This morning when I should have been working on the daily blog post I decided to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive to see if it still worked as I remembered it working. It does, sort of.
There are two approaches. You could install Linux straight onto the internal HD of a mac device but if you do, and you encounter problems then it could take hours to fix your mistake.
For a while now I have been wearing a Casio and an apple watch or a Garmin and an Apple watch, or a Casio and a Garmin watch or a xiaomi smart band and a casio or a xiaomi smart band and… it goes on.
A Break of Routine The reason for which I’m flying between so many devices is two fold. I have too many devices. There was a time when I went climbing, hiking, cycling, diving, swimming, on via ferrata and more and I was happy with just one watch.
As I write this I am waiting for my Apple Laptop to complete two tasks. The first task is to convert all my audible books from AAX to MP3 format. This is taking days to complete because I have over 500 books and my mac book pro is slow, due to it being from 2016.
Very Slow Time Machine I’m also waiting for my mac book pro to backup to a one terabyte external HD, before repurposing a one terabyte SSD.
Yesterday I went for a walk, during which I listened to two podcasts via AudioBookShelf, but that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is that the seasons have changed. The snow has melted and there was a brief interlude in rain so plenty of people went out for bike rides. So many in fact that I seemed to be one of only two or three people on foot.
Almost every time I get into the car I wish I was going on a road trip. I wish I was driving from point A to point B and that the drive would take hours, rather than minutes. As much as I hate “commuting” between point A and point B on a daily basis I love travelling from A to B as a journey. I love sitting for many hours in a car, thinking, looking at the landscape, remembering things, thinking of the future and more.
Over the years I have used Aperture, Picasa and the Apple Photos Apps. In that time they have organised my files chronologically, automatically, as soon as I took pictures, in some cases.
What They Do Aperture was well behaved. It would organise photos by year, by month and by day, so it’s easy to migrate a library from drive A to drive B. Apple Photos on the other hand makes a pig’s breakfast.
I have been an audible member for years at this point and in that time I have “bought” hundreds of books. I write “bought” because I payed for a Platinum account for years and got credits and got the books with those credits. Over the years I have collected more books than I can read in a year.
That library lived in the cloud, rather than my devices, for years. I would download the books I was listening to but not those that I had finished, or would read later.
On the 17th of February I will stop using Google One Drive and I was looking at the smaller tiers. You have 15 gigabytes for free, 100, and 200 gigabyte options, and then 200 gigabytes. At the moment I have 200 GB on Google Drive for documents and three hundred GB for photos. All of those photos are now backed up with Immich, PhotoPrism, and possibly one or two other storage solutions.
When looking at hard disk options I noticed that with the Seagate One Touch Hub they offer six months with Mylio so I decided to try the app, without buying that app. My first thought is that it claims to replace Google Photos and iCloud and yet the cost is similar per month. If you compare it to self-hosting solutions like Immich, PhotoPrism and NextCloud then it’s not that interesting, especially since it is for windows and mac but not Linux.
People want us to see the Apple Vision Pro VR kit as revolutionary but it isn’t, for a simple reason. Several years ago I was going to the World VR conference and loved playing with various VR kits but they almost all had the same problem. They cost an arm and a leg to buy.
The HTC Vive was an alluring device because of how well it worked and how good it felt but it was made unreachable by its price.