512 Pixels

Well, this looks really nice. via The Verge

This week on Ungeniused:

From a Russian art museum to 10 Downing Street, cats are hard at work, keeping mice at bay.

My thanks to our sponsor:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code UNGENIUSED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

Apple Support:

You can use a split keyboard on your iPad and move it up or down your screen to help you type.

Unless you have an 11 or 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which really bugs me. I’d love to have this on my giant iPad.

This time on Liftoff, we mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8:

In December 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first human beings to travel to the moon, circling our nearest neighbor and making history while doing so.

My thanks to eero for sponsoring this episode.

Federico recently wrote about how a nice iPad stand can make the device much more usable in certain situations. That got me thinking about checking some out, and I discovered Amazon has some real weird ones for sale.

nbryte Tablift Tablet Stand

• Price: $39.95
• Compatibility: Basically any tablet less than 10 mm thick.
• Pros: Super flexible.
• Cons: This thing is just waiting to kill you in your sleep.

ieGeek Tablet Phone Stand

• Price: $19.99
• Compatibility: iPads smaller than 10.2 inches in size.
• Pros: Less murdery than the nbryte.
• Cons: Looks like a tripod exploded.

iKross 2-in-1 Recipe Holder Stand

• Price: $28.99
• Compatibility: All iPads, the Surface Pro and the Nintendo Switch.
• Pros: Clever idea for kitchen use.
• Cons: Raw chicken juices all over your iPad.

JETech Floor Tablet Stand with Height-Adjustable Gooseneck and Toilet Paper Roll Holder

• Price: $19.99
• Compatibility: iPads smaller than 10.8 inches in size.
• Pros: The whole “two birds with one stone thing.”
• Cons: You’ll be single forever.

MagicHold 360º Turn Height Adjusting Stand

• Price: $69.99
• Compatibility: Pretty much any tablet out there.
• Pros: Useful for people with limited mobility.
• Cons: If you don’t have limited mobility, your friends will wonder about your life choices.

Magichold® 3 in 1 360º Rotating Height Adjustable Stand

• Price: $199
• Compatibility: Tablets and most laptops.
• Pros: It’s on sale right now at $89.99.
• Cons: It would still cost you $89.99

John Markoff, writing at The New York Times:

In 1983, Mr. Jobs oversaw the construction of a state-of-the-art plant where the new Macintosh computer would be built. Reporters who toured it early on were told that the plant, located just across San Francisco Bay from Apple’s headquarters, was so advanced that factory labor would account for 2 percent of the cost of making a Macintosh.

“Steve had deep convictions about Japanese manufacturing processes,” recalled Randy Battat, who joined Apple as a young electrical engineer and oversaw the introduction of some of the company’s early portable computers. “The Japanese were heralded as wizards of manufacturing. The idea was to create a factory with just-in-time delivery of zero-defect parts. It wasn’t great for business.”

What Mr. Gassée found several years after Mr. Jobs was forced out of the company, was that the reality of manufacturing was different than the personal computer pioneer’s original dream.

ants, on the 69kmla forums:

Hi all, I built a Spotify player for my Macintosh SE/30.

Drop whatever it is you are doing and go check this out.

I got it set up per Joe Rossignol’s screenshots, and once Apple Music is set as the default music source, it works really well. I could play music from my library, but the Echo could not find any of my personal playlists. Likewise, it could not play music that I had uploaded to iTunes Match.

I don’t know if these features will be available after the service’s official launch date, but as of right now, Apple Music on the Echo feels half-baked.

Update: I’ve gotten a couple of emails from people saying playlists are working for them, so maybe some of this is just teething problems.

It is joining iTunes Ping in the great beyond.

Apple:

Apple today announced a major expansion of its operations in Austin, including an investment of $1 billion to build a new campus in North Austin. The company also announced plans to establish new sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City and expand in cities across the United States including Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years, with the potential for additional expansion elsewhere in the US over time.

This is weird; I thought the only way a corporation could choose a location for expansion was to pit cities against each other in a public bracket.

This week on Connected:

Myke struggles to use Amazon’s website, Stephen checks his heartbeat and Federico tinkers with keyboards for the iPad Pro.

I also make a confession about the number of HomePods in my house and Federico pines for the return of the Smart Battery Case.

My thanks to our sponsors for this episode:

• Luna Display: The only hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless display for your Mac. Use promo code CONNECTED at checkout for 10% off.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code CONNECTED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
• Simple Contacts: Contact lens prescriptions from home: Use offer code CONNECTED20 for $20 off your first order of contact lenses

I last wrote about my backup strategy in July 2015, and a lot has changed, so I thought it was time to update things.

This is the part where I copy and paste from that 2015 blog post:

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I shouldn’t have to preach the importance of a good backup system, but there are some key tenants that should be part of any approach:

1. Be redundant. Having a single backup is good, but what happens if it gets killed by the same power outage that cooks your computer.
2. Be easy to manage. Time Machine is popular because it’s easy to setup and doesn’t need on-going care. Anything past the built-in backup will take more work, but it’s good to minimize it.
3. Be testable. Every once in a while, restore data from a backup to make sure everything’s going well. This doesn’t have to be some big, drawn out thing. For me, a small recovery can put my mind at ease every quarter or so.

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My hardware setup is radically different from what it was in 2015. While I still have a Mac mini, it is now the server, hosting a Drobo 5D stuffed with 4 TB hard drives for a total of 17 TB or so of storage. Moving away from the Synology isn’t that juicy of a story. It had a hardware failure and I moved on.

Like before, this large pool of hard drive space houses the family iTunes library, past work projects and the mountain of nerdy stuff I’ve gleaned from the Internet over the years.

The beauty of a Thunderbolt RAID is that I can manage it with the Mac mini, which sees it as a huge external hard drive. This means I can run Backblaze on the Mac and have it protect everything on the Drobo:

In addition to Backblaze I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup the data on the Drobo onto a series of external USB drives for off-site storage. The data set is shared across multiple drives, but CCC makes it easy enough to manage:

I moved to CCC from SuperDuper! because Carbon Copy Cloner feels a lot better supported at this point, and it makes dealing multiple tasks like this much easier.

My iMac Pro and MacBook Pro are much simpler. Almost all the data on them is in Dropbox, outside of the iTunes and Photos libraries and any active Logic or Final Cut projects. Even so, both of these machines have dedicated Time Machine drives, Backblaze accounts and off-site USB drives updated with Carbon Copy Cloner a couple of times a month.