Use a spreadsheet!

Fitbit won't let me download more than a month of data, and I'm too lazy to do it every month, so I'll lose that stuff, which is a shame because the historical data is really useful.

I gained the quarantine fifteen, and this morning I weighed in at my lowest level since (checks phone) December! Somehow I find it very gratifying to know this.

And now Google owns Fitbit, so it looks like the app will be pretty stable.

Is there a better weightlifting app. I just started. I looked around for the paper sheets like at my last gym, but I guess things changed since the 90s.

There is definitely a better one than the one I've got.

2 before seeing 1.

And now Google owns Fitbit, so it looks like the app will be pretty stable

Oh, my sweet summer child.

Heebie's phone has been lifting bitcoin since 2018.

You're supposed to use you phone to scan a code to see a video of how to use the machines. That seems too involved.

"And now Google owns Fitbit, so it looks like the app will be pretty stable."

Google Reader would like a word.

My financial life lives entirely in an app that was last updated five years ago (developer died suddenly of a heart attack), and is clearly going to stop working some day. I remember to do a manual backup every month or so, but I'm going to be very annoyed when it does stop.

5/8: Okay, yes, Google fails fast, except that Fitbit is already a well-established and presumably profitable brand, not a project that directly contradicts their goal of monetizing the web. It'll be around.

Spreadsheets are great*--I've convinced myself that using spreadsheets to attack problems is an important part of being an adult--but I use Google Sheets and I'd be f'ed if they disappeared. But I pay for Google Cloud and so I expect I'd at least get a heads up to export my data.

* The one caveat is if they become extremely annoying if they get too big or your data requires complex normalization. At that point you have to level up to a real database with custom entry/retrieval scripts, but thankfully most projects don't get that far. Use the good enough solution.

I'd be insanely hosed if Google Sheets was discontinued.

I still use Open Office.

My kid recently lost some photos that were in an iphone backup. A newer backup overwrote the old one instead of existing in addition. Copying the file by hand beforehand would have saved them, if the behavior was clearly documented beforehand.

My gf has lately been pretty frustrated by how greedy time machine is with disk space.

Apple especially, but most other consumer-facing utilities as well, are not at all described with real-world constraints in mind (mostly storage, but using any of this stuff is nightmarish with a weak connection where say generating partial results during intervals of good connectivity and then aggregating would be helpful but is impossible ). One guesses that some latte-sipping product manager decided that support for such features would only help the poors or maybe allow people to delay buying/subscribing to the newest version.

If you're not paying, you're the product as they say, and sometimes whether or not you're paying....

10: just last night and today I was entering data into an excel spreadsheet and it slowed down so much that I had to enter a number, hit return, and then wait to make sure the cursor advanced (or I would end up entering another cell's data in the first cell because excel was still processing the complex command "return" (or "down arrow")). Then today I sorted and 30 seconds later the sort hadn't completed (8 columns, 150 rows, a tiny matrix). WTF Excel? At first I thought my keyboard was dying but it wasn't the keyboard.

11: I use google sheets for research data but do a once-a-month download to back up so at most I'd have to re-enter a month's worth of data. So I'd only be sanely hosed.

My fitness monitor (Galaxy Fit) is still in the box because I couldn't get it to work six weeks ago when I got it and I still haven't gone back to try again.

I did buy a Versa, back when I posted about it, and tried to get it to work for 2-3 weeks, got fed up and returned it. I don't know if it was just a lemon or if the whole line is buggy, but I'm back to my ancient fitbit. Except I haven't been wearing it and I'm annoyed not to have a watch on.

I've convinced myself that using spreadsheets to attack problems is an important part of being an adult

Perhaps this is the secret to my youth!

I'm starting to get concerned about my photo and music history and Apple software behavior. I'm on about the fourth piece of hardware where I've been dragging the libraries along for each migration and strange things are starting to happen. Photos have two or three or even four replicates of the same photo in the library. Music, which I originally copied from CDs to get them populated to my library, get replaced with different versions of the same song from the music store. The album associations to cover artwork are all f'ed, where it tells me that some artists song is from a different album from a different artist. I suppose at some point they'll sell a service or app to clean up the mess they've made, but I have, I don't know, 18 years of photos on the Mac mini now? They're backed up periodically to two separate time machines, one kept in my office and one at home, and more recent photos are duplicated on Dropbox.

lw: re: Time Machine, I have a friend who told me he bought a commodity external disk drive and somehow used it with Time Machine. Disk space is cheaper than dirt these days, innit?

I had SO MUCH photo-archive anxiety. What finally helped was just to pay through the nose for Google Photos and put everything there. Jammies has a server for our house, but the process wasn't second-nature to me, and we weren't mirroring it with an off-site server in case of fire, etc etc etc. I had fears about outdated technology, fragmented programs from different times, all sorts of things. I don't know why Google Photos seems solid enough to reduce some anxiety, but it does.

It's truly not even that much money, compared to say therapy or medication. It's just that it's occurring in a category that's usually free.

19: Exactly the same here! Once I got all the photos I care about to Google, a weight lifted off my shoulders. (and they're duplicated a few other places, too. Can't be too sure, I guess.)

The timeline/map integration was unexpected. Not sure how I feel about it. I think it's a net plus, but it's pretty good at finding sad reminders.

18: That's what I did as well with my work machine, since I'm an international border and a few thousand miles away from my IT department. If I recall correctly, the setup process even preferred an external drive.

"Disk space is cheaper than dirt" though might change if Chia, a cryptocurrency that uses space instead of computation, takes off. The only saving grace is that a lot of consumer-grade SSDs aren't appropriate for it. But even that could change if there's an opportunity cost for manufacturers.

I lost most of my photos, documents, etc. some years ago because of insufficiently-careful data storage and transfer. I felt terrible about it for a while, but subsequently it was very freeing. From time to time now I accidentally delete, or lose track of, some (not-work-related) photos and data and practice not caring. The art of losing, etc. I'd probably feel differently about this if I had kids.

Unless you had losers.

I'm starting to think about upgrading my computer. It's a 5-year-old laptop and showing its age. I'm not looking forward to backing up stuff from it. I have a folder on the desktop "2016 computer move stuff", where all the files from my computer before that one went, and a lot of them still are. In that, there's a folder named "Salvaged from old computer", from the computer before that one, which has a lot of files from college, some of which may now be over 20 years old. I'm tempted to come up with a more rational system, but if I don't do so in the next 2 weeks then I won't be able to in the next 4 months, due to summer travel and other real life stuff, and by then the hardware might have made the choice for me.

I now have two computer towers and one old laptop which I have not saved the data from and which I included in my last move in hopes I eventually do.

26: I haven't been able to save the physical computers. Small house. (In theory I could have put them in the basement, but the half of the basement that has a floor is pretty cramped, and the half that doesn't isn't ideal either for obvious reasons.) I have a portable backup drive but should probably look into cloud options at some point.

We have so many photos saved on cd. Because I'm old (school).

It's probably good for me, but I'm kinda sad that all my old .chat files are no longer readable. There's some weird switchover where the chats that are old enough are just in html and are perfectly readable, and then I switched to using iChat and they become unreadable.

I scanned a bunch of my parents' old slides and those are in my digital library too. I suppose the slides themselves are still somewhere.

23 I'm now this way about possessions after a traumatic divorce and then an overseas move.

28 They degrade over time. You should back them up every 3-5 years, no longer.

I can confirm that 23 does feel bad forever if you have kids.

My youngest sister is still a bit put off at the number of pictures there are of me as a baby compared to her even though I was a better looking baby. Maybe we'll say they were lost.

She's much better looking than me now and I'm not bitter.

Call me a bad parent, but I think it's possible to imagine having enough pictures of your kids. For the first year of my daughter's life, we probably averaged 5 pictures of her taken per day. It's dropped off a big in recent years, but still, Cassandane always wanted or felt obliged to take more than I did.

yeah but you probably also don't think I need to write a book chapter per week about our lives so that we may relive it in near-real-time someday.

i keep vestigial "fitness" notes (length of time in h2o, swim route, water temp @ crissy field buoy although this isn't accurate for the cove or immediate environs, wind speed) in my tidelog, a magnificent publication. would be happy to hold onto prior years tidelogs, or fine with them going astray. it'll be a convenient way to check water temp year over year, though.

all of the online crap is so greedy for personal data & the industry has distinguished itself with its profligate disregard of privacy, a fitness app is super unappealing to me.

I totally sympathize with Cyrus, because our newer machines have layer after layer of stuff copied from older machines now dead and gone. I name the folders for that stuff after the now-gone machine, and then I forget which machine was which.
I back up to an external hard drive (2TB) but I'm worried about it because the software is awful (WD Smartware, unsupported) and I forgot to back up our machines for the duration of the pandemic. Ouch.
If anyone has a more supported and less stupid backup system for Windoz boxes, I'd love to hear about it.
ps: We also have tons of photos on Google as a separate backup for that category.
pps: We also also have boxes and boxes of photos from our kids' childhoods, etc. that I'd like to scan, too. So, I can see the rest of my life forming up as a useless-data curator.

Is anyone else experiencing significant increases in Windows suckiness over the last few years? My worst experiences have been with updates, but also weirdness like the built-in photo-viewing app ceasing to work at all -- on multiple computers. (I found a substitute that works just fine.) Or the backup and restore functions not working.

I had my backups on Dropbox -- and Dropbox ceased synching properly. I've moved everything to Onedrive -- and also now make sure that my local backup drive is up-to-date. I had thought that a cloud drive was safe. Apparently not!

My current object of Microshit hatred is Teams. They're trying to make that their gateway to chat, cloud files, and embedded apps. It's the slowest goddamn piece of shit in the world. Trying to navigate it feels like running on a 386 box. 15 or more seconds to switch between threads or chats, even ones you just had open, and the navigation history is such that it doesn't actually take you back to where you were when you press back. Shockingly this is something they actually developed internally then decided to commercialize, so the motto "eat your own dog food" makes me think that MS developers love Alpo.

holy shit, I loathe Teams so hard.

Our horribly disorganized IT department has mandated Teams for our entire large, diverse organization and ... I like it. It works fine for me, even on my six-year-old personal PC.

I like that they keep pushing Edge. Sometimes I use it, like the way you buy crappy candy to support a kid's team.

We use Teams. I hate it so much. Worst UX I've encountered in a long time (except maybe ERP).

I don't mind Teams, except for the thing where if you get a meeting invite/call, it doesn't show up in the chat list until you actually join it. Which can make it a real pain to find if you don't join immediately (especially combined with Outlook's default behaviour of deleting invites from your inbox once you respond to them).

44:Even my IT dept which pushed Explorer for ever prefers Chrome to Edge.

SP or anyone with Apple Time machine, do you have thoughts on replacements? The hard drive part is working, but the router is aging and making my internet connection unstable. We may need a new back up drive too soon enough, so suggestions for that would be appreciated too.

Teams itself is fine. The problem is there are like four different ways to connect to my office's network, and Teams voice chat and screen sharing only seems to work if people have picked the same connection options.

I replaced (partially) Ume's time machine with a proper router and a synology NAS. We hadn't actually been using the router part for years although I have now repurposed it as a wifi extender. The disk was showing signs of age and complaint. Setting up non-Apple hardware as a time machine disk is not hard. In fact I have a second ex-laptop drive doing just that for me right now.

I use Edge because its got the same rendering engine as Chrome but its not Chrome. I use Firefox more than Edge, though.

I find Teams saccharine but usable, especially for jumping onto quick work calls (a lot more seamless than Zoom). I don't like Microsoft trying to turn everything into Teams.

I realized I'd been so used to keyboard commands to switch Outlook between mail, calendar, and contacts that I'd have no idea how to switch if the keyboard commands reorganized, because everything moved around. It took me a while to notice where the buttons are now.

I am peeved that they took the longer keyboard sequences and started throwing in numbers - so before, a line graph in Excel was Alt,N,N, now it's Alt,N,N1; and to insert a comment R,C changed to R,C2. I guess they wanted to have more than 26 commands after each first letter and didn't care enough to, say, just give the new commands letters that didn't mess up the old ones (say, starting with numerals).

You can get a 4TB hard drive for like 80 bucks. An old one got filled by time machine because it's inefficient so I just bought a couple new ones and have backup copies and it should be good for a couple years. Setting it up as a time capsule takes five minutes. I call it RAID negative 1.

52: what do you use as a router? Asking for recommended brands.

The backup disk is connected directly to the mac, but rest of the house is a Google onhub with Google mesh devices.

I replaced (partially) Ume's time machine with a proper router

I read this as a paper router a few times.

I got some external hard drives, but they kept failing, and when I tried to get tech support, the staff seemed to be intentionally disconnecting on me. (This was all Western Digital, maybe they're especially bad.)