I HATE APPLE

Found a MacBook on sale today and was so tempted apart from that keyboard.

Pity there isn't a tiny Thinkpad tbh

are there any modern laptops with good keyboards? they've all seem to have taken a cue from apple and decided worse keyboards are the way to go.

all the non-apple ones

which ones though? even thinkpads went rubbery garbage.

no one is putting high travel cherry switches in laptops, it's true. but dell XPS keybaords are fine IMO (perhaps not for you if you think thinkpads are no good).

i've even tried razer's opto-mechanical laptop keyboard -- like typing on corn flakes. what a world!

I like my new 16" macbook pro keyboard better than the one in my workplace dell latitude but I may be a fringe case

i don't really have a stance on this issue, but what are you guys pining for, the clackety-clack of PS/2-era keyboards?

I am pining for the X60-era thinkpad keyboard, that was a gem.

i guess i type hard because i have a recent gen macbook pro and my wife says it sounds like a telegraph office

aside from the whole "they don't work" thing, the usual complaint is that travel is so low/bounce so small that they are painful to use (and very loud!)

I'm pining for a keyboard where the f and j keys haven't broken off completely

Nhex - I think the issue is that a certain amount of travel or tactile feedback is necessary to both trigger the "I've pressed the key" muscle memory along with stopping the motion without it feeling like your fingers slamming into something

I'm a light touch on keyboards and actually have the opposite issue where I'll just barely tap

A couple of years ago I bought a Unicomp replica of the IBM Model M keyboard, which is easily heavy enough to serve as a murder weapon, and I love the huge noisy full-travel keys. It works beautifully with my new iMac.

I do get a cool nostalgia trip with a big old ibm keyboard or replica that reminds me of the green screened card catalog computers the library had when I was a kid

Because time machine is not an off-site backup. Don’t know how much I’d trust anybody who just says use Time Machine! I use Time Machine and backblaze and have lots of stuff in Dropbox and google docs. Used to also use super super to clone my system drive for an even easier way to back up and restore system drive without having to deal with time machine.

― dan selzer, Sunday, 2 February 2020 00:33 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

the thing is happening again which caused me to take the laptop to be looked at (i.e. to the guy who said "just use time machine") -- viz the laptop tending to hang and the spinny disc, bcz backblaze seems to use a lot of memory? is there something else i can be doing to sidestep this? it's not the worst thing in the world but it's mildly annoying when i have 12-odd GB available and still getting intermittent memory-pressure red in the activity monitor?

in the incremental os updates lately some beachball spinning began to occur where it formerly had not, may not be in your control

maybe -- it just really reminds me of how it was behaving two years ago and i wondered if there's a thing i can do

are you sure it's backblaze that's lagging? i can tell that safari in particular has gotten worse, whether it's because of its own code or an os subsystem it depends on, so that it's obviously a side effect of upgrades.

mark how big is your HD? 12GB isn’t much free space on a, say, 500GB drive. rule of thumb is 10% free at a minimum iirc

tracer it's 120GB

xp to j.
well i don't use safari so it's not safari -- what i generally use in a working day are:
chrome: could be chrome! massive memory suck i believe!
scrivener: unsure, it now has a fvckton of docs in it tho most of them aren't in daily use
mail: lol i have unfiled emails going back 12 yrs in my inbox alone

plus spotify for when the wifi signal to my headphones isn't buggy which is not never :(

i wasn't getting problems before i turned backblaze back on but this exactly coincided with upgrading to catalina 10.15.2 so

if you know how to use activity monitor then watching cpu percentages when there is an obvious lag is a good index to what the actual cause might be. sometimes it's a surprise, though what you're doing when the beachball appears is a pretty good bet.

i use scrivener, probably not with the nightmare kind of projects you probably have stuffed into yours, and i have found it to be extremely well-behaved.

I would free up like 10GB more HD space and restart.

^ mr tech support here

a fair bet for the cpu to jump into the yellow if not the red (and the lag to be in effect) is when backblaze is backing up! it doesn't register on the monitor tho

lol the guy that dan deplores is the guy tracer (ages ago) suggested i go to

What the guy on Hackney Road? No if so I agree, he’s a jackass

Backblaze may be needing some disk space to do its copying operations is my hunch mark. Try giving it more room to maneuver.

i need a new guy tracer (not for this problem)

maybe i shd delete some of my [checks notes] roughly two million old emails what do you think

some of them go back to 2002, it's a resource

i have some from doomie

That’s important historical material!

There are better ways, large files and caches lurking back there. CleanMyMac is great but expensive. You can try CCleaner for MacOS which has a free version. You can also try doing an advanced Spotlight search yourself and see what files you’ve got that are larger than, say, 200MB

when backblaze is backing up! it doesn't register on the monitor tho

mark s, I have the same laggy issues with my MBP and Backblaze. I've got a fairly new SSD with plenty of free disc space (around 500gb), so it's not that that's the issue. I think simply it's that BB is resource hungry when doing its thing comparing the back-up files to the latest version of files on the MBP, and that it maybe gets more so as the size of the back-up increases over time. I got so frustrated at the slowing down I just changed the backup schedule in preferences to 'only when i click <back up now>', and I'll turn it back on every week or so and leave it running overnight to do the back-up.

that's weird tho - I have an old (2011) Mac mini and have been using Backblaze for years - and literally never noticed when it's doing its thing

my backblaze is also backing up a large external drive at the same time, would that add to the burden? i googled around a bit re this issue when i first posted here abt it and vaguely remember reading some procedure i cd do to possibly restructure* the process of "comparing the back-up files to the latest version of files" to make it less time-consuming -- when i have a moment i'll go look again and post it here so ppl can see if it's a good idea or a bad one

*in my mind i processed this as "re-arrange the boxes as they sit in the warehouse" just so you know what the non-computer hardware is we're dealing with here :) aka defragging i guess, since that's how i processed defragging back when it was a thing you had to do now and then (shd i still be doing it now and then?)

I have a new Apple Music problem: I can log into it on my iMac and iPad, but no longer on my iPhone - where I get an error message telling me that my apple id email address is not valid.

I could spend further hours fiddling round to see if I can solve it, or maybe just wait till the next IOS update.

It's worth checking from time to time that Backblaze is functioning correctly in the background. Mine stopped backing up after the Catalina OS upgrade, but without any indication. To their credit BB did alert me, but some time had gone by which could have been critical.

bit the bullet and bought a CleanMyMac license (partly out of spite since the hackney road guy said it was a useless waste of space lol and removed the free version for me last time i was there): now i have 16.6GB available which is better not worse i guess (a more detailed deletion will be v time-consuming and painful as it will have to be small stuff mainly but this is a start)

tracer i need a new guy

https://i.imgur.com/BwXBhAm.png https://i.imgur.com/FKf2UBY.png

lol ok this is my life now

*quits activity monitor*

OmniDiskSweeper is a good free tool for identifying which folders and files are filling up your Mac.

i restated to bed in the previous deletion-sweep and when it started up it also decided unasked to take 45 mins reinstalling catalina from scratch so i'm now at 20.8GB available

hullo spinny disc i haven't met you for 45 mins wheres it at

Awesome

CleanMyMac is a v good product imo

Definitely sus that your System Preferences were represented by the Chrome icon!!

Malwarebytes is free and totally worth running as well just in case a network of bots has decided to commandeer your computer for its own dark ends

lol i get quite a lot of that kind of flirty icon cosplay, is it bad? my ilx bookmark used to read "murder" (currently it reads "second")

things do seem a bit calmer and less bloated since i just switched the backup schedule to once a day (=overnight)

I've always stayed away from CleanMyMac because of lots of talk about malware being included and it being nigh on impossible to ever uninstall again? Don't know if there's truth to that but it scared me off. Are those reports off?

I don't use a lot of apps on my mac, as it's old and slows things down. One I do use, and might be of use for you Mark, is Memory Cleaer. It's free and fast. I set it to clean my memory every hour, and I have def noticed it improved performance.