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The End

This is the final post on Minimal Mac. This project contains what I believe in when it comes to a mindful and intentional approach to technology. After nearly 2,500 posts, I have nothing more to add to what has already been said. As I wrote in my book enough, saying no is actually saying yes to other things. It’s time to say “no” to this project so that I can say “yes” to others (or, in some cases, fully commit to agreements already made).

For those who have read and enjoyed this site at any time over the nearly six year span, I thank you and hope it has truly helped you in a meaningful way.

For those new to the site or coming across it the first time, I have compiled the best posts and quotes of the last six years into a book called, Minimal Mac: What We Believe In. The eBook has long been available for purchase. But, I also now offer a beautiful print edition for those that would like a more physical reminder of what we believe in.

Paperback

eBook

I also am making the t-shirt available for a limited time once again for those that may want one as a souvenir.

Minimal Mac Shirt

In closing, this has been really fun and fulfilling and I am deeply grateful to each and every one of you. In general, most of us are bad at saying goodbye. I’m really bad at it. Therefore, it is best to just get over the fear and come out and say it.

Goodbye.

P.S. For those that wish to continue to read my work on these and many other topics, patrickrhone.com will be the place to do that for as long as I can still make words work. Please stop by.

We are all many things. We all do many things. We will do many more things throughout our lives. Yet, when we are gone, most will primarily remember only one of them. They will pick from the lot and remember you as that. What they pick will, in their mind at least, be all that you are. Therefore, it is our job to ask ourselves with all the things we allow ourselves to do, with each and every one, “Is this something I want to be remembered for?” This is why it is important to make “No” your default response to most things. Those things that seem like great ideas should get a “maybe” until they earn a solid answer one way or the other. But “yes” should only be given to those things that, if you were gone tomorrow, you wouldn’t mind being remembered for.

patrickrhone / journal

From staples like Disk Utility and Activity Monitor to once-in-a-while lifesavers like Grab and Migration Assistant, OS X's Utilities folder is a goldmine.

I agree. Jason highlights many good ones here. My personal pick would be DigitalColor Meter. I find I use it several times a month.

Resist the urge to buy the latest, shiniest smartphone, writes Christopher Mims. Like cars, the functional difference between this year’s model and last year’s has never been smaller. One result is a growing marketplace for used electronics of every kind.

Interesting perspective. Well worth the read. It is behind the WSJ paywall though. Adding it to Instapaper grabbed the whole article for me though.

There’s nothing wrong with liking the crazy, fancy stuff us geeks like. We can’t control our obsessions, but we can control how we communicate them to others. Smug superiority gets us nowhere.

I loved this interview with Mike Dickens who is traveling the world with his main setup being the one you see above. But the part that stuck out to me was his answer to what he would do differently if he could:

I would bring a laptop. I spent a few months weighing the options, literally, between an iPad Mini and an 11″ MacBook Air. I ended up selecting the iPad for two reasons: size and photo editing. It may seem contradictory, but I’m more fluent editing pictures in Snapseed and VSCOcam on the iPad than in Aperture on a laptop with similar plugins. However, the decision was short-sighted. On a trip of this scale, there are more tasks — and more varied tasks — than an iPad is capable of supporting at this point.

The road to figuring out what is enough for ourselves is paved only by figuring out what works and what doesn’t. By occasionally erring on one side or another will we often find that balance.

Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: There’s a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first “real” computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern Web.

I love projects like this. They prove that even the technology we consider “old” is still pretty useful if you want it to be.

onethingwell

minimalmac

Removes all known adware from your Mac. It is very simple to use, and should clean up your system in less than a minute, from start to finish. Just open the app, click the Scan for Adware button, and remove anything that is detected.

I have been using this in client situations with increasing regularity. Works great.

But, this also should point out the fact that such things that we Mac users used to not even worry about are becoming increasingly common. In the past, the Mac was largely protected by its relative obscurity. As an adware developer, why even bother the manpower targeting a machine with less that 5% worldwide marketshare? Well, Macs are no longer in that position. As Apple grows, so does the size of the target. Sad but true.

(For what it’s worth, a program called Genio is the adware I most commonly run into these days. But it is far from the only one.)

I'm a pretty big fan of outliners and have been for a very long time. I personally use and love OmniOutliner Pro but not everyone needs that kind of firepower. This looks like a nice simpler alternative.

Getting to know your Mac better is what we believe in around here. This is a pretty good round-up of the hidden power that lays in wait behind your Option key. (via The Loop

The only speculation on the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition I'm going to do...

What if the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition could be quite easily updated?

What if it was as simple as swapping out the S1 chip and changing the band?

What if the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition came with free upgrades for life?

Now I just removed a barrier a typical $10,000 watch buyer might have to buying this $10,000 watch.

(A reminder: This is not primarily tech product. It is primarily a $10,000 watch. This is a completely different market for Apple and, at this price, they are going after a completely different customer who will be purchasing this model for completely different reasons. The competition at this price level is not with other smart watches, it's with other $10,000 watches and the thinking going into it is completely different than anything else Apple has done before. To apply what Apple has done in the past or any other product they have produced before to this one is foolhardy at best and ridiculous at worse.)

parislemon

I’m shy. I’m always focussed on the actual work, and I think that’s a much more succinct way to describe what you care about than any speech I could ever make.

Jony Ive, explaining why he never appears on stage at Apple events — from the insanely detailed profile by Ian Parker. (via parislemon)

Yep. So much this.

So many of the tools we rely on every day are more fragile than we think. Hard drives fail, batteries swell, connections break under stress, software updates have bugs that only manifest under edge cases. When things go wrong, it’s a huge, and sometimes expensive, pain in the butt, and we’re always surprised when it happens. Now matter how much we reduce the points of failure in our technological lives, we’ll never reach a zero failure rate.

The cup is already broken.

This. So much this.

Look at the apps that you have given explicit permission to bother you. Do it now. How many pages is it? I have twelve apps that are allowed to interrupt what I’m doing, though when I started this, I had closer to twenty. Look at each of them and decide if each app is allowed to pull you away from whatever you’re doing, be it playing Threes! or doing your day job. Think about how often they interrupt you, and what they interrupt you for

Make "no" your default when something or someone asks if you would like to receive notifications.

This is very important and I've increasingly seen it on some of the Macs of my clients. When they call me in with inevitable problems and weirdness with their systems, I immediately remove it and explain to them why it is to be avoided. As Macs get more popular they are increasingly a target for this kind of stuff that we in the Mac community have never really had to bother with before. I also commonly see an Adware package called Genio along side of it. I, personally, suspect it is installing this too but have yet to able to confirm the connection. I use AdwareMedic for that with tremendous success.

These days, I expect the machine to accept my query, and throw the relevant set of my stuff back at me. Browsing through directory windows seems anachronistic now, and - interestingly - it also feels artificial.

Yep, to me too. Spotlight search in Yosemite makes this especially true.

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