Last night I connected a brand new MacBook Pro to the latest Time Machine backup of my (now) old MacBook Pro. A few mouse clicks later I started the restore process and left the machine alone. Some hours later, the restore was complete. I had a perfect replica of my old laptop, up to date. I was amazed. I’ve used Macs for many years and like them for several reasons but this just blew me away. This was the most effortless transition I’ve ever had with a computer.

There were only two minor issues. One of them was of my own making.

First, I noticed was that some applications that need network access were crashing on launch. Safari was working fine so I searched online and noticed that others had reported a similar issue. Apparently some network configuration was incorrect. I rebooted the laptop and the issue was gone.

Second, I had to manually copy over some folders that I had deliberately excluded from the Time Machine backup. These include large amounts of media that I have backed up on another drive. I realize now that there is no point to excluding them and that if I hadn’t excluded them to begin with, this issue would have been non-existent. Also, I would have saved myself some time since an overnight restore would’ve restored them along with everything else without any manual intervention.

This morning I left the old laptop at home and took the new one with me. It worked quite well. Everything was where it had been, where it was supposed to be. I haven’t had to boot the old laptop at all.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself at Powell’s Books on a Saturday morning after being awake all night cheering India to victory in the 2011 Cricket World Cup. While at Powell’s I found the books that brought me there, but also decided on the spot to get a Kindle and to order the books on that. I’d been thinking of getting a Kindle for over a year and I had a feeling that it was the right time. That night I placed the order for it. It was at my door when I returned from work on Monday. The door had kindly signed for it.

I had seen the latest Kindle model in person before so I knew what to expect in terms of look and feel. As I spent large chunks of time reading on it I realized how comfortable my eyes were and how much paper-like the screen was. I can never read for more than about an hour or so on the iPad, even at minimum brightness. The Kindle, on the other hand, is a complete joy to read on. I feel that the magic of the Kindle is that one forgets that it’s an electronic device.

One feature of the Kindle that I didn’t know about before was that it can highlight popular text snippets, i.e text that has been highlighted by a number of people while they read the same book on their own devices. It is very interesting to see what others find worthy of highlighting. Of course, one wonders how much affect the highlighted text has on new readers, many of whom perhaps highlight the same text, thus perpetuating the importance of that text. I wonder if authors and/or publishers seek these snippet out as they create new editions or entirely new content.

It’s only been a couple of weeks but I’ve already read a bunch on the Kindle and look forward to a lot more.

Here’s another reboot of samgrover.com. It wasn’t much in the last iteration anyway. I’ve moved the older blog back to samgrover.wordpress.com. Eventually this and that may merge. Or not.

I’ve done this because I’m really not interested in maintaining a self hosted blog or website. I think the better solution for me is to host them elsewhere (on services that make that simple) and make regular local backups.