Tuesday, 17th May, 2022

I’ve yet to do anything whatsoever, and I will just move the mac mini temporarily, but I still feel that the better option is to sell the mac. I don’t want more choice, and more scope for distractions. Yes, iMessage, and Photos and safari handoff are nice but I think I made them out to be more beneficial that I thought. The biggest challenge will be photos. But even that isn’t really much of a challenge. I already store them in organised folders on the computer, I back these up to my friend’s server. There’s no face recognition, or auto memory generation, though but I could install DigiKam or Lightroom or something and use that. I don’t want to pay for Lightroom subscription, but I do have a key to classic or whatever the standalone version is called. Apple Photos has been nice but I’ve not really used much of it. Sometimes I open it and look at what it suggests, or I’ll find a photo from the library on my phone to show someone. But nothing that I could easily do without.

Printed photos is what I really want, and Apple Photos hasn’t helped with that…

The hardest part will be unwinding iCloud subscription to the 50GB tier and removing all my photos. The 2TB tier is only £7 a month but I have a lot of only £<10 month things and they do add up. I should do a subscription list and see what it is.

I won’t be selling the mac mini until an eBay seller offer comes along but I should be ready as it could be any weekend. I’ll sell the Apple Cinema 23” HD too, that’s going to be a pain to post but I don’t need it cluttering the house. Also the mac mini is a little slow, likely Photos app’s fault, and it’s stuck on some older version of macOS.

But I do worry that once I’ve sold it, I’ll miss having a mac for some reason. Probably the trackpad.

Finally setup the ThinkPad with the dock on my main monitors. Bluetooth and figuring out the sequence of power button pressing of the dock was a bit of a pain. Still not sure I know what it’s doing, especially when the screen doesn’t come on to enter the decrpytion password. GNOME handles it all well, except I think there’s probably an optimum power/wake/power button setting combination to make things smoother. One thing I can say though…

I LOVE IT! 🥰️

I’ve been trying out using gedit for editing this blog. It’s by no means as fully featured as VS Code, but it does still have a lot of tricks up its sleeve. There are a lot of plugins for it, and you can set custom scripts to run on a shortcut - basically any bash code you want. I have a quick git commit and push one. So with a simple Ctrl+Shift+p (for push) all the new posts are pushed. Good enough for me, and quicker than VS Code’s GUI.