Mac Utilities
Utility programs I am trying out on the Mac.
iStat menus
Billy Newman Photo Podcast Feed
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
Link Mac Utilities
Website Billy Newman Photo http://billynewmanphoto.com/
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/billynewmanphoto
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter https://twitter.com/billynewman
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/billynewman/
About http://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
https://billynewmanphoto.com/feed/podcast/billynewmanphotopodcast
If you’re looking to discuss photography assignment work, or a podcast interview, please drop me an email. Drop Billy Newman an email here.
If you want to book a wedding photography package, or a family portrait session, please visit GoldenHourWedding.com or you can email the Golden Hour Wedding booking manager here.
If you want to look at my photography, my current portfolio is here.
If you want to purchase stock images by Billy Newman, my current Stock photo library is here.
If you want to learn more about the work Billy is doing as an Oregon outdoor travel guide, you can find resources on GoldenHourExperience.com.
If you want to listen to the Archeoastronomy research podcast created by Billy Newman, you can listen to the Night Sky Podcast here.
If you want to read a free PDF eBook written by Billy Newman about film photography: you can download Working With Film here. Yours free.
Want to hear from me more often?Subscribe to the Billy Newman Photo Podcast on Apple Podcasts here.
If you get value out of the photography content I produce, consider making a sustaining value for value financial contribution, Visit the Support Page here.
You can find my latest photo books all on Amazon here.
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
Link
Website Billy Newman Photo https://billynewmanphoto.com/
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/billynewmanphoto
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter https://twitter.com/billynewman
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/billynewman/
About https://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
139 MAC UTILITIES
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Appreciate you guys tuning in to check this one out. I wanted to catch up on a couple of things that I’ve been working on recently, which is often what I’m talking about. But I’ve been putting together a couple of things during the last couple of weeks and kind of run across a couple of ideas related to photo stuff and media stuff, as is the usual. But a couple of things I wanted to talk about were some Mac apps today, I’ve been trying to sort of set up my mac book to be
is configured with a few more utilities and a few more pieces of software that make it a little more functional for me. So I want to try and talk about those a little bit today. But one of them was I stat menus, and it was this application that I’d heard about. Maybe over a year ago, I’ve been using it a lot when I was trying to render some 360 footage and a lot more like video footage. I was using a computer the whole day to do that. So this program is stat menus are good for adding in a bunch of information like a bunch of system information to your computer right at the top of the wizard bar at the top, you know, like the Apple menu and your time and your clock and stuff, right? If you get a lot of information about your disk space, network speeds, uploads and downloads, and CPU and GPU. It’s pretty interesting, and I like to again check it out. And kind of when you have a bunch of graphs that sort of indicate when or how much how much of a system is going toward that task at that time. So right now I’m doing an upload to Amazon photos to try and get a backup of all my images up there. And I’m looking at the network monitoring. And so showing me like a history of my network upload speeds over the last 24 hours. And I see like there’s a big dip before like 5am while I was running overnight, and then now it’s back up like two maybe 3x what it was before. So it’s an interesting kind of monitor, like how high your speeds are. And that sort of thing. When I was running, rendering video out, it was cool, because you can see like the temperature sensor sensors inside of the computer. And in addition to that, you can see the hard drive space that was left on each few drives, including your externals, and you can see how fast the CPU and GPU are working. So I’ve been using this app a lot for kind of the system process, monitoring stuff, it’s cool, I’ve been enjoying it, it’s kind of fun to, to get used to. In addition to that another one that I’m checking out is probably one that a lot of people have heard of before, but I think it’s called magnet, magnet, I think and it sort of reproduces the functionality that you get, I think started back in Windows seven, where if you pull a window to the edge of the screen, it’ll sort of snap to the edge of that side of the screen or oral snap to beast split-pane window. It’s kinda interesting how it works. But I like I like how it works on Windows. And I have been sort of frustrated in the past that I don’t have that kind of utility in the Mac OS system. So I you know, just windows are sort of built to kind of float all over each other. And I did kind of like that part of, of windows or even back in my experience of working windows, which is in a way I work with a computer now I have like seven windows up right now. The windows, I don’t really always go to full screen application almost all the time. So it’s kind of interesting, that workflows rate changes over time. What else am I working on? Oh, Amazon photos, that was another one that I guess I’m I’m kind of going through right now sort of lean into another side of it. But I’ve been using Amazon photos for a while and the Amazon drive system, I did have some backups or not even really backups for the photos backups of the photos, I suppose because it’s the dngs. And it is the JPEG images, I think you can put video up there also. But that takes up paid storage space. So for photos that you can put as many photos on the cloud as you want with your prime membership. And I think I put like probably almost 100 gigs of photos up there. So it’s cool, you do have access to all of your images in that library of images you have online, like I can pull it up on my phone in an app, and I can pull it up on the web and a few other places. So it just gives me an accessibility to my images I hadn’t really had before to every image and that way at least that’s kind of cool that you know, I do see that I have access to all of those photographs bigger than that I really need to go through and make more functional collections of smaller sections of that. So I have just a lot of the photos I would need to use set up in a high quality system that is more accessible to me that’s still that’s the little piece that isn’t really quite as tight as I would like it within my photo business. But I’ve been you using Amazon photos to make a backup of everything, almost everything is already there. But it can incremental area like as you go, you need to get all the new stuff up there. So I’m trying to put up a bunch of the stuff that I’ve had for the last couple months when I haven’t really been able to put a sync back up to the Amazon photos. cloud backup. The cool thing is though, is I’m trying to work with iCloud a little more in addition to that, and so I’ve been setting up the iCloud
put it in Finder. So I can access my iCloud data there in Finder from multiple computers and from my phone, which is cool. But on my phone in my files app, I was going in there and I put in. So I have like the Amazon drive application on my phone, I had my files application sort of show that I can go to my Amazon photos, files that are from my phone. So without even going to the Amazon photos application just from my files app, I can go through and browse all those photos folders on the cloud and then pull up and view those images. I thought that was kind of cool. Or it was just interesting to see like, Well, yeah, I can jump to each any data photos that I want back in time, because they’re all backed up now and more accessible. So So I think it’s pretty cool. It’s a it’s a free service when you pay for a Prime membership. So I guess the proper way to say it is it is it is a premium service that is included with your Prime membership, which seems to be pretty valuable. A lot of the time I like the Amazon cloud services and cloud storage services, which I’m trying to get a little more into, like I was mentioned, I think it’s I think it’s 11 or 12 bucks a year for 100 gigabytes of storage space on Amazon drive. And I’ve been trying to think if that’s going to be something that I need, you know, like a more a more proficient more full service cloud storage system. Storage, I definitely need I’m looking into like hard drives right now try to find something, but I don’t know if I really need the collaborative accessibility that is provided by cloud storage so much, I think I need like fast, hard drives fast data storage and stuff. So I can I can kind of move things around. And it seems to be more useful for me than the big cloud. I’m looking at eight terabyte and 10 terabyte Seagate hard drive right now a couple of the brands I was looking at, like the G drives and those cooler like aluminum metal cases, I was looking at other Lacie drives about Lacy stuff in the past. And but I’m looking for a bigger desktop drive, I have a couple of smaller, portable drives that are great with a laptop when you’re when you’re moving around. And that’s worked really functionally the last couple of years, but I am looking for something that really probably what I actually want is a NASS or some network-attached storage device. I’ve been interested in those for a long time, they’re kind of expensive to get into. It’s almost like buying a desktop computer when you load it up with big hard drives, and you have to buy an enclosure, and it’s a big project, just all as that as it is. So really picking up eight terabytes or 10 terabytes for for 200 bucks seems like, like it would solve my problem for the time being. But that’s what I thought five years ago when I bought a four terabyte hard drive. And I thought that would solve my problems. And now I have four filled up. Four terabyte hard drives. Well, one, two, those are before the two. Those are both ones. So there are four, that’s for sure. So yeah, I need to get a bigger, bigger amount of space to kind of do the data management staff that I have in the background, the tough thing is, is like so you have four terabytes, wow. And so it’s like a lot way more than I would have ever thought in the past. But man think about 20 years from now. But in the data we’re gonna be talking about, we’re talking about AR files or photogrammetry projects, there’s something it’s gonna be insane data. Four terabytes, I got to back that up somewhere, right, so I need a second four terabyte hard drive to have all that duplicated over to, so now I have two full four terabyte hard drives, which is kind of the problem. Yeah, I seem to run into I’m going to get this eight terabyte hard drive. And then I’m going to need a second one to back it up to, so the idea is that it’s really just going to be this one big tank drive, that’s going to be the archive area for all this stuff to go and get backed up to. And then we’re going to have the smaller, you know, four terabyte hard drives that are maybe a little faster. I’ve been doing black magic speed tests on them though, and they are not that fast. Like 100 megabits a second, I’ll get in a second but yeah, try to get the four terabyte hard drives I have right now to be more active, like for video projects or for the photo libraries or something like that. Maybe I can break it out and have that run a little bit more stable on some of those but the interesting thing the thing I was going to mention is that these drives are USB three, right? Wow USB three that’s fast. Hey, maybe soon they’re gonna be Thunderbolt three or the USB 3.1 USBC connector. That’s That’ll be great. That’ll be what what is that 10 or 20 gigabytes a second incredible speeds. Wow, that’d be awesome or USB three what that’s five gigabits a second gigabytes a second slippin. Now, the slow hard drives are what the the weakest link in the chain is. So you’re sort of throttled back to the speed that the drive can write to. So the 7200 RPM drives these spinning disk drives, which used to be kind of state of the art video drives 10 years ago. And that kind of considered really slow, they are really slow their data write speeds are somewhere around 100 megabytes a second, which is below half of what was advertised for the even USB two speeds of 250 megabits a second, megabytes a second. Okay, so we’re running 100 megabytes a second on a USB three, four terabyte hard drive, it’s good. It’s cool. It’s, I think, better than the USB two connection, Acme does. So it’s faster than a USB two cable, happy to have USB three. But Wow, that is like not the same kind of performance at all. So that’s really where you’re going to see the performance increase when you go to an SSD hard drive. So I was trying to consider that about any like future stuff, I was thinking about, like, getting like a pro desktop computer and trying to build out some stuff, like I was saying, a network, storage device or other stuff that I could use, but thinking about, okay, so for performance with like a higher-end computer, you’re really going to get slower speeds. With that, you would get really fast speeds if you had an SSD, or if you had the right type of enclosure that was built to work with it really quickly. So that’s kind of been crossing my mind to for future-proofing. What I’m up to for the the 2020s as we’re getting into it. I really think though, you know, round, most logically, but the answer was probably get the reasonably priced eight terabyte drive now wait some years into the future and pick up some multi-terabyte solid-state drive of the future that can transmit things at faster speeds. I’m sure we’ll get there sooner than later. Well, thanks a lot for listening to me kind of ramble about computers that I have installed on my laptop. That’s pretty interesting, right? But all of that is in service of the greater goal of trying to get some photo stuff put together, which has been going pretty well to go through a bunch of images in the catalog. And I’m trying to get together I think I’ve been trying to talk about it in in so many ways a few times. But I’m trying to get together a couple sets of portfolio sort of structured into like, let’s say, easily landscape, commercial shoots, portrait shoots, wedding shoot something like that. And so there’s kind of a collection of each second have. So if people are to look at those photos, I sort of see, oh, yeah, there’s the, there’s this and then there’s that. So that’s kind of the plan, which is close to coming together pretty fun. And other than that I’m getting into video stuff, I’ve been editing a lot more Final Cut, I’ve got the big monitor up, I’ve got the weakened tackle that I’m trying to go through and kind of get used to using the pen, it’s probably easier to do that in Photoshop or Illustrator or something like that to get used to the pen, that final cuts are cool too. Also, you get to kind of flow the pen back and forth. As using a tablet is a faster way of working than with a mouse. In some ways. It’s sometimes a little more accurate, but it really is a bit of a learning curve in some way. So try to tighten it up. It’s coming. Anyway, thanks a lot for listening to this episode, this coast to coast broadcast of the Billy Newman photo podcast. I appreciate it. You can check my stuff out at Billy Newman photo comm or subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or the Google podcast. So thanks