Where is the internet? On someone else’s computer. (Sorry for the cliche)
That’s why you need your own onsite backup.
A lesson from history. Back in 2009, the social bookmarking site ma.gnolia crashed. When they went to restore their system, their site backup was also corrupted. For three weeks, the site was down until they finally announced, “all user data in the database was irretrievable, rendering the site essentially dead.” (reference 1, 2) Ouch!
I trust Dropbox, iCloud, etc., but only so far. Accidents happen.
Heck, how many disreputable groups are trying to hack and take down these services on a daily bases? Even a partially-successful denial-of-service attack for one hour would cause a minor panic.
Backups are like insurance. You hope not to use it, but it’s there just in case. Could you live without your data stored in the cloud for an hour, a day, a week, a month?
Yeah, I couldn’t believe the price he was paying. But I think he had premium channels in the mix as well.
I would love to cut the cord but my family isn’t there yet. I did switch from cable to DirecTV and saved a ton of money thanks to their introductory pricing but if I could just drop it entirely when the contract is up in 18 months…I guess I have 18 months to inventory what we really watch and find out what the streaming options are for them.
Agreed. I do have valuable documents but they’re on Dropbox and on several computers. If Dropbox ceased to exist, the documents wouldn’t vanish from my laptop or desktop. I have Backblaze on my desktop to put my mind at ease. If my computer at work and laptop that I carry with me vanished at the same time as Dropbox and Backblaze vanished… well, then I imagine I’d have bigger worries.
I tried cord-cutting for a few months. But I never got the HD antenna working reliably. And with all the subscriptions we were buying for individual shows, I don’t know how much money we saved. Eventually the hassle proved too much and we went back to paying for cable.
My dock is on the left and auto-hides as well. Never really thought to do it until I heard it so often in the show. But in reality, with my workflow, it wouldn’t really matter where the dock is. I have removed every application I can from it and I never use it to launch apps. I launch everything with Hazel—takes one- or two keystrokes. I cycle between my running apps with a quick cmd-tab.
I go for days without even looking at the dock. The only thing I really do with the dock is to drop documents in the trash.
And speaking of Hazel, how about that beautiful 1P trick to launch a website and automatically log in with your 1Password credentials? I’m not sure I could even run a computer without Hazel.
I think cord cutting is often more about giving the cable company less money than it is saving money out of pocket (although with all the consolidation going on in the market, it’s the same half-dozen companies that ultimately get your money anyway…). There’s also the “everything is available on-demand” aspect of Hulu, Netflix, etc. which you don’t get with cable. But yeah, total it up and if you’re trying to replace all of the channels you watch frequently, you probably won’t save much money.
Do any of the services like Sling.tv have commercial skipping yet? The Tivo’s ability to skip commercials with one button press would be hard to live without.
We didn’t save that much but definitely found it a cost cutter. The truth is we’re not that much into the premium channels. We watch NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, ESPN, BTN and rarely one of the other stations. The Olympics or the Golf Channel. Beyond those we’re music listeners. It was a real waste to pay for 999 cable stations.
@artiscanaday What services did you use to replace the sports channels you mention? Throw in the food channels and yours list is almost exactly our list of most-watched channels.
You clean it…how? I mean, you can clean up your own content, but how can you clean up the system? On my own iMac, I recently found, after numerous system updates, frameworks that have been deprecated for some time and were not removed by the normal update processes. Because of this I am contemplating (with fear) my first nuke and pave ever!
Previously I was happy to just delete apps. Now I also have CleanMyMac, and will plan to run that before I upgrade to Mojave. I figure if libraries and frameworks aren’t doing any harm, they can just stay where they are.
Another popular MPU practice I don’t get: Self-rationing email time.
My problem isn’t spending too much time on email. It’s that I don’t keep up with email. I get hundreds of emails a day and I accept that there are important emails I just won’t be able to read and respond to. Sorry, people who send me email – I can’t even read your messages, let alone respond to them, and also do my job and live my life.
I peek at email literally every few minutes but only open open messages every couple of hours, when something comes over the transom that actually requires immediate attention.
I slammed down email sent to me by my staff. Very clear rules on when, what and why email me.
The most annoying ones were the FYI cc:. I sent out a very clear message: I am not interested in daily routine stuff. At all. Emailing me means you are not able to deal with something by yourself and the problem does not fit within the regular meeting structure. Department heads report to me very specific KPIs, so I won’t even read emails that address those. “I sent you an email about figure xyz”. No, didn’t read it, deleted it, will be reported to me on xyz. My predecessor was some kind of micro-manager that read and replied to everything. So it was a huge “educational” effort. But people got used to it and just by getting rid of all the FYIs, cc:, and “reply to all” cut my emails by 80+%. Thunderbird has an add-on that allows you to generate email statistics by time, sadly not available for Outlook. I’d really like to see the graph and the changes after enforcing some rules. Also very important: “recipient economy”. Ppl tended to include too many recipients. Rule: “As little as possible, only if necessary, no FYI”.
And so on.
I agree with the cable cutting. I cut the cable over a year ago. I now have Apple TVs on our primary TVs and a couple Rokus on smaller TVs (office and grandkids playroom). I subscribe to Netflix and Sling (for local sports), and have set up a Tablo for local over-the-air stations.
I was in the same boat. I upgraded my iMac which I had kept going from Snow Leopard onwards to Sierra. I always installed updates without doing a nuke and pave. But the system was seriously unstable and slow. I did use clean my Mac and freed up some disk space but this did nothing for performance. I had thought about getting a new iMac because I thought the issues were primarily hardware. But, then I decided to do a nuke and pave. The Mac works like a new machine. It also gave me the time to deliberate on what apps I really needed.
Coming from Windows, my biggest ‘miss’ in the beginning, was not being able to make my app windows full-screen. Not the ‘green-button’ max to take up everything including the menubar, just the ‘normal’ full-screen.
Moom etc. fixed this for me from the beginning.
But that’s the thing I never got/get.
I gather it is/was the norm, from the early days of the Mac OS, to _not_have windows ‘full’, but to tile/group them etc. The Siracusa et al approach.
Maybe it would be more feasible on a 5k 27", but in my iterations of 13", 15" and 24" monitors - apart from those few times when having two apps side-by-side on one screen made sense for a particular, temporary activity, I am virtually always running them full, on both/three monitors or through Spaces/Cmd+Tabbing.
And I have tried. But the compulsion becomes too strong after a few minutes, and they all get full-screened again. There are the few exceptions: Messages, Notes, etc. and any of the Font picker type pop-ups.
But if it’s something I am “working” in, I cannot tile/have it anything but full-screen…
