Coffee heat rising

Mac-Cranking…Future Tense

So it seems to have worked, sort of: The scheme to copy all the MacBook’s data files over to DropBox is finally in place. It took half my lifetime, but there it is. All the system’s applications (and all the data files but two) are backed up on an external hard drive.

It took half my lifetime to accomplish this. And the system seems to be running slow…possibly because it’s still backing stuff up to DB. Notifications from DB keep popping up to the effect that this or that “shared file” just got stored.  But far as I can tell by looking at the DB file structure, everything seems to be up there and online.

In an hour or so, an independent Mac tech is supposed to show up at the door. When I proposed to schlep both computers to them, they counter-proposed to send their man here. Yay! And believe it or not, having him come here rather than me making two separate trips to Scottsdale to get each of two systems updated will save a few dollars. I think I’m in love with this outfit… <3

The new external drives I bought at Costco won’t run on the operating system presently installed in the two machines. So I’ll have to wait till MacDude gets here to plug those in and start them making extra Time Machine backups. Far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier.

Seriously: my plan is to back up to a different drive each week, so that at any given time should I get a ransomware attack, the files I really care about will have been backed up before the hackers could break in. If you’re just continuously letting Time Machine back up, obviously whatever is going into TM is also going to be affected by the ransomware code. Whereas if you have, say two (or even three) hard disks moving in rotation, at least one of those disks will be free of malicious code at the time you discover the code’s presence on your computer.

We’re also told that the latest versions of OS X offer a degree of protection against the current ransomware programs.

The OSX upgrade should allow me to install a cool little program called iBooks Author, which allows you to format e-books — even nonfiction books with graphics! — for sale through Apple (iTunes). This is a relatively small market. But since I’m not exactly getting rich on Google, I don’t care: I now regard the e-book publishing as more akin to a hobby than a business. And if it’s a hobby, creating an iBook looks like fun.

It also would make it possible to create attractive e-books for clients. If we’d had this option while Pete (the Mongolian Bank Magnate) was living, we could have made his book available in electronic format for all his friends, with all his photos intact and in full glowing color. Unless you decide to use an offset printer, you really can’t do a print-on-demand book with color images. He was disappointed about that, and I felt bad that we couldn’t satisfy his wishes.

He did, of course, want hard copy. But if we’d been able to produce a really attractive e-book readable on a tablet (as opposed to a clunky Kindle), he might have been satisfied with that.

So…it’s another option.

I’m also going to install Pages. This, I think, would be worth learning. Pages will convert a file to ePub, which is good. It will do for bookoids with very simple format: no graphics, just long toilet-paper rolls of gray space. That, of course, defines a work of fiction.

Additionally, Pages supposedly will now talk to Word pretty efficiently. Yesterday I came across a claim that you can do the same kinds of edits in Pages as you can in Word’s “Track Changes” function, and convert the whole thing over to Word.

Now, I’ll believe that when I see it. BUT…if it will convert and hang onto comments, and if it will bring a Word document into pages so I can read and edit it, then working back and forth between the two programs might be easier than it sounds.

I no longer edit copy in “Track Changes.” Instead, we’ve been using “Compare Documents,” which is less unstable than “Track Changes.” Instead of making edits that are visible onscreen in real time, open the file you’re going to edit and save to disk under a new name. Then simply make the changes you desire, as though it were your document, your golden words you were polishing. When done, run “Compare Documents” on the original, unedited document to generate a second file that shows everything you did as tracked changes. Save to disk quickly, before the damn thing corrupts and crashes your system… 😉

So the question is, would a document that had been edited and polished in Pages, then converted to Word, allow you to do that? I don’t see any reason that it wouldn’t. The only question is whether comments would come across intact.

If they do, then the whole endless headache of having to work in Wyrd would be resolved (assuming Pages isn’t weird, too…). And it would moot the issue of being forced, by way of upgrading my out-of-date Word program, to rent Word and put my clients’ proprietary work in the Cloud.

I do not want to do either of those. If there’s a way I can make Pages generate an edited Word file, it would keep me in business for another couple of years and spare me a great deal of aggravation.

Next: to decide whether to buy a new Mac.

The business has done exceptionally well so far this year. In fact, I could afford to buy a pricey new MacBook. And I probably should, because the one I’m working on right now has about reached the end of its life.

However, I’m put off by two things:

Reviews of the new MacBooks have not been what you’d call stellar. The absence of USB ports: not good. No, I do not want a dongle hanging off the damn thing. I do most of my work sitting in a big leather chair that does not hurt by back, with my feet on an ottoman to further forestall back pain. Some doodad flopping around my lap is not gonna make me happy.

And the price. When I bought the two machines I have now, I had a good job with a good income. I could afford to spend stupid amounts of money on a cult computer.

Now I do not have a decent income. It’s very hard to justify spending upwards of $1500 when I could by a PC that does the same thing for a fraction of the price.

On the other hand, there’s…Microsoft. God help us. One of Funny’s readers reports that the new Windows 10 shuts down and reboots at its convenience — interrupting you in the middle of whatever you happen to be doing. That would make me screaming batsh!t CRAZY.

Not that the Mac doesn’t render me batsh!t with some regularity.

7 thoughts on “Mac-Cranking…Future Tense”

  1. Not all MS Word features are supported in Pages. Apple has a chart (https://www.apple.com/mac/pages/compatibility/) showing what does and does not convert correctly. Also in converting back to .docx from .pages text comments will remain but other edits will be treated as accepted upon conversion.

    Microsoft pushes the Office365 subscription model, but you can still purchase Office as a stand-alone installation. And yes, Microsoft offers their cloud as a storage option, but files can be stored locally. Though if you’re using Dropbox with client projects, you’re already storing client files in the cloud. https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Office-Home-Business-2016-for-Mac/productID.323023600/?vid=323801700

    • My plan, if comments will stay in place in conversion from Pages to Wyrd, is to use Compare Documents in Wyrd. So any changes that were made in Pages and then came over into Word wouldn’t appear as track changes: Wyrd would see a new document, one that has comments in it. Doing a “compare documents” with the author’s original will then generate a third flle showing all the differences as tracked changes. Ingenious, eh?

  2. I buy new laptops all the time, I refuse to work with slow technology. However, my 2013 MacBook Pro is still humping along and I have no plans to update it for a couple of years. Whatever you buy, make sure it has a solid-state drive (SSD) – nothing improves performance like that. I always buy high-end and stuff them full of RAM but that might be pricey on a Mac.

    I don’t lend much credence to laptop reviews. They always complain about battery life; I don’t care, I’m always plugged in. As for lack of standard USB ports, oh well. Technology moves ahead. I don’t miss SD card readers, I hardly ever use them anymore. And Dropbox eliminates (mostly) the need for thumb drives, which are irritating anyway.

    Your idea of rotating backup media is a good one. I hope Time Machine gets along with it.

    • Okay, but how do you get your photos off your camera if your camera won’t talk to your computer except through a USB port (nonexistent??) or through a sim card (slot gone?)? My camera will not take pictures at all unless the sim card is installed, and no, I can’t afford to buy a new camera and no, I can’t afford upwards of a hundred bucks a month for a cell phone. WHERE do people get the money for these things, and more interestingly, where on earth do their souls find the patience and tolerance to have to fiddle with “upgrades” and “improvements” constantly?

      We put in a nice solid-state drive, and the machine does seem to be running much better. I don’t at all care for the new OSX update — it apparently disables functions I use _all_ the time, or hides them, or makes them harder to use. Every time you update an operating system, this kind of thing happens…which, dear Apple and Microsoft developers, makes updating mighty aversive for some of us. 😀

      • My photos wirelessly sync with my computer. The traditional USB port is showing its age and beginning to go the way of the dodo in favor of the smaller USB C and other wireless option? For now, to attach a traditional USB device you can get a USB C to USB adapter fairly inexpensively that would allow you to still connect an older device.

      • So one question i have is will the USB C port allow your computer to speak wirelessly to an external hard drive? That could come in very handy for backing up data in Time Machine.

  3. The USB C port itself would not allow wireless communication with an external disk. To connect to the disk wirelessly, you would need to setup the external disk using wi-fi or bluetooth. For example, the Apple Airport Extreme has a traditional USB port where you can plug in an external hard drive and access it over your home wi-fi network.

Comments are closed.