Domestication

No, not me, that happened long ago. This is computer domestication. Here's a hint.

 For some of you this is no big deal. Last time I did it was about 9 years ago which is an eternity in computer time. It seems like just last week I was consulting with a buddy about the various Mac models then on offer, and buying a fairly high end (for the time) iMac. 

It served me well, ingesting well over a quarter million photos. I'm not sure how many have been edited, since some have multiple edits, one set going to a client's social media folder, and another set of those going to their web sized folder. Or even me doing multiple edits trying different things. I just know there are 57,700 items in the folder I export to. Make of it what you will.

I never had any problems with it, and it's still doing it's thing. Just last weekend it ingested 1100 photos from a race, and then I edited. Let's just say there was a lot of computer chugging and I had to be patient. I had maxed out the OS and was still several version behind, which meant I was behind on Lightroom upgrades as well. I'm just now beginning to explore what I missed out on. 

Let's go back. Of course there was some dithering about upgrading. It used to be a fairly simple process. There were the pro machines for the geeks, and some pro-sumer models. Typically the strategy was to buy at the low end of the scale for memory and storage, then do third party upgrades as necessary. I added more memory to several of my computers along the way.

Well, Apple caught on to that game. Now when you buy one of their computers you have to decide up front how much memory and processing power to buy because it can't be upgraded afterward. What people are doing now is buying maybe a bit more memory than they think they'll need, and maybe a bit more processing power to future proof it as much as possible, but without getting stupid about it. Chips and memory are expensive, and their SSD storage gets stupidly expensive quite quickly. At least we can still add external storage. 

As a digression, because I know you're going to ask, and you know photos eat memory, there is 1 TB on board, 24 TB in a RAID drive, 10 TB in a another drive, and several portable external drives not currently in use that add up, I think, to 11 TB. I'll need to look at them and see what's on there. That isn't counting a handful of USB sticks of varying capacities. I had a kludgy way of off site storage that doesn't work anymore so I need to take a serious look at Backblaze. 

As a digression within a digression, let's talk about computer memory for a minute. In 1956 a 5 MB (yes, megabyte) hard drive weighed a ton, and was the size of a large refrigerator. There's a famous photo of one being loaded by forklift onto an airplane that you've probably seen, and if you haven't, it isn't hard to find. The average seek time was 600 ms, and for a modern hard drive it's 5 to 10 ms, and the SSD drives are faster yet. It leased for about $35,000 a month in today's money. 

I don't know how to express how much memory has changed. SD cards are about the size of a postage stamp and are 2mm thick. I have a bunch of 32 GB cards, and they're considered small now. I have a 128 GB card, and I've seen 256 GB cards. Several of my readers know lots more about computer programming than I do, and can probably speak to the agonies they went through trying to make programs as small and efficient as possible because the memory size constraints were brutal.  Now, everyone knows about bloatware, (looking at YOU Microsoft and Adobe!)  and it's one of reasons computers need constant upgrading. It's a never ending cycle, chips got smaller and faster, memory got smaller and cheaper, so software expanded to fill the space. They rushed to get the product out the door, bugs and all, and didn't care about efficiency. Sigh.

Just for fun, a joke you've probably heard. Q: whats the definition of a software feature? A: A bug with seniority. 

For ordinary people increased storage media sizes means its easy to store something just in case, and maybe multiple copies in multiple places, or successive versions of it, just in case. Then some years later you look at an arcane file name and wonder what the heck it is, and which of two (or more) versions is the real one, because it might not be the most recent one.

I probably would have bought another 27 inch iMac, if it was on offer. Not. The 24 inch was a distinct step back even with the faster chip, so that was an easy no. Then there is the Mac Mini, a sort of successor to the cube I had for a bunch of years, and still have, in a box somewhere. (Anyone want to buy a vintage Mac Cube complete with a large display monitor?) It doesn't have port for an SD card so that's at least one adapter, and it needs a screen, keyboard, and mouse. Lots of processing power though, probably more than enough. Then there's the studio desktop. Lots of ports, and more than enough processing power for me. Overkill probably, and there's still a monitor to buy. 

Then there's the MacBook Air and Pro because sometimes I travel with a camera and want to be able to copy the photos onto an actual hard drive, and being able to edit is a great bonus. It's nice to write on a laptop rather than a desktop. Sometimes I give photo presentations, and the old Air (2012 vintage) struggled. Plus, maybe, just maybe, I might have a photo shoot where I need to be tethered to the computer. I did that once and the client really liked it. I'll need to figure out the cable situation for that. All the preceding have a bewildering number of upgrades to chips, memory, and storage. 

So yes, there was dithering and filling out a spreadsheet with the different options. Eventually a decision, and action, mainly because I found a deal on a refurbished Apple monitor. Yes, it's possible to get cheaper monitors that are almost as good. But then there's the search and decision, and hoping it will play nice with the laptop. My thinking is that I'll be looking at the monitor for years, and I'm spoiled from the iMac monitor.

Apple makes it easy to migrate from one computer to another. It walks you through the process. Since I didn't have a cable that would plug into both, I used WIFI and was prepared to wait. When I first got it going it took forever to do the first file, like a minute, then a bunch more, then it said 4 hours at about 65Mb/s. I ate dinner and read a bit, and then it said 40 minutes, which I didn't quite believe. I didn't time the whole process but it was under an hour. 

I started poking around and Carbon Copy Cloner, the software I use for backups, popped up and got a bit pissy about upgrades, and it didn't quite seem to know which tasks were to get done or where some of the folders were. I'll need to look at that a bit more thoroughly as I do some more file housekeeping.

Then onto Lightroom. The Creative Cloud files that Lightroom likes to see didn't come over so I had to download that, and then upgrade Lightroom. Or maybe it was the other way around. Eventually I got it all sorted. The stressful part is remembering all the passwords.

Along the way I played with different ways of seeing the laptop and external display. I think I've got it the way I like it now, and it looks fabulous! Along the way I learned that I can't just unplug the monitor, I need to eject the 2 external hard drives first. Plus, just at this very moment I'm listening to one of my favourite tracks for editing, a cover of Inna-Gadda-da-Vida by Sina. It sounds fabulous! Oh, and the finger print sensor thingie works great. Though I should probably log in with my password every now and then so I don't forget it.

I was out this morning for a round the garden photo tour, mostly to gather a batch of photos to run into Lightroom. Ingesting and building previews for 100 photos took well under a minute. Going from photo to photo to triage them was instant. Editing was fast. So I'm happy. There was brief hiccup on export. Lightroom just needed to be reassured that the folder they normally go to was still there. The slowest part of the process now seems to be reading the data from the SD card. Next time I import 1,000 photos I'll have to time it.

At the moment the laptop and new monitor are jammed onto one side of the desk, and the old iMac is on the other side. The plan is to clean off what is no longer needed on it, load up a ton of photos on the old iMac, and set them up as a screensaver to run all the time. That we we get to see the photos. I've watched them go by, and can remember when and where for all of them. That turned out to be quick and easy. There was lots of room for a folder with all the exported photos. The screen saver looks at that, and now the photos are in a slow scroll from side to side, with a variety of frames around each, which is kind of cool.

To move the old computer I'll need to investigate the rats nest of cables under the desk. I vacuumed under there yesterday. There are more cables plugged in than I remembered, and at the moment I have no idea where they go or what they do. I'll need to carefully follow cables. There are 15 power cables plugged into two surge protectors, and a pair of outlets. As it turns out one of the cables was charging up a first gen iPad that was last used to play music into the stereo system. That was maybe 10 years ago as proof of concept, and that iPad will no longer charge up and the software is beyond obsolete. Off to the e-recycling bin. It makes me a bit sad to toss away something that was expensive and worked well at the time. That iPad was used a lot to play music while I was on the bike spin trainer as I prepared for Ironman.

The actual move of the old iMac and set up of screen saver went without a hitch. I really should go get a bigger surge protector and rearrange cables. I'm not entirely sure the power bars under the desk are actually surge protectors. And did you know that you can buy a surge protector for your whole house? An electrician can install one on the main incoming line upstream of your circuit breaker box. Maybe I'll have that done when we convert the basement lighting over to LED's and build in a red light for the darkroom.

What all do I have plugged in, you ask? Let's see:

• Phone. Yes, a landline phone. It's nice to have a phone number to give to people you don't want to talk to. We never answer it unless we expect a call, or the person talks to the voice mail, and it's someone we want to talk to, and it's possible to pick up.
• Paper shredder.
• Computer monitor.
• Laptop charge cable.
• 24 TB hard drive.
• 10 TB hard drive.
• Lamp.
• Router.
• WIFI
• Stereo power amp.
• Stereo something else. And maybe another something else. Then again, I can't remember the last time we actually turned the stereo on. Mostly we listen to music through the computers. It wasn't so long ago that stereo systems were a thing, and that's another digression we won't get into.
• One power bar plugged into the other, and it's plugged into the wall, which is probably not the way it's supposed to be done.
• Portable heater to keep my feet warm, and yes, it's plugged into the wall when in use.
• Hmmm. I think I'm missing something. When I untangle, I think I'll put a little piece of tape on each cord to tag what it's running.

Negative Lab pro seems to work but I don't have any film developed to try the whole process. Maybe this weekend. I'm not sure if I'm on the current version. If it works I'm not sure I care.

Bookwrite fired up just fine, though I don't know what my next book project will be. 

There's a new icon called iPhone mirroring that I'll have to see if it does anything useful. Just looked, and maybe it's because I'm a geezer and don't get it, but, I don't get the point. And yes, I turned Siri and Apple Intelligence off, off, and OFF. At least I think I've done so. Maybe our robot overlords are just fooling me and they ignore those settings as they gather data to further their fell purpose.

The laptop to do list, because I've got to hit the publish button here sooner or later:

• Tidy some of the power cable rats nest.
• Look at file folder setup on the external drive. Prune and simplify.
• Related to that, dive into CCC and redo task list to simplify ongoing maintenance.
• Get my fingers used to the new setup. Think about the ergonomics of the whole thing.
• Think about if I want to migrate Scrivener and files from the old Air. At the least I need to backup the files. Right now that means using an SD card to transfer file because that's the only storage media the computers have in common. Neither the laptop or monitor have any of the old rectangular USB outlets, which means adapters. Sigh. That could lead into another digression about Apple and aggressively removing things to make devices smaller and cheaper. 3.5 inch floppy disks. Optical disks. Several different ports for connecting to peripherals. There's probably more if I were to think about it for a few minutes.

Anyway, I'm happy I did this, even if the road was a bit dithery along the way. In a week I'll probably be asking myself why I waited so long. Then again, technology updates are a Red Queen's race that I'm not much interested in. I stonewalled a Roger's sales team the other day, trying to get me on their system. He kept saying sports net, or something like that, and didn't get I had zero interest in that. The up and download speeds were blah blah blah, and the current speeds are just fine. All for more money.

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