April 2018 – Tech Reflect

Invite people to lunch

2018-04-26

When you work at a very large company, especially one that has experienced a lot of growth, it’s easy to lose touch with people and feel less socially connected. A couple of years ago, I decided to start sending out lunch invites to people, just one person at a time. I tried to vary the kinds of people I invited:

People I’ve known forever but lost track of
People in different organizations (i.e. not just engineering)
People new to the area where I work or perhaps new to Apple People that are great to brainstorm with
People I work with cross-functionally
People who spend too much time in their offices and otherwise have work/life balance issues

Many people need to be dragged away from their desko! Taking a break for an hour can have a lot of benefits:

Networking can be tremendously important
It’s a great mental break
You can

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2018-04-23

Your job could be killing you

I’ve always fought, with pretty good success, to have a good work/life balance and to fight for it for others. Here’s some advice I’ve gathered over the years to help improve your good work/life balance.

Have children or pets. Your priorities will be forced to change. You can make the world a better place at work and also make it a better place for your “kids” by being home.
Develop a passion that has nothing to do with your job that you look forward to finding the time to work on
Use your vacation days and never cash them out. Many companies have a cash out program that sounds great, but it’s really a benefit to them. You’re gone less and they have less liabilities on the books.
See a doctor regularly to make sure work isn’t causing your health to suffer. I know

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Why does rebooting fix everything?

2018-04-20

This comes from a long career of software testing where I went through more than a dozen release cycles, noting which testing methods work best.

We’re all familar with the following troubleshooting steps when encountering a problem on our computers or phones:

Quit and relaunch an app if that’s where the problem lies
Log out and log back in (on a Mac)
Reboot

In fact, it’s often the first thing many people try. And for me, I reboot all my devices every morning.

More often than not, the problem goes away. Why is that? Well, a few possible things can explain it:

Sometimes caches can be cleared on reboot that were causing problems
Sometimes background processes were running that were affecting an app you were running
The overall system became constrained for resources and rebooting starts everything from scratch

But I’d offer another explanation: It’s because of how software …

The Help menu in complex applications

2018-04-17

People seem to ignore the Help menu, especially more advanced users. However, I’ll often see users of complex applications spend an inordinate amount of time hunting through menus and submenus looking for a particular option. Perhaps you want to know if there’s a keyboard shortcut for a command.

Let’s take a complex application like Pixelmator Pro. You want to add a mask to your document. You look in Insert, then Tools, and then Format and you finally find it in a submenu.

A simpler approach would be to open the Help menu and enter “mask” into the text field.

Hovering over any of the results will open the menu and highlight the menu item. Hitting Return will execute the menu command.

Note that Pixelmator has excellent help, but most applications don’t, so this can be every more valuable.

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Less frustrating hot corners

2018-04-16

Hot corners are pretty neat and I notice a lot of people using them to Show Desktop (especially), but also to lock the screen or enter one of the Mission Control modes. But I also run into people that hate that they accidentally activate hot corners too often and they eventually just turn it off. So this tip is special for a few reasons:

I’ve probably given it out more than almost any tip on here.
People have hugged me after I told them about this
It’s hiding in plain sight!

If you go to Mission Control preferences, there’s this bit of explanatory text at the bottom:

Even if you do read it, it’s not super obvious what the text even means. Now click on the Hot Corners button in the lower left and you’ll see something like this:

Then each of the 4 menus looks like this.

Bring up …

Backing up iCloud Drive

2018-04-13

Whether it be user error or a bug, it’s definitely possible to lose data on iCloud Drive. If you keep important data there, personal or otherwise, it’s important to know a few things:

While Apple does backup iCloud Drive, the frequency may not suit you. A restore may also overwrite other files you’ve changed since the last backup in an attempt to restore one file. Some network backup solutions don’t back up iCloud Drive so you may have to manually configure them to do so

Manual backups

Backing up iCloud Drive yourself is an option.

Time Machine DOES backup iCloud Drive. However, Time Machine’s backup schedule is not predetermined. However, it’s possible to turn off Time Machine and then manually back up using the tmutil command. I’ll be honest and say that I’ve found this route to be frustrating but maybe you’ll have better luck.

The crazy option

I have …

Create a test file of a certain size

2018-04-03

There are a number of possible reasons you may want to create a file of a specific size. For example:

Testing upload/download speed (you may want a very large file, for example)
Testing edge conditions related to file size
Test the behavior of a mix of large and small files

Probably one of the least complicated UNIX utilities every written is called mkfile and is designed for this purpose. It’s super simple to use:

mkfile <size> <filename>

For size, you just use a number, suffixed by b(bytes), k(kilobytes), m(megabytes), g(gigabytes). So, a specific example:

mkfile 10g TenGigabyte.txt

This creates a 10 gigabyte file called TenGigabyte.txt.

The files will all just be zeroes, but for many purposes, this is fine.

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Tech Reflect

Reflecting on 25 years in tech

Month: April 2018