This tank of a laptop is an Aluminum G4 I bought off Craigslist nine years ago to repair and use as a backup/utility machine for sunsetted software. It’s been stored carefully in a bin in the basement, and occasionally it gets dusted off to be pressed into service. The last time I used it for a big project was when I batch-processed all of our first and second-generation font files into OpenType format (modern Macs and most current software doesn’t play well with TrueType or Type1 fonts) with an ancient, unsupported specialty app, generate sample sheets for each folder, and compile them into PDF booklets.
I’ve got two big bins of legacy hardware down there, everything from original MS Word 3.5″ floppy drives to whole laptops, and every time I straighten up the basement I look at the bins and think about culling the whole collection, minus one or two machines. And every time a mixture of apathy and unease stops me. Hoarding situations always start with the words, “…I might need that someday,” so I have to be very careful about what constitutes being useful and having a serious problem. In my defense, I have lightened the collection a couple of times already, but there are still more machines that probably need to be dropped off at an e-cycling center.
Yesterday Jen was working on a file provided by a client with an embedded typeface that wouldn’t open on her machine. After looking it over for a few minutes, I went down to grab the G4, booted it up, and converted the old TrueType font they sent into OpenType and got the file working for her. The machine fired right up, and even though the spinning hard drive is making some kind of vibrating noise, it worked like a charm.
Is it hoarding if they still make you money (or save it in this case)?
I got an email this morning from Bank of America assuring me that they have ruled in my favor for the fraud claim I filed last Thanksgiving. I’m glad they made an actual human review the case instead of just letting the robots decide everything was legit, because I was ready to go nuclear on them.
IKEA just announced a suite of smart home products that work with the Matter standard, including a whole slew of smart light bulbs, five smart sensors, remote controls and a smart plug. I’ve dabbled with home automation before, and I’ll be looking at these carefully to see how well they work with HomeKit. Our AppleTV is ancient, and if we upgraded to a new 4K version I could use that as the hub for smart devices, including these.
It’s been a minute since I’ve bought digital music online. Here’s the bullshit I had to go through to buy an album this afternoon:
- Apple’s Music app (the replacement for iTunes) in its normal state, does not have a visible link or menu item for the iTunes Store. It can be made visible in the Preferences. Why is this?
- The only visible way to see new music is to sign up for a subscription plan, which I refuse to do. I have enough subscriptions.
- So I went to Amazon, where the only visible link is a subscription shill as well. I refuse to do this too. Surely there must be a better way.
- A couple of searches later, I found a CNET article on how to buy and download new music. CNET still exists?
- This contained a link to a page on Amazon that was not immediately available from my Prime account. Thanks.
- From here I found my album. I purchased and downloaded it in MP3 format.
- Now, to get it on my iPhone. I imported it into Apple Music, figuring it would sync. It did not.
- Another search told me to AirDrop the files to my phone. I did this, and it only put the files in my iCloud Files folder without importing them. I deleted them. The fuck?
- More searching revealed that I needed to connect my phone via a cable to my computer. How very 2005 of them.
- I did this, the first time I’ve connected this phone to my computer ever. I had to tell each machine to trust the other, and wait for the handshake.
- Then I went through Ye Olde Sync screen to manually select the music and load it on my phone. How can this still be the way?
I am aghast at the state of things. I figured surely these days there would be a quicker, easier way that didn’t involve yet another subscription, but this is The State Of Things, I guess.
When I started learning graphic design, the program I worked in was Quark Xpress. From the earliest versions in black and white up through their disastrous switch over to V.5, I was a staunch Quark guy; I knew PageMaker but found it was inferior in many ways. In the early aughts I finally switched over to InDesign as it eventually was bundled as part of the Creative Suite and the IT support I was doing required me to know how to debug and troubleshoot it. I found that InDesign was relatively easy to learn and integrated easily with Photoshop and Illustrator, making the switch that much easier. All of my legacy files remain in Quark format, which is why I’ve still got at least two machines that run it reliably, but I haven’t booted it up in probably ten years.
I’ve been using Final Cut Pro ever since I got the gig at WRI, and it’s served me very well for that entire time. It was easy to learn, followed many of the same UI and conceptual frameworks I was already familiar with, and ran quickly (in 2014) on a 5-year-old Mac Pro. But as the length and breadth of the videos I’m producing have gotten longer and more involved, FCP has gotten slower and slower, making the editing process a slog. The latest video I worked on clocks in over an hour, with about 90 gigs of source files. Getting it to the finish line has been painful—it should have been finished several days ago, held up only by the spinning beach ball. I’m not using slow machines; my personal laptop is a M1 model, and my work laptop is a M4 with twice the memory. But I see no difference authoring on the work laptop than I do on my personal machine, which is ridiculous.
The guys at work both use Adobe Premiere and have been telling me to switch over for years, and I’ve been putting it off for that entire time. I’m going to make two big changes to see if it makes a difference in my editing workflow: I’m going to work off a solid state drive instead of a spinning disc to see if that helps at all, and if there’s no difference, I’m going to try using Premiere.
File this under Things I Learned today: my work MacBook Pro and personal MacBook Air can charge from both the MagSafe port and one of the two USB-C ports on the side. I found this out quite accidentally at work when I plugged my work machine in and it made the happy “I’m charging” ping when it was connected to a Dell power brick/port extender.
I’ve got two sets of Apple Airpods Pro: my original set, which I bought in 2020, and a Pro 2 set, which I bought in the middle of 2024 to upgrade the first set after the microphone started failing. I had the originals replaced under warranty in 2022 when one side went bad and started clicking constantly, and they returned to faithful service. I use the good ones for everything but working in the garage, and I relegate the first set for getting dirty under the truck or painting a bedroom. They’ve been crackling in my ear for several weeks now, and I finally took the time to look up a solution: the noise cancelling circuitry is going bad, apparently. Turning it off solved the problem immediately, but leaves me without a cocoon.
John Gruber does a deep dive on the current state of bootable Mac cloning software in 2025. It’s been a minute since I’ve had a bootable backup drive for any of my machines, and while he recommends SuperDuper, I was always a fan of Carbon Copy Cloner. I used to diligently keep a bootable backup of my primary laptop, and kept another drive handy for catastrophic recovery back in the days when I was a freelance Mac support guy. With the switch to Intel and then to the Apple Silicon architectures (not to mention various flavors of OS and file systems) it got hard to stay current with all the required flavors needed. Apparently the last update of Sequoia blew everything up, but this was a bug and has now been rectified.
According to a well-placed source, Apple is working on a smart doorbell.
The lock would work just like your iPhone, automatically unlocking your door when you or another resident looks at it.
I would happily swap this out for our Ring doorbell; just having FaceID be able to unlock the door would be fabulous. We’ll have to see if they offer a video review system the same way Ring does.
I’ve been doing a ton of video editing over the last year and a half, and one of the sad truths I’ve come to realize is that my year-old MacBook Air (M2/8GB/500GB) is just not fast enough to work with the files I’ve been generating. Final Cut Pro tends to slow to a crawl when encoding or rendering large previews, and I like to work fast. For the past few months I’ve been considering buying a faster newer laptop and selling this one (or giving it to Finn to use for school) but Apple just released their new Mac Minis yesterday, and I like what I see in terms of specs and price. For ~600 I could get a M4/16GB/256 Mini, which would easily outrun this laptop for half the cost of a new one. I work from an external drive so I’m not worried about space; I just need inexpensive horsepower and I don’t mind having something small on the desk to do the job. Filing this away for future reference…
Two Sundays ago I was grinding welds out on the floorpan of the Travelall. Without thinking, I put my right index and middle finger down on the surface to gauge the smoothness and burned the pads of both on the superheated metal. For a week I had no visible fingerprints, which meant the touch-unlock feature on my MacBooks and older Apple devices was useless. It (my fingerprint) is still not working properly. So I’m going to get out and do crimes while I’m still untraceable.
Jen did some digging months ago and learned that our new Honda actually came with remote start as a feature. I used it for the first time this morning, when the temperature was 38˚, and I have to say it’s pretty amazing. The weather is getting colder—this morning I had to bust out the middleweight jacket to walk Hazel and I was still chilly—so the little things like this make all the difference in the world.
The little purple iPod I bought at a yard sale this spring has come in super-handy with an unexpected feature: it’s got a built-in radio receiver which uses the headphones as an antenna. When I’m out working on the truck on a Sunday afternoon there is nothing I enjoy more than tuning in to the Ravens game and listening as I work. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work that’s loud, which tends to drown out any sound from the radio in the garage, especially when I’m bouncing from a welding helmet to ear protection when I’m grinding. And Mom will be happy to learn that I’ve upgraded my eye protection to a set of full-coverage goggles, which do a much better job of keeping flying debris out of my eyes, especially when I’m grinding under the truck.