The thing about having old computers is that parts inevitably fail and replacing them becomes more difficult as time passes. The most common items to fail are hard drives, and replacement drives are getting rarer and more expensive every year. Luckily, thanks to the ingenuity of the retro computing community, there are modern ways to …
My Keychron K6
I bought a Keychron K6 from eBay recently and have been using it for a few weeks. I deliberately purchased one with clicky blue switches to test out the loudest option. I like this keyboard from a design perspective. It has a small form factor, about the size of an Apple Magic Keyboard. It doesn’t …
A Story of Keyboards
In October I came across an article on ArsTechnica about a kickstarter for a 1,200 page, two volume book chronicling the history of keyboards. While I had never previously been interested in the history of this device I use every day, I’m still a retro computing enthusiast and was naturally intrigued. After reviewing the campaign …
My New Dock
I’ve had a Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Express dock on my desk for 5 years or so. I got it with my work Mac, a 2018 MacBook Pro, to enjoy the single-cable docking experience. It’s worked great with my personal Macs as well, providing power, a 60 Hz refresh rate on my 4K display, and enough …
The 2023-24 iPhones
Yesterday Apple introduced the iPhones that will carry us into next year: the iPhone 15 (in regular, Max, Pro, and Pro Max varieties). On the whole they include Apple's typical improvements - better chips, better cameras, thinner bezels, and new colors. There is one big change this year, which will be impactful to everyone: USB-C. …
Charts & Graphs: Local Photo Storage
I've been talking a lot about my backup strategy recently and how I have both local and cloud components in it. While we use Time Machine for regular backups of our Macs, I've been using external drives to store our photos for many years. I've got two RAIDs that I use for that purpose. As …
An Adjustment to Our Backup Strategy
I recently posted about our backup strategy to ensure we had fast access in the event of a restore as well as protection in the event of a catastrophic loss. In that diagram, we use a 2011 MacBook Pro to backup data from our RAIDs up to Backblaze. That works very well except for the …
Our Backup Strategy
We have a lot of data, photos and videos mostly. I've got 60,000 images from my DSLRs, mostly RAW, going back to about 2006 and taking up around 1.4 TB of space. Outside of that we have all of our regular photos and videos from our phones and old-school digital cameras. That adds 62,000 more …
M2 MacBook Pro Performance Tests
I’m very meticulous when investing in new hardware and do a lot of research prior to purchasing. Once I buy something I like to understand the improvement in practical terms. I usually run performance benchmarks, but this time I went further with more tests and some graphs. These aren’t the fairest comparisons since the two …
Ordered My M2 MacBook Pro
Apple updated the MacBook Pro for the M2-series today. The updates were mostly a spec-bump as widely rumored, and that is fine with me. An M1-series MacBook Pro would provide what I need, but I've been waiting a bit since the M2 version was so close. In general, not much has changed. The form factors, …
Relatively Ambitious 