Saturday, July 29, 2017
This morning I abandoned my plan of using an external USB 3.0 usb drive to run a separate installation of macOS for home stuff separate from work stuff on my new MacBook Pro provided by work. It's just too darn slow. Running Sierra from a USB drive is tolerable in a situation in which your built-in drive fails and possibly a few other scenarios, but I can't imagine anyone trying to work or game that way on a regular basis. The Samsung 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Fit (MUF-128BB/AM) I am using is not the fastest USB drive available today, but it is one of the smallest, and that's why I chose it. Even if it were the fastest, I still can't imagine it being very usable. Since I probably can't return it, I guess now I'll just keep it in case Patrick needs it or I'll use encrypted disk images on it, which is still acceptable for work use as far as I know. Recently after having a new MacBook Pro for about a week or so I did a full shutdown and then realized in a panic that it had no on-off button so for about a minute I didn't know how to turn it back on. Instinctively, I pressed and released the Touch ID button, since that's the location that the on-off button used to be on older models, and to my surprise it worked. Breakfast at home: three-egg mexican scramble with two hash browns, 8 ounces of orange juice, 8 ounces of milk, and lots of hot water. Spent the day continuing to set up the new laptop and preparing to stop using the home iMac. Today I learned that it is possible for a Mac to search volumes that are physically connected to other Macs (and maybe other computers?) on the local network but that the trick is: (a) you need to be in a full Finder window, and (b) you must select "Shared". This reverses my belief for the past seven (?) years that it simply wasn't possible with OS X or macOS, and it's an example of something Apple does that just doesn't work they way you expect. I had simply thought it was something that was broken and Apple didn't care enough to fix. It seems that Spotlight won't ever show these results, but in Spotlight during a search if you scroll to the end and select "Show all in Finder" and then in the resulting Finder window chose "Shared" then you're able to see your results. If you still don't, then you might need to manually run "mdutil -i [volumename] on" to turn on indexing for that volume. Tonight I began using our new electric toothbrush, an Oral B White Pro 1000, as recommended by The Wirecutter. It is louder than I had hoped, but it leaves my teeth feeling cleaner than I could have reasonably done with manual brushing.