Right now, if you give blood, the Red Cross will test it for Covid-19 before distributing it. They say it takes about 1-2 weeks for the results to come back. It took a little longer than that for the email to come but I was also not expecting anything but negative. Still, good to know.
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. ...
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. ...
Filters in Gmail are incredibly useful but about 50% of the time the default is to see something like this: This is an example of what programmers call a “write only” command. Why? Because a few months or weeks from now - or even tomorrow - you’ll have no idea what this corresponds to. You’re much better off putting in “From: somecompany.com” or “Subject: [list prefix]” in your filters so that you can remember what they mean.
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. ...
This year we had the worst forest fires that I can remember. Things were bad 3 years ago, when teenagers playing with fireworks set off a forest fire 40 miles from Portland. Soccer games and other sports were cancelled because of the extremely poor air quality. But this was worse. The farm where my grandfather and father lived was classified as category 3, meaning that everyone was to evacuate immediately, for several days. The house where my parents-in-law was classified as category 2, meaning that they were to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The smoke and the worry was causing so much stress that they moved to stay with a grandchild. ...