I HATE APPLE

update on my backblaze issues: since i switched to "backup now" as my option to decide ive had 0 problems with the return of the spinny disc -- will follow up on SSD as advised at some future point (like when i can get a bus to this guy's workplace and not a 4-hr round walk lol)

i also found some more space just via deleting attachments in mail which had built up since i last had a clear-out and will maybe try OnyX at some point also to really get into the dusty nooks and crannies

If you mean my friend Pablo he says he does pickups.

oh does he? i didn't see that on his site -- i need to send off the query anyway (since cost is also an issue given i have 0 work currently)

get me work alba

I guess he doesn't promise it on his site as he doesn't want to be racing across London to trace an iPhone battery but this i world be a bigger job and his mum still lives in Hackney so I guess he's there quite a lot!

Yeah I think the cost of an SSD is worth it but not inconsiderable if you're out of work :/

Replace not trace, he's not a spy

the spy is you doxxing his mum :D

anyway thx yes, i will pursue this

SSD prices have dropped a lot just in the past year. you can get 1TB for about a hundred quid.

Oh that's good. Yeah I think it was about twice that when I got mine.

They’re also easy to install depending on your computer. Hi to OWC and buy the drive and they’ll send you the tools and a link to a video.

Ah yeah - by all means give that a go. I wasn't brave enough to do it myself.

while tidying up i happened to look a little bit more carefully at the packaging for my replacement laptop battery and i'm pleased to say the warning on the side says "Risk of fire or bum if mishandled"

i: do backblaze fans know any ways to dial down its space hogging
ii: ilxor tips on what i can clear out of ancient garbage which cleanmymac™ fails to dig out

― mark s, Saturday, April 25, 2020 2:52 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

mark i've logged several tasks to BB about the space hogging (which I can see from my periodic GrandPerspective scans. they repeatedly send a pre-prepared blurb that doesn't quite answer the problem - so why have i got a 15gb BB block just sitting there when I'm all backed up? In the end I bought a 1TB SSD and it's all good now because I'm not close to the edge storage wise. BB is good, but it's not always that good.

re BB: i back up by choice now, once a day if i remember over night, which means less spinny disc while i'm working

sevdral times since i installed the new battery the whole thing has just turned itself off while sitting there -- as far as i can interpret the report it's bcz it's overheating? might a new battery cause this?

also chrome now keeps falling over (i think it maybe failed to update properly for some reason and is stuck in some flimsy in-between state -- maybe i shd reinstall?) (will i lose all my lovely bookmarks if i do?)

i still haven't contacted tracer's new guy to find out about the upgrade, if it keeps misbehaving i will

it's Alba's guy! which speaks even better of him :)

check the power manager / energy saver settings mark

this isn't powering down tidily while at rest, this is blinking out abruptly mid-move* and when i restart giving me a warning message and a bunch of coding crap to send to apple

*not a move i'm directly making though, it hasn't ever done it while i'm working on it, only when i'm not looking

If you're worried about Chrome losing your bookmarks when you reinstall it you can export them all first and then import again if needed. The place to do this is a bit hidden but I'm sure if you Google there are instructions. I make that backup every so often anyway just in case.

Also, if you're logged into Chrome and have our set up to sync your bookmarks (this may be the default these days) then they all get saved in the cloud anyway so even if you log into Chrome on a completely new computer the bookmarks magically appear.

Our = it

cheers alba and everyone, sorry i am very demotivated and self-loathingly ground under at the moment, caught between "of course this shd all be perfectly easy for me to research and grasp" and "please can i clear all this toss out of my head and have interesting stuff back in there, as a treat"

no this sounds like some bad juju mark. i really think you should get Alba’s guy to give the whole thing a once-over, get BB working right, and quote you for an SSD. like a bike tune-up sort of.

ok so i reinstalled chrome w/o incident

(or only dumb incident, i didn't lost any of my lovely/stupid bookmark but it subtly reordered them so that the ones i use most were hidden out beyond the double expansion arrows)

no this sounds like some bad juju mark. i really think you should get Alba’s guy to give the whole thing a once-over, get BB working right, and quote you for an SSD. like a bike tune-up sort of.

yeah mark ssds are magical

i downloaded OnyX to see if it can help me clear space until i sort out an SSD but whenever i set it to run (and whatever i ask it to do) it just gives me unresponsive

ok maybe it's just the bigger things i ask it to do that stall it, i'll try it overnight

ok ignore this OnyX complaint it just takes a long time (and apparently signals that it's doing what it is actually doing by saying it's "not responding")

ok lol so i quizzed alba's guy on installing an SSD, here's the essence of his response: this macbook air already has an SSD, installed in such a way as to slow the processors and reduce the RAM so as to keep the price low: since RAM and processor are soldered on, it can barely be upgraded (a faster model of SSD is possible but cost greatly outweighs benefit)

which is gloomy news tho he has been very helpful in other ways so this is a good development

not to doubt the dude but some OG Macbook Airs did come with woefully slow hard drives. If it's that old you have more problems than the drive, though

i mean this is basically what he says, i could trade up the drive but it makes much more sense to pay a bit more and trade up the whole thing -- esp.as i could also sell what i have secondhand to offset it

How about an ilxu didn’t realize it was an air. They’ve only ever had SSDs. No question, by a new computer.

Yeah, I didn't realise it was a MacBook Air. How old is yours (Apple – About this Mac)? Annoyingly, I'd be happy to sell you one for not much money if I was still living in the UK.

If international shipping wasn't a complete bother right now, I'd be doing the same :/

it's a mid-2013 11-inch, i did carefully give this info once upon a time but it's now buried way upthread in the 8000 posts that only unfurl if you want them to (and who wants them to?) so fair enough no one remembering lol

My wife had the same and tbh it's worked just fine, though she just replaced it with a new macbook pro 13".

well the original issue here was that backblaze seemed to be using much more memory than it maybe should be

(also that i needed to replace the battery, but this has been sorted and seems to be fine; then that chrome had misinstalled in an upgrade, also now sorted)

the randomly shutting off issue portends bad things imo particularly since you have a new battery. did Alba’s guy mention anything about that?

it hasn't done that since catalina last upgraded and i reinstalled chrome -- if it starts again i'll talk to him again (tho basically "buy a new one" sorts that too)

ah okay that’s good

thinking of finally upgrading to 10.15. do we know anything now we didn't know when it came out?

The latest thing is that piece doing the rounds about the sheer amount of phoning home it does — even exec calls trigger sync networking to check the certs of the executables. I'm still trying to put off updating

mine's been stable

I can tell you that running the 10.15.4 combo updater fixed all of the problems I was having and I'm thankful that trick still works.

does 10.15 bring anything worth having? I'm annoyed that they deem my mbp too old to use sidecar.

well they still haven't fixed the stupid library listing bugs in itunes/music : /

but offhand i can't recall a new feature or important fix that i rely on

thanks, I think I'll just continue to hold out then.

We replaced our AppleTV recently and the new remote is driving us all crazy. It's crazy touch sensitive, easy to pick up and handle upside down without realizing it, and the menus are all shit. Non-intuitive and confusing.

Top tip: you can train it to listen to a standard IR remote in Settings. We just use our TV remote with it now. (Not least because we lost the stupid tiny one)

you can control it from yr iphone also