The New Computer (Patreon)

I think I may have mentioned in one of the recent updates (or maybe on the Kickstarter project blog?) that my PC has been making unhappy noises, and in fact, I can no longer count on it to boot up if I make the mistake of turning it completely off. When I mentioned this to Spouse, he suggested we get ahead of the inevitable failure by getting a new computer now and while I was dithering about this, took care of it for me.

So I now have a new computer!

It is a Mac.

I have been running a dual-OS system since I bought Vellum, which is my ebook-and-paperback layout program, and exists only for the Mac. I regret nothing about the investment into a cheap Mac mini (bought off eBay!) to run Vellum because it has saved me tremendously in time and money—it’s the reason all my books now have paperback editions simultaneous with my ebook editions, requiring no special Kickstarter campaign to drum up the cash to pay a graphic designer. But it’s meant that I’ve had to kludge together a workflow across platforms based on legacy systems for the PC that I’ve had, in some cases, for 20 years. (“Your copy of Photoshop is so old we have to trick the software into thinking the servers that used to check the license are still operating. That’s not going to last forever.”)

Gamely, thus, I have plunged into attempting to switch over to the new system, with the attendant learning curve. If you wonder why I’m so quiet, it’s because I’m attempting to port everything over (or find alternatives for them) while juggling other things. Let me tell you more!

The New Scanner – One of my biggest priorities was ensuring the new Large and Fancy Scanner still works. It does, in fact work… sort of. The scanner utility will scan for me, but if I try to open it from inside any piece of software, it fails. This is obviously a scanner driver problem, but we have the latest driver… so for now, I am experimenting with the utility, which will scan and then open the resulting file in a program you designate. Which brings me to…

Replacing Photoshop – I did all my scanning in Photoshop, and all my editing not only of those scans, but of all the book covers and interior illustrations, with their billion layers. I’m not willing to shell out the amount Adobe wants, so I’ve been looking for alternatives and it turns out Affinity (which I already got involved with several years ago when I bought and then forgot Publisher) has a Photoshop competitor, Affinity Photo. Using it, I am not only fighting my lack of familiarity with its interface, but also my lack of familiarity with the Mac interface (why are the buttons to close windows on the left!!), but so far I think it’ll be “good enough.” And no, I don’t want freeware. I want to buy a license from someone who will be forced to answer my emails if I run into problems! What good is being a business of my own if I can’t write off the ability to pay other people to fix my problems??

Replacing Office – Turned out to be easy, because I don’t have to. I did try (pluckily!) to use Pages for a while, but looking at decades of accumulated Word files made me nervous and the last straw was discovering that Numbers, the Mac spreadsheet program, didn’t correctly open my accounting files. Buying a license for Word/Excel/PowerPoint was pretty cheap and took care of that headache.

Consolidating Files – Which brings me to the biggest headache, and thus the biggest opportunity in the whole endeavor: combing 20+ years of documents out of my old computer’s four (!) hard drives and reorganizing them logically.

I’ve been thinking about this for over two years now. The amount of detritus that I’ve been passing from computer to computer is immense, and even includes backups of my old student accounts from college UNIX servers (did you know that old-style mailspools were stored as single, enormous text documents? Lordy, I do). I realized there was no way I could gracefully share or pass on my business to anyone else, whether they be assistant or heir, because of the mess, and I told myself I’d fix it and never did.

And here I am now! So I have been laboriously picking through the flotsam, tossing out junk and saving lost lambs into their proper places, and the intention once I’m done is to turn this new, streamlined, single-point-of-data into the source for my daily backups to cloud and external drive. I’d say about about a third done and weirdly… I’m enjoying it? It’s a little like housecleaning, and a little like finally tackling that looming project that was looming like a looming thing, and a little like treasure-hunting. Sometimes the treasures are fun, like the specs I sent the artist I was thinking of hiring to do the covers for the Jokka novels, showing the relative heights of all the characters. Sometimes they’re heartbreaking, like the shared folder with the friend who died, that demonstrated that she and I had been at work on an art book project. But all of it is necessary and I’ll admit it would have taken a step as extreme as ‘switch platforms’ to get me moving on it.

There are other issues I’m going to have to resolve, certainly, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the Mac solves some of the problems I had with my PC:

Microphone Volume – It’s a known issue that the same microphone, plugged into a PC will record at a ridiculously low volume; but plugged into a Mac will record at normal volume. There are dozens of hacks to fix this but they’re all bad and rickety and stupid. I was already experimenting with recording on my old Vellum Mac in order to get around this problem; having one computer means I don’t have to mess with it. If I want to record, I just hit the ‘record’ button and the output is no longer a hushed murmur I need to apply a billion filters to boost.

Printer Woes – Here is where I mention that earlier this year I had to move my label printer from my PC to my old Mac mini because for no reason I can discern, my PC stopped correctly printing to it. I’d ask it to print, and it would tell me it was jammed. I would turn the printer on and off, and then it would advance three or four labels and then print the last label I tried to print out and the new one, and if I was lucky, it would print it centered on the sticker and not half-on, half-off it. I did all the expected stuff (including reinstalling the driver) and got nowhere. I plugged it into the Mac, and it was fine. I was on the verge of tossing that label printer and ordering a new one, so that saved me $200. Still no clue why the PC decided to mutiny that way.

Video Editing – If I use my phone to record video, the file format it exports isn’t readable to the movie editing software I bought several years ago. If you follow my Youtube channel and wonder why my output has basically stopped, it’s because the contortions I have to make to get my phone’s video to a piece of software that can gracefully edit it required too much brainpower and I didn’t have it to spare. Now my desktop can read my phone videos natively. No more shenanigans. Which brings me to…

Integration with my phone – I switched to an iPhone when it became clear that Apple has locked up schools, platform-wise, and my family at large was already in the iPhone ecosystem. The moment I thought ‘but I won’t be able to accept a Facetime from my dad or daughter’, that was the death knell for my Samsung. At the time, a lot of the proprietary Apple apps simply wouldn’t talk to Android, and I needed to stay in contact with them more than I needed to have any specific type of phone. So I switched, years ago, and while the initial learning curve took some time, after a while it stopped mattering because—seriously—it’s just a phone. As long as it does the stuff I want it to do, I don’t care what OS it’s running.

But this decision, made years ago, means that I can now do things like answer texts from my computer. Which in the past would have sounded unimportant to me, until I started getting texts about health emergencies. If you have a reason to need to be able to read people’s texts no matter what you’re doing, it’s nice not to have the phone soldered to your hip. My computer also now notices the notes I make on my phone, which means they no longer disappear into an abyss after I make them. I actually see them now! Good stuff.

Tags and Searching – I only lately noticed that the Mac prompts you for tags when you save a file. Any file. And that the search function in the Mac is so much faster than the one in windows, that using those tags might actually be helpful.

Icon Size – And finally, a dumb, small thing: in Windows, you can set the icons in a folder to one of several set sizes (small, large, larger, etc). But on the Mac, you get a slider in the corner, and you can zoom them to any incremental increase you want. This sounds unimportant, except that I have thousands of scanned images and not-so-great eyesight. I can now look in one of my sketchbook folders and increase those icons to large enough to actually see what the pictures are… and if I can’t see a specific picture because it’s particularly low contrast or hard to make out, I can move that slider up until I can.

I expect to be at least another month in getting everything sorted out, though, because I’m rarely home lately, and I am chafing at the friction it’s introducing into my workflow while I’m trying to get the Kickstarter collection finished up. But I’m already glad I did it. ‘Just pretend that your old machine went up in flames, it’s toast, gone forever,’ my spouse told me, ‘and instead of thinking ‘what can I rescue’, think ‘what can I do now that I don’t have to worry about all that legacy stuff that was holding me back.’’

And you know, I never would have thought it, but… it’s kind of refreshing…!

So that’s the story. More as I figure things out!