[quote=papaluv4gd]The best alternative for a facemask is no facemask. Seeing that 99.9% of masks being worn are designed for bacteria and NOT for viruses, the whole mask thing is anexercise infutility. ...

Non-medical masks are not to filter the virus itself, they only stop you from spewing larger droplets containing the virus on your friends once you get it and don't know yet for the first week or 2. They will help a tiny bit to protect you from others' droplets, but not much.

Could be futile, (especially if it goes airborne), could save the life of someone you care about. We don't know for sure. But we know that Japan did very well, didn't shut down or stay-at-home or social distance but they do wear masks all the time. I must admit I used to laugh at them until I found out they do it to protect others, not themselves, when they are sick. So they are patriots, not wimps after all. Let's all wear masks and get back to work and school! Worth a try. Worked for Japan.

There are many causes worth fighting for and a few worth dying for. Masks are not one of those to me.

My cousin is a nurse in a covid ward in Arizona. She wants everyone to wear masks. What the heck, why not try it? But it won't help much unless everyone wants to help.

It's your choice. Be brave, you can be strong enough to wear a mask.

I use a free Chrome plug-in called "The Great Suspender".
It suspends tabs that you are not currently viewing in Chrome, causing them to use nearly no RAM so Chrome won't over-tax your computer.
Go to chrome://extensions/ and search for "The Great Suspender" to get it.

I am a photographer and designer who works on both print and digital (online).

Printing vendors/manufacturers for magazines etc. are considered essential and are still up and running.
We are in the middle of printing a huge catalog now.
COVID-19 is not the reason for print demise, declining ad revenue is.

I have a Kindle and laptop and read magazines on them when print is not available, but I enjoy print much more for relaxation.

It's a mixed bag, digital is easier to search, print is more fun to read and easier to flip back and forth.

I have books and magazines from 50 years ago (LOL, also the first and the last print editions of Macworld magazine!). Good luck reading my PDFs ebooks etc. 50 year from now, when computer formats have moved on.

The next iPhone will do it.

[quote=Burtzy]This reminds me of a book called "A Martian Wouldn't Say That".

I typeset an edition of that book when I worked for Price Stern Sloan!
Those guys were a hoot.

Nice!

Yes! More distance on the road please. I always try keep 2 or 3 seconds apart from cars in front of me.

I took a drivers ed class and the instructor asked us what would happen if we did leave that much space, would a car just cut in, change lanes in front of you? I said, no 2 or 3 would!

That's why when my iPhone 6s's screen cracked, I used the ATT insurance to replace it with a refurbished 6s instead of a 7 or 8 (at the time). I love the 'ol plug with good headphones at home and in my bluetoothless car's audio.

But I do use bluetooth earbuds when I'l walking the dog etc., it's just easier.
I hear the new iPhone might have no ports at all, wireless charging, backups and all... ugh.

I've been on the bandwagon for 6 or 7 years.
I replaced my old dead SSD with a new SSD!

I've recovered entire hard drives many times all by myself (with 3rd. party software) and never had a spinning disk that spun but would not at least mount in recovery software. When my SSD completely "disappeared" it was a new experience and very confusing.

I cloned my old SSD, taken from my dead laptop, to my new MacBook (old laptop killed by wife's wine accident, but SSD was fine!)
and put the old SSD in a drawer with all my old hard-disk backup drives.

A year or so later I tried to use the SSD in an old iMac that I got for free... took it out of the drawer and:
It was dead as a doornail, activity light went on, but not even terminal would even see it no less mount it.
Not bad sectors, not wearing out from too many read/writes, it "died" from NOT being "exercised".
Couldn't see it, couldn't format it. Gone.

So, yes, DO get an SSD, but DON'T leave it in a drawer for more than a few months with no power.
Even name-brand, modern SSDs need power now and then to refresh the memory sites. (That was news to me)

Install/Turn on/mount/lplug-in your old SSD every few months or it can die from neglect. That's been my experience and what the tech at OWC said when I bought my new SSD to replace it last month.

Good advice for spinning disks, too, fire 'em up now and then to keep them happy.

I use Solid-state Drives (SSDs) but not for archive backups.
SSDs are great, quiet, and FAST but they DO fail and when they do there is no saving them. Just lost a 500GB SSD that is a bit old (3 years). Doesn't even show up at all in Disk Utility so you cannot recover anything and cannot even re-format it. My 10-year old Hitachi spinning-disk drives are still working great.

Tech support said it was my fault because I did not power it up for a year or so. They said SSDs need to be mounted and "excercised" at least once every 3 months to refresh the data and apparently that is true!

(I bought a new SSD to replace it and I did have a spinning-disk backup of it!)

Great shots!

We still have all those things in LA, although my hula-girl collection is on a shelf in the office.
As far as I know Bob's Big Boy in Burbank is the only place in town to still have car-hops and window trays!
But not at the moment, of course.

[quote=bobbyjohn]Agreed to a point. But why was the left so opposed to putting the simple question on the census: "Are you a citizen of the USA?"

I wish we could, but if we ask that question, a vast majority of the undocumented and even legal citizens who have undocumented relatives or have become naturalized citizens will not respond at all to the census out of fear and we will not get an accurate count, off by millions.

We need an accurate count to budget for school attendance, determining how many House Representatives a state gets, and to fund many other programs that are open to all.

Otherwise things will be underfunded/undercounted and that will affect benefits and rights for all of us — "legitimate" residents and natural citizens, too, especially our school children.

All individuals are legitimate.
It's a count of everyone that lives in the USA, regardless of their immigration status.
So it counts citizens, undocumented immigrants, felons, everyone.

Most paid backup services allow you to send an external hard drive to them, they will "upload" for you and send it back or in the case of Amazon's paid "glacier" service, they sent us a BIG hard drive, I copied my files to it and sent it back. That will by-pass the ISP's cap and can be faster, though it did take them weeks to complete the 20TB "upload".

[quote=saw615]When I first upgraded to Catalina, startup was very slow....
But remember that part of the slowness has to do with having to index Spotlight and I presume upgrading to the new file system—both of which may take several days.

You can turn Spotlight indexing off with a terminal command (but spotlight is useful and terminal is not easy).

You could easily turn recognition off in Photos.app preferences and see if things speed up!

I have read several threads on other sites saying that Catalina needs several days, up to a week to index spotlight AND that Photos will redo its "scan all of your photos and recognize the people, scenes, and objects in them" which takes forever and uses up cpu making everything SLOW especially if you have a lot of pics in Photos.

Personally, I seldom upgrade until the new macOS gets to version 10.XX.6 (that will be 10.15.6, Catalina is only 10.15.1 now. (10.15.2 in beta). The .6 release is generally the most stable and developers have all the bugs worked out by then.

In reality, I don't upgrade at all until there is some new software I really want that requires new macOS.
Still running El Capitan on my home/personal Mac and High Sierra for work Mac.

macOS gets worse for me with each new release. Added security features make many of my custom workflows more and more difficult and I don't really care about any of the new features (iOS apps ported to Mac, etc.)

And I do a bootable backup before any big update. Two of them. I like to use SuperDuper! - from Shirt Pocket software for that. It's free for full backups/restores, worth paying for incremental "fast daily/scheduled" backups if you want an up-to-date bootable backup. Carbon Copy Cloner has a free 30-day trial, and is also excellent.

With a bootable backup (or two) you can always just re-start your Mac booted into the backup - instantly back in business without a LONG wait for files to restore, then restore your Mac overnight when you're done working. Time Machine can't let you use all your backed-up files until they're restored.