OS X / macOS had, for years, a Finder Favorite that listed all files by date modified. It was removed in Sierra for unknown reasons.
The closest replacement I’ve found is to save a “This Mac” spotlight search on ‘.’ That is, create a Spotlight search for your Mac and enter a period as search criteria.
This works on Windows 7 too (I don’t have Win 10).
I needed to print our team hockey photo at Walgreens, but somehow I’d saved a cropped version of the team photo instead of the original — and these days Walgreens doesn’t let one print an image without cropping [1]. Part of the image was cut.
My first thought was to custom print from Aperture to PDF then export a JPEG from that (it’s complicated) — but something funny happens with page orientation in Mojave/PDF.
The real answer was to use my old copy of Acorn (still works in Mojave). I resized the canvas to fit the horizontal image and fill in the right 3:2 horizontal:vertical orientation. Then I threw in a title for photo. Looked like it was deliberate.
[1] Once upon a time I think that was an option — just printed with white borders.
When I used Sierra my screen saver was based on Aperture albums stored in an external drive. When I traveled the screen saver switched the default, but when I reconnected it went back to Aperture.
Mojave can’t use Aperture/iPhoto albums. So Screen Saver points to a share drive. When I travel it switches to default, but when I return it *doesn’t* switch back to my share.
Anyone have a workaround? I wonder about creating some kind of local alias for the remote image folder ...
Update: I created a symlink for the share folder that has my slideshow images using the SymbolicLinker service. Then I pointed ScreenSaver slide show to the symlink. When disconnected ScreenSaver shows black screen. When connected shows my images.
I’ve been contemplating migration to WordPress for almost a decade, but Google kept Blogger good enough to keep that headache at bay.
Alas, the days of good enough are ending. Google is removing their photo management API without recourse. They do support posts with images, but only by using their web interface. It’s a concrete and undeniable sign that Blogger is either dead or going to a bad place.
I though I’d migrate first to wordpress.com then to my Dreamhost open source wp install, but via Twitter Daniel Jalkut tells me he got better results using the open source importer directly.
I’ll do a dry run on one of my big blogs first. The URL won’t change but I’m sure feed subscriptions will have to be redone (ugh).
Update 2019/04/06 - results of the pipdig import process
I tested the Dreamhost free version of the pipdig importer from a Dreamhost wordpress (open source) blog. The results can be seen here for the moment, I’ll eventually delete them. I found:
Pipdig is better than nothing, but I’m going to try wordpress.com’s import tool next. I wonder if a better solution wouldn’t be a static site that I could archive on my personal web server, then do a web server redirect to handle the links. For now I’m still on Blogger. The porting experience reminds me of the impossibility of leaving Apple’s defunct Aperture photo management app.
(As I write this the wordpress import is processing - result should eventually show up at gordontest.tech.blog temporarily, but we’ll see if it works. It’s taking a long time.)
Update 2019/04/06b
Well, that wordpress migration didn’t go so well:
Your site has been suspended from WordPress.com for violating the Terms of Service. If you believe this was done in error, please contact us as soon as possible to have the suspension reviewed….
I sent a contact inquiry, nothing yet.
I use a Synology NAS to backup our two MacBooks. I’ve been ignoring it for 4 years, but a recent hardware failure made me look into it.
I found a number of packages installed and/or running that I’d not updated and mostly didn’t need. So I removed all those and I created a reminder to check the NAS quarterly. I also realized I hadn’t gotten monthly status reports for a long time — for years really (if ever)
To enable Synology email status reports you have to configure Notifications. Old-school SMTP is rarely available now, so I experimented with the Gmail option. I got this:
Oookaaay … that’s an interesting range of permissions. Synology is a Chinese corporation, so this effectively gives Xi the ability to harvest my email. Instead I created a synology user on one of my domain based Google Suites and enabled access there then forwarded to my email.
Interestingly my old settings suggested I had gone down the Gmail road at one point. I wonder what I was thinking, in my 2015 post I commented “Synology is a very Chinese product — including off-key English syntax. I wouldn’t install it in a US government facility.” Maybe I started the setup and then stopped?
My 2015 Air shut down suddenly two weeks ago. The battery was at about 80%. When I got it home and plugged it in it showed classic bad SMC behavior — the power diode didn’t light.
I did an SMC reset and it worked, but a week later it did the same thing. I did an SMC reset again, but without checking if it was necessary.
It happened yet again. This time it worked fine as a soon as I plugged it in. That gave me hope that it was a battery issue, even though system info showed only 80 or so cycles. It’s an old battery.
After doing the usual 3 backups-to-current-state-prior-to-repair (one update to my Carbon Copy non-bootable clone backup, one fresh full bootable clone, and one Time Machine backup) I brought it in. It failed the diagnostic test with a big red dead battery note.
So $140 when the part comes in, which is a nice relief. If it had been the motherboard that would be $340 and I’d have a machine with a 4yo battery and a 4yo SSD. Might be better to just buy new.
The beta version of Simplenote’s web client will export notes as text files and will use the note title as the name of the text file. When I’d previously exported from my Simplenote library the text files names were all GUIDs.
This is obviously much better. It means, as long as you don’t mine plaintext, you can get your data out of Simplenote in a portable and useable form.
To use the beta version of the Simplenote web client use the URL simplenote.com/new.
I’ve been using nvALT to enable data freedom for Simplenote [1], but it’s good to have a second option. (nvALT works on Mojave, but had issues with High Sierra. I’m planning to skip from Sierra to Mojave.)
PS. Recently Simplenote added plaintext note import, though needs Electron version for Mac.
- fn-
[1] It took years longer than it should have, but Automattic fixed search in the Mac client.
See also
