Our Tornado Tech

Posted on May 7, 2024 by Granger Meador

Last night I was drifting off to sleep when I dimly perceived a faint wail muscling its vibrations through the triple-pane windows. We Okies know that sound all too well. Our city of 38,000 souls is dotted with a few dozen tornado sirens, and that sound told me that a twister had been sighted and was tracking toward town. Washington County Emergency Management was telling us to take shelter.

Here is a video from the tornado that damaged the Hampton Inn 2.5 miles from us, and you can clearly hear the siren warning everyone to take cover right up until the twister struck and disabled it. [Profanity alert: the fellows who shot the video had quite a scare.]

Washington County Emergency Management tests the sirens monthly, as they are important in a state that averages 58 tornadoes each year, with 24 in a typical May.

Bartlesville has a few dozen tornado sirens

Our “shelter” is a closet

I have lived in two homes that had the ultimate in tornado protection: underground refuges. But both had significant drawbacks. From first through sixth grade, we lived in a 1940s home in Bethany, an old town in northwest Oklahoma City. It had been expanded in the 1960s and gained a basement shelter under an attached garage. But, like many basements in Oklahoma, it needed a sump pump because of the high water table. When the power failed, the pump would stop, and the basement could slowly fill with water. As a kid, I remember seeing how the water level in the basement could get higher than I was tall, which was anything but reassuring.

Oklahoma basements tend to get flooded

Despite its position in Tornado Alley, less than 10% of homes in Oklahoma have basements. In addition to a high water table, much of Oklahoma has red clay soil which absorbs moisture and causes basement leaks and cracks. Also, building codes required foundations be poured below the freeze line, but the freeze line here is quite shallow at about 18 inches, while it might be three to five feet in some other states.

When a basement is too expensive or you don’t care to deal with water issues, you can opt for a storm shelter. In the cold war, people would often build one in their backyard. In the early 1990s, I rented a 1950s home in Bartlesville’s Pennington Hills subdivision. It had a shelter built into the hillside behind the house. But the water table and clay soil meant that shelter was always partially filled with water, and I had zero interest in pumping it out. My next-door neighbor was a preacher with a basement under his living room floor, and he and his wife invited me to come over and take shelter with them in any storm…that’s the Oklahoma Standard.

When I bought my home in Arrowhead Acres back in 1994, I didn’t mind that it lacked an underground shelter. After an EF5 tornado killed 24 people and injured 212 others in Moore back in 2013, interest in above-ground shelters skyrocketed. But they require room and cost thousands of dollars. If I were to get one, I’d look for one that could fit into the corner of our garage.

The type of housing was a crucial factor in the rates of death and injury per 1,000 homes damaged or destroyed in the May 3, 1999 tornadoes in Oklahoma

The reality is that 99% of people exposed to the worst F/EF5 tornadoes survive them, although they are no doubt traumatized. The type of housing is crucial: apartments are much safer than houses, and one study found the risk of death from tornadoes was 35 times higher for those in mobile/manufactured homes than those in permanent homes like ours.

The key advice we follow is to get to an interior room away from windows. The only room in our house that has no exterior wall is the walk-in closet off the master bedroom bath. So Wendy has a survival kit in it, and we hunker down in there with the pocket doors shut that stand between it and the nearest window.

Getting the news

Bartlesville Radio news director Nathan Thompson

The afternoon before the storm I ran into Nathan Thompson, the news director of the radio station, at a local grocery. We chatted about how he would have a long night, with a City Council meeting followed by him helping monitor the severe weather at the radio station. I thanked Nathan for the coverage he and the others at the station had provided last month when we had tornadoes passing nearby.

Once Wendy and I were situated in the closet, I connected to the Live Feed from our friends at Bartlesville Radio using my cell phone. We listened to Nathan and Tom Davis reporting on the storm, with station owner Kevin Potter and his son, Kaleb, out driving around to report on developments. I had the pleasure of teaching Kaleb and his brothers, and I am grateful for the local radio station’s hyperlocal coverage, which I find far more useful than watching television meteorologists.

We’re fortunate to have underground wiring in our subdivision, so while the lights flickered a bit, we never had a power failure. Our information network, however, had some issues. From July 2022 through April 2024 we had three ways to access the Internet at home: cable modem, fiber optic, and cellular via our iPhones. I decided to cut costs by $94 per month by discontinuing the cable service, hoping that a storm or power failure wouldn’t take out both the fiber optic line and the cell towers.

First our fiber optic line went dark, so I switched to cellular data. We listened as Nathan and the other radio staff shifted from their second-floor studios to their ground floor shelter and back. Then even the cellular feed stopped working.

So I pulled out the $40 emergency radio I purchased in 2020 and dialed in KWON 1400 AM radio. Thus we soon knew that the area southeast of Washington & Tuxedo boulevards, about 2.5 miles from us, had been hit and the tornado was zooming past to the northeast. That allowed Wendy and I to return to bed and try to get back to sleep.

The emergency radio also has a weather band, but I don’t find that particularly useful since they trigger alerts for storms that are never going to be near me, and I really only care about tornadoes and hail, not thunderstorms in general, which are a dime a dozen around here. Nevertheless, weather radios certainly help people across the region, and if I didn’t live in an area with tornado sirens, I would keep one tuned in for alerts when it was stormy. NOAA Weather Radio stations use seven different frequencies, and you can easily look up which one serves your area.

Meador Manor’s television antenna has seen better days

The next morning, I walked around the yard to confirm that we had no damage. I noticed the old television antenna I mounted to the chimney back in 1995. It has two parts: log-periodic dipole elements for very-high-frequency VHF channels and a Yagi-Uda part for ultra-high-frequency UHF channels.

Years ago, several of the long elements on the log-periodic part of my antenna snapped off in a storm, so my antenna can no longer reliably pick up VHF channels 2-8. But the Yagi-Uda part is intact, so it can still pick up Tulsa area stations 6, 8, 11, 23, and 41. You might wonder how an antenna that can’t pick up channels 2-8 can pull in stations 6 and 8; allow me to explain.

The broadcast television channels I should be able to pick up with my antenna

When television went digital, many of the stations began broadcasting on different channels than their branding from the analog days. Most use a “virtual” channel that makes them appear as a different channel on your television than the frequencies they are actually broadcasting on. Tulsa’s KJRH, for example, has always been known as Channel 2, although it now actually broadcasts on the frequency range for channel 8. Similarly, Tulsa’s KOTV Channel 6 is really broadcasting on channel 45, KTUL Channel 8 is really broadcasting on channel 10, and KOKI Channel 23 is really broadcasting on channel 22. The only station I can pick up that is actually using its advertised channel is KOED Channel 11 of the state’s education network.

You can put your address in at tvfool.com and see what channels you can pick up with various types of antennas and what channels they really use, but if you ever do use a television to pick up broadcast signals, it will disguise all of that for you.

Seeing the old antenna, I pondered how I stopped watching broadcast digital HDTV television long ago but kept the antenna just in case. While that antenna had long been superfluous, we had made good use of the antenna on our little emergency radio the night before!

Getting the word out

Early the next morning Supt. McCauley sent word that the schools would be closed for the day. In my communications role for the district, I needed to send out voice calls, text messages, and emails to 6,200 folks across the city, send an email to hundreds of district employees, and post about the closure to a dozen school news feeds and their Facebook and X accounts, etc. However, the fiber optic line was still out, so I’d have to rely on the cellular network.

I finally put the Magic Keyboard Folio for iPad to good use

I realized that I’d left my charged Chromebooks at work. Time is of the essence when closing the schools, so I didn’t plug in an uncharged Chromebook and tether that to my phone. Instead, while I did put my iPhone into hotspot mode, I grabbed my iPad and the Magic Keyboard Folio for it I had ordered back in 2022. I used the iPad to access the communication services and send out the notices. I almost never use the Magic Keyboard for the iPad, but I was glad to have it handy this morning. Typing on that was a lot more comfortable than composing messages on the glass screen of the iPhone or the iPad.

The fiber optic line lit back up a bit after 7 a.m., and I used it for work for much of the day. However, when everything had calmed down, I decided to see if I could have used my Mac mini for the posts during the fiber line outage. When I relied on a Windows desktop computer, I had no reliable way to tether it to my iPhone’s cellular network when the in-house network failed. I was glad to find that my Mac readily tethered to my iPhone, and just to make sure, I used the iPhone’s cellular network connection to create and share a post about our re-opening the following day.

Technology, old and new

The modern technology of the weather services allowed the county emergency management folks to trigger the old technology of tornado sirens in plenty of time for Wendy and me to take shelter. We first used modern but then quite old technology to stay abreast of the storm developments via the local radio station. I later used modern technology to send thousands of voice, text, and email messages to people about the schools being closed, make social media posts, and more. All that again showed that in times of trouble both old and modern tech have their uses.

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Fragmentary Fisher-Price

Posted on May 1, 2024 by Granger Meador

Fisher-Price made toys that I know I loved despite infantile amnesia. Children generally cannot remember events from before the age of three and start remembering things consistently around the age of four. We adults can access fragment memories, which are isolated moments without context, from around age three. Scattered among my fragments, with reinforcement from old photographs and home movies, are memories of Fisher-Price, which created about 5,000 different toys from 1930 to 2024.

Irving Price, Helen Schelle, and Herman Fisher

Herman Fisher had been manufacturing, selling, and advertising games for a company in Churchville, New York. He and some investors tried to buy out the firm, but they were unsuccessful. So Fisher teamed up with Irving Price, the mayor of East Aurora, New York, who had been an executive at Woolworth. Price raised $100,000 in capital for them to start their own firm, with the following creed: “Fisher-Price toys should have intrinsic play value, ingenuity, strong construction, good value and action.”

They teamed up with Helen Schelle, who had previously operated Penny Walker Toy Shop in Binghamton, New York to create durable toys made of heavy steel parts and ponderosa pine, with colorful lithographic labels. Schelle and Price’s wife, illustrator-artist Margaret Evans Price, collaborated on the company’s early successful products.

Wobbles was a new pup in 1964, while Snoopy Sniffer had been around for almost 30 years
Wobbles was made from 1964-1967

The company’s first major success was The Snoopy Sniffer, a pull toy introduced in 1938. They were producing its third iteration when I was a kid, and that product would continue to 1980. But for my first birthday in 1967 I received a different Fisher-Price dog from my uncle Tim: Wobbles, which made an arf-arf noise and had four wobbly wheels to make his spring tail bob, his wooden head turn, and his big plastic ears rock. It was priced at $2.35 in the 1964 Sears Christmas catalog, or about $23 in 2024 dollars, and it was sold for only four years.

Schelle had retired in 1957, while Price held on as chairman of the board until 1964. But Irving Fisher was still running the company when I received Wobbles along with two additional Fisher-Price toys on that first birthday: Cry Baby Bear from the neighbors on one side of our house, and the Chatter telephone from the neighbors on the other side.

My first birthday with my parents and neighbor Jamie Robbins was a bonanza with Cry Baby Bear, Wobbles, the Chatter telephone, and a toy piano
Cry Baby Bear from 1967-1969

Cry Baby Bear was sold from 1967 to 1969. When pulled, its head bobbed up and down while it made a crying sound. It sold for $1.88 by JC Penney, which would be about $17 in 2024 dollars.

In my infancy I played with a Fisher Price Roly Poly Chime Ball, although I only know that because we have a home movie of me playing with one in the bathtub. Fisher Price produced those from 1967 to 1985.

A favorite of my first batch of Fisher-Price toys was the Chatter telephone from our neighbors, the Robbins. It had a rotary dial which rang a bell when turned and released. When pulled, the phone made a “chatter” noise and the eyes went up and down. My phone’s body was made of wood, but its top, dial, handset, and wheels were plastic. You can see it sitting on the chair behind me in the photo, where I am sitting on a little stool my father had made in his high school shop class. I am wearing my red boots while watching our RCA Victor black-and-white television set, which was out of the camera view.

Watching television with my Chatter telephone on the chair behind me

In his study, my father had a special rotary telephone: a company phone tied into the network of Cities Service Gas Company. At the time, he was the Assistant Manager of Gas Control, helping ensure natural gas was supplied to cities across Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, and Nebraska. I enjoyed pulling my Chatter phone into his study, where I would imitate him, chattering away on my own phone, although I wasn’t talking about pipelines and compressor stations.

Fisher-Price had introduced their telephone toy in 1961. Mine was listed for $1.79 in the 1967 Montgomery Wards catalog, which would be $16 in 2024 dollars. At the time I played with my Chatter Phone, we still had rotary dial telephones in our home, although the Bell System had introduced “Touch-Tone” push-button phones in 1963.

Over the decades, rotary dial phones were gradually supplanted by push-button ones. Until 1983, we had to rent our telephones from them, and it wasn’t until we moved in the late 1970s that my parents paid extra to upgrade from rotary dial to Princess Touch-Tone phones. Back when we moved from near The Village to Bethany in the early 1970s, I know we were among the last to get numbers in the old SUnset 78 telephone exchange, as our number at the time, 789-0888, was quite slow to dial. Late in that decade we moved again, and our new neighborhood, Windsor Hills, came with the WIndsor 94 telephone exchange. But when I was a kid, while I was dimly aware of the old telephone exchange names, they were no longer in regular use.

In 1968, Fisher-Price introduced a push-button non-pull phone, and Fisher himself retired in 1969. The company was sold to Quaker Oats, which continued to offer other more modern variations of toy telephones, but the increasingly anachronistic rotary Chatter phone was still popular. Mattel bought Fisher-Price back in 1993, and it still sells a modern version as well as authentic reproductions.

The Fisher-Price toy that I remember quite clearly was the last I received: the Play Family Action Garage that was given to me for my fourth birthday in 1970.

It was new that year, completing the firm’s trilogy of Play Family toys of the Play Family Farm in 1968 and the Play Family House in 1969. The garage was three stories with a car and pedestrian elevator, a ramp, a service lift, and four cars with “Little People” figurines that had a wood peg-like body and wooden spherical head that “plugged” into the cars.

A crank on the side of the elevator would lift the car elevator and the passenger cab, with little stop signs popping in and out of place on each level. A bell rang on each level, and when it reached the top, a car would spring out of the elevator to zoom down the ramp. You could also roll a car to a hand-cranked wheel on the top level to align it with some marked parking places.

My original set also had a cardboard Play Family Service Van where you could store the accessories; that was soon discontinued. The playset was $10 in the 1970 Montgomery Wards Christmas catalog, which would be $77 in 2024 dollars.

I also had a separate tow truck with its own car it could pull. I had at least eight Little People figurines which were wooden pegs with spherical round wooden heads, plus Lucky the Dog. I remember being annoyed that I couldn’t pull the driver out of the truck: he was just a wooden head screwed into the base.

My playset was so old that all of the figurines were white; in 1971 Fisher-Price finally swapped in an African-American figurine for its Action Garage set for that and subsequent years.

Other Fisher-Price playsets I recall playing with, although I didn’t own them, include the Play Family Farm and the Fun Jet. The farm had plastic animals with movable heads and legs and a barn door that made a moo sound.

By the way, they still sell versions of the action garage. While it still has a gas pump downstairs, you can charge your electric car up top.

The modern Action Garage

So thanks to Herman Fisher, Irving Price, Helen Schelle, and many others who enriched my childhood and that of countless others, even if our memories of our oldest toys are fragmentary.

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Mac Day 9: Organizing My Photos

Posted on April 28, 2024 by Granger Meador

Once I had transferred the 130,000 digital photographs on my Windows computer to my Mac, I was ready to contemplate my storage and sharing of photographs online. My workflows and uses of online services have shifted over the years, but they eventually stabilized into four main online repositories for my photos:

  • Flickr for public vacation photos, which were linked in blog posts
  • Google Photos for the occasional shared album shared with friends and family, and mirroring my iPhone and iPad photo libraries
  • OneDrive backup of my photo collections on my Windows computer, including the unedited and edited vacation albums
  • iCloud for shots taken with my iPhone, including Shared Albums with Wendy

I decided to take stock of the various subscriptions I have that include photo storage:

I decided to cut costs by not renewing Microsoft 365 Family and to contain costs by ensuring that I would not need to upgrade my Google plan. I delve into each service below.

Flickr

I settled on using Flickr to publicly share my travel photos back in 2006, when it was the most popular dedicated photo-sharing site on the web. I paid $24/year for a Pro account in 2007, and in 2024 that cost me $73. After adjusting for inflation, the cost of the service has doubled in 17 years.

I have 12,784 photos and 157 videos consuming 53 GB on Flickr, and they’ve collectively garnered over 2.3 million views. But Flickr faded over the years, with few interface updates and declining engagement. I used to get several solicitations each year from people either seeking permission to use one of my Flickr photos or offering payment for licensing. For awhile, unsolicited sales paid for the cost of my Pro account, but that hasn’t happened in years.

Flickr peaked about a decade ago | Source: Franck Michel

I still like how interested people can go to Flickr and browse my public photo albums, and many of my blog posts link to albums there, so I will keep that account and continue to use the service, mainly for vacation photos. I don’t want to post my vacation photos directly in WordPress. I pay $42/year for its Starter Plan, and that only provides me 6 GB of media storage, and I’ve already used 35% of that with graphics across my many posts.

My Flickr albums view

Google Photos

I’ve used Google Photos for various projects over the years, but I’ve never really liked it. I created some albums to share with others, but the process is cumbersome, and I have discovered that any descriptions I type in for a photo on Google Photos, or a photo stored in Google Drive, are NOT retained in that photo’s metadata when it is downloaded. So that isn’t a productive use of time for a service I don’t really like very much.

Google Photos albums can be shared, but the service is not set up to allow the public to browse a set of your albums. Here’s what a sample album looks like in Google Photos:

What a Google Photos album looks like if I share a link

And here is what the same album looks like on Flickr:

A public album of the same photos on Flickr

While setting up my Mac, I installed Google Drive for Desktop to make it easy to access my personal and district Google files in the Finder. That prompted me to check my settings.

Google Photos once provided unlimited free storage of photos up to 16-megapixels, but it now limits you to 15 GB of free storage shared across Google’s Photos, Gmail, and Drive services. I’m currently paying $30 per year to expand that to 200 GB. I was using 73 GB for Google Photos and 77 GB for the other Google Services, and Google has been warning me that at my current fill rate I’ll be out of space in about a year. Their next tier is 1 TB of storage for $100/year.

I do not want to pay more for Google given how much I’m already paying for Flickr, Amazon Prime, and Apple One Premier. Google Photos was duplicating all of the photos on my iPhone and iPad, and I don’t need that since I have access to those on my Mac and in iCloud+. At one time I thought I might use the smart features in Google Photos to locate photos, etc., but I never found time for that.

I experimented by seeing what would happen by switching the Google account from uploading photos in Original quality to Storage saver and compressing everything with Storage saver. That only reduced my photo usage from 73 GB to 67 GB.

I decided to delete all of my photos in Google Photos to avoid a subscription increase. That turned out to be a tedious process. For safety’s sake, I deleted the Google Photos apps on my iPhone and iPad, to be certain that any integrations wouldn’t delete photos from those devices’ built-in photo libraries. Then I had to select the first photo in Google Photos on the website, scroll down some distance, hold down SHIFT, and select a later photo. That would select all the photos I had scrolled past, and I could delete them.

It didn’t work to select the first photo and rapidly zip down to an earlier date with the right timeline sidebar to select the last one: that didn’t select the photos in-between. A perusal of the internet showed that Google hasn’t made a provision to bulk-delete your photos. So I went through the manual process, deleted thousands of photos at a time.

I deleted all of my photos from Google Photos to ensure I wouldn’t have to pay for more storage

OneDrive

In my previous post, I shared my plan to allow my Microsoft 365 Family subscription expire in June, so I didn’t bother creating an album example for this post, and I’ve actually never created any albums there. But for a couple more months it will be the online backup for the 130,000 photos stored on my Windows desktop computer.

Amazon Prime

It was only when writing this post that I learned of Amazon Prime’s photo storage and sharing service. As a Prime member, I have unlimited storage there. Now, I know all too well that Amazon is run by sharks, and they are likely to change their terms or even drop the service altogether at some point. Google and Apple are less likely to drop their photo services since they are selling points for Android and iOS hardware.

Here is an album of the same photos on Amazon Photos:

Sharing the same photos with Amazon strangely doesn’t include the title of the album

The album title was omitted, so despite the unlimited storage, I’m skeptical of sharing photos with that service. However, at least for now I have unlimited storage of photos at full resolution there as part of my Prime membership.

So I went ahead and downloaded, installed, and set up the Amazon Photos app on my Mac, telling it to maintain an online backup of my photos on my external drive, as I had been doing with OneDrive for the photos on my Windows desktop computer.

Apple Photos

I saved the obvious photo service for a Mac user for last. I purchased Apple One Premier in late 2020, at the same time I ordered the Mac Mini. We were amidst the COVID pandemic, with no vaccines yet, and I decided it was worth $30/month to get the Music, News+, and tv+ services along with plenty of iCloud+ storage.

However, I was skeptical I would make any use of Fitness+ since I have long had my own morning aerobics routine, or Arcade, since I’ve never been much of a gamer. What sealed the deal was the ability to share all of those services with five other people, so I could give Wendy and my closest friends using iPads and/or iPhones the same benefits. The service had climbed to $38/month by December 2023, which is about 6% above the old pricing if you adjust for inflation.

I get 2 terabytes of storage with that service, and I was using 200 GB of that: 132 GB for 22,747 photos and 454 videos, 42 GB of documents, 20 GB of backups, 2 GB of text messages, and 55 MB of emails, which is cute since I rarely use the default Mail app on my iPhone or iPad, mostly using Gmail.

Those photos only partially overlap with the 130,000 photos on my home computer. I had only managed the iCloud+ photos in album form using my iPad. Also, Wendy and I like to create a Shared Album on each trip. So I had 175 of My Albums and another 95 Shared Albums.

As my number of albums multiplied, they had become harder to manage on my iPad and iPhone, and I had wished for a way to nest them so that I could put travel albums in one group, history albums in another, etc. I didn’t know of a way to do that in iOS until I Googled the topic today. It turns out that you can do that on an iPad by tapping All Albums in the sidebar, then tapping +, then New Folder. However, I find selecting a dragging albums on an iPad cumbersome; I’d much rather organize them on a big screen using a mouse. So it was time to start doing just that with my Mac mini.

The secret to creating Folders for your photo albums in iOS

Before I went to town on that, I decided to look into what renaissance man Michael Wray had shared with me: that you can create separate photo libraries on a Mac and, since reportedly the photos or their index are all in one file, that could get corrupted. So he always has a backup and chooses to create separate libraries for different events, clients, etc.

I opened Photos on the Mac, and it complained that the photo library file was in the trash. I tried creating a new one, but it wasn’t showing all of my iCloud photos. I had to locate my “System Photo Library” and enable iCloud syncing for it.

That made my multitude of disorganized iCloud albums visible, and I was able to organize that mess into 10 folders and then sort the albums in them alphabetically. It was a bit confusing in that you can only nest folders, not albums, and there is a bug when you try to create a new album in a folder. At first that correctly created a blank album, but later it would just duplicate the contents of the current folder. I could only get it to return to creating a blank album by closing the Photos app and re-opening it.

iCloud photos after the sorting

Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t support folders for Shared Albums or sorting Shared Albums except by date. So they remain a bit of a mess.

As for the 130,000 photos on my Mac’s external drive, I can’t simply add them into iCloud, even though I have plenty of space in the service, because that would then mirror onto my iPad and iPhone, and I don’t have enough storage on those devices.

I debated creating separate libraries on the Mac, that wouldn’t sync to iCloud, and using those to organize the photos. However, I already had the 130,000+ photos on my Mac sorted into file folders on the external drive. Now I was backing all of that up to Amazon Photos, which appeared to have similar search functions as the iCloud/iOS/Mac Photos apps, albeit how well they worked was still uncertain. So for now I decided to stick with just one Photos library on the Mac, synced with iCloud.

Workflow Changes

When I was using Windows, our vacation photos in a Shared Album would get downloaded as a ZIP file and extracted to a folder on my SSD. Then I’d build up a subfolder of selected shots, touch them up in Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018, and then upload them into a new album on Flickr for inclusion in blog posts.

That worked, but it was messy and redundant. Our best photos might end up in nine different locations, with only two of those being the final edited product. I could go back through dozens of folders to delete unedited shots, but that isn’t a good use of time.

I’m hoping to shift my workflow so that I keep the final edited album in iCloud, doing all of my edits in the Photos app, including the more advanced tools available in the macOS version. If I have to, I can do additional work in Gimp and then load the photo back into the iCloud album. Then I’ll upload them into Flickr. That would avoid creating folders on my external drive that are backed up to Amazon Photos.

What’s Next?

Getting my photos shifted and re-organized was my largest concern about shifting from Windows to the Mac. I’ll get some practice this summer with my new workflow after Wendy and I return from a vacation in southern Oregon and northern California.

The last “big thing” about moving to the Mac is its tighter integration with Apple One services and the various macOS counterparts to many of Apple’s own iOS apps. After I gain more experience with all of that, I’ll share. But I think this eighth post in a row about moving to the Mac is enough…for now.

As a kid, I learned that Eight is Enough
Posted in Mac, photos, technology | Tagged | Leave a comment

Mac Day 8: Shifting 130,000 Photos

Posted on April 27, 2024 by Granger Meador

Digital photography, like many things, is both a blessing and a curse. I love how I can readily create, manipulate, and share digital photos. But the ease of their creation has already allowed me to build up over 130,000 of them on my desktop computer since the year 2000.

My first digital camera was the Nikon Coolpix 990 in 2000

The Nikon Coolpix 990 was my first digital camera. It cost $1,000 and took 3.1-megapixel 2048×1536 images. I bought six more dedicated digital cameras over the next 16 years, culminating in my Canon EOS Rebel T6 which takes 18.7-megapixel 5184×3456 images.

Along the way, I relied more and more on the ever-improving tiny cameras in the seven iPhones I purchased from 2008 to 2022. My iPhone 14 Pro takes 12-megapixel shots with a 48-megapixel sensor. My shot count was high enough before I started carrying a capable camera with me everywhere I went!

OneDrive

I have used Microsoft software for the entire 42 years I have had my own personal computers. My first, a TRS-80 Color Computer, was an 8-bit computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM, and it ran Microsoft Extended Color Basic. Later I used MS-DOS and then Windows from versions 1.03 in 1986 to 10 in 2024. I’ve been using online storage with Microsoft since at least 2008, and I’ve been paying $100/year for Microsoft 365 Family since 2014.

I have one terabyte of OneDrive storage, and for years I’ve used that as a backup for the photos on my desktop computer. My 130,000+ photos consume 340 GB there, organized into the same folders as on my Windows desktop computer, and folders and photo albums are distinct things on OneDrive. Those photos do not fully overlap with the 22,747 photos consuming another 132 GB of space in my iCloud+ account through Apple One Premier, which all came from my iOS devices.

I hope to finally let my Microsoft 365 Family subscription expire in June. However, letting go of OneDrive means I need to ensure my personal photos collection, distinct from the snaps in iCloud that were taken with iOS devices, is up in the cloud as well as backed up at home. Getting them accessible on my Mac was the first priority.

Transferring my photos to the Mac

My Mac SSD was too full of my photos

Since I was only rarely using my Windows desktop computer anymore, I decided to transfer all of the photos on it to my Mac Mini and then figure out how to re-organize them. Since both computers were wired into our home network, I used Apple’s Migration Assistant to copy them over. The files transferred at about 100 MB/s, so it took about an hour.

Back in 2017, I spent $545 for a 2 terabyte Crucial MX300 solid state drive (SSD) for my Windows desktop computer, and it has always worked perfectly. What a contrast to the years of spinning hard drives that would inevitably crash after enough years of use.

However, my 2020 Mac Mini only came with a 500 GB SSD. Apple is notorious for overcharging for things like memory and storage, and I wasn’t willing to pay their premium price back in 2020 for a one or two-terabyte SSD. Copying over all the photos left me with only 22 GB free on the Mac’s internal drive, which was less than 5%. That was unsustainable.

Rather than delete all of the photos and try again later to get them off the PC or download them off OneDrive, I decided to buy an external SSD for my Mac. I already had a 2 TB Seagate drive, but it was my Windows backup drive, and it was a spinning hard disk drive with a maximum transfer rate of 120 MB/s.

I also had a 1 TB Samsung SSD with a maximum transfer rate of 540 MB/s, which I bought for any emergencies knowing that if nothing else, I could use it in a few years when I retire; I currently have about 363 GB of data in my district account and have built up about 70 GB of files in the online district archives. Whenever I retire, I’ll sift out anything that is the property of the district or protected by FERPA, but the rest I plan to copy to ensure decades of work products are protected and available. If I were just going to have a Time Machine backup for the Mac’s SSD, that 1 TB drive would suffice, but I didn’t want to cram a backup and all of my photos on a drive that might get filled up in a few years.

My new external 2 TB SSD is quite small

The Mac Mini has two extremely fast Thunderbolt/USB 4 USB-C ports rated up to 40 GB/s. So I spent $158 for a two-terabyte Crucial X9 Pro SSD with theoretical transfer rates of up to 1050 MB/s. Although I’m used to tiny external SSD units, I was startled when I unboxed the new SSD. It was only 2.56×1.97×0.39 inches (65x50x10 mm). I’m still amazed when I think back to the 10-megabyte hard drive I used at the Oklahoma Department of Tourism in the 1980s that was the size of washing machine…this device is smaller than my palm and has 200,000 times as much storage.

I plugged in the SSD and promptly used Disk Utility to erase its Windows-compatible exFAT format and replace that with Apple’s APFS, which is optimized for SSDs on Macs. That only took seconds, and then I used the Finder to copy all of my photos from the Mac to the external drive. It took 11 minutes and 20 seconds to copy 371 GB, for a transfer rate of 540 MB/s, which was certainly plenty fast. That got me back up to 392 GB of free space on the Mac’s internal SSD.

Backups

My current backup philosophy is that for important files you always want to have accessible, in addition to a copy in the cloud you should have at least one and preferably two local copies. Before cloud storage became affordable and reliable, I insisted on two on-site physical copies and an off-site physical backup, although I’ll admit the off-site ones were sometimes months out of date.

I remember spending hours swapping 5.25″ inch 360 KB or 1.2 MB floppy disks and then 3.5″ 1.44 MB floppies, then Iomega ZIP drive 100 MB disks, and for some years listening to tape drives whir for hours. I used recordable DVD optical discs a few times, and then spinning external hard drives. The diligence paid off, since I seldom lost any data, but it was a pain.

My 2004 and 2009 Windows machines had RAID 1 redundant spinning hard drives for backup, and by 2015 those RAID 1 configurations had allowed me to survive at least four hard drive failures. I finally shifted to solid state drives in 2015, and I have never had one fail, although I do have an old backup of my current Windows machine’s SSD on that 2 TB Seagate spinning external drive.

At this point in the process, I had my 130,000+ photos organized into files folders in three locations: my Windows desktop’s SSD, the external SSD on my Mac, and up in the cloud in OneDrive. An old subset of them should also be in the outdated backup on my Seagate drive. But I had no backup yet of the Mac itself. Granted, there wasn’t much on it yet, and a lot of my data is online in my personal and district Google Drive accounts, but years of experience told me to not wait too long to get the Mac backed up.

I owned a 2010 MacBook Air and for well over a decade I listened to the MacBreak Weekly netcast, which covered iOS and Apple TV as well as Macs. But when the pandemic hit and disrupted all of my routines, I stopped watching Léo Laporte’s TWiT shows. For the past few years, I’ve done my morning exercises watching late-night monologues. Their reliance on political humor isn’t mentally healthy, so I’m re-subscribing to MacBreak Weekly, which I can easily watch on the Mac via its Podcast app along with catching it on my iPad.

All that meant I knew the backup method for Macs is Time Machine. The internet told me I could create an additional APFS volume on my external drive which I could set to be used for Time Machine, or I could partition the drive. If I used an APFS volume, it could grow if needed at the expense of the volume where I stored my Photos. I wasn’t interested in that, so I partitioned the external drive into two one-terabyte APFS partitions and set up Time Machine on the new one.

Before the end of June, I need to get my photos into a different place in the cloud if I’m going to let my OneDrive subscription expire. I thought I might just put them in iCloud+, as I have plenty of storage there thanks to my Apple One Premier account. However, that would overload the available storage on my iPad and iPhone. So I need to examine my options.

But I already have 270 photo albums built up in iCloud that needed to be organized first…more on that in the next post.

Happy computing!

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Mac Day 7: Draw with Magnitude & Direction

Posted on April 26, 2024 by Granger Meador

For 28 years, I taught students about vectors as representations of physical quantities with magnitude and direction, and how adding, subtracting, and multiplying them differed from the “scalar” mathematics they were used to. We covered the vector cousins of common scalar quantities, such as displacement adding direction to distance, velocity adding direction to speed, and so forth.

Vectors are also used in computer graphics, with images created using a sequence of commands or mathematical statements that place lines and shapes in a two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. That contrasts with bitmapped or rasterized graphics of a grid of colored pixels. Photographs are represented with bitmaps, while scalable diagrams are best handled with vectors.

The most famous early use of vector graphics in popular culture was the original Asteroids arcade game released by Atari in 1979, made possible by directly manipulating the electron beam in a cathode ray tube to draw shapes. In a typical television, the beam instead would scan across and down the screen repeatedly in a set pattern to create a raster, rather than a vector, image.

Asteroids used vector graphics

In my previous post, I explored editing bitmapped photographs on my Mac, and I decided to wait and see if the default free Photos app will suffice. If not, I’m prepared to spend $70 on Adobe Photoshop Elements 2024. But what about vector graphics?

Thankfully, the free online Google Draw, which is part of Google Docs, has vector tools which are sufficient for most of my needs.

Should I want something more sophisticated, my go-to in Windows has long been Corel Presentations, which descended from 1990’s DrawPerfect. Professionals might use Adobe Illustrator, but that is too complex for my needs, and I have no interest in paying for a monthly or annual subscription for Adobe Creative Cloud after I retire.

Inkscape is a free open source vector editor that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I was a bit skeptical of it, given that its free open source counterpart in advanced bitmap editing is Gimp, and I wasn’t impressed with Gimp’s interface.

Fidding around with Inkscape

I found Inkscape a mix of familiar and strange. I am used to right-clicking an object and selecting a menu option for a rotation, but in Inkscape you click an object once while in cursor mode to get resizing handles and again to get rotation and skew handles. Once you know the trick, it’s a fine approach.

Inkscape has a more limited set of shapes than some programs, but it can manipulate them in sophisticated ways. If I ever needed to go beyond Google Drawings and used Inkscape, I’d definitely need to use Help > Tutorials to figure out some of the basics. I’m not a fan of surrounding all four sides of the editing area in tiny icons, but I feel pretty confident that between Google Drawings and Inkscape my vector drawing needs will be met.

I have dabbled in Cartesian coordinates, but vector geometry is where I draw the line.

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