So much for that

My last blog entry explained how I was downsizing my computer gear. I had sold my iMac, my MacBook, and my iPad. All to be replaced by a newer MacBook.

The reasons for doing this are a little difficult to explain. First of all… I have a bit of a computer habit. I spend most my time in front of one, both at work and at home. I’ve been fighting this off and on for years (unsuccessfully I might add). Second, because my iMac was my best device (by a long shot), I spent most my free time basically chained to my desk where it sits, as opposed to using my other (more mobile) devices away from my desk.

I’ve actually gone to great lengths in the past to help curb my technology habit. I went so far as to go without internet at home. I figured I could take my laptop to where there was public wifi when I wanted to use the net. I suppose that was a little extreme. And it wasn’t because the of the cost either. It was because I felt it would be better for me not to have access at home. Something to literally force myself to do other things. Well, like most of my other attempts, that was short-lived.

With my latest downsizing I guess I kinda thought that the move to having the MacBook as my only computer would help free me from my desk. I would be completely mobile and free to geek out from anywhere.

This sounded attractive. But in reality, even after successfully getting rid of all my other gear… I still pretty much spent all my time at my desk. I went so far as to run my MacBook in closed-cover mode… with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

That’s when it occurred to me. I actually paid a premium for this MacBook in two ways. One, it’s super small size and portability made it cost more. And two, there was also a significant performance sacrifice involved in getting it that small. Essentially, while a desktop machine was the most suitable tool for what I was doing, instead I was using an underpowered and overpriced laptop for a purpose it was not intended for.

Of course when I realized this, it kinda torqued me off. There were a few different times where I swapped back and forth between using the external monitor, keyboard, and mouse… and just using the MacBook as a normal laptop. While the external monitor, keyboard, and mouse gave me the best functionality. They caused me to miss out on the MacBook’s best selling point, which is the super high quality of it’s hardware.

Ok, I’ll acknowledge that this is definitely a first-world type of problem. But (luckily) my life is so boring that I am always trying to figure out ways to optimize my little existence.

After the above realizations, I started thinking iMac once again. I toyed with the idea of buying an iMac and selling my MacBook. I figure I could use my iPad for anything mobile (yes, I bought another iPad). But I do believe that I could be deemed certifiable if I were to sell my new MacBook only three months after purchasing it.

I did order a new iMac. I’m typing this on it now. This time I did a custom-build with an SSD instead of a fusion drive. It’s quite a bit quicker.

So this “experiment” in downsizing was a little expensive. However in the end, I ended up upgrading my MacBook, my iPad, and my iMac to newer models that were all significantly better than what they replaced.

My wife had a bit of wisdom. She said that perhaps I should just accept the fact that I like computers and stop trying to fight it. Hmmm…

Gear trading

Wow. I just finished over two weeks of selling a lot of my tech gear, partially just to trade it for more. This has been a long time in coming. In buying stuff… I suffer from “mission creep” where I keep adding more and more. At some point I need to clear out the excess and do a bit of a reset.

I sold my 27″ 5K iMac, iPad Air 2, early-2015 MacBook, 4 pairs of headphones, and 2 headphone amps. I used eBay for the bigger-ticket items and Craigslist for the lower-value ones.

To replace this stuff, I bought a new 2017 MacBook. Essentially, the new MacBook is replacing my iMac, iPad and old MacBook. My old headphones and headphone amps had already been replaced by a couple pair of Apple AirPods.

My wife and I also swapped out our Series 0 Apple Watches for the latest Series 3 w/LTE. And I did a scheduled phone upgrade from the iPhone 6S Plus to the iPhone 8 Plus. (my wife is holding out for the iPhone X)

I also sprung for a Nintendo Switch and a few games. We have a Wii U that has been obsoleted. For now we’re keeping both. The Switch goes in my office.

This all pretty much happened with no money out of pocket. I’ve been really wanting to downsize my gear for a long time. I finally did it. In spite of the fact that I believe everyone I know would have probably advised me against it. And yes, when you sell used items you certainly take a hit. But Apple stuff has pretty good resale value. And some money for the old stuff is better than no money.

Of course the biggest change for me is getting used to the 12″ screen on the MacBook compared to the gorgeous 27″ 5K screen that I had on the iMac. But part of the goal here was to decrease the role that computers have in my life. Yes, having a computer is a fact of life. But I have decided that I wish to embrace a form of “minimalism” to where these things don’t have more of a role than they need to.

I also think that having my only computer able to go anywhere with me is a bit liberating. No longer will I feel tied to my desk because I feel compelled to “enjoy” my desktop computer. The highest level of functionality I have is now completely mobile. I didn’t really use my old MacBook that much because it was always a compromise when compared to the iMac that was sitting right there on my desk. It’s now no longer a matter of choosing. I have one iOS device and one macOS device. Problem solved.

First-world problems… yeah sorry. Although it’s a big change to my little world.

Well that didn’t last long

A couple months ago I bought a wireless speaker from Harman/Kardon called the Onyx. That speaker has now failed on me. I am beyond the refund window, so Harman/Kardon was going to replace it. Well, honestly I wasn’t that impressed. So I had another idea.

After I’d initially ordered that speaker, I noticed that Harman/Kardon is still selling the Soundsticks 2.1 setup (pictured above). I used to have a set like these when I bought my first Mac back in 2002. So there is some sense of nostalgia.

The Soundsticks happened to be exactly the same price as the Onyx. So I talked them into sending me the Soundsticks to replace the failed Onyx. Yes, it’s possible they chose style over substance. But I believe this 2.1 setup will out-perform the Onyx.

In search of good sound

I just got a new wireless speaker for my desk at home. I wasn’t necessarily in the market for one… but this popped up in my twitter feed as a “deal”. I recognize Harman/Kardon as a quality audio brand. And it was discounted about $350 off regular price. I think one could safely say it was originally overpriced. But after the discount it’s probably just about right. One selling point for me… it has Airplay built in. So I can play to it from my computer or my phone, seamlessly and lossless.

Apple all the way…

I’m not sure why I did it. Perhaps it had something to do with an app on my iPhone that would allow import of a photo… but only from my Apple photo app… not my Google Drive. But I figured I’d be better off being completely in the Apple ecosystem.

I just spent the last 24 hours or so migrating all my data from Google Drive back over to the Apple iCloud. And at the very last, I even moved all my Gmail mail and contacts over to Apple’s email service. This is something I was pretty sure I would never do.

So now I am 100% back on the Apple ecosystem. I never really thought I would go back to the Apple iCloud email. The main drawback it has… I can’t send email as if I’m at my own domain. Gmail allows that. At one time this was pretty important to me. I own three domains and I want to be able to send email as-if from those domains. But I figured what the heck. I suppose I can live with elden.f@icloud.com. So that’s the address my email will be from from now on.

I suppose I should have less hassle now. Everything is Apple. I’m no longer connected to anything Google on my devices and/or computers. I still have some Google docs. And I really like Google docs. But what I have left there are pretty much just backups of stuff I’ve migrated back over to the iCloud.

In theory things should be pretty nice doing the 100% Apple thing. We’ll see. I know that it’s not the absolute best cloud service out there, but I think it should be alright. Sometimes the path of less hassle is the best.

VMware

I’ve been a little bored lately. And my allowance fund has been building for awhile. So I decided to spring for VMware for my iMac along with a memory upgrade to make it a workable thing.

My iMac (which is the latest higher-end model) only came with 8GB of RAM. Some of the iMac models are not even upgradable. Mine is. I had four slots with only two used. At any rate, I replaced my two 4GB sticks with four 8GB sticks for a total of 32GB. That should be enough for some virtual machine fun.

I now have 12 different operating systems installed in VMware. I bought a license for Windows 10… the rest are all Linux. Oh, and FreeBSD just for kicks.

Not sure what I’m going to do with these except just play around. One thing I learned from my previous experience with ChromeOS. And that is, if you have all your data in the cloud, pretty much any computer is a ChromeBook/ChromeBox. That’s because if you have a browser, you have everything right there, regardless of the operating system you happen to be running. So any of these operating systems will serve me equally well, as long as I use a browser that supports my LastPass password manager.

Actually, I find macOS to be pretty sweet. And I really have no need to use anything else. It’s all just for grins I suppose.

Another chance

Ok, I’m going to back pedal a bit from my recent post “The Apple Experiment“. One thing that prompted me to originally move to Google Drive from Apple’s iCloud was because I was having trouble with my only Mac and started using my Chromebox instead. That’s when it became evident that Apple’s iCloud was never really suitable to be a truly platform-independent cloud service.

However, I have since ditched my Chromebox and am now back using Apple hardware again (I actually forked out for another iMac). So… yes that’s right, I moved my stuff back to Apple’s iCloud. It really does mostly work ok. And there is one advantage. Because all my iCloud data also sits on my local machine, I can easily back it up to external hard drives (something you can’t really do with Google Drive).

I am still relatively unhappy with the stability of MacOS. Since my last post there has been at least one instance where I had to hold down my power button to reset again. This sort of thing normally happens when I’m doing something fairly intense.

Originally my big problem with it was happening when I was encrypting 5-6 large external hard drives. More recently it happened when I was syncing a very large amount of data via iCloud. Under normal usage I don’t have a problem. However that is no excuse. An OS that buckles under pressure is still highly annoying.

The Apple experiment

I just moved my domains to Google Domains. As a side-benefit, they now integrate well with Blogger. So the new URL of this blog is w7ldn.com. My other blog is at one of my other domains (moondog.org). And my third domain (eldenf.com) forwards to my Google+ page.

The reason for the domain move? My old domain registrar (NameCheap) had spam filtering on their free email forwarding that I could not turn off. There were some email that I was mysteriously not receiving. It doesn’t seem to me that an email forwarding service should do any spam filtering at all. After all, the email box that eventually receives the mail will have it’s own spam filter, no?

I made the choice last Christmas to switch back over to Apple gear after years away. So virtually all my gear is Apple now.

While I am an Apple fan, I’m not a fan of their cloud services or their email service. I have a number of beefs:

  • With their email service, I can’t send using my own domains. Since that’s the main reason I have my own domains… that’s a problem. However, Google lets me do that.
  • With their iCloud document service (Pages and Numbers) not all of the important features are available on the web or on my mobile devices. Only on a Mac does one have full functionality. Google Docs are entirely web-centered. So I have every feature available to me via the browser regardless of what operating system I am on.
  • With their iCloud file storage service I have to have all my files stored on my local hard drive. The iCloud storage is less of a cloud storage and more of a cloud backup and synchronization facility. Google lets me store everything in the cloud. I don’t have to have it on my machine at all. Again, all I need is a browser and I have access to all my documents, regardless of what computer I’m on.
  • Apple iCloud seriously hosed my photo library on multiple occasions by duplicating photos and making an entire mess of things. It took hours and hours to clean up. I’m guessing it was simply a cloud synchronization issue. Google Drive has no such issues because you have one and only one copy of your files (if you do it right).

When I initially went back to the Mac a few months ago, I migrated all my documents to iCloud. Figured I’d give it all a fair try. After coming to the above realizations, I moved everything back to Google Drive. Now I’m back to using Google Calendar, gmail, etc. Luckily the Google stuff for the most part is operating system independent so it works fine with MacOS.

Still there are a lot of things to like about Apple stuff. But I’m not entirely sold on any particular platform. Last Christmas when I made the decision to go with Apple, I was initially shopping for a Chrome Book. And honestly, that would have worked just fine (and saved me a ton of money).

While I’m on the subject of Apple vs the competition… I will say something about my Macs. I am experiencing a level of operating system instability on both of my Macs that I have never experienced on modern Windows installations. Anyone who tells you that MacOS is more stable than Windows is seriously mistaken. And I say this after having resorted to all the normal trouble shooting measures like doing a fresh install of the operating system (multiple times). Seriously I cannot count how many times I’ve had to hold the power button down and kill my machines because they quit responding.

There may have been a time where MacOS was more stable than Windows. But that time is not now.

Back to the Mac

My wife and I have an annual tradition of buying ourselves something around Christmas each year. Not only is it Christmas, it’s bonus time at the company where I work. These things frequently take the form of electronic gadgets.

This year, my plan was to buy a Chromebook. These are pretty inexpensive laptops that run Chrome OS. I ordered one online at Best Buy, and arranged to pick it up in the store.

However, when we arrived to pick it up, it wasn’t ready. So we started browsing. That’s where the trouble started. They sell Apple gear.

To make a very long story short, between then and now, I’ve managed to replace most of our gear with Apple stuff. We traded our Android phones for iPhones. We replaced our Android tablets with iPads. And I ended up replacing my PC with an iMac. (my wife will still be using a Windows PC)

I was fortunate to be able to sell my old desktop PC for a reasonable price. So that helped. But my allowance will take awhile to recover from this.

So far, I’m enjoying being an Apple user again. I originally became a Mac user back in 2002, shortly after they introduced their new operating system based on FreeBSD (OS X). I think I sold my last Mac somewhere around 2009.

So Macs aren’t new to me. I had a bunch of old software licenses for stuff that I used to use back then. I’ve renewed and updated the licenses for a number of those things. Of course some of them are now defunct.

Before this, I was pretty deep into the whole Google ecosystem. All my stuff was on Google Drive. I have used Gmail for many years. But I figured if I was going to do the Apple thing, I would go the full route.

So I am now using the Apple iCloud stuff. It’s not perfect, but it seems to work pretty well. I have cloud storage, plus a lot of the Mac and iOS software use iCloud to sync data. I’m also using iCloud email. There was once a time where I had higher-end needs. But now for the most part, any reasonably capable service will fit my needs just fine.

And of course we’re using the Apple Music service for our tunes. When we switched our phones, we also dumped Verizon in favor of T-Mobile. One nice thing about T-Mobile is, they have free music streaming. So that’s what I end up listening to in my car most of the time.

Build complete

Got the new machine built and running.

I reconsidered the RAM and went with 16GB RAM instead of 8GB. The i5 processor I went with is pretty high-end (for an i5). So I didn’t want to hinder the performance of the box by shorting it on the RAM. And 16GB is the max for this motherboard (cheap motherboard).

I am using a 120GB SSD as my boot drive and a 1TB HD for extra storage.

I had to send the original case back and get a replacement. A number of the plastic tabs that held the front panel on were broken. Luckily there was no issue with the RAM (I was worried). NewEgg was very good about it.

The internal wifi adapter I bought proved to be very problematic. It had significant driver issues with Linux (and Windows too according to the unfavorable reviews). So I opted instead for a wireless bridge. That way all I need to deal with is the wired LAN adapter. I got a 4-port dual-band 802.11n bridge. It will connect our whole office to the router in the living room. And I even managed to position the two so that they are pretty much line-of-sight with no obstructions. That should be quite reliable.

After a lot of back and forth I decided I will run Fedora on it. I know I change my mind on this sort of thing almost as often as my underwear, but I’m hoping to sit still on this choice for awhile.

One of the problems with the Haswell chip on-board graphics is drivers. That chip is so new that a number of Linux distributions do not support the graphics on it yet. I was initially going to run Debian. No support. Then I thought it might be a lot of fun to run FreeBSD again. Got it all installed. No support for my graphics.

I could run a *buntu derivative, but I figured Fedora should be fun. Arch would be ok, but I don’t really need that level of frustration with getting basic things to work. So Fedora it is.

After placing my order for the new machine I decided to sell a few things on Ebay to offset the cost. The processor I went with was about 4 times the price of the Celeron I was initially going to go with. And changing my mind on the RAM cost a bit as well. So I sold my recently-purchased Chromebox and my Kenwood hand-held ham radio that was rarely-used.