Back From the Dead—But not using a bootable drive…

My Mac Backup Strategy, was:

1. Backup to Time Machine regularly to have access to that data.
2. Backup regularly to a fast “bootable” external drive “clone” using a nifty 3rd party tool such as SuperDuper.

Having an external bootable backup meant that if my internal drive(s) failed, I could quickly fire up a workable system and continue working, until I restored it all to a replacement drive. But as I discovered last night…

At this writing, you can’t make a bootable backup disk with Big Sur. And the M1 (non-Intel) Macs can’t boot from an external drive. Now what? You could (and should) keep using Time Machine of course, but that is just saving your data and apps, not creating a “boot disk”. You’ll have to repair/replace your drive or Mac first, then recover using Time Machine. Unless you have a backup computer and work with all your data “in the cloud”, hours or days of downtime is inevitable with a hardware failure.

Short version: Make multiple backups of everything that is important to you. Including backing up to (a non-bootable) external drive with SuperDuper or other “cloning” utility. If your recovery strategy is “Make an appointment at the Genius Bar”, make sure you allow for at least a few days of downtime. If your business can’t afford downtime, try to work with all your data “in the cloud”, have a spare Mac, and be sure if you shut one Mac down, you can still do everything you need to on the other. And Test and Verify that this actually works!!

Readable Technical details and workaround(s) at Shirt Pocket Watch (SuperDuper developer’s blog) www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/, and this thorough summary from TidBITS: The Role of Bootable Duplicates in a Modern Backup Strategy.
— Read on

P.S. TechWite is also back from the dead. At least for this one entry. I’ve always been UNPREDICTABLE. 😎

—Techwite

That VR is so hot right now.

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VR is HOT right now. Do you know why? You probably see those goofy goggles and imagine some gamer shooting aliens. That is WAY off. The whole VR world has changed. TechWite helps you understand how.

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• “Old VR” – Think of Google Maps “Street View”—flat, boring…
  • 2D – although you can “move”, the images have no depth.
  • Viewed through a porthole – big screen, little screen, it’s still like a submarine.
  • Controlled manually – by a keyboard, joystick, or game controller. It kind of works, but it’s not like being there.
  • Still images create the 360 degree “dead” world
  • No interaction with anything “in” the images

• “New VR” – Think of Star Trek TNG’s “Holodeck”—mind blowing, you are there!
  • 3D – What you see has depth, you can see “around” objects
  • It Devours your vision – that’s what those goofy headsets are for- everything you see is part of the VR world. Add stereo sound, and that’s why it’s called “immersive”. You are in it!
  • Controlled by your movement – Turn your head to the right, you see what is on your right in the VR world. Look up, look down, ditto. This alone is a bit of a shock the first time you experience it!
  • Content can be 3D 360 degree video – Want to go for a helicopter ride over Manhattan? Be sure to hold on to something before you look down!

That’s just the beginning. Size, gravity, time – they can’t stop you. Examples:

• RTVR – Like drones? Be one. Experience flying, in Real Time Virtual Reality
• Remember Fantastic Voyage? You are now a tiny submarine inside a living human body. Explore the arteries and veins and organs. You see this, and experience it.

There’s so much to learn about this, to think about. Fortunately, the Tech media is all over it. (Links for you, below.) Start reading about it. But no words can do this justice, you must experience it. Get some Google Goggles, get the New York Times app for your iPhone or Android, and download one of the demos. Then take some time to imagine the possibility of experiencing the impossible.

—TW

via TidBits On the iPhone, Virtual Reality Is Unofficially Real

via AirWatch Blog  5 Epic Examples of Business Using Virtual Reality

via Google Filed Patent For Injecting A Device Directly Into Your Eyeball To Improve Vision – Forbes —Yes, another suggestion that we are not that far from “The Matrix”.

via Augmented and Virtual Reality: A New Vision – Deloitte CIO – WSJ

via Virtual Reality Therapy: Treating The Global Mental Health Crisis | TechCrunch.

via Samsung Announces Gear 360, a New Virtual Reality Camera – The New York Times.

 

How to Fix Persistent Apple Calendar Entries

Meetings, appointments, reminders—if you’ve put Apple’s iCloud Calendar to good use for awhile, you probably have lots of old Calendar events, maybe years, maybe decades of old events. You are paying for that storage with your money, and for the processor overhead with your time. And…do you really want the NSA to have access to all this? You should clean it up. It’s the past. Let it go! But how?

This is Apple, so it should be easy, right? Well, yes, but friends, this is one of those rare potholes in the normally smooth road of the Apple ecosystem. Apple will help you hide your old Calendar entries, but we want to DELETE, and just locating information on how to delete them requires an epic effort worthy of a Homer narrative. For you, TechWite provides the “Cliff’s Notes” shortcut to the answers:

🙈  The iCloud Ostrich Method

Hide old events in iCloud: Click the Gear icon for Preferences… > Advanced > Old Events. But they are still there.  We want to DELETE and in iCloud, that’s as good as it gets. On your Mac? Back when versions of OS X were named after BIG CATS, there was a similar option in Calendar > Preferences. That option is GONE.

Stop Making Sense—Warning: If you manually delete appointments ONE at a time, iCloud will try to send “updates” to all the meeting recipients of those old meetings. You may have hundreds or thousands of entries. Imagine the annoyed responses from old friends, lovers, family, and former work associates asking why you are cancelling a meeting in the PAST?? My advice: If you encounter this issue, and get queries, DON’T RESPOND.

Like the Labors of Hercules! The long, tedious, and frankly annoying search propelled as if by a motivational prophecy from the Delphic oracle—that this should be easier, this should be obvious, and if “The Steve” were here, this simply would not be a problem.

• Apple support on Twitter abandoned me because I didn’t “DM” them.
• Apple Support Communities (formerly known as ‘the boards’) had many, many, many posts asking for help on this topic, and virtually NO solutions.
• Books about “Calendar”? There were some books about iCloud but otherwise, not to be found.
• Mac OSX Hints site came closer to a solution by suggesting cool Apple technologies AppleScript, and Automator, but for me, these either worked partially, inconsistently, or not at all. And at last I found…
• “The Golden Link”—to “Advanced Calendar and iCal troubleshooting“, which was: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204598. (But, this being the Inkernet, where everything is subject to change, as of this update, March 1, 2022, the Golden Link is a DEAD Link! Fortunately, I summarized most of it.—TW)

  iCloud: Advanced Calendar and iCal troubleshooting

  The most common causes for data-based issues with Calendar are:

• Unreadable or incompatible calendar data.
• Reoccurring calendar events that have no end date (such as birthdays).
• Duplicate events.
• An excess of calendar events that happened in the past (especially those that were previously synced from another calendar client).

Any of these conditions could be the cause of your issues with Calendar in OS X (or iCal) and iCloud.

Well thanks Apple! And in that most important (and now disappered) article, Apple explains how to perform all kinds of maintenance on your Calendars, backing up, disconnecting from iCloud and other services, cleaning up, and restoring. I leave that work to you, reader.

…to delete those old entries, here are the two answers:

1. Delete Entries in Macintosh Calendar App: In the search bar, type “.“—a single period—and press <Return>. This will produce a search response list of ALL your entries, which you may then select (using the various select options that you know how to use, right?) and <Delete>. (This still has the issue with sending “updates” to recipients, so be careful. Otherwise, go to #2, below.)
   [BTW: Can you do this in iCloud? I can’t even find the Search Bar in iCloud. Where is it??]
2. Use a 3rd Party Macintosh Calendar Tool: Download a more capable Calendar replacement, or a Calendar utility. These will do the work for you that Apple has abandoned. I recommend BusyCal. You can download the free trial, and use it to batch clean your calendar using their wonderful List View of calendar entries. You may like it so much that you decide to buy it. (I did!)

And there you have it.  Peace Out.—TW

Edited with BlogPad Pro

Forecast CLOUDY For IT Jobs and Vendors

Wake up and smell the drought. IT infrastructure jobs fast evaporating…

via The Morning Download: Cloud’s Impact on Traditional IT Vendors Looks Increasingly Serious, JPMorgan Chase Says – The CIO Report – WSJ

“41.6% of corporate workloads at big companies are expected to be running in the public cloud within the next five years, up from 16.2% today.”

Hey, this is no happy blog post. Techwite wants to help, Techwite wants to be positive. And Techwite also wants to speak the truth. Sometimes that means taking a look at what is happening and discussing it. If that’s not for you, skip this. I’ll have a Tip soon about iCloud Calendars. Otherwise, if you have more information or comments about this post, join in.—TW 

Make no mistake, moving to “the cloud” is part of a trend to shift as much of corporate IT as possible into a commodity subscription service, like electricity.  Billed monthly by volume used, managed offsite, no local server upgrades or software updates, maintained by somebody else. The WSJ article referenced here concerns itself chiefly with the effect on the investment world of mega-cloud vendors Microsoft and Amazon on their smaller rivals Oracle and IBM. But from a human standpoint, your local IT, your local data center, your local administrator, your local Help Desk, THEY (and if you are one of these people, I am talking about you)—ARE ALL GOING AWAY.

“Hybrid Cloud” and “Middleman” Hosting is a stepping stone. You’re company isn’t putting everything in the Cloud? Not yet? Accenture, IBM, Dell—somebody like that—can take care of your local IT administration requirements! They’ll manage your relationship with Microsoft, and for now you can tell everyone you are “going to Office 365” although technically, you’re not. (That would be using Microsoft totally as your host for Office…)

Your IT Infrastructure Director may optimistically tell you, “Don’t worry, we’ll need someone to engage in ‘vendor management‘, someone who understands Infrastructure…, and heck, if you get on well with them, maybe you can work for the hosting vendor!”

If you know your stuff, you can probably point out that your “hosting vendor” is missing the boat with Microsoft Exchange backups, mobile security, a proprietary and non-standard archive solution that “locks you in”, and inefficient mail routing. But how long will that save your job if you are seen as a bump in the road to “the full Cloud”? And will that endear you to your potential new employer? Remember, the CIO wants his IT Infrastructure to be as easy to manage and replace as an iPad.

Meanwhile, the data center/hosting company is getting squeezed on both ends and trying to survive a similar change. How long can they compete with their big brother—and former mentor? Does anyone need a middle man?? Your Account Manager’s boss is telling him, “Don’t worry, we’ll probably get absorbed by Microsoft. And either way, you can probably work for them!”

We are seeing a massive consolidation and centralization of data and processing, and elimination of jobs. In addition to the stripping of jobs as the infrastructure ascends to the cloud, much of the work that was outsourced to cheaper labor sources will soon be automated—think robots and “chatbots“. There are going to be fewer and fewer jobs in IT Infrastructure. (Coincidentally,  last week the Verizon strike provided an example of this shift:  The Verizon Strike Signals a Larger Economic Battle.)

What about the people? The overall trend is clear for companies, especially large companies, and service organizations. But what about at the individual level? The level of the gal or guy in IT today? IT is the “service economy” equivalent of the Detroit factory job in the manufacturing economy of 20 years ago. This is just the beginning. Clearly there will be some jobs in hands-on management of Cloud services, such as AWS, and there is still time and opportunity for corporations and small businesses to hang onto that shred of control. As for other opportunities in IT? Infrastructure is going to shrink drastically or disappear altogether. That leaves software development. Web development, mobile apps, databases. The skills will be needed and they are constantly churning, so those who can stay on top of the latest development trends will likely stay employed.

Many of these trends are going to affect the rest of the economy as well. The Uberization of driving jobs will soon shift to autonomous cars and robot assisted shipping. Even the old saw about finding a job “flipping burgers” will not hold true for much longer. Where will people find work? That I would like to know.

“…we have to make sure that we have the kinds of policies here at home where we provide people with the skills they need to get the jobs that are available in the economy…”
—US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, interview with Kai Ryssdal, Marketplace

Yes, Jack, we need to be sure that people are trained up for those jobs. But what are those jobs? And where are they? Where are they?

— Techwite

Cloud Risk: “The Hotel California Effect”

via Wal-Mart Considers Open Sourcing Hybrid Cloud Tools – The CIO Report – WSJ.

This Desert Life

You gotta love this. It’s a problem for customers, but cloud vendors love it. You move your data, maybe even your apps, and probably outsource most of your administration activities (making a big chunk of  your IT team “redundant”). The corporation achieves the dream of freeing itself from IT and making infrastructure a utility service. But then, the Cloud or Hosting vendor doesn’t meet SLAs, you don’t have the in-house talent to challenge them when they use technical excuses for long delays or missing capability. And you are stuck. Locked in. They call it “The Hotel California Effect”. Now what? Anyone with experience moving from one hosting service to another knows it can get real ugly real fast.

Wal-Mart may open-source tools that make such moves easier. Hop from one “cloud” to the next. And I’ll thank the Counting Crows and call that, “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby“, to wit: “…You can never escape, you can only move south down the coast.“

Operate Like Airbnb and Uber with the New DNA for IT – The CIO Report – WSJ

“Similarly, the key to the next 20 years of enterprise IT is not to provide more and more technology, but to manage a platform that enables any application to exist in your environment.”

via Operate Like Airbnb and Uber with the New DNA for IT – The CIO Report – WSJ.

Thanks, Pat Brady. To paraphrase a source I can’t locate, I think you’ve got “the beginnings of the kernel of an idea somewhere in here”. I’d summarize your suggestion for Future IT as: “Manage a platform that enables“. But without more details for this hopelessly generic message to CIOs, some will probably figure they understand and use the slogan to promote bold initiatives to house traveling employees at Airbnb locations, and get to their destinations using Uber. Your “new” IT will enable users by “allowing” those apps on their mobile devices.

The “DNA” is “Awareness”, “Identity”, “Integration”, and “Insight”.
What? What are you saying? What “Awareness”? Really. This non-specific mumbo-jumbo is just a tease! You’d never get away with this kind of writing at the New York Times. But okay, maybe I’m missing something here…maybe this is just a “concept piece”, you’re talking to CIOs. They don’t want to be bothered with details.

Let me translate. Guys and Gals, you want your people to be more productive, creative, efficient. You want them to like the tools they use for work. You want the tools to work well together. You don’t want to waste your resources managing a bug-riddled platform with a swiss-cheese of security holes that performs like an exhausted dull-eyed old mule struggling on the trail up the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. My advice? Buy Macs. Use Evernote. Support iOS. And please find a way to keep that stuff from being hamstrung by your old legacy data and security infrastructure. If you can’t do that, then go ahead, you might as well promote Uber and AirBnB. Cause that’s all you’ve got left.

What is the Cloud anyway?

Lost in the Cloud #2

It was, hm, some years ago, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in between listening to Friday night jazz sets, and I was trying to explain to some friends what “the cloud” was. IBM had already starting to promote the concept of “the cloud”, and Microsoft was not that far behind. In IT, it was beginning to be a buzz word, just like all the other marketing labels foisted on us in the last twenty or thirty years. Clearly not that many people understood it yet. Except for the rare far-seeing visionaries, few people saw the power, the potential, the inevitability that was to become “the Cloud”. And though the term is now in common parlance, there are probably plenty of people who still want to ask, “What the hell are you talking about? What cloud?”

But don’t worry. I’m here to explain.

Other than its own defining article, “The”, the Cloud, is not much different than its real-world counterparts. Clouds are out there. Far away, up in the sky. They move, they disappear, they change, evaporate, and re-form. They do whatever they do, and unless they are up to no good, most people don’t even think about them. And that’s pretty much the story of “The Cloud”. It’s your data, accessible to you out there, and you don’t have to think much about it. And this isn’t even new.

Pretty much anybody on a computer, anybody using the Internet, was already using “the Cloud”—they just didn’t know it yet. How did this happen?

• Email is the obvious one – All of you with your AOL, MSN, Yahoo, & Google mail “on the web” stored on some big company’s servers.
• Facebook (and MySpace before it) – With all that personal information, photos, timeline, likes, accessible to just about anyone.
• Flickr – And all the other photo-saving and sharing sites with thousands and thousands of your photos.
• YouTube – Zillions of home videos, old home movies, and pirated clips of TV shows, and movies, and everything else.
• iTunes – Jeez, let’s not forget the bizillions of songs, and albums, and playlists and reviews that Apple had up there-at first, just to buy and download and store on your own device, but that changed rapidly.

You get the idea. Everybody started pushing stuff up onto the Internet primarily to share it, but also to store it. As usual, Steve Jobs had some idea of where this was all headed. He understood this was going to be about storage. Storage players were beginning to appear – think DropBox and Evernote, with apps and access from many devices and platforms, and of course from the web browser. You could store your stuff, all kinds of your stuff, on the Internet (maybe even referred to by that time as “the Cloud”). It was safe there, presumably. (This was before we found out about our friends at the NSA). You didn’t have to worry about backing it up, or losing it if your computer was lost or stolen.

Apple tried pretty early on to capture and cash in on the consumer storage idea. But Apple stumbled a lot on this one. It was “Mac.com”, and then “Mobile.Me”, then “Me.com” – heck! I can’t even remember all the various names as Apple tried to re-brand and renovate this idea and eventually settle on (duh!) “iCloud”. At one point you could have your own web site, and photo galleries, and Internet storage that worked just like a disk drive, sort of… but it was all a moving target. Apple managed only recently to integrate iCloud into the MacOS, and iOS, and the Apple apps, and your data, along with iTunes and all the media available there. Microsoft, Google, even Amazon, are all competing with Apple in this same space. Who gets to sell you stuff? Who gets to keep it for you? In “the Cloud”. This “ecosystem” wasn’t just devices, it was storage, of your stuff, by someone else, away from your home—and eventually, storage of your work stuff away from your office.

Because the move of data —by businesses—into the Cloud, is another part of the story, to be addressed by TechWite, another time! TFSB!

The Incipient Cloud

For decades IT people have made diagrams of their networks and data centers with lightning bolts that point from someplace local to a fluffy blob. Riding from the local computers and corporate data center and LAN, all the data and email and files and voice telecommunications, everything, rides that lightning bolt and disappears into this blob, which was sometimes called a “network cloud”. That cloud was a little symbol to represent the enormous external private and public networks that we now generally refer to as “the Internet”.

Unpredictable Issue #83

Unpredictable Issue#83.  That’s right, I’m re-discovering old content. From the end of 2000 to 2007, I wrote 83 issues of my newsletter “for Macintosh” and eventually also “iPod” users. Those were the days my friend. The final days of Microsoft’s Monopoly Game, the Return of the Steve, Windows Ex Pee, and the introduction of Oh Ess Ten. The Eunuchs took over Apple and forgot a Whole Lot about what makes a good user interface. Features that were GFD (Good for Demos) and interface options that were TOTE (Too Obvious to Explain). It was the era of the Geek Speak Review, when for a short time, I offered to work at Apple as the EVIP of DRAT.  Times haven’t changed much, we’ve got the FCC giving away the Internet, and Comcast buying it, the iOS team re-learning what works and what doesn’t, and everybody lost in the cloud. LIfe is good, and Tech is worth Witing about!

Lost in the Cloud

How did we get here?

Many years ago, before there was yet a new millenium—much less a generation to be named after it—Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates had clearly dominated the desktop computer marketplace with their super-successful Windows operating system and Microsoft Office combination. They had done very well, but not everyone was using Windows. That pesky Steve Jobs was still chipping away with his “non-business” Apple products. Especially in the Education market – that is: schools. Bill kind of enjoyed watching Jobs to see what he’d come up with next, but not Ballmer. He wanted to crush Apple. Period.

Turning their attention to the education market, Bill and Steve opted for the best and fastest way to compete. Philanthropy. They gave away Windows and Office to schools. This polished Microsoft’s image in the press. And at low cost. Microsoft’s many corporate clients had already financed Windows and Office, and with little competition, were locked into complex licensing agreements for years to come. This was great; Bill and Steve could write off the education donations at their full retail value—hundreds of dollars per unit. But, this wasn’t good enough for Ballmer. The problem was, it still cost Microsoft to ship boxes with disks, and manuals, and marketing materials to schools. “There’s got to be a better way!” He told Bill.

Bill thought about this. And then, he brought up a new idea with Ballmer: “What if we just gave them the ‘software license’? They can download and distribute it themselves. No disks, no manuals. We just send them a fancy postcard with a number on it. They’re responsible for the electrons. We just host the stuff on our servers. What do you think?”

“Brilliant!!” Ballmer beamed. “Full retail price tax write off for the cost of a post card!!”

And so began Microsoft’s ventures into electronic software distribution, to be rapidly followed by the “subscription model”.

To be continued…

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