The Online Photographer

Portfolio App for the iPad?

Carl asked me what I use as a portfolio app for picture presentations on the iPad and it's one of the (many) things I just don't think I know enough about to speak of. Anyone have any favorite ways of presenting pictures on the iPad they'd like to share?

Mike

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kirk tuck: "I second the use of Portfolio but I wanted to step in here for just a second and bring up one little thing: Everyone keeps mentioning 'slide shows' and when I hear that I presume that the slideshow plays through the images at a fixed pace. But that's not at all the way ad agency people want to see images; either on a screen based portfolio or in real life. The don't want an automated slide show. They want to be able to spend as much or as little time as they please on each image. They want to control the pace. Always. Slideshows are great for unmanned presentations but are not what people should be looking for in a portfolio app for an iPad."

Mike adds: I concur completely. The user needs to be able to control the pace through the presentation, preferably by swiping or with a fixed, non-moving arrow. (It always annoys me when I'm clicking through images and the arrow moves under my cursor and I have to reposition the cursor.)

New Toy!

I've owned many Apple devices since I began writing on the original 128k Macintosh in 1984. The one that's least necessary is also the one I like the best: the iPad.

I bought my iPad Air, the original one, in 2013 (which does seem like a long time ago) because I thought they were cool and I was feeling flush back then. At first I couldn't figure out what to do with it and I barely even touched it for the first six months I had it. Within a few years it became my favorite Apple product and the one I'm closest to in everyday life. I watch movies and videos on it, read email on it, even answer the phone on it (although it's Wi-Fi only, it links to the iPhone when a call comes in). I take it to bed with me, where I read books on it before falling asleep. It's my alarm clock. When I get up in the morning I check the time on it and read the AA Daily Reflection. I read on it while I eat breakfast. In fact I do almost all of my newspaper and book reading on the iPad—it's been so long since I used my actual Kindle device that I don't even know where it is any more. (It took me a while to get accustomed to reading on the iPad screen, but I've adapted. Now if I have a paper book I really want to read, I'll buy the Kindle version too so I can actually read it. On the iPad, every book is a large print book.) If I'm eating alone at a restaurant and only have my phone, the book I'm reading is also on that, and the devices keep track of where I am in the book.

And by the way, it's the best way to look at portfolios. You can pass it around like an album and let people swipe from one picture to the next at their own pace. Pictures are an ideal size for reading distances, and have all the resolution the screen size calls for.

To this day there's nothing at all wrong with my old iPad and I'm not dissatisfied with it at all. It works perfectly well and it's all I need. Unfortunately, however, it's a 16GB model and that's its downfall...I've been getting "storage full" warnings for a long time and I have nothing left to throw away to make room. I don't think I've done an IOS update in quite a while, because I don't have room. A few days ago I found myself deleting apps I would really rather keep, and thought, okay, enough.

The one thing I hope the new toy does better is pick up the Wi-Fi signal in the back room...the old one doesn't do that very well, even with my fancy alleged range extender.

At least I've gotten my money's worth out of the 2013 iPad. I've paid about a hundred dollars a year for it. A bargain, considering how much I use it. And how much I like it.

Gift cards seem like free cash
Every year B&H Photo gives me a gift certificate to thank me for being an affiliate, and I had several of those piled up. So I used them, plus some cash, to buy a new (early 2019) iPad Air. I splurged (gift cards seems like free cash) and bought the one with 256GB of storage for about $160 more.

Do I really need 16X more storage? Well, I don't know, but over the years I've owned a great many Apple products, and the thing that often seems to push me to upgrade or update is a shortage of storage space. I suppose sooner or later I would have upgraded all those old things anyway, but I think I would have saved money over the years and kept most of my devices for longer if I'd had the foresight to max out on storage as a matter of course. I know I'd keep my current iPad with no complaint if it weren't for the storage problem. Probably a fool's economy to scrimp on storage.

But then I might not even need an iPad at all. I could probably get along fine with just my iPhone 7 Plus and my Mac Mini. The iPad is arguably the device I need the least. And yet, as I said, it's the one I like the most.

And now Xander gets the old one for free! I'm looking forward to when the new toy gets here, but there should be more life left in the old toy yet.

Mike

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We've Come a Long Way, Dudes and Dudettes

Does it ever occur to you to be grateful for the (good!) changes you've been able to witness, and the cool technology you've experienced the introduction of? It's something I appreciate. I've very glad my lifespan straddled traditional film and early digital, for instance. I wouldn't give up experiencing either one if I had my choice.

I mentioned recently that my first computer was an Apple 512k Macintosh, in 1985. (It was also author Michael Crichton's first Mac, and his experience was similar to mine—amazed and pleased, never looked back.) 

The very first Apple hard drive was made for our computer, although I didn't buy one. Too pricey. I'll bet Michael Crichton had one. This is it, the HD20.

A couple of days ago I broke down and bought this as my media drive. Loaded it up yesterday and overnight. Unfortunately it's almost full.

HD20: $1,495, 20MB, about the size of a large telephone book. That's a dated reference, by the way.

Samsung T5: $329 on sale, 2TB, and tiny and light. Its capacity is 100,000 times that of the 1985 drive.

And this is fun: at the Apple HD20's price of roughly $75 per megabyte, the T5 would have cost $150 million. But that's in 1985 dollars—adjusted for inflation, it would be $372,090,000. I wish Moore's Law applied to printer ink.

The 500GB model is still available at the sale price of less than $100. If you have any use for such a small drive.  :-)

Mike
(Thanks to Charlie. Top illustration courtesy
Museums Victoria.)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(Not) everything must fade away

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David Brown: "My company designed and manufactured all those early hard drives for the Apple Computers. My have times changed. All my storage is SSD now."

Jamie Pillars: "Regarding the Samsung T5, these things have gotten just too small! I can picture it now...I load it up with my entire photo archive and then lose it in the couch cushions!"

A Non-Review of the 2018 Mac Mini

This absolutely doesn't rise to the standard of a review—I'm not remotely competent to write one. On the other hand, I've used Macs since 1984, pretty much from the day they were introduced. I've lost track now, but I believe I've owned or regularly used 17 of them since that first one, either at school, at the office, or at home.

But I did want to mention that my new (2018) Mac Mini has had an almost transformative effect on my workdays, and I'm delighted with it.

The specs on mine are:

• 3.0 GHz Core i5 (six core)/ Gigabit ethernet
• 16GB RAM
• 512GB SSD drive

I had Apple install the extra RAM, even though we know they overcharge for it. List price on my Mini is $1,499.

The decision was really between the 3.6 GHz quad-core i3 and the 3.0 GHz six-core i5. I don't really have any way of knowing the practical differences the choice would make for me, but since I seem to always have a lot going on on the desktop, I went with the six cores over the higher clock speed. And it seems to have worked out.

Nothing in the middle
A while back, I was grousing about the lack of a mid-range model in the Apple lineup, a non-iMac, display-less model between the cheap intro-level Mini for "switchers" and the graphic-arts-studio-level (but now seriously outdated and kind of a bollix from the start) Mac Pro.

[Aside for non-Apple people: Apple really expects desktop buyers to buy iMacs, which are the proper heirs of the original all-in-one Macintoshes. And they're lovely machines—I've owned them right from the first "Blueberry" iMac of early 1999 to my current upstairs computer that I use for book writing, a lovely 21.5-inch Retina iMac with an SSD. Mine is a 2017 I bought as a factory refurb.]

Well, here's my point: the 2018 Mac Mini is that Goldilocks computer I wanted. It just happens to be in the old Mini box, is all.

I'm astonished by what a difference it makes. Everything is zippier, even the work I do online in the TypePad compositor where I spend most of every day. It never makes noise, never gets hot, never crashes or hangs, and is highly responsive to everything I want to do with it.

I suspect that my previous Mini—a 2012 model I picked up because it was higher spec'd than the pre-2018 Mini—got worked hard and put away wet by its previous owner(s). It might be the second-worst Mac I've ever owned, after a klunky John Scully era desktop that coincided with the nadir of Apple in the mid-to-late '90s. The 2012 Mini is the only Mac I've ever had that crashed (my '93 Quadra 605 of sainted memory crashed once in six years, when the little battery on the motherboard that kickstarted the display ran out of juice). Before I sell the 2012 Mini I'm going to get it cleaned, get a new fan for it (the old one is broken now), take out the second hard drive (I suspect it makes it harder to cool) and maybe even get a new main drive put in if it's not too expensive.

Whee!
Given that I input hundreds or most likely thousands of little commands a day, from scrolling a folder to resizing an image for the Web to flicking between windows in Firefox, the aggregate improvement in the speed I can work is, as I said, transforming. It saves me loads of time over the course of a day and imparts a sense of ease and freedom I had been missing. I didn't even realize how much my creaky old 2012 was slowing me down and frustrating me, until all that slowness and frustration vanished.

Downsides? Just one—the disappearance of the card slot. Yeah, yeah, I know all the arguments, but I've always appreciated the elegance of the built-in SD card slot and I'm sorry to see it go. The current killer Thunderbolt3 hubs are the $299 OWC Dock and, even better because it reads UHS-II cards natively, the hugely flexible American-made $310 CalDigit TS3 Plus. I'd love one of those, but I'm a beer budget guy. I use a Lention USB-C 3-port hub I bought for $20 on eBay.

Conclusion
Would I recommend the 2018 Mini? Heartily, if it happens to be what you need. Me, I like to be able to unhook the computer and stash it in a safe location when I'm away, and I like to be able to use my 27" NEC monitor.

But really, if you're currently not locked in by past choices and just need a super-slick, beautiful computer and want to be able to do anything on it, including working with photos, my first recommendation would be one of the still-new 2019 21.5" Retina iMacs. They're light and easy to move around, very pretty, and right-sized. The display is lovely (and you don't stop thinking so—I still appreciate mine whenever I use it) and let's face it, they'll do most anything most of us ever want to do. There are 27" models too of course. I've owned three 27" iMacs and I work on a 27-inch monitor right now, but I could live with the 21.5" size. Those start at $1,249, which means you're paying no "Apple tax" in any sense. They're just plain worth that.

...In my opinion. Your biases may vary.  :-)

So all is well in TOP-land. I imagine I'll be writing about Mac no. 18 at some point on down the line.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Everything must fade away

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Mark Cotter: "'Non-reviews' are often the most helpful. I think of myself as knowledgeable enough about specs to decide what could suit me, real world reviews are the most useful. And this is especially useful as I am thinking of replacing my seven year old 27" iMac (the last with a DVD drive built in), and a Mini similar to your configuration is on my list."

The Very Very Very Best Backup...

...Is still a box of prints! (Or a "few-of-a-kind" custom book like a Blurb book.)

Okay, maybe not the best backup but the best archive.

I had planned to make this point again two days ago (bringing us around full circle in recent discussions here on TOP), when this comment came in from David L. night before last:

"My engineering career was as a hard drive engineer and in server storage. My advice—make prints."

(That's his whole comment.) 

Ending up with prints is still a good idea, even though I know most people don't do it.

It's always been a good idea to think of a photograph in digital form as a transitory state—a state between the taking of the picture and the final object—a print, or printed book, or whatever the final creation might be.

Of course we do want to have a working archive—our shooting in mass unprocessed form—so that we can go back and print old files, reconsider our editing choices, or bring together different groups or pairings or whatever. It's the raw material for our ongoing creative activities as photographers.

A well-made print (pigment inks on stable paper) is a write-once, set-and-forget medium. It has to be physically protected, sure, but that's a different problem, and one I've written about elsewhere.

Ultimately nothing is permanent—but it's a good idea to remind ourselves every now and then that "backup" of the material we work from is just a fluid working state, and not, in itself, a final achievement.

(See what I do for you? I just said with 264 words what David L. said better with 17. Heh!)

Mike
(Thanks to all of you who helped me with my backup strategy)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Everything must fade away

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Tim Smith: "In my 20s I worked in a print darkroom for several years. We entered into a contract with Yale to make contact prints of their extensive collection of glass negatives. Aside from the fact that they were stunning and technically amazing, it strikes me that as long as they haven't been smashed or destroyed, you could do the very same thing today. I fear that the evolution of digital may someday make even the best drives obsolete or at least very difficult to recover. I can't even remember all the storage devices/methods that have come and gone, like: SCSI tape drives, ZIP drives, CD-RW, etc.

"So yeah, prints."

Deal of the Day: Samsung SSD (Solid State Drive)

On topic for World Backup Day, Amazon's "Deal of the Day" today is Samsung SSD portable solid-state hard drives for anywhere from 25 to 31% off list.

The larger sizes are still pretty expensive, but they're more reliable than spinning portable drives and great as scratch disks among other things. The 1-terabyte size is only $178, marked down from $250 (Newegg's best price is $218). The 500GB size is only $98. The ones on sale are USB 3.1. By the way, this is a top recommended brand of external SSDs according to several review websites.

Deal ends in 15 hours as I post this, but these deals often end early because Amazon runs through the sale stock. Get 'em while they last.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Geoff Wittig (partial comment): "I love this drive, and just bought my third 2TB unit. They're tiny, they're much, much faster than traditional hard drives, and in principle they're much more reliable because they have no moving parts. Every photograph I've taken and saved for more than 25 years fits on one of these units with room to spare. My circa 1.3TB archive can be transferred from one of these drives to another in less than two hours. So it's easy for me to have a complete copy of all my photos off-site at my office, another copy in reserve at home, and a third I use as my working drive with Photoshop."

New Backup Plan (?)

Dateline, Sunday March 31st — Today is World Backup Day, in case you haven't already guessed the reason for the recent topics. (Also because I got a stonkin' new Mac Mini which is awesome, brilliant, slick and fast.) I'd link to WorldBackupDay.com, but they're probably getting slammed, because the site has not been responding for a while. Maybe they took World Bandwidth Day off to go to the beach. —Mike

So here's the backup solution I've decided on...as of, um, this minute. See if you approve. I'm not too slick on this stuff. (Warning: I do not think this is a very interesting post. You might want to treat World Backup Day as a holiday.)

This is the second time I've tried to get serious about backup. The last time I was helped by a well-timed boot in the rear from Bill Tyler. That was back in February of '18, which, as Peggy C. noted, was the last time we talked about this subject. Back then, Bill challenged me to sign up for Backblaze before sundown, and I did.

Here's the latest plan. See if ya folla.

1. My Mac Mini has a 512k SSD. That drive holds everything except photos and music.
2. The Mini's SSD drive will be backed up to my Time Capsule router as usual, via Time Machine. (Time Machine is the name of the automatic backup software that comes with every Mac. The AirPort Time Capsule, which Apple no longer makes, is a wireless router that includes a hard drive or hard drives for...well, for backups via Time Machine.)
3. Next, I'll return the two new WD My Passport portable drives I got yesterday. No longer part o' the plan.
4. For the photos and music, I think I'll continue using my existing 2TB WD My Passport portable drive (which is named "Passport One"). I've already had one fail and I know they're not terrifically robust, but if one fails I'll just rotate another one in. I currently have two of the little portable drives, and new ones are cheap enough. (They're bus-powered and about the size of a pack of cards.)
5. A reader who wishes to remain anonymous donated (nice word for "gave me as a present") an AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad 4-bay storage enclosure he was no longer using. (Pretty nice.) His insight was that vibration reduction and proper cooling help hard drives live longer—the AKiTiO is solid and has a big low-speed fan in the back. He told me he had persistent problems with his hard drives until he stripped them out of their single enclosures and put them in the AKiTiO, at which point his problems stopped.
6. For the enclosure I got two slow (5400 RPM) 3.5" 4TB hard drives. I researched madly till late at night and ended up buying two of these from B&H Photo*. They were on sale for $84.99 each when I bought them.
7. With the two 3.5" drives, I've decided not to go with RAID 1, based on the advice I got here yesterday. Instead I'll take Rodolfo Canet and Trevor Johnson's advice and use Carbon Copy Cloner 5 (MacOS only. But it's on sale for World Backup Day! Twenty percent off) to back up the Passport One drive to each of the two drives in the AKiTiO every time I download a card. That way new shooting will exist in three places before I even remove the card from the slot.
8. The Mini and Passport One will both continue to be backed up to Backblaze as before.

So here's the upshot:

• Mac Mini: backed up on Time Capsule (kept on a shelf halfway down the basement stairs) and with Backblaze offsite backup.

• Passport One drive with all my photos and music on it: backed up on the two identical 3.5" drives in the AKiTiO and also on Backblaze.

So I'll have:

• Three copies of the boot drive disk—the original in the Mini plus one backup in the house and one in the Cloud.

• Four copies of the photos/music external drive—the one attached to the computer for everyday use, the two identical clones in the AKiTiO, and one in the Cloud.

So what say ye? Approve?

I know that some of you are probably going to say I need one more offsite disk, solemnly rotated in and out of a safety deposit box at the bank, but really, my photos aren't that great.  :-)

Mike

*By the way, best not to buy hard drives from Amazon. As you probably know they tend to stick things loose in a roomy box with a couple of symbolic air pillows thrown in. Not smart with hard drives not to use careful packing.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Neil Swanson: "So I wonder, how long does it take to upload a 2TB drive to Backblaze or a similar service? It would take seemingly ages to go from drive to drive but to a 'Cloud'?"

Mike replies: Per Backblaze: "Ideally, Backblaze should be able to complete your initial backup within 30 days, and that’s OK. Be patient, especially if you have a lot of data. Backblaze will complete your initial backup as soon as possible." I think mine took about 10 days or two weeks, something in there. But it happens in the background, so it's not any hassle.

Bruce McL: "Nice backup plan. As a retired Mac IT guy I approve, with one addition. Buy one more drive for your enclosure. Have Carbon Copy Cloner make a clone of your system SSD to the new drive once a week, or have it update the clone every night if you want. Get a small capacity, fast, spinning 3.5" drive—1TB 7200rpm HDDs are cheap, under $50.00. I don't quite trust Time Machine to recover everything after a catastrophic failure of a system drive. It can work, but it's a messy process. With a CCC cloned drive it's easy. Plug the backup drive into any Mac. Go to System Preferences: Startup Disk and select the backup HD. After a restart, everything from the system drive will be there and will be functional. If your SSD suddenly died, you could be back at work in minutes."

Mike replies: Bruce, is there any risk of having all my local drives in one non-RAID enclosure? I thought last night that maybe I'll just streamline things and put the media on a separate drive in the enclosure, instead of on the 2TB My Passport portable. So I'd have four drives in the enclosure—one fast 2–4TB drive for media, the two slow 4TB drives for media backup, and the one you suggest, a 1TB fast drive with the backup of the System on it. 

William Whitaker: "So, today I have to drive everywhere in reverse?"

Mike replies: Don't get your back up.

Michael T.: "Whatever you end up doing it is important to test it from time to time. For example, see if you can boot your Mini from the two external backups. If not you need to understand why and remedy. Same with backups of your photos and music. It is also a good idea to occasionally run the repair function in disk utility on your backup drives. I run carbon copy and find it to be easy to use and quite robust. Good luck!"

Mike replies: CCC recommends that you restore several random files every now and then just to make sure everything's working smoothly. I'll also try to remember to learn how to boot from the backup once everything's set up.

Kev: "This has been a very useful topic, thanks Mike. I'm moving from a mini to the new MacBook Pro, and it’s changed things a bit in terms of storage and back up, so your thoughts are very timely. Also the commment made re. Time machine as a backup tool - I’ve always been a CCC guy, only had to use it once to recover from a borked main disk, and it was faultless and easy. Recent change of machine made me give time machine a go, and it has proved useful when I accidentaly wrote over a crucial file, but I think I'll follow advice and also ensure I have a weekly clone with CCC. Excellent stuff, and you explained it better then I could, as currently I have the plan sketched out on a piece of A4 paper as it was getting so complicated!"

Bill Poole: "Passport-style drives are not really adequate for continuous use. The drive gets too hot when run continuously. Heat shortens drive life and these drives are not specified for long life to begin with. They are good for clones that are off most of the time, and for data transfer. One option is to get a drive in a better case such as sold by OWC (available on Amazon). The better option these days for any external drive that will run continuously is the Samsung T5 line you mention in your subsequent post. The two clones should really be staggered in time, perhaps by a week. Otherwise you may find both clones and the cloned drive all have the same problem, perhaps something like ransomware. One of the clones should be offline, in a small Pelican box, in an ESD safe bag, with a desiccant. And it goes without saying that everything runs off a UPS."

Timo (partial comment): "As long as the system makes sense to you—and is something you do regularly—it seems fine. It mirrors my understanding of contemporary computer set ups: that is, one has a small, fast boot disk with the OS and programs, connected to larger but slower data storage, in our case photos, that use conventional Winchester drives. So each side of that Thunderbolt connection needs a back up strategy. But a few notes/tweaks:

1. On the boot side of things:

• I agree with others who think you should have a bootable clone of your Mini's internal drive. Carbon Copy Cloner (essentially a nice GUI wrapper for the UNIX 'rsync' command, but with customizations) is terrific for this. So one 'task' the left-hand pane would be a clone of your boot drive. I might suggest you spring for one of those Samsung SSDs on sale today. Plug it in, and schedule the task to run every night at 2 a.m. or so. Now you're really covered if the Mini's internal fails, and if you bought the SSD, the boot from the clone is fairly speedy (whereas a boot from a 5400 rpm external drive is painfully slow). Best of all, it's set and forget
• The first CCC clone takes awhile, but subsequent clones compare what files have changed and only copy the newer stuff, cutting back up times dramatically
• Keep using the Time Capsule and Time Machine, but think of this more as a system for recovering files accidentally deleted or corrupted. In back-up jargon this is 'versioning,' and it's nice to be able to 'go back' and fetch something from before a user-error. However, whole system restores from Time Capsule back ups are flakey and/or time-consuming enough to not be worth it, except as a fallback, in my opinion

2. On the data side of things:

• I think you'll need a TB3 —> TB2 dongle to hook up that AKiTiO to your new Mini
• you will probably need to 'exclude' your new drives in the AKiTiO from your Time Capsule, or it will fill up prematurely (depending on how much data you have, of course)
• the Thunderbolt 'pipe' between your new 5400 drives and the Mini is really fast, such that the drive platter speed in your new drives will be the limiting factor in terms of speed
• I personally find the copy-to-two-drives a bit of overkill for one problem (drive failure) but less-than-ideal with regards to human error. I might change the copying such that one of your new WDs is a copy of the passport photo/music drive, and the other WD is a trailing copy—something only done weekly. (And one can use CCC to schedule this weekly copy.) So, if you muck up something on your music/photo drive, and inadvertently (or automatically) copy that muck-up to one AKiTiO back up, you still have an older version to recover a file or three from.
• I learned from kind of crazy Reddit threads about 'shucking'—essentially buying cheapish Best-Buy-branded external hard drives, and 'shucking' them out of their enclosures in order to use the drive inside in your own enclosure. The advantage is cost, and, as your benefactor who put drives in his AKiTiO noted, it's also good not to have to rely on the commodity-price drive controller bundled with the external drives on sale. At any rate these drives in external enclosures often go on sale for prices one-half or less of bare drives (but also with less warranty)."

DavidB: "Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, Third Edition.

"It examines a variety of strategies, programs, and hardware for cloning and archival. Worth the $15 price."

Mike replies: I just read the sample—I especially like that he "took control" of his Take Control books from the original publisher, as recounted in the "Read Me First" section.  :-)

John Camp: "I've often wondered why people need such huge-capacity drives. I know there must be a reason, I just don't know what it is. A 1TB drive like the one you illustrated could hold (I think, I may be wrong, I'm not a numbers savant) up to something like 13,000 uncompressed raw photos from my GX8's. Yet Geoff needs a 2TB drive! To me, that's inconceivable. On a full 2TB drive, If I looked at each of my GX8 photos for ten seconds each (and if I had that many) it'd take me virtually two entire work weeks just to page through them. That's a lot of #@$%! photos."

Ken Tanaka: "In answer to John Camp’s puzzlement over why hard drives have reached, and exceeded, such enormous capacities the answer is simple: VIDEO. The incorporation of cinema-class 4K video facilities into still cameras has mandated lightning-speed cavernous memory cards and these ginormous tiny portable drives. Certainly, larger still image file sizes also contributed to this trend but not with the force that video-in-still-cameras did. Video is also responsible for increasing the complexity of camera menu systems, a recent complaint campaign here."

Mike replies: I also think that 2TB isn't all that much. Take John's figure of 13,000 photos per terabyte, Geoff's 2TB drive, and Geoff's statement that he has 25 years' worth of digital images archived on one drive. As I do the arithmetic (never my strong suit, n.b.), 26,000 photos over 25 years is close enough to 1,000 photos a year, and with two weeks for giving it a rest (and making the arithmetic simpler) that's only 20 photos a week. I'm a light shooter but I don't think I've ever shot less than 20 exposures when I go out to photograph with a digital camera in my hand. I'll do that much just to warm up.

I have about 80,000 Plus-X, Tri-X, and P3200 35mm negatives from my younger days. Granted, I keep everything, even the rankest junk, because of the way negatives are filed and stored. But that was all done between 1980 and 2000. So that's 1,040 weeks, meaning I shot an average of just under 77 pictures a week during those decades, which is, in turn, just over two rolls of film per week. That's not very much at all.

RAID!!!

[UPDATE Sunday March 31: Readers in the comments talked me out of my brief infatuation with RAID. I'll leave this post alone, but my backup plans no longer include RAID. Please see the next post for my backup plans as they developed from the collective advice I got from readers. Thanks! —Ed.]

-

Because I am an unwilling slave to authoritarian Big Brother corporations and my mind has been taken over, I can't help thinking of the old Raid bug spray commercials that featured insects happily destroying human property until the can of Raid comes out, at which point they all shriek "RAID!!!" and flee.

But what we're talking about here is not that, but computer storage. In the computing world, RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inferior Disks." It's an umbrella name for several strategies for ganging physically separate hard drives together in various ways to make them work less poorly.

There are several types. The first is RAID 0 (zero), so called because it offers zero protection from failure. Photographers don't need to mess with this type; all RAID 0 indicates for us is that we must momentarily become sad and feel sorry for videographers.

Then there's RAID 1, which is the important one for us. In RAID 1, two identical drives are linked together in the same volume, which are often placed in the same enclosure. The capacity of the array is the same as the capacity of a single hard drive, so you are getting one for the price of two plus the price of the enclosure (such a deal!). But the salient point is that any file you copy to the first disk is automatically copied exactly on the second one. So, if when one drive fails, you can keep on working. If you remove the bad drive and insert a fresh one that's still good, RAID 1 will immediately begin rebuilding the new drive from the surviving old one.

There are many other types of RAID, including RAID 5, RAID 10, RAID Track 9 1/2, RAID 42, and RAID TTPoP (to the power of Pi). All of these types and many others not listed may be ignored with a devil-may-care attitude and a dismissive wave of the hand on account of us not being smart enough to be IT persons.

You might think that RAID 1 means you are also automatically backed up, but oh no, bug-spray-breath. Because good backup hygiene demands that you still be backed up even during a failure. When one of the drives fails in a RAID 1 setup, you would then temporarily have all your data on one physical drive, and that is not enuff. (Isn't it annoying when people try to be cutesy by spelling "enough" like that?) So a RAID 1 box is highly reliable, much more so than a single external drive, but you still need to back it up somewhere else. How you do this is the same problem you had in the first place, but never mind.

Note that stated RAID 1 capacities must be cut in half. For instance, a 4TB RAID 1 box has two 2TB drives inside and offers 2TB of storage. I hope I don't need to say out loud that if hard drives actually were reliable, we wouldn't need RAID setups in the first place.

You might already have one
What some people don't realize is that you can set up a RAID 1 in MacOS Mojave using regular old external hard drives. I do not know if this is better than or worse than or the same as the bespoke solutions.

Start with two identical hard drives. If not new, make sure there's nothing on 'em you want to save. If new, make sure they are formatted for Mac—"Mac OS Extended (Journaled)." Do a Spotlight Search to find Disk Utility if you don't already know how to find it. Under the File pulldown menu in Disk Utility, there's an option called "RAID Assistant." You can use RAID Assistant to set up Striped (RAID 0), Mirrored (RAID 1), or something very charmingly called "Concatenated (JBOD)." This last is pronounced "jay-bod," and, this is true, it stands for "just a bunch of disks." I'd use JBOD just for the name alone if I could think of any reason to do so. A JBOD is a volume that just lumps one disk with another resulting in a larger drive.

The best Thunderbolt 3 dock

So while I wanted a super-duper hardware RAID 1 in its own fancy enclosure, they're all expensive, and I ended up just buying two 4TB Western Digital My Passport portable drives which I plan to set up as a RAID 1 in Mojave. Offsite backup courtesy of BackBlaze. Good enuff (?).

If you really want to go the Ferrari route, try a RAID5 setup with the awesome made-in-the-USA CalDigit T4. Way above my pay grade, so you're on your own with that. CalDigit, by the way, is the company that makes the best Thunderbolt 3 dock for photographers, the famous TS3 Plus, the one that has a UHS-II card slot in it and that can charge your laptop at full speed and run your monitors and has umpteen ports and on and on. There are glowing reviews all over the Web.

Enuff! (Er....) And now, many readers will write comments that I am not smart enough to comprehend, but which I am hopeful of learning something from anyway.

Mike

P.S. It's actually Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Originally inexpensive, says Wikipedia.

But you knew that.

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Speed: "Many years ago I worked in a bank. Every Friday afternoon a professor from the music department at the local University brought in some sort of computer storage media, put it into his safety deposit box, removed last week's media, said 'have a nice weekend' and left. He was a man of few words. And fewer worries about backups."

Jim Richardson: "I must say that after a while MEGO when it comes to RAID. And since what I really wanted was data security, not data availability (as 01af so nicely pointed out) I have run my business on JBOD. To me the giveaway is that RAID users always have stories to tell. I don't want stories to tell. I want to know where the files are."

["MEGO" means "my eyes glaze over." —Yr. Hmbl. Ed., working so you don't have to.]

Bob Johnston [no (immediate) relation to the ed. —Ed.]: "Beware the RAID 1! I am retired now but used to work for a computer company. If I had a pound for every unrecoverable failure of a RAID 1 array I would be a rich man. I won't bore you with the details but there are several failure modes that can render a RAID 1 unrecoverable. The simple kind of RAID is intended to keep you working seamlessly, so for Mike there is a value. If his disk fails while he is writing his blog he won't be interrupted. But it does not negate the need for a backup. Therefore, in my opinion, unless you can afford RAID 6, RAIDs are of little value to anyone who can wait a while whilst their data is rebuilt."

Bill Tyler: "Several years ago, I was working at a very large software company on very large storage systems. We had thousands of servers, each with lots of disks attached to RAID controllers. At that time, a petabyte was a lot of storage, and we had lots of petabytes. Anyhow, the official line was that we had nice redundancy because each RAID array could withstand the loss of a disk. Fortunately, each byte of data was also stored on a different RAID array on a different server. I say fortunately, because the bit that wasn't considered in the official line was the RAID controller—the thing that all the disks attached to—as a point of failure. If that goes, the whole RAID array is toast. The point was driven home forcefully when we discovered that a batch of those RAID controllers were subtly defective.

"Whatever you're using to create and maintain a RAID array, whether hardware or software, is a single point of failure. Be warned, and use RAID judiciously."

Rodolfo Canet: "RAID 1 doesn't protect you from accidental deletions. Use one of your two new drives for data and tell Carbon Copy Cloner [MacOS only, 30-day trial available —Ed.] to back it up to the second one at regular intervals. Easy and cheap, and you can work directly from the second in the case the first dies and you don't have the time to buy a new one (that's the problem of relying totally on Time Machine)."

Edward Taylor: "If you want to be wealthy, design a permanent storage solution. There is no practical permanent solution at this time. Back up once, store in a drawer forever, no worries about it becoming unreadable in the future. I am shocked that this has not been accomplished yet after at least 40 years of widespread computer use. It is really absurd."

Write On (Blog Notes)

I finally broke down, bit the bullet, unclenched the fist clinging to the wallet like grim death, and bought a new computer. I had the kind help of Ben Rosengart and Steve Rosenblum. I bought an Apple 3.0GHz i7 six-core Mac Mini with 16 GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. It's not here yet.

I have a stack of envelopes sitting on my desk from readers who mailed donations recently, which is what paid for most of the new computer. The return addresses include J. Reid, Nicholas Hartmann, Robert J. Sliclen, R. Teasley, G. Andros, Andrew Morang, Mark Gregg, J.F. Van Domelan, Jim Henry, Andrew D. Kirk, and Alan Currie—and there were at least three more whose names I despicably neglected to scribble down before depositing the checks. I apologize for that. I am not organized.  :-( 

Big thanks to them and everyone who donates to the site in any way. Donations now make up for the decline of the camera market and the incursion of YouTube reviewing channels, which dwarf the old TOP in terms of viewers. The Internet is changing!

You what?
I remember talking to a business-book writer in the early days of the Internet. He told me I should write about asbestos illness, because attorneys paid top dollar for leads to clients. When I told him what I did write about, he highly approved, saying that camera sites were known to be among the most lucrative to "monetize." He said the only problem with them was procuring content, which was a PITA (pain in the you-know-where), and he asked me what my sources for content were. I allowed as how I wrote most of my own content, and that, in fact, the content was my principal interest and the monetization of the site was a distant second. He stared at me as if I had just told him that my preferred sexual partners had hooves and grew wool. Apparently such a peculiar motive toward business was a little outside of his wheelhouse.

The Internet is changing; I write on.

Mike
(Thanks to all)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Thomas Mc Cann: "Occasionally I get a twinge of conscience and would like to make a contribution, but dislike Patreon. Is there another route to make an ocasional contribution?"

Mike replies: A small group of diehards sends the occasional much-appreciated old-fashioned check. The mailing address is me, 740 East Lake Rd, Penn Yan NY 14527. Thanks for asking!

Calibrate That Monitor!

I used to love these...great way to calibrate that monitor. I don't need them any more because my NEC came with its own colorimeter, but the Datacolor Spyder5PRO is on sale as part of B&H's Mega Deal Zone, which has been extended until Midnight Saturday. The sale price is only $89.99. (Current price at Amazon, where it's an "Amazon's Choice," is $134.36.)

Do note that your remaining window to get the sale price is very limited—it's Saturday evening Eastern U.S. Time between 6:00 p.m. (when B&H reopens from Shabbat) until 11:59 p.m. (when the Mega Deal Zone ends).

They're easy to use.

Mike

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Photo[shop]-Specific Computers

I'm far from a computer expert, so take this with the appropriate chunk of salt. I'm just reading and reporting back.

A friend sent me this interesting short article about picking a computer for Photoshop and Lightroom. It's a product description page for a photo-specific computer built by a PC fabricator. It's on Punch and it's called "What kind of processor do I need for Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC in 2018?"

It starts with a brief description of cores and threads, then moves on to clock speed. Turns out multi-core CPUs aren't really that significant with photo processing: "...we have undertaken testing using a range of processors from dual core right through to the huge 18-core variants. We were quickly able to conclude that both Photoshop and Lightroom are not able to take advantage of a great number of processor cores." Two- and quad-core machines are fine, the authors say, with maybe an extra two cores for running background tasks at the same time.

The situation is the opposite with processor speed. Their conclusion is pretty stark: "Photoshop performance scales directly with processor clock speed."

This would seem to emphasize the importance of turbo boost, but the authors explain that turbo boost requires CPU cooling to avoid overheating the CPU and operate at good efficiency. It's good news that the new Mini has a redesigned fan—sorely needed, in my experience—but how does that relate to what they're talking about? Beats me.

I'm not sure all this helps me choose a Mac Mini model. But then, I don't really do massive Photoshop projects—I process relatively straight, don't do a lot of processor-intensive functions like panoramic photomerges, and print small. I should probably just make do with the most basic base Mini if I go that route.

Oops
But I did some configuring, and it turns out you can slam the budget pretty easily configuring a Mini. The Mini is not mini any more in terms of $. I guess you're getting a lot of computer, but you're certainly paying luxury prices. (And before the Apple-haters chime in, I'm in the Apple ecosystem and I'm not getting out. It's not a question of just one device—it's how all of them work together.) I suppose my next work computer will be a 21.5" iMac, which is what lordly Apple decrees customers like me shall buy. Who am I to argue with a trillion-dollar behemoth?

The first Mac I did my work on, Spring 1984.
Ten pages of text per floppy.  :-)

Still, interesting article. (I love primers.) I'll be interested to hear what some of you think who know much more about the subject than I do.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

P.S. And here's an interesting thought. It's finally at least conceivable that I could go with a highly configured iPad Pro and an iPhone, and dispense with everything else. No more desktop, no more laptop? Radical.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Thom Hogan: "As I outline in an article on my site: memory first, dedicated GPU second (if you can get one), CPU clock speed third. In broad strokes, that's where performance in Photoshop comes from. The thing you absolutely want to avoid is virtual memory or scratch disk spills out to a slow drive.

"To answer your question on the new Mini, it's unknown yet just how much heat dissipation the fan on it can manage long term. If it's efficient, then yes, the turbo boost speed is very important. If not, the base clock speed is probably more important."

[Here's that link —Ed.]

Vince: "If you’re going to get an iMac, you’ll be much happier with a 27". Especially since that’s the size screen you already have. But I don’t know why you would. A Mini with an i7 and 512GB SSD is $1,500. If you want 16GB of memory, give Apple $200 to upgrade it. (The memory is replacing the built-in, and 16GB is $170 from OWC; it’s worth the $30 not to mess with it.) If you want 32GB, give OWC $330 to upgrade it. Around $1,700–1,800 total. A comparably equipped iMac 27" is $2,500–2,600, and only has four cores instead of six. Why spend the $800–900 when you don’t have to? (Unless you also want a 5K monitor, in which case definitely get the iMac.) (Note: I own and love the iMac. But you have a Mini and a good monitor. It seems to make more sense to stay with the Mini.)

"Also, what that article really says is that Adobe apps are bloated and horribly performing. If you really want to improve the performance of your editing, get new software instead of beefing up your hardware to ridiculous heights."

Moose: "Likely not much factor for your use, but GPU is a significant factor for many Photoshop users. Your link mentions two reasons: 'The downside of utilising a processor with integrated graphics solution is that both the processor and GPU share the computers main system memory. Not only does this consume valuable memory for graphics use but it eats up memory performance bandwidth too.' A more powerful GPU also speeds up some display functions."

Joe Holmes: "After eight years with my elderly Mac Pro desktop machine I finally upgraded last year to the 27" iMac Retina 5K, with every available upgrade and 40GB of RAM. What an enormous difference, a huge amount due to moving a lot of my software to a superfast SSD. Everything is now just snappy. One thing I've long depended on for photo processing is two monitors—it's great having a full-screen image on one and all my Photoshop palettes and tools on the other. I know you love your existing monitor, but you might consider keeping it and using the iMac's (gorgeous) 27" Retina screen as a second monitor. All it takes is the right cable. Of course the iMac is much pricier than a Mac Mini, but if you, like me, expect to keep the machine for at least six or eight years, it's a very worthwhile investment."

Thomas Tveit Rosenlund: "That is not a photo specific computer. That is actually an Adobe specific computer. Because of Adobe's software architecture the applications can't utilize a lot of cores in an optimal way (only for some tasks like batch output/input). It is the same story with GPU. There exists other software solutions for photo processing and cataloging that actually manages to utilize the resources of a multi-core setup as well as the GPU capabilities in a much better way. Capture One is one, I am sure there are others as well (Capture One is reportedly better developing Fujifilm X-trans files also, so the switch should really be a no-brainer for the author of this site).

"What you really need is a Microsoft Surface pro and an upgrade to Capture One for Fuji.  :-)  "

Mike replies: I've been trying to make friends with Capture One for Fuji. The plugin I really want to keep is Nik Silver Efex Pro 2, and it looks like I should be able to learn how to integrate that. I just think I'm going to miss ACR. I've spent time and effort learning ACR and I'm attached to what I know how to do in ACR....

david stock: After decades of Mac use, I'm feeling stuck. With Apple's lack of desktop choices, iMacs are what many photographers seem to turn to. But I dislike the screens. They are pretty for viewing, and for web content. But for someone who prints photographs regularly, they are suboptimal. They are extremely bright and saturated (and too reflective). Because they are optimized for web and movie viewing impact, they are hard to profile accurately for printing. They have a history of problems with uneven illumination. And they are actually too high in resolution to allow conveniently judging critical sharpness (as Lloyd Chambers and others have pointed out). I had high hopes for the new Mini. It's powerful, with lots of good ports. Its only drawback for me is the lack of a dedicated graphics card; I can't wrap my mind around paying $700 for an external GPU box. Apple promises a new Mac Pro next year. But I'm sure it will be incredibly expensive...."

Mike replies: FWIW, I've felt that frustration. I invested in the NEC PA272W last year to have a more configurable, lower-glare display, but Apple's options of low end (Mini) and high end (Pro) desktops were both too extreme for me—no Goldilocks solution. I needed a box right in the middle. The new Minis are likely going to do the job when I upgrade next Spring, assuming I can afford to. 

But maybe the real problem is Photoshop. I just looked at Capture One's system requirements. It's a pretty basic, casual page, but they say minimum is 2 cores, 8 GB RAM, and 10 GB free hard drive space, and optimum is 4 cores "or better," 16 GB RAM "or more," 100 GB free hard drive space, and an SSD drive. Seems like the Core i3 Mini with extra RAM would serve. I just don't know about what you mentioned, which is how the lack of a dedicated GPU might affect anything. I just switched from coffee to tea; switching from ACR/Photoshop to Capture One should be easy, right?

But hey, I learned a lot today. I guess I'll just keep my ears open and read the real reviews when they start appearing, and just keep learning till I know enough.

Hallelujah

Oh, joy.

New Mac Mini.

This will not excite some of you, but I've been waiting for this day for quite a while. The Mac Mini is exactly what I need (I prefer the form-factor because I can use my third-party monitor of choice and secure the computer when I'm away), and my 2012 is in need of updating. I'm on my computer 6–10 hours a day so little differences add up.

Photoshop CC speed performance compared with current 2014 model:

Here are the rest of the details. Available November 7th.

As my friend Steve texted when he heard: "Yay!"

iHappy.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Jim Kofron: "i2."

David: "New Mac mini, Yay! No SD slot, Boo!"

Kodachromeguy: "Wow, good news, I hope. I, too, am using one of the 2012 Mac Minis and have been waiting for the next version. Let's wait a few months for the first users to provide some feedback. Let them do the troubleshooting."

Keith: "Based on the extended delay between the D300 and D500...uh, wait, wrong product. Between the previous Mac Mini and this current one, you may want to buy on the high end of the spec. Might be anchored to it for awhile."

Gordon Lewis: "The reasons that same may feel motivated to curb their enthusiasm over the new Mac Mini is that, in classic Apple fashion, the cost mounts steeply with every option you add to the base configuration. For example, the lowest priced model is $799. The next one up is $1099. Want an extra 8GB of RAM? That's $200 extra. Want to double the base SSD drive capacity? That's another $200. Want a faster processor? Yet another $200. And because Apple makes it difficult if not impossible to retrofit any of these components, including RAM, you can't upgrade components over time. Instead, you have to anticipate future needs and buy everything at all once. I mention all of this as a generally satisfied Apple customer, not a 'Windows fanboy,' but I call 'em like I sees 'em. The Apple ecosystem has its benefits, but economy is not necessarily one of them."

New MacBook Pro

Apple has updated its MacBook Pro with Touch Bar models to incorporate 8th Gen Intel Core processors, True Tone technology, and the Apple T2 chip.

The 15.4" models now feature 8th Gen Intel Core i7 six-core processors, which are up to 70 percent faster than 2017 predecessors, while the 13.3" models now feature 8th Gen Intel Core i5 quad-core processors, which are up to twice as fast as the previous models. The 15.4" models now utilize DDR4 onboard RAM and can be configured up to 32GB for optimal multitasking. These models feature a dedicated AMD Radeon Pro 555X or 560X graphics card with 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM. The 13.3" models utilize integrated Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 or 655. [Text from B&H Photo.]

They seem expensive to me, but then I guess they are, for most people, arguably (and I use that word advisedly!) the best all-around computers money can buy. I probably should have bought a new MacBook Pro of the generation just prior to the Touch Bar models (which I can see myself being frustrated with—any control panel that changes itself would not get along well with my brain, or rather the other way around) to run my NEC monitor at home and detach to take on the road with me. But I went another direction, so it's too late now, until I need to update next time. Sigh.

The last time I used a laptop as my main computer, it looked like this:

...And sounded like this. (You would need to listen to the entire three minutes and 25 seconds to get the full experience, but please spare yourself.) Talk about the bad old days!

And yet it was one of my favorite computers ever, if I'm honest. I probably have readers who were "tweens" when that computer was current. And they think I'm old, only because they have no idea yet that their own lives are going to zoom by with the speed of an 8th Gen Intel Core i7 six-core processor.

:-)

But I digress. From the digression. Here again is the latest and greatest.

Mike

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louis mciver: "Yes, the physical interfaces of the Macbook Pro continue to deteriorate, with the Touch Bar taking the cake. It is a significant visual distraction and also very prone to triggering something or other when one of your fingers accidentally rests on it, which is a very natural and ergonomic thing for your fingers to want to do. Fortunately there is nice piece of free software called 'Touchbardisabler' that completely turns off the touch bar. Screen brightness and volume keys are automatically remapped and you can also remap the escape key to another key such as the caps lock key."

Peter Wright: "I am very glad to see at last a four-core MacBook Pro 13 inch, and I expect I will buy one in a few weeks to replace my old MacBook Air. I think the Thunderbolt 3 interfaces that get so much criticism are really another reason to make the purchase: At last I can expand/update the machine externally using fast SSD storage or GPUs. I’ll take high-end interfaces any day over the clutter of different low-speed interfaces we have seen up to now. All I wanted in addition was more horsepower under the hood."

How To Use a Standing (or Sit-Stand) Desk

My messy desk in the sitting and the standing position

It's well known by now that sitting at a desk all day isn't good for you, and standing desks—also called sit-stand desks—have exploded in popularity. To the point that it might be considered a fad.

But I love mine.

There are a lot of options. You can get just the leg set, and then you can have a local cabinetmaker craft a custom top in whatever size and whatever kind of wood you prefer (in our area we have loads of Mennonite woodshops that will provide reasonably-priced, very well made solid wood furniture of any specification or design on demand). You can buy inexpensive hand-crank models. Or you can just buy a complete desk that comes with a tabletop, like I did four years ago. (Word to the wise: do opt for the "expert assembly" if it's available in your area.) If you really want to go all-out there's even a beautiful, deluxe new type with four separate legs that comes in several colors and sizes. (This is the killer app among current options, and it's apparently considerably easier to assemble yourself—assembling the older two-legged ones like I have is a challenge. The "expert assembly" guys who came to my house worked for two hours. Two guys. Two hours. Glad that wasn't li'l ol' me.)

What you might not know is that standing all day might not be all that good for you either. The trick is to change your state a lot—get into the habit of changing position. Sit for a while, stand for a while, sit for a while. If you can mix in "microwalks" it's a very good idea, too. Take a two-minute walk to the water-cooler every hour or so. Just make sure those walks aren't to the soda machine (at work) or the kitchen (at home)! A slightly longer brisk walk (5–15 minutes) at midday is a smart idea too.

I have these microwalks built into my day because of the dogs. They're also my built-in exercise timer (theirs, but also mine.) I also touch my toes for thirty seconds once or twice a day. (This takes longer than you'd think because it takes a while to stretch all the way down there.)

Here's the right way to use a standing desk: every hour or two, raise the desk to standing height. Take a standing position with your feet comfortably (about should-width) apart and deliberately put equal weight on both feet.

When you catch yourself shifting your weight, sit down again.

That's it. Doesn't have to be any amount of time. Two minutes, six minutes, twelve minutes, doesn't matter. As soon as you shift your weight it's a sign of discomfort and you've been standing long enough. Take a load off. Sit.

It's the intermittent change of position that does you good.

And don't forget those little walks.

Mike

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Speed: "The power of photography—I am now going to clean my desk."

Wednesday Open Mike: Remember Moms

Great gift idea for Mother's Day: B&H has the Apple 9.7" iPad (2017, 32GB, wi-fi only, gold) on sale for only $269. Your Mom is worth it.

I love my iPad.

I have five Apple devices. Of those, by far the worst is the one I have to use most of the day every single day, the 2012 Mac Mini that I use as my work computer. It overheats and crashes frequently and it's not all that powerful when I'm doing things in Photoshop. Why Apple can't make me a competent basic computer in a smallish (but not overly small) box, that doesn't @!#%#$ overheat, is one of those problems that's annoying chiefly because it shouldn't be a problem at all.

The phone (mine's an iPhone 7+) is my favorite "thing" ever, large or small, tech or mechanical or art-object—favorite all-time. Well, actually I liked the 6+ a little better because the button was real, but "same difference" as we said when I was a kid.

I'm writing my book on a 21" iMac that I like a lot (it's not connected to the Cloud and has almost nothing on it), and then I have an older MacBook Air laptop that I don't use except when I'm traveling. Which means, I hardly ever use it.

The device that I need the least is the one I'm most attached to: my iPad.

When I first got it, I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Now it's like Linus's blanket: I take it to bed with me every night, and it's what's in front of me when I eat alone. I use it mainly to watch videos, movies, and snooker (snooker's my no. 1 spectator sport), and I read books on it. It migrates around the house.

It's fantastic to look at pictures on. It's just the right size to hold in your hands, and the Retina screen shows off digital images nearly ideally. I like looking at pictures on it.

You've probably already gotten your Mom a present. Just thought I'd add a suggestion.

Alternately, try flowers!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Ernie Van Veen: "The boys and I bought an iPad mini for my wife got Mother's Day five years ago. She's never been a fangirl of tech stuff, but she was, as we say in Australia, 'chuffed' when she got it. She uses it every day for everything from Facebook, to news, blogs, email, and reading, and she takes it in her handbag everywhere we go because it's her first choice for photography. Lately she's been complaining about the limited storage space...I think it may be time for a new one."

Eolake: "I couldn’t agree more about the iPad. Love of my life since the first one. Tip: make a search on Amazon for Tablet Grip. There are many different kinds, and when you hold a tablet in your hand, it makes a big difference. (There are some for phones too.)"

james wilson: "I keep my mini cool with Macs Fan Control. It is a great little app that increases the fan speed in response to processor. I batch process hundreds of images at a time and the fan goes faster and faster to maintain a normal temp. I love my little Mini, no problems."

Mike replies: Thanks. This seems to be working well. It's not clear what the best settings are or what the target temperatures should be, but I was able to get the case cooled down quite a bit and the CPU temps down from 210°F to about 180°F. Hopefully that will help with the crashes, but of course it could be something entirely different causing those.

A Brief Plea to Apple

Boy, does this feel like a grain of sand in the Sahara. It doesn't even amount to a hill of beans. Maybe one bean, at best.

However, we have several readers who work for Apple, so maybe one of them can get this to the right department. A seemingly minor thing, but I'm in dire need of a timed Do-Not-Disturb mode for my phone. I go to meetings of my fellowship most nights, put the phone on Do-Not-Disturb mode when the chairperson prompts me to do so...and then forget to turn Do-Not-Disturb back off again until sometime the next day—when I discover that I've missed one to five calls. Calls can be critical, because one might come from a friend in trouble.

Using the Scheduled mode in Settings kinda works, but kinda not, because the meetings are all at different times. And I still forget to reset it.

Either that, or maybe Apple could provide me with a younger and less absent-minded brain—but maybe even mighty Apple can't afford that.

Mike

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Ray Hunter: "Perhaps you could ask the chairperson to state a reminder regarding the silenced phones at the close of the meeting, a mirror to that at the beginning of the meeting. I know it isn't a solution to a functional memory, but it's a Band-Aid."

Mike replies: Paul Butzi suggested the same idea privately. I spoke at the meeting last night, and I brought up the phone issue. We did end the meeting with a reminder to people to turn their phones back on. We'll see whether that sticks, but I'm going to try to remember to announce it at the end of meetings.

Michael: "The alarm clock function in your phone can be a big help. I have number of different pills which have to be taken daily, some at specific intervals, some two hours after eating—with nothing ingested for an hour after taking—plus eyedrops on another schedule and such stuff. The entire schedule set as a series of alarms on my phone does more than just remind me to take this or do that. If something interferes to throw me off the clock, I can quickly reset the rest of the day to accommodate the change. If the dislocation is a big one, I can incrementally time-shift my way back to the normal schedule over the next few days. This may seem to have nothing to do with your problem but give it a try. Set an alarm for shortly before meeting time and another for a reasonable interval after it’s over. Turn the phone function off when the first one sounds. When the after-meeting alarm sounds, turn the phone back on. Low tech? Yes, but it works."

John: "You've become too reliant on technology. Leave your phone at home or in the car when you go to meetings."

Mike replies: That presupposes that I can remember to do that, which would functionally never happen, given that I've been trying for about twelve years now, unsuccessfully, to remember to take the canvas shopping bags from the trunk into the store when I go to the grocery.

Learn Something New Every...Post

Well, it's going to take me a long time today to catch up with all the comments from yesterday (sorry; I've got the flu), but I have to say that I learn something with almost every single post here. Who knew that there was a little tiny button on the address bar of my very own browser called "Enter Reader View"—

Which turns this—

Into this—

I spend roughly a fifth of my life in my browser, but I didn't know that*. I can't say there's any site I would consign to the purgatory of Reader View permanently (you can do that)—I want to see their special contents—but whenever I start to get irritated by the whirring and whizzing and blasting and zinging on some random page somewhere, that little pebble of knowledge is likely to be a godsend.

Thanks, specific readers, and thanks, vast brilliant TOP-reader Cloud (VBTRC). TOP readers are seriously the smartest people on the Web. Not just in subset photorelated.

(Another question for the VBTRC: What was that site that every year does an elaborate infographic about the state of the photo/camera industry in the year just past? I've been trying to remember and/or find it for days but I can't come up with it. Does anyone recall?)

As a last word on the "ruination" of the Internet, this quote from Maria Popova of Brain Pickings: "The internet—its beauty is that it's a self-perfecting organism, right? But as long as it’s an ad-supported medium, the motive will be to perfect commercial interest, to perfect the art of the listicle, the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated article, and not to perfect the human spirit of the reader or the writer." (Thanks to Merle for that.)

We'll continue to be part of the semi-pricipled semi-resistance,  :-)   in favor of the human spirit of the reader and the writer. 

Mike

*Every smart person is aware of the dim reaches of his or her own ignorance. In the beautiful alleged words of Isaac Newton, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." (But read this. It's still a beautiful quote.)

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Weekend Special: Alert!

I know it's the weekend and I'm supposed to be working on the book (working title: The Best Digital Camera—with Tidbits on Life, Love, Loving Life, Learning Photography and Knowing Thyself—is that zany enough? It's for those of you who contribute to TOP through my Patreon page, and it will be free to you...when it's done...eventually...), but I felt I should say that today is the LAST DAY of B&H Photo's slammin' Cyberweek Apple sale.

B&H, which I believe is the biggest Apple vendor on the planet apart from Apple itself, is closed now. But it opens again at 5:45 this afternoon, and the sale goes on from there to Midnight.

Especially recommended: the new iPads, and the 13" MacBook Pro. The latter is arguably the best Mac laptop. Despite bitter criticisms of the new Pro laptops, they've been "selling briskly" according to industry analysts, and have contributed to Apple's 15.4% sales increase in the segment year-on-year—although it is still only the fifth largest purveyor of laptops, after HP, Lenovo, Dell, and Asus.

As for the iPads...I read a survey some while ago in which owners reported that the iPad was their least essential Apple device, but the most loved. That is true for Yr. Hmbl. Ed. I couldn't even figure out what to do with the danged thing for the first five months I had it, but now it's like my toddler blankie...I take it up to bed with me every night, and it's the first thing I pack when I travel. It's my main e-reader...I can't even find the charger for my Kindle Paperwhite any more.

One thing it's very useful for: as a dazzlingly beautiful portable viewer for your photographic portfolios. The new oversized 12.9" iPad Pro is stunning in this role (you will need at least a 6-MP camera to show off its talents, heh heh), but they're all good for that, even the little guys. I watch movies on mine, too. Least needed, most loved.

Go, and behold what treasures await ye. We live in the future. Ends when the clock strikes twelve.

Now get back to work, Mike

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The Mac Isn't Dead Yet

Big (big) news in the computer world is that a trio of Apple execs led by Phil Schiller, the world's highest-paid CMO, held a highly unusual and atypical gathering, with, in Schiller's words, "no black cloth that’s going to come off something right now." An interim, between-product-announcements update press meeting. The context, according to a long but interesting article by Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch, "is that Apple’s dedication to the Mac has taken a bit of a philosophical beating lately among its core professional customers." And the upshot is: a) yes, Apple still cares about the Mac and its many users; and, b) they're sorry(!) they haven't updated the Mac Pro like they should have.

(Er, Apple's apologizing. You got that.)

Phil Schiller said they would "talk about what’s going on and frankly be a little more transparent with some of the things we’re doing, some of the places we’re going, because our pro users desire that and we care deeply about them and we’re dedicated to communicating well with them and helping them understand what we’re doing and what we’re up to."

(Apple is concerned about transparency(!!). You picked that up too.)

The specific news is that Apple is going to rethink the Mac Pro completely, but it won't be ready this year. (Note that that is not the same as saying it will be ready next year.) This is believed to be the first official confirmation that the Mac Pro will be updated and continued.

Along the way, Apple provided some interesting figures about Macs. The Mac user base is approaching 100 million; Mac sales have a $25 billion run rate and almost qualifies as a Fortune 100 company all by itself; the current percentage of laptop/desktop sales is 80/20; and MacBook Pro sales are up 20% for the first quarter year-over-year.

You can see from those numbers both a) why they don't want to blow it, and b) why they might have been complacent. 

The meeting happened yesterday in Apple's Product Realization Lab at its Cupertino office campus. There were four people from Apple there: Schiller, whose title is Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing; John Ternus, who's in charge of Mac hardware; Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi; and, to moderate and watch the clock (the meeting ran for 90 minutes), Bill Evans of Apple PR. There were only five writers at the table: John Gruber of Daring Fireball; Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch; Lance Ulanoff from Mashable; Ina Fried of Axios; and John Paczkowski from BuzzFeed.

So that chorus of critiques we were referencing and linking to a few weeks ago was being listened to. Check out the articles if you're interested.

Mike
(Thanks to Gordon Lewis and others)

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Gordon Lewis: "I find it hard to believe that Apple has suddenly become infected with humility and transparency. It's more like embarrassment. They haven't upgraded the Mac Pro since 2013. That's a long time to sit still in the IT world. Expecting their pro customers to wait another year or more for an upgrade or other new pro-market products is asking a lot, to say the least. My concern is that by this point, whatever they eventually come out with will be too little, too late."

Jim in Denver: "It's too late. I'm going to buy two PCs in the next week or so. It's been 18 years since I've had a PC, but the Mac product is just not getting things done anymore. Hopefully they hit the ball out of the park and give me a reason to buy another Mac in a couple years."

PaddyC: "It's very good news. And as [John] Gruber reported, they also mentioned they have new iMacs (including a pro-ish one) coming up. I mention the iMacs because I do have some concern over the price of the new Mac Pros whenever they arrive.

"All around great news for this late 2010 Mac Pro user."

Speed: "A competitor has surfaced."

faberryman: "So they will do something sometime unless they change their mind."

psu: "I sort of object to the framing of your headline...the Mac was never dead. Far from it. People were just unhappy that the one they thought they wanted updated was not living a fuller life."

Mike replies: Remember that I'm not a subject-matter expert in this area, I'm just reporting. Or, in this case, not even reporting, just linking to the five articles written by the writers who were at the meeting. The longer version of the quote in my first paragraph, written by Matthew Panzarino, is as follows:

"The context, of course, is that Apple’s dedication to the Mac has taken a bit of a philosophical beating lately among its core professional customers. The narrative is that Apple has not put the resources needed into making the Mac work for pros, has neglected updates and could even be working toward a future where there are no Macs, just iOS devices. That’s the picture you’d get from the think pieces, anyway."

"A future where there are no Macs, just iOS devices" is a future in which the Mac would be dead, right? Maybe I should have used the full quote in order to support the headline.

Michael Perini: "It is interesting and a little sad to note that in Phil Shiller's description of pro users, photographers never enter his mind: 'There’s [sic] music creators, there’s video editors, there’s graphic designers—a really great segment with the Mac. There’s scientists, engineers, architects, software programmers....'"

Computer Note (and Front Flip) (OT)

When is a time capsule not a time capsule? When it's a Time Capsule

Whew! Well that was a narrow thing, and nervvy. I became aware about a week ago that my main backup drive, a 3-TB Apple "Time Capsule," had developed hardware failure of unknown extent and unforseeable consequence; the discovery put me on notice, and on edge. The Time Capsule is  a Wi-Fi router with a hard drive in it for making automatic backups using Time Machine, "Time Machine" being the backup software application that comes with the Apple macOS computer operating system. The two are designed to work together, seamlessly and easily and without bothering anyone, which, when things are going well, they do. Anyway, I received the replacement Time Capsule a few days ago, and yesterday and last night completed copying the data and swapping in the replacement. I can't say that it was a huge risk at any time, but it made me anxious all the same...one of those things that seems large when it's looming over your head...you know. The actual task was less of a hassle than I thought it would be when I was reading the how-to page, which gave me the cold sweats.

I've mentioned before that one of the reasons I got into photography in the 1980s was so I wouldn't have to work with computers. That's gone well.

I give Apple very high marks for customer service. They sent a replacement Time Capsule under warranty (it's possible they won't accept the old one as a return, because I wrote on it to remind myself which cable goes where—if so, that will prove a very expensive mistake), and then a Senior Applecare Advisor walked me through the procedure of making the switch.

...And it worked. I feel like doing a front flip!

...And speaking of which, and while we're off topic, you must see this absurd yet amazing thing:

The remarkable event happens following the two-minute mark, so either skip ahead or hang in there. Granted, he wrecks the truck immediately afterward, but the feat is astonishing all the same.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to guess that things like monster trucks and tractor pulls are a peculiarly American thing, and that they don't have this sort of thing in Britain, or Switzerland, or, say, down on the French Riviera. What you might not realize is that the ritual seems equally peculiar and foreign to certain classes of Americans as well. The primary audience is apparently little boys, to whom a monster truck rally includes pretty much everything that's important in life.

Back to work now, Mike.

Mike

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Eric Rose: "Both my brothers-in-law are huge into tractor pulls up here in Alberta. Since they are farmers by trade they just happen to have a few tractors to play with. They prefer the old ones. I think half the fun for them is restoring the old beasts and seeing them beat the new stuff."

Dogman: "I bought a Time Capsule last year at the same time as the new iMac. It replaced my previous backup device...nothing. Nothing since both backup drives on my old Mac Mini died at the same time, likely due to a storm that caused power spikes.

"About three months ago, the Capsule started making loud, screeching noises. It actually woke me up one night the noise was so loud. Being the computer-knowledgeable, handy type, I whacked the damn thing real hard and then laid it down on its side. It stopped screeching so I could sleep but I was pretty sure it was only a temporary fix. Turns out, it quieted down. That made me think it might have quit working but it has been functioning like new while still being silent. At the time, I switched it from automatic backups to manual so I now do backups when I remember it. I thought this might extend the life of the machine but I guess that's debatable. Anyway, all is well for the time being.

"Looking into the issue on the 'Net indicated to me that the noise might have been due to an accumulation of dust around the cooling fan—we live in a house built in the 1930s that has been constantly recirculating dust from the Roosevelt Administration. Whacking the Capsule hard might actually have shook the dust loose and fixed the problem.

"Or not."

Bruce McL: "Carbon Copy Cloner. Buy an external hard drive and clone your Mac HD with Carbon Copy Cloner. I don't say this lightly. I've been a Mac Consultant for many years. Time Machine does a good job of archiving—saving copies of old stuff. CCC does an excellent job of backing up. You can plug a hard drive cloned with CCC into any Mac and run the Mac from that drive. All of your settings, all of your apps, everything will be there and will work. Time Machine does not do that. Restoring a complete system from Time Machine is more difficult. I have three backup hard drives that I clone with CCC. I alternate between two of the drives each week, and the third one is in a safe deposit box in my bank. I swap that out every two or three months. If you want to save a little money, you can buy bare 3.5 inch internal HDs and run them in a Voyager hard drive dock."

Gordon Lewis: "I'm trying hard not to reveal my biases, but what the hell: Are you really at such loose ends in Penn Yan, New York that you've resorted to watching monster truck demos on YouTube? I suspect it's time for a small group of your most devoted readers to knock on your door and deliver a much-needed intervention."

Mike replies: It was clickbait on or near a Jay Leno's Garage video, and I do watch those sometimes when I'm at loose ends. I'm a big fan of Jay Leno...not particularly as a talk show host, and not particularly as a comedian, but as a great car guy.