Category Archives: Technology’s Betrayal

Not If, But When

Last week Jordan’s four-year-old white plastic MacBook started to freeze up. Fearing the worst, I immediately cloned her machine to an external drive. A few days later the dreaded folder with a ? appeared (has that replaced the sad Mac face?) and it refused to boot up. I ordered a 250GB, 7200rpm drive off Amazon as a replacement. I guess that 250GBs is the new entry-level for laptop drives.

When the drive arrived today I dropped it into my toaster dock, fired up Super Duper! and cloned the backup drive back to the new drive. It took about one hour. Once I found my Torx screwdriver it was just a matter of popping the battery off, taking off three screws, pulling out the drive bay, and swapping the dead drive for the new one. I put everything back into place, fired it up, and…the ? folder popped up again. But only for a second. The Apple logo showed up after that, and the machine booted up cleanly.

The whole experience reinforced what I always tell my friends: hard drives will fail. Not IF, but WHEN. I think I’ve had three hard drive failures over the last ten years, including this one. Cloning your drive regularly can get you back up and running much faster than trying to take your computer in to your local computer repair shop and hoping they can dredge some data out of your dead drive.

What could I have done better? I should have been backing up to a laptop drive, so that I could have just popped that in instead of waiting a week for Amazon’s super saver shipping to deliver the replacement drive. I also need to start cloning both of our laptops on a more regular basis. I’ve gotten lazy with mine, since I also have online backup via Backblaze. A local, physical backup is still preferable to online backup for quick restores, however.

TextMate 2 May Never Come

John Gruber at Daring Fireball linked to this particular post by Watts Martin on the choices facing current TextMate users. John Gruber quoted the humorous first paragraph which asks users to face the reality of abandonment, but it’s this paragraph that sums it up for me:

First off: if you are a Mac user and compatibility with TextMate is an absolute must-have, let me ask you two questions. Is TextMate 1.5 still working for you? Can you keep living with its limitations? If you answered both those questions “yes,” our work is done here. Go in peace.

At the recently-concluded An Event Apart conference in Boston I saw TextMate windows on a lot of laptop screens, (including the presentations by Jeremy Keith). That tells me that lots of people are still finding TextMate 1.5 to be an effective tool, despite its shortcomings. TextMate 2 may never come, but for many people (myself included) TextMate 1.5 continues to work just fine.

For the rest who can’t/won’t use any of the alternatives suggested by Martin, you can keep checking the TextMate 2 status page.

The NY Times Digital Subscription

I’ve been thinking a lot about the New York Times’ new digital subscription, and I’ve enjoyed reading the posts about it by Khoi Vinh and John Gruber. This post by Mandy Brown, however, sums it up quite nicely for me:

First, I resent the pay structure that the Times proposes: it is vastly cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday paper (a habit long ago abandoned) than to read the news on all my various devices. I can think of no other reason for this strategy than to protect the already dwindling print subscription model; as such, the paywall is a tactic for the way down—a means to temporarily sustain a business that is destined to fail eventually. I find it difficult to fund a ship when its own captain admits that it’s sinking.

The different pricing levels for mobile devices also irk me. It’s insulting because they seem like a cynical attempt to wring more money from users based on an artificial distinction between mobile device screen sizes. They remind me of how Hulu draws a similarly artifical line between a computer monitor (Hulu) and a television screen/mobile device (Hulu Plus), in the hopes of preserving the established business model that serves the networks and cable/satellite providers.

I certainly think that the NY Times has every right to charge for its content. I would have no problems paying for that content if it were coherent, and reflective of its value. But it’s not. Again, Mandy Brown says it better than I can:

Similarly, the high price of their subscriptions seems to stem from the assumption that they will be the sole paper anyone subscribes to; they have presumed their position as paper of record.

The net result is that this week I’m searching for alternative sources for my news. Perhaps the NY Times will finally settle on a pricing structure that makes more sense, but I wonder if I’ll care at that point.