Now that I've used the new 2018 iPad Pro a bit longer, I thought I would share some more in-depth observations about Apple's latest pro tablet. There are some concerns about durability, curious design issues, and really nice aspects in practice. Let's dive in! Handle With Care The 2018 iPad Pro has a slab-sided design reminiscent of the iPhone 4 and 5, but its durability … [Read more...] about Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro
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The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!
I'm loving the new 2018 iPad Pro. It's amazingly fast, showing off Apple's chops in hardware design like no Macintosh can do. Frankly, it's as important an advance as the iPhone X! Amazing Progress from Apple When the first iPad Pro came out in 2015, I was astonished to see that Apple's in-house A9X CPU had passed the Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs in my old Mac Mini and 2007 MacBook … [Read more...] about The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!
Add a Mirror to an Existing ZFS Drive
One of my criticisms of ZFS is that it's not flexible: Once you set up a dataset, you're pretty much stuck with it. But this isn't entirely true: You can add a mirror or stripe to an existing pool without destroying the data. Since this is quite a common operation, I decided to write it up for posterity. A Very Simple ZFS Pool Let's say you built the world's most basic ZFS … [Read more...] about Add a Mirror to an Existing ZFS Drive
How To Remove Raw Images From Apple Photos and iCloud
Apple Photos isn't the best application to manage a large digital photo library, but the integration with iCloud, iOS, and macOS is extremely useful. But even though Photos can process and store raw images, it is severely lacking in terms of library management: Smart folders don't properly recognize them and there's no easy way to remove them from your library so these huge … [Read more...] about How To Remove Raw Images From Apple Photos and iCloud
Recalling An HP MediaSmart Server To Active Duty
I was recently given an old HP MediaSmart EX470 server along with some other junk hardware. Although it has no graphics, a slow single-core AMD Sempron CPU, and just 512 MB of RAM, I was able to revive it quite satisfactorily. Here's how I upgraded the hardware and software. Remembering the MediaSmart HP released the first MediaSmart server in 2008, and there was much … [Read more...] about Recalling An HP MediaSmart Server To Active Duty