mostly nonsense
This is a quick followup to my post from this week about backing up my family’s photos and home videos with Google Photos and B2. A reader asked why I use B2 over Amazon’s cheaper S3 Glacier alternative. I started to reply directly, but then like everything I write, it kept growing. And then I thought my answer might be interesting to others as well. So, here you go…
Two of the topics I’ve written about the most on this blog are backing up your data and photography – not professional, artsy photography, but more in the sense of your family’s photo and home video library. I’m a huge nerd for these topics. Part of the reason for that is my own obsessive personality traits, but also because of my affinity for nostalgia and history. My life, to a certain degree, is documented through the literal data I’ve created over the years. And the lives of the people I love are likewise documented through the digital archives I keep. So when those two topics intersect, holy cow do I ever proudly fly my geek flag.
I’m a firm believer in the whole mind like water spiel that David Allen preaches through GTD. I jumped on the Gettings Things Done bandwagon around 2004 I think – the first of my two senior years in college. And here we are in 2020, which means I’ve been practicing this methodology (with varying levels … Read more
Remember standing in line at midnight to literally pay $129 for Jaguar? Or in 2007 for the iPhone launch? There could be no more literal embodiment of the Futurama SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY meme than the way I felt at those and many other Apple community events. It was a momentously joyful whirlwind of nerdery and consumerism run amok in truly the best way possible. The Apple of old used to earn our money by creating products we loved. Now it feels like they take our money by locking us into services we have no choice but to use.
I’m filled with rage and despair and also just sad thinking about what we in the tech industry unintentionally unleashed upon the world and then willfully made worse through greed and arrogance. This is my small contribution to make things better. It likely won’t matter. But it does give me some relief to have done something. Anything.
I live and die by my keyboard. And here are the shortcuts I couldn’t do without. (Maybe this post should have been titled “A Love Letter to KeybaordMaestro”.)
Maybe the documentation has disappeared online, or maybe it was only ever available via word-of-mouth fifteen years ago, but I lost about four hours the other night trying to figure out how to make the dropdown choices in my NSPredicateEditor show user-friendly names instead their actual key paths.
So, I did what I almost always do when I face a situation of deep despair on my Mac. I reached for the greatest Swiss Army knife of them all Keyboard Maestro and came up with an incredibly lo-fi solution that isn’t as feature rich as what those other apps offer or as convenient as Dock folders (when they don’t disappear), but it works for me!
As apps deviate further and further away from the HIG with custom UI, whether for design reasons or in the pursuit of a mythical, cross-platform code base that management thinks will cost less, we lose the benefits of a well reasoned platform that was formerly easy to work with and a joy to use.
…I’m just glad I’m to the point in my nerd existence where I can be happy applying a fix and not caring about the real underlying issues that don’t concern me.