blog.8-p.info

My 2017 MacBook Pro couldn’t keep up with the world, in terms of its storage space. Namely both Xcode and macOS installer are getting bigger and bigger. So my first computer errands in 2022 is installing a third-party SSD in the MacBook Pro.

Feather M17 SSD

I bought Fledging’s Feather M17 SSD (1TB) from Amazon.

Installing the SSD was cumbersome. Fledging’s video and iFixit’s guide were quite helpful.

Time Capsule and Migration Assistant

The kit includes drivers and a bootable USB drive. The drive and the SSD themselves have macOS already. However the version was slightly outdated and they couldn’t read my Time Capsule backup, made by Big Sur. So I had to first create a bootable Monterey installer. After formatting the SSD as APFS, I installed Monterey there and used Migration Assistant to restore data from the backup.

All soldered MacBooks

By the way, this particular 2017 non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro is the last non-soldered SSD model. After that, all MacBooks have soldered SSDs. While Apple is correcting Touch Bar and some other questionable hardware decisions, they haven’t made Macs upgradable. Probably never.

So, I may not buy these all-soldered Macs anymore, at least as my daily driver. My first Mac was iBook G4, which I could swap the battery by just having a coin. No screws. Now the battery is glued. We went way too far.

I’ve been reading about “digital gardening”, starting from Maggie Appleton’s A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.

It is an interesting movement which reminds me the web before blogging. Digital gardens are

• Inter-connected than chronological
• More iterative than “fire and forget”
• More authentic than polished, performative blogging

In my view, blogging vs. digital gardening is unnecessary binary. It may be more like a spectrum. Some blogs are more garden-ish and some of them are more like magazines.

Blogging is constrained. It is a trade-off.

That being said, I do agree that blogging is constrained, compared to what digital medium could possibly do. The constraints are trade-offs. Blogging makes WWW more like magazines, better or worse. It is more familiar, easy to start, maintain and follow others. We are not hypertext natives.

I’m currently reading Own Your Tech Career. One of the recommendations the author made is having a professional online identity and be mindful and possibly separate private topics such as politics. While I can agree that is reasonable, I personally haven’t.

The domain of this blog, 8-p.info was actually chosen to reject that sort of financial industry-safe seriousness. I like Kicks Condor and the Whimsical Web and ultimately want to make something like that.

That being said, rejecting the idea without trying is something I’d like to avoid, especially nowadays since I’m getting older.

So I would try “blogging like a pro” a bit for the rest of this year, like post mostly technical stuff at regular intervals and resume social media for a while. I did the other side of the spectrum for a while. So doing the opposite may make sense.

I’ve added my now page on 8-p.info. The term is coined by Derek Sivers in 2015 and there is an aggregator website called nownownow.com.

While I knew the existence, I wasn’t sure that is for me. I already have a blog that I could post “what I’m doing for now”. Do I really need another page? Honestly speaking, I’m still not 100% sure how long and/or often maintain the now page.

On the other hand, I like the now pages’ “have your own site” vibe and the emphasis on a midterm perspective. It feels “slower” than the big mainstream internet and I like it.

Derek Sivers uses Drew DeVault’s Sourcehut

By the way, Derek Sivers uses Sourcehut, which I didn’t expect.

CoRecursive podcast is good. I have listened Full-Time Open Source (which is about Zig), The Untold Story of SQLite and Software That Doesn’t Suck (which is about Subversion), and all of them are quite interesting.

The host, Adam Gordon Bell’s editing seems more intentional than other tech podcasts. He sometimes insert a third-person voice over, such as;

Adam: Andrew understood before he even started what the C language brought to the table, and this is important. C is a small language and it’s everywhere. C is used by 20% of software developers according to the Stack Overflow Survey. Some conditions may apply there.

I think that he is replacing some back-and-forth conversation with this technique to make an episode more “dense”, which I like.