It’s Been A While

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I’m as guilty as the next person.  I mean to post in a blog regularly and I do for a short time, and then it gets neglected.

Whats been occurring?

A few months ago, I had the opportunity  to buy a secondhand iPad Mini 2 for a good price so I did. It’s been a real useful addition too. I like the size; quite frankly my Samsung Galaxy NotePro 12.2 is too big to chuck in a car at pocket and carry around everywhere.

Then the PC died. I’d been running Windows 10 Technical Preview on it for the best part of a year, and it was certainly better than Windows 8, but it was still prone to annoying slowdowns and lock ups.

AppleI decided to go for a Mac instead. My current budget wouldn’t stretch to a Mac Pro, and as I already had a decent  Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse and a widescreen monitor only a few months old, a Mac Mini fitted the bill just right.

As I had my data on external drives and in the cloud, set up was a doddle, and I was up and running in no time.  Of course, when you’re running software, the Operating System should really just be there in the background taking care of everything and OS X does just that. None of those hang ups or slowdowns either. I’m happy with the switch, and perhaps a new iPhone might logically complete this change to a new ecosystem.

I’ve actually been writing this post on my iPad Mini. I’d be the first to say I’d rather be using a full size keyboard, but the experience hasn’t been too bad. Better than blogging anything more than a couple of sentences from a smartphone!

 

 

 

Day #1 of 13

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[ad name=”Banner 728*90″]Starting today I’ve got thirteen days off the day job.  I don’t know why I call it the ‘day’ job, as it’s all hours of the day and night. In fact the only time I don’t work is all the way thru the night.

Keyboard

I got up this morning with plans to get some work done at the computer, but my plans have been somewhat frustrated by issues with the desktop.

I really need to do a clean install of Windows 8.1,  so first up was an order for a 120GB SSD, so I’ll have a new, fast, drive on which to re-install a hopefully somewhat faster booting OS. At the same time this leaves all my data intact on the existing 1TB hard drive that’s now the boot drive within the machine.

Installing the drive when it arrives tomorrow (I do love Amazon’s free next day delivery option with Prime – even though it’s increased in price with  video streaming added).

In my experience,  the hardware install is almost always the quick, easy, part. It’s the OS re-install that takes the time.

Canon & Coffee
Canon & Coffee

Another job I’m undertaking is converting all my RAW photo files to DNG. I’ve already had a few issues in the past with read issues when Camera Raw has been updated,  and it was unable to read the RAW format from my mew Canon 70D. That issue is sorted now, but it was another time-wasting problem while it lasted.

Once they all converted I’m going to move them all from the hard drive to an external drive. That not only frees up space on the desktop’s hard drive, but it allows me to have the added portability of  working with Lightroom and Photoshop on my laptop when I want to.

I currently have my RAW files backed up in the cloud on Google Drive, but I’ve decided to move to Backblaze as it’s a better price point, and allows for unlimited backups at no extra charge, including the aforementioned external drive(s).

Tablet
NotePro 12.2

Other computer related tasks in the next few days include sorting out my untidy collection of mp3 files, and getting those properly catalogued, and then synchronizing them in iTunes Match.

After all that I might get time to get a bit of gardening done, and sink a few pints of good craft beer. In fact, it’s almost beer o’clock as I type,  so I think that could be my very next task. Now, where’s my scarf, it’s cold outside.

Blogging From the iPad

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Coffee
Cappuccino

Having never had any Apple devices before, I have to say that I’m quite enjoying the iPad mini 2 that I bought a few weeks ago. I rather like the size; it’s certainly more manageable than my Samsung Galaxy NotePro 12.2

I’m trying out a new blogging app called BlogPad Pro.

It’s certainly more WYSIWYG than the official WordPress app that I’ve been using on my Android devices is. Mind you I have admit I still prefer to use the full size keyboard at my desktop for extended sessions.