Macs on Jim Deibele's Blog

Apple Photos - Please Give Me a Clue When Asking Me to Confirm Person!

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 11:04:27 -0800

I get the feeling that people at Apple didn’t have siblings. Or they only have 1 child.

Below is a picture of my daughter. But it looks a lot like her younger brother when he was the same age. A dad told me that kids would turn out to be very different and I’ve found that to be true for my kids.

But there are ages where they looked very much alike!

Use Dropbox or Google Drive to Sync Your Downloads Folder Not iCloud

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote an article talking about using iCloud to sync your Downloads folder.

So I did that and I found out I didn’t like it. I’m running tight on disk space (I have to cull more photos from Photos, which is taking up the most disk space for me) so Apple is uploading the files in ~/Downloads, then replacing them with an .icloud version. That means that I need to download the file to use it.

Delete Time Machine Snapshots When Your Disk is Almost Full

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re running a Mac with limited internal disk you’ll encounter this message:

There’s a great article on how to manually delete Time Machine Snapshots

Key steps:

List available local snapshots “sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Volumes/Macintosh HD”
Delete each snapshot “sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2020-11-01-002004”

I’ve had to do this a lot when upgrading to a new beta release.

The Perfect Mac

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Are you traveling a lot?

Do you like to carry your computer around the house with you?

If so, maybe you need a MacBook. But for most people, the perfect Mac is the Mac Mini with an i3 processor and 256GB of SSD. Why? Because you can expand the system memory on your Mac relatively cheaply to 32GB and you can attach terabytes of SSD for about $130/TB.

MacOS will load as much as it can into RAM and you’ve got 32GB of RAM, your processor will be flying along and outperform much more expensive processors if they only have the standard 8GB of RAM.

Sync Additional Folders with iCloud Drive

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As the kids are getting older, 2 out of the 3 have switched to MacBooks from Chromebooks. That makes 4 out of the 5 of us pretty firmly in the Apple eco system. And after switching from Picassa to iPhoto to Aperture to Google Photos to (Apple) Photos, I’ve decided that’s going to be my last switch. I’m going to keep my personal photo archive backed up to iCloud.

A few years ago, iCloud was not as stable as it is now. But it now seems as stable as its major competitors Dropbox and Google Drive and we’re already using it to back up our various Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

Don't Run as Administrator on Your Mac

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One of the first things that I do on a Macintosh is to create a new user (say “admin”), give it administrative privileges, and then reboot. I log in as admin and lower my own privileges to an ordinary user.

Why? Because there were a series of exploits relying on quietly doing things requiring administrator access. You’d download a game and never notice during the install process that it was accessing things it wasn’t supposed to. Things like your passwords stored in your browser, access to your camera, etc.