My Micro Monday is @ddykstal because everyone needs a badger and chief entropy officer in their timeline.
Just published What’s keeping me in this relationship (with my Mac)? wherein I explore my devices, apps, and start eating an elephant.
What’s keeping me in this relationship (with my Mac)?
As chief technolust-er, procurement officer, and father of a couple of growing kids I have been thinking a lot about the optimal technology plan as our computers pass 5 years of age and the kids break into their teenage years. It used to feel like we needed a couple of computers plus iPads (not to mention phones and gaming consoles). I’ve begun to question this assumption quite seriously but have found it difficult to come to a conclusion – partly because the kids’ preferences are mercurial and also the future demands of school work are unpredictable (e.g. our daughter is pursuing the digital animation track in HS).
I decided to find a simpler elephant to eat, at least for now, and sat down and enumerated the tasks that drive me to use a Mac vs an iOS device. First up the list of “can’t be done on my iPad” items.
- I use the Banktivity budgeting and finance management app. It has a richly featured iPad version that I use heavily. Unfortunately the iPad version is missing the full custom reporting package found on macOS. I only need to check these custom reports once or twice a month, and create new ones rarely, but it is a barrier to completely leaving a Mac behind.
- Income tax preparation. I use TurboTax because I don’t trust doing it online and want to ensure I have the full ability to run it locally in the future.
- Video processing/rendering (it's slow enough on my MBP)
- Major Photo editing projects. There are a lot of great photo editing apps for iOS but I find them slow when dealing with large and RAW images. It's OK when processing one or two but I don't have enough time or patience for doing a large project using iOS apps.
- Software and electronics development projects
- A few random forms and web sites which don’t work properly on mobile Safari (can't believe companies can't get this right)
- A couple of server processes (though these are no longer indispensable)
And now the list of “could be done on my iPad but not as easily”:
- Heavy duty spreadsheet work. I spend a fair amount of effort managing investments and our financial plan. By way of example the Numbers spreadsheet that covers most of this has around 10 different tabs most filled with wide tables. I can do simple updates and tweaks on with my 10" iPad Pro but the screen just isn't wide enough to permit simultaneous clarity of the details while at the same time enabling an effective big picture view. I've contemplated if the larger iPad Pro would be sufficient but I'm not sure. Added context: I have a wide screen monitor on my MBP.
- This one is a bit of a "to be determined" but I've long used Photos on the Mac to create our Christmas Cards and Calendars. Given Apple's decision I imagine this will become more difficult on the Mac. I have yet to explore options on my iPad so I'm not sure if the Mac will still have a clear advantage.
This was a useful exercise for me. The “can’t be done on iPad” list, though lengthy, is almost entirely comprised of activities I do infrequently. The only outlier is software and electronics development projects which tend to have me at a Mac throughout a day or a few days. The conclusion for me is I don’t need a Mac any more. I can share a decent Mac with the kids.
N.B. No actual elephants were harmed in the writing of this post. 🐘
Manchester United is off to a terrible start this season. Such lackluster play against weaker teams. Jose Mourinho can’t seem to coach consecutive good seasons. ⚽️
My thought of the day: Action beats Reaction
I watched some people leave locked Windows laptops unattended while they went outside to talk or went the “facilities”. In case you don’t know, not only can they be stolen they can be hacked, even when locked, in a matter of seconds.
Normally when I hit a coffee shop first thing in the morning I get a ton of stuff done. Today I’m just sitting here alternately staring into space, having thoughts, and watching people. I guess that’s what I need. Not even listening to anything.
I find this perspective a bit mind-bending. I feel like I’m sitting cross-legged on an asteroid watching the sun go by with earth a distant spot of light.
Watch a movie made by a robot—on the surface of an asteroid | Popular Science
Thought it might be good to share a post from today: Things That Help Us Relax: Wirecutter
Finally feeling like Fall today (60F this morning).
Photo from 10 years ago today.
We saw a full rainbow this morning while getting the kids to school. Couldn’t grab a panorama sadly. And the colors were better in real life. Just use your imagination.📷😉 🌈
September 26, 2008. Last hope of Fall. 📷 🌺
Tried out one of my longed for features on the ⌚️ today: it works perfectly for controlling my music when I take a 🚿. Siri and even the touch screen. ✔️
@burk I wonder if it would be useful or interesting to have a page with a list of emoji’s used on micro.blog sorted by frequency of use?
Started going over to the dark side… Mojave install on my MBP in progress…
@cygnoir @macgenie Loved the interview! Haslted has such an engaging personality and I am forever a fan of libraries and librarians.
Normally I use watch faces with quite a bit of data/complications. But these motion-based faces are about to change my mind. I keep raising my watch just to watch it.
N.B. Static screenshots just don’t do this justice.
My new ⌚️ is possessed or something. Both times I tried to set it up it was in left hand mode. I told it I’d download apps later. When I try manually the same 4 apps worked on both pairings and all else failed. Now an hour later it seems to be downloading every possible app…
I really like my new Series 4 Apple Watch. But it came with some setup frustrations. The biggest is I can’t install apps on it. Clicking install just results in a never ending progress circle. Rebooting my devices doesn’t help. And Apple’s Watch support site won’t connect 😩
There have been a couple of high profile posts from users leaving micro.blog. I had given this serious consideration a few months ago. I wanted to document for myself the key factors in my decision. It’s posted if you’re interested. Why I’m (Still) using Micro.blog
My Micro Monday is @johnjohnston. Thoughtful, teacher, Scotland — what’s not to like?
Some things on my shelf.
Why I’m (Still) using Micro.blog
There have been some posts recently from a few respected micro.blog users about leaving the service. The concerns they’ve expressed are certainly valid and I’ve previously raised nearly all of them to Manton myself. I too gave serious consideration to leaving a few months ago so I thought I’d summarize for my own future reference some of the factors that influenced my decision to remain. To be clear this is not a post meant to disagree with anyone. We can see the same issues and come to different conclusions.
- The number one reason is the excellent ratio of interesting people and posts to noise and hostility [footnote title=...]For this stage in its growth I feel micro.blog has reasonable tools for managing noise and hostility in my timeline and is working to maintain community[/footnote]
- Early on I switched from using micro.blog hosting to self-hosting Wordpress on my droplet so I solidly own my content [footnote title=...]Partly because I do want to truly own my own content and don't see Github pages as viable and partly because early on the apps lacked sufficient features[/footnote]
- I am an iOS user so supported apps do actually exist [footnote title=...]I can fall back on Wordpress on the rare occasion that's necessary. I don’t trust the 3rd party apps, so far, because I prefer a settled workflow.[/footnote]
- The backend service and apps are evolving in a direction that generally feels right to me
- I hope in some way my presence can help micro.blog evolve and become a useful service for a significant number of people. I’m getting more out of it than I’m putting in. [footnote title=...]I don’t think the service should try to be for everyone or every need. There’s nothing wrong with serving a useful niche at scale.[/footnote]
In case you missed this: as of September 21st by Federal law you can now request freezes to your credit at all 3 national credit bureaus in the US. Freezing and unfreezing is free. Link is to the FTC and includes some Q&A on the details.
Got great news today. I ordered my ⌚️:35 after the store opened with an earliest delivery of Oct 2 (Tuesday of next week). Today I got a notice from UPS the ⌚️ is in Kentucky and will be delivered tomorrow. Nicely under promised by Apple. Pretty excited to upgrade from series 0.