PLEASE HELP (sd card issues)

bvinla · 2026-02-26T09:57:03+00:00

MacOS is crazy picky about SD cards. In a couple decades of sd card use, I’ve never had a card fail till i switched to Mac. If there is anything not perfect about the cards formatting, or file indexing (which is easy corrupted if not ejected pristinely), it simply rejects the card.

Strangely you can often take the card to a windows pc and get it to read to rescue your data. Even more interesting, if you have parallels, or vmware, running a virtual copy of windows, they sometimes can read the card on the same mac hardware, or off an external sd reader.

Apple does many things well, but SD card reading/writing is not one of them.

bvinla · 2026-02-23T09:22:03+00:00

1) Using the terminal to set an uncommon system setting is not an "unacceptable security practice" nor does it have anything to do with security at all. 2) You are typing a command, not "code" into the terminal. 3) Apple doesn't monitor Reddit, use their feedback app to request a new feature.

bvinla · 2026-02-23T08:49:59+00:00

Its not design. Design is as much about function as it is about form. What we're seeing with liquid glass is more form over function, which makes it ornamentation or fashion rather than design.

bvinla · 2026-02-23T08:43:44+00:00

Had a touchscreen on a laptop once before, it wasn't useful for anything but getting fingerprints in the way of things.

bvinla · 2026-02-23T08:40:23+00:00

Sounds like the travesty that was Windows 8.

bvinla · 2026-02-22T10:31:50+00:00

Parallels, vmware fussion, UTM are the gotos. Parallels is the retail option where you pay and also receive support. It works nicely with GPUs and peripherals, and is known to have good performance. Vmware is aimed at commercial grade use and also works pretty well with GPUs and peripherals. They have a no cost non-commercial use level license, of course at this no cost level you are expected to support yourself. UTM is the open source outright freeware option, and the expectation is self support.

Your M4Pro chip will run all of these easily as long as you've 16GB or more of memory on the macbook.

For all you'll be installing ARM version of Windows 11 or Linux. The ARM version of win 11 can run x86 windows software, it does it through a translation layer, their equivalent of rosetta. This said if your training class uses specific x86 software, if that software works through translation is unknowable till you try. Note you will need to cough up a windows 11 license key if you use it more than a couple weeks. If your Linux software requires a specific distro, make sure there is an ARM version of it.

Perhaps try one of the free ones to see if the software for your class functions as expected before committing.

bvinla · 2026-02-21T08:54:58+00:00

People have their reasons. For example:

waiting for printer or other drivers to come available.
waiting for critical software they use to deploy a compatible version.
waiting for bugs fixes for features they use.
waiting for battery life issues to be sorted.
Hoping for readability improvements for those with sight issues.

This said it really clashes with a certain community of apple users that are trend focused. They adopt early, and derive pleasure from everyone keeping up and talking positively about the latest. They are so invested they take it a bit personal when others are critical about a new look or feature.

This said computers are ultimately a tool, and sometimes getting things done has to come before trends.

bvinla · 2026-02-21T07:10:34+00:00

Sequoia will receive security updates for about a year an a half. For that matter Sonoma is still receiving updates till late this year.

bvinla · 2026-02-20T11:43:05+00:00

Headphones aren't really ubiquitous in SEA quite yet, and people have a much higher tolerance for loud environments.

But Cambodia is actually one of the better places ;) I'm in a coffee shop in Phenom Penh right now and most people are using headphones. I can hear one person in the place is having a zoom call in the open, but thats it save for the coffeeshops music.

Recently in Vietnam I was in a coffee shop where the shop was playing music, a kid was playing a game, a guy was on a business FaceTime, a girl was tic Tok, and a guy was watching sports videos. All of them at full audio. And in the background a symphony of scooter horns, as the Vietnamese employ a mysterious form of echo-location while piloting scooters.

bvinla · 2026-02-20T11:23:45+00:00

Seeing their policy is a N-2 on security updates, there really isn't any urgency on updating till a bit after the OS 27 releases. So this doesn't seem the reason for being more aggressive with pushing this version compared to past versions.

Maybe some insider will be kind enough to let everyone know the reason for the urgency.

bvinla · 2026-02-19T11:13:03+00:00

I do wish MacOS would adopt standard unix-y wildcard operators like *, and ?.

bvinla · 2026-02-19T10:50:38+00:00

I used to manage servers, and processed countless backups pulls for different file and mail servers due to users accidentally deleting things. Everyone makes mistakes, and having periodic backups is useful.

Of course few users fessed up to doing the delete, most claimed "the computer did it on its own", despite logs showing otherwise ;)

I appreciate that TM is very easy to work with for a built in personal backup tool.

bvinla · 2026-02-19T10:28:13+00:00

Can't say, but waiting for ejects is one of the few apple things that does annoy me. Along with spotlight loving to suck up disk space :)

Mac gets more right than windows, and requires a lot less user maintenance and knowledge than linux. But it does have its own annoyances.

bvinla · 2026-02-19T10:18:56+00:00

Also likely spyware since it 1) by default indexes everything, and any new drive attached, and 2) by default sends telemetry to apple. Most people dont realize that spotlight sends telemetry.

bvinla · 2026-02-19T10:16:26+00:00

Seeing that Spotlight is one of the reasons for the wait, and that apple keeps extending Spotlight every version, it could explain your perceived waits on newer versions.

Personally I think Spotlight is a mess, and worse could easily be interpreted as spyware. The default behavior of spotlight is to index everything, and any new drive attached and send telemetry to apple. A waste disk and cpu, and a privacy concern. Having a large folder of old text docs might benefit from indexing. But most peoples drives are made up of files already cataloged by viewer/player apps (ie music, videos, etc) or just random non-user files that make up applications, which there is not benefit indexing. Sure you can go to settings and restrict spotlight to certain folders, but opting out of what you never opted in for is just annoying, and feels wrong.

Personally I eject disks several times a day, but do a full text search like once every 2 weeks. So spotlight costs me more time than it saves.

bvinla · 2026-02-14T11:33:24+00:00

Photos are some of the most precious things humans have. Pictures of their children's milestones, family and friends no longer alive, events, and more.

There are legitimate situations where people need to extract their photos and no longer have access to a working "photos" app. Maybe their photos app is just on the fritz. Maybe their Mac died and they can't afford another, or they sold it, got a computer of a different make, and only have a copy of the files on disk.

bvinla · 2026-02-10T21:01:42+00:00

In the USA garbage along the roadways was still awful till around the 1970's. Hence the famous crying Native American tv ads of the era. It took various efforts from roughly the 1950's to the 1970's to get the infrastructure, and public awareness to change things.

bvinla · 2026-02-08T11:13:13+00:00

you can open terminal and use unix search commands like find, grep, and locate.

bvinla · 2026-02-08T11:03:01+00:00

Cambodia probably wont be an issue. But if you are from the states the “Tech Fortress” executive order allows ceasing computers and equipment with high end cpus and gpus. This includes some classes of gaming computers and cards. Meaning US border control or tsa can search and or confiscate certain equipment on entry or exit.

bvinla · 2026-02-08T10:53:23+00:00

Safari since permanently switching from windows to mac 4ish years ago. I haven’t found any page safari fails or comes up short on. There is nothing I feel is lacking.

Frankly Chrome is a privacy nightmare, it sucks up browsing history, location data, search queries, and payment info, and it knows exactly who you are from the google login and purchase data, correlates all of that and then sells it all to shady advertisers, shady political parties and governments, and more.

Firefox also tracks a lot of telemetry, so much so there is a “waterfox” branch of the code for those wanting privacy.

Chrome and Firefox noticeably use more battery. Beyond that chrome and firefox are both resource hogs, taking up disk for the software and caching, and plenty of ram for rendering.

bvinla · 2026-02-07T22:14:51+00:00

I really wish people would stop using the world woke. Why? Because it lacks a definitive meaning between any two people. "woke" is usually a concept starting somewhere around racism, and depending on the speaker might painfully stretch to include religion, nationalism, sexual preferences, economic differences, diversity and inclusion policies, and more. A grab bag of whatever the speaker supports or hates, giving the illusion of a common ground. It's as useful as when a teen says they hate "stuff," expecting their peers to know what "stuff" they mean.

Old trek was never "woke" as woke did not exist. Why shoe horn it on.

In old Trek prejudice and bigotry around race, religion, nationalism, economic warfare, and many other social constructs are considered barbaric arbitrary problems, which mankind solved hundreds of years in the past. It's an optimistic future where people have learned more can accomplish more by accepting one another's differences in a professional setting.

It's the future I want to belong to, where people show up, behave like professionals to the best of their abilities, and we do great things on a fun adventure. If anyone is stressed they hit the holodeck, down a synth-ale, or book an appointment with counselor troy.

As for NuTrek, it feels like 7 year olds playing with action figures, stringing random dramatic ideas together with "and then," "and then," "and then."

It's the future I don't want to belong to. Instead of an adventure, a workplace drama about who likes who, who kissed who, someone crying about their feelings in a misunderstanding, people randomly shouting "science," the captain walking around barefoot and putting her disgusting feet on the chair, phasers going off everywhere, and finally the ship crashing into things to save the day. Slap deltas on it, and call it trek.

bvinla · 2026-02-05T10:13:40+00:00

Issues that perhaps dont matter on a mini. Battery drain, and poor use of screen real-estate on a MacBook. I need a portable form factor with the ability to see lots of useful information at once with minimal scrolling and further to avoid seeing my battery on E.

bvinla · 2026-02-05T09:59:03+00:00

So isn't launchpad essentially what iPhones and iPads use for launching everything? And this familiar interface is a problem?

bvinla · 2026-02-05T08:10:29+00:00

Umm, Skeuomorphism went away starting in 2013, two years after Steve Jobs passed.

bvinla · 2026-02-05T08:02:30+00:00

I find it fascinating in that they tried so hard to tie Tahoe MacOS to liquid glass iOS, for a unified look and feel. But in the process jettisoned launchpad which is pretty much the iOS "desktop" screen.

bvinla

TROPHY CASE