick a disk which is named “EFI Boot”. If you’re thinking of using this approach be sure to check out the first comment on the 9to5mac blog which points out an upgrade limitation which might eventually matter.

I’m hoping this will also have the advantage of allowing me to boot this Windows SSD on either my iMac or MBP should the need arise. But knowing Windows I’ll hope to avoid trying this out.

Wish me luck: I’m trying to install boot camp and Windows on an external SSD so I can use it from my iMac.

I found this while out exercising today. They were only on this one tree out of a whole forest of them. Nice to see a wonder of nature in the middle of my day.

A few years ago our family of 2 adults + 2 kids would have needed 3 computers. Now one is all we need plus 4 iPads ranging from basic to Pro. Cost-wise this is actually cheaper for us.

I’ve seen quite a few posts, here and elsewhere, about the cost of the new iPad Pros. My interest is in the high end so I feel the pain and I am hesitant to upgrade. But I’m not sure Apple is hurting itself since iPads still start at $329 with several price points above that. I think it best to compare to laptop prices which start at a few hundred dollars for a basic model and rise to a couple of thousand. Screens, speed and storage are the main drivers of those costs differences as well. Maybe I tend to think of this analog because my iPad is my main computer (even though I also have an older MBP I use it less than 10% of the time).

We’re not really into Halloween but do like to give out candy to the kids. Unfortunately it is quite rainy this afternoon and may spoil the evening as well. 🎃 👻 🍬 ☔️. No way we would ever eat all the candy we bought ourselves.

Our 14 year old daughter decided she wanted to go to the freshman homecoming dance. So she asked a guy to take her 😂. We had no idea these giant mums were a tradition these days. It’s nearly as big as she is! All parties pictured here. 📷

Apple is rightly known for its hyperbole. Hyperbole aside, the new iPad Pros are truly amazing. I definitely want one!

They clearly have the power to be a software developer tool. Hopefully they’ll provide the tools for that at the next WWDC. It would drive a huge sales bump.

Apple keynote MacBook Air thoughts: 1. Tim Cook seems really excited by this 2. I doubt a group of people have ever expressed so much enthusiasm for recycled aluminum

Duck duck go? Or father-son?

My 9.7” iPad Pro is 2.5 years old so it’s a bit hard to justify an upgrade. I want to get the larger iPad Pro so that + a new keyboard would be 💰. However if Apple adds better multi-window support I might talk myself into it. I’d care a lot more about that than “full Photoshop”.

🍳 🥓 🍞 breakfast for dinner is a winner

Wispy ⛅️ 📷

This shipwreck discovery is a stunner! Shipwreck found in Black Sea is ‘world’s oldest intact’ - BBC News

I asked Apple to give me the data it has on me. They provided it today and I downloaded the files. After going through it all I can say it was terribly boring. Which is exactly what I want. I appreciate Apple’s stance on my data and privacy.

I’m wondering what the mid-term election results will do to my social media participation. After the presidential results I ran and hid for a couple of months to get away from all the negative energy people were constantly venting (even though I agreed with their POV). At least for me negative energy is counterproductive to driving change, serves to drive further polarization, as well as hurting (my) personal well-being. I avoid it in real life and social media is no exception. I don’t know if the community on MB and the tools in the apps well be effective in managing this or not (e.g. mute doesn’t work right IMO). Time will tell but I am a bit hopeful.

So important. So rewarding.

Here in the US, early voting starts tomorrow in my state. Voting participation is much lower for younger generations and worse in mid-terms. Although it is too late to register, now is a good time to remind those you know who are eligible to get out and vote. Each vote matters.