The Aptly Named, Sam's Blog

I was convinced I’d get the Midnight Green one until last night. Then I changed to Silver. We’ll see how that goes.

‪Today I mark twenty years of living in the US. On a personal level, there have been a few ups and downs, but recent years have been great 😊.‬

Here’s a photo of the passport stamp from that day.

And a photo of me taken during that first year.

RIP Robert Frank.

Everyday I set an alarm for around 6am on my Apple Watch. And yet…

P. S. Maybe this event will usher an actually smarter Siri era. One can only hope.

Once again it’s the time of the year when I wake up at sunrise.

One rose on its branch is reaching for the sky.

I switched my weather complication from Dark Sky to built-in Weather and my Apple Watch Series 4 battery life dropped in half. Consistently over two full charge cycles. I made no other change to the configuration or my routine. Needless to say, I’ve switched back.

I need a new keyboard. This one keeps putting bugs in my code.

Absolutely gorgeous photographs: Closer Encounters with Reuben Wu

Looking forward to trying out the fresh new NetNewsWire bits. I already use Feedbin so am just going to sync. nnw.ranchero.com/2019/08/2…

WFH Vignette #29: When you get sucked into work and realize 45 minutes later that you’re still wearing the apron from when you made breakfast.

I’ve been using a OWC Thunderbay 4 (Thunderbolt 2) external enclosure with four 3 TB hard disk drives for the last two years. I bought it on eBay as a new but opened product. It’s been great. I had two of the drives in a RAID 0 configuration (for higher bandwidth single volume) and they were serving as the primary storage of about 1 TB of photos.

Recently I decided to partially upgrade that setup by purchasing a Crucial 2 TB SSD. In order to install it I also had to purchase a OWC Spare Drive Tray since the ones in my Thunderbay didn’t have the right setup for 2.5” drives. That took a few days to arrive. In the meantime I installed the SSD into an old USB LaCie enclosure and moved my files over to it.

I decided to measure the drive performance as I went through this process. And for that I used Blackmagic Disk Speed Test which is available for free on the Mac App Store.

Each disk in my original setup had about 190 MB/s read/write speed.

The RAID 0 gave me about 300-320 MB/s. I forgot to speed test it before I removed it, but that’s what I recall from back when I first set it up.

In the intermediate setup with the LaCie enclosure I got about 250 MB/s write and 270 MB/s read speed.

Once the drive tray arrived, I moved the SSD over to that and into the Thunderbay for the final setup where I’m now getting about 350 MB/s write and about 380 MB/s read speed.

I may be able to extract some more performance from this SSD by making some other purchases and changes, but I don’t feel compelled to do that at this time. This is better than what I had, and quite acceptable for my use. In fact I felt totally comfortable moving my iCloud Photo library over to it as well. This freed up about a third of my internal drive storage.

I could’ve done this sooner but the tradeoff of storage size vs. price didn’t seem worth it. In the future I may keep an eye on the price of such drives and pick up at sale to upgrade more of my Thunderbay drives.

And in the foolhardy-comparison-department, here’s the crazy fast speed on the internal SSD on my iMac (Retina 5K, 27”, 2017 model).

Wore a polo shirt today, but it’s chilly so I put on a hoodie for the morning. I feel like this is a fashion faux pas. Not that it really matters since I’m in my home office. But I do have video calls to attend 😂

I went to the rally organized by Popular Mobilization that I heard about from Sarah Innarone, inviting everyone to gather, be themselves, have a good time, and in doing so tell the fascists that hate has no place in our city. Following are some photos I took.

Over the weekend we went camping at South Beach State Park. It was a lovely campground just off the beach amongst many trees. I don’t recall having visited the coast in such nice weather. The town of Newport was a short bike ride away and we rode our bikes around parts of it as well. Following are some photos.

Relaxation with Olive. /cc @macgenie

Morning coffee on most days: First 100 ml – 😊 Second 100 ml – 🕴 Any more – 🤢

It’s a rainy morning today but these are from a rainy morning last week.

Twitter Trends feels more “in-your-face” with the new interface design.

Pro-tip: Change the location preference for that to a country in which you have zero to minimal interest.

Nice gradient of colors at sunset last night.