#Osx

Every year, I post on the software tools and workflows I’m using. I always pick up tips from seeing other people’s posts outlining their tools and workflows and it’s helped tweak and improve my toolchain to squeeze out extra productivity. This is what the end of 2019 looked like in tooling.

I’m always mildly surprised when I do this post how much my setup evolves over the course of a year. Sure, there’s innovation in software, and slow changes are often the hardest to see, but as I’m always trying to simplify things GTD-wise changes can be pretty dramatic year to year. For the interested, you can see the 2019 , 2018 , and 2017 editions of these posts as well if you’re digging for some better ways to do things, especially as we’re in the new year (and decade!).

With a Macbook 12" update unsighted in two years, and Apple releasing a revamped Macbook Air last year, I started considering whether my next laptop needed to be Linux. Surprisingly though, the issue became not so much Linux as the OS, as PC laptop hardware available. Early 2019, this is how I saw my options.

My trusty Macbook 12" 2016 has been a shockingly excellent laptop for my needs: ridiculously light (<1kg) with a bright retina screen and enough memory and storage to get everything I need done (8GB RAM and 512GB SSD respectively). Completely silent since it has no fan, and with the nice reliability side effect that comes from not a single moving part, my only complaints to date have been about battery life and a processor that could have been a tad punchier (though perhaps thermally incompatible with fanless cooling). I’ve been super happy with it (and do most processing heavy-lifting in the cloud anyway) so despite my initial worries about purchasing one in 2016, my complaints have been very few. More than three years with a laptop is a record. Laptops rarely survive 18 months under my cruelty.

Every year I like doing a refresh on my Desktop tools posts 2018 here and 2017 here . I’m constantly tweaking and clarifying my toolchain to try and eek a bit more productivity out of my tools.

I’m still on my trusty, early-2016 Macbook which is now going on three years old, but I’m mow at the point I could probably move over to Linux with little disruption. Also, investigating ways to do things cross-platform has really added better arrows to the quiver. Strangely, now the issue in moving to Linux is finding a laptop as good, light, and powerful as the Macbook I currently have (and additionally, is fanless and silent.).

It’s time for the 2018 refresh of the Desktop tools I use . I’m amazed what changes year-to-year as I try to simplify and clarify my toolchain and productivity.

Some of the evolutionary changes were interesting as I started experimenting with moving off the Apple ecosystem and moving back to Linux and an environment I move directly control and can future-proof. In particular, it’s brought up interesting compromises (and opportunities) I’d have to consider before making the leap.

I love reading Uses This where people share their tools and workflows. I’ve sniped some great tools from their posts. And back in 2004 when I started the blog, one of my most popular posts was about the tools I’d moved over to as an Apple switcher and early adopter. Time for a 2017 refresh post.

The first thing that amazes me is how much the character of my desktop and tools have changed over a decade. I’ve also changed my tastes considerably to tool selection and usage. I’ve shifted over time to moving to simpler, well-designed tools, with a much greater emphasis on text formats and simpler syncing and future-proofing, as well as adding much fewer things judiciously rather than trying to jumping to the next shiny thing unless it has a clear and compelling value over my current stack in productivity or problems it can solve.

Strangely, one of the earliest things I learned in unix computing was crontab -e. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say, the reason I learned to use vim in the first place, was so I could fire off automated jobs in cron while I slept (Don’t ask. Mine was a complex childhood. :-) ).

I’ve never been a fan of Apple’s launchd replacement on the OSX operating system.

Everyone I know that deals with large amounts of data has been looking closer at Hadoop as it’s matured. Especially with tools like Hive, old datawarehouse hands are taking a serious look at it as a better type of long time data archive and storage. You probably should too.

While most of the time for the types of real work you’d be doing, it makes more sense to spin up Amazon’s EC2, Elastic Map Reduce or another flavour of virtualized Hadoop instance in the cloud for the clustering and crunching benefits, it’s very good to have a local install for development and testing.

[Updated: 2013-01-08 - A lot of people asked for Postgres instructions]

After my faithful Macbook Air went down hard in Tonga, I was really surprised at the number of outdated posts, misinformation and general number of questions (even on Stack Overflow), on how to install a Rails dev environment from scratch on a new OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion machine.

This HOWTO runs from zero to getting you to what I consider a naked dev environment where you’re good enough to start and source control a project and issue a rails new command. It starts from a totally fresh install of Mountain Lion with all system updates.

While getting my new system back to the way my old system was configured, I’ve been very surprised at the amount of old, outdated information on setups floating around the web.

For example, a few months back Chrome provided a new way to have both mailto: links and your default system mail handler in OSX set up from the browser. Google searches still point to the outdated and cumbersome methods to do it. Here’s the easier way…

Sure, they make it cutesy, but you have no idea how often this actually happens. Disaster recovery in most orgs is not given anywhere near the attention it deserves. If it can happen to Pixar, it can happen to you.

So, um… do your backups kids. And make sure you have offsite backups as well! I use Crashplan myself (which works on Win, Mac and Linux) though was using Haystack’s Arq on my Mac until very recently as well. Seriously, the minimal cost is nothing compared to losing photos or critical docs. Believe me.