Wednesday 08/10/2022
Main activity today was to lead a tour of 20 Apple employees at the museum. Given a knowledgeable group and a private tour, I stretched out to some topics I don’t normally do, but kept them to the end.
Back home I worked on Lois’s iMac. This is a 2014-era iMac that Lois has replaced. It was running very slowly and I want to try reformatting the hard disk to see if it will go faster. But before I do that, I promised I would save the files to an external drive. Although she prepped her new iMac from a backup of this one, she is afraid there might be something she missed.
To do a backup I need a large capacity flash drive, so I bought one off Amazon. Unfortunately after wasting a couple of hours formatting it and having it fail, I looked at the reviews on Amazon and discovered others violently dissing it as a fraud and a scam. So I wasted $30 on a supposedly 1TB thumb drive that doesn’t work. I ordered another from a reputable maker. Meanwhile I’m trying to take dumps of specific users (there are 4 user folders defined on this system and I’m not sure which of them have useful files) onto a smaller thumb drive, and the iMac is behaving strangely. It’s kind of buggered, basically. She was smart to replace it when she did. I am reading up at ifixit.com on how to replace its hard drive with an SSD, but I am wondering if it’s worth it, given that it can’t run the latest OS.
I updated my own 27-inch iMac (2015 retina) and found that it, too can’t run the latest OS, only the one before.
In lieu of a floor meeting, because it’s tradition to have no formal meetings in August, we had a 6th floor cocktail party this afternoon. After cheese and crackers and wine I was nodding off. Such a party animal I am.
Codgerville 