It’s time for the latest Lab Report from MacSparky, covering this week’s Apple news and updates…
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It’s time for the latest Lab Report from MacSparky, covering this week’s Apple news and updates…
This is a post for MacSparky Labs Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?
It’s easy to get hung up on creating date-related shortcuts when you don’t know when the shortcut will actually run in the future. Did you know you can use relative dates in Shortcuts? Here’s an explanation how it works…
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It’s that time again. Mike and I are proud to announce the release of the 2023 Focused Wall Calendar. This wall calendar works great when you hang it within sight of your desk. It’s that big thing you can look at before taking on a new commitment to make sure you aren’t already in over your head. That’s how I use mine, at least.
I also like this calendar because it easily lets me plan out the big rock projects of my year. For instance, I’m spending lots of time working on the Obsidian Field Guide over the next few months. I need to look no further than my wall for confirmation of that fact.
This is the fourth year we’ve sold these calendars, and we’ve received so much positive feedback from folks putting them on their walls. Moreover, the calendars get better every year. Here are a few of the features we’ve got built into the 2023 iteration:
In addition to all of the above, this year, we’re also giving you a digital download for Today’s Action Plan. It’s a digital file you can write on with your iPad or your Remarkable to plan your day with your tablet. This is an excellent combination with the Focused calendar. I’ve been using the Daily Action Plan over the past month as we’ve been perfecting it for you, and I love it. (Power tip: export the action plan to Day One!)
You can get it all now for just $30 plus shipping. Get yours today.
It’s not too late to sign up for my deep dive tomorrow on window management for Tier 3 (Early Access) MacSparky Labs members…
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Backblaze, the online backup service I use, buys many spinning disk hard drives. And by a lot, I mean over 230,000 drives. They also keep data on which drives last and which fail. That’s pretty important when you are buying on their scale.
The good news for the rest of us is that they routinely share that data. Here’s the most recent data on their drives. A few things that stood out to me:
4TB used to be the standard drive size. Now they are buying 16TB drives. These days you can put a lot of storage on a spinning disk.
Even though manufacturers are better than ever at making reliable spinning disk drives, older ones still fail at an accelerating rate over time. If you use a spinning disk in your backup routine, you need to replace them occasionally. This is obvious, but seeing the data helps send that point home.
I had some four-year-old drives last year (the last two spinning drives in my fleet). I rotate the two drives locally and offsite as a last-line-of-defense backup. They hadn’t started failing, yet I knew they didn’t have much gas left in the tank, so I replaced them. The good news is that because spinning drives are getting so cheap, the cost to replace them is only going down, and spinning drives are just fine for these backup/archive-type jobs for most people.
Check out the Backblaze statistics if you’d like to get a better idea of who’s making the best spinning drives today.
On this episode of Focused, Mike and I consider the focus benefits of mind mapping and discuss the tools and methods we use to think beyond the outline.
This episode of Focused is sponsored by:
In this Friends of Dave (FOD) interview, screenwriter and Mac nerd Willliam Gallagher joins me to talk about Stage Manager, Apple Mail, and Task Managers. William also shares some of his secrets on how he makes time to write… This is a post for MacSparky Labs Tier 2 (Backstage) and Tier 3 (Early Access) Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?
Over the years, I’ve used a lot of tricks to put iPhone and Apple Watch frames around screenshots, but none of them have been as easy (or as good) as Federico Viticci’s Apple Frames Shortcut. They just released the latest update today, and if you ever want to share a screenshot with a frame around it, this is the way to go.
We’ve got some excellent MPU Apparel on sale, but just for a few more days. The Classy T, Sweatshirt, and Zipped Hoodie, all with the woven MPU battery. It’s a classy design on quality apparel. This year, we’ve added the sweatshirt, which feels more like a sweater. I have one and love it. I’ve ordered more. Either way, just a few days left so check it out.
I hope everyone enjoyed an extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning. The whole thing with shifting time from Standard to Daylight Saving always seemed a little crazy to me…
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