Cleaning AirPods and Memory Foam Replacements

I’ve been meaning to write up how to clean dirty AirPods and AirPod cases for over a year. Now 9to5 Mac has done it for me. All the techniques recommended by Michael Potuck are good ones. I’ll just add a few more:

  • A slightly damp cotton swab is a great way to clean gunk out of the AirPod case rim and rim lid. It’s amazing how much dirt I can clear out with that step alone.

  • +1 on the Blu Tack. You’ll find so many uses for that stuff.

  • Make sure to check the lightning charging port. I thought my AirPods died, and it was just lint from my pocket in the charging port.

Related to AirPods Pro, I bought a pair of memory foam replacements for the rubber inserts, and now they work much better with my ears. Your mileage may vary.

Apple Silicon in 2021

In the last few days, we’ve had rumors from both Ming-Chi Kuo (via 9to5 Mac) and Mark Gurman concerning the planned Apple silicon Macs (hopefully) for 2021. It looks like lots of interesting Macs are on the horizon.

14” and 16” MacBook Pro
There are two new rumored MacBooks Pro. The 14” design to replace the higher end 13” MacBook Pro has been rumored for years. These will likely get a souped-up version of the M1 with more cores and processing speed. It sounds like a new design and possibly a new screen technology. That part is expected. There are a few more tidbits I didn’t expect:

  • Demise of the Touch Bar. I’m actually starting to appreciate the Touch Bar. However, it may be going away with these new Macs.

  • New I/O. One rumor is that Apple will support additional connections. I find that one hard to believe. At best, I’d imagine an SD card slot, but we’ll find out soon enough.

  • There is also a rumored return of MagSafe for laptops. That would be amazing.

There are no rumors to this effect, but I would bet we’ll also get a second-tier Mac Mini (in a space gray case) with the same silicon as the new MacBooks Pro when they release.

iMac
The rumors are that we’ll get something similar to the look of the Pro Display XDR with a flat design on the front and back and removal, finally, of the iMac chin. It sounds like there will be two sizes, but they may both be bigger than this generation’s iMacs. It also isn’t clear whether these iMacs will get different Apple silicon than the iMacs Pro or not. There is also a rumored external monitor that will be more affordable than the Pro Display XDR.

This isn’t in the rumors, but I’d speculate that there will be two performance levels of the big new iMac, and the iMac Pro will go away.

Mac Pro
The prevailing rumors on this are that the existing Mac Pro will continue for the meantime to support Intel and the third-party ecosystem and peripherals around Intel.

The interesting secondary rumor is that Apple will make a separate smaller Mac Pro that will have a design similar to the G4 Cube. That Cube had a bunch of problems, but it was also a thing of beauty. I remember visiting a friend and lusting after his G4 Cube back in the day. With Apple silicon and its low thermals, I think it would be easy to build one in a cube. It would be a great capper to this Mac renaissance for Apple to make a cube Mac Pro.

Either way, it looks like we are going to have a lot of great options available to us once all this rolls out. I know it is against Apple’s DNA to share details ahead of time, but I really wish they would provide a product roadmap on this stuff. Many folks need to plan for buying new Macs (and Apple will most certainly sell a lot of them in the next few years). If we knew generally what’s coming, it’d be a lot easier to make intelligent decisions.

Mac Power Users 571: Catching up with Jeff Richardson



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Writer and lawyer Jeff Richardson returns to Mac Power Users to update Stephen and me on how he’s working at a 12.9-inch iPad Pro most of the time, even when needing to use Windows.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.

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Rethinking Mac Hardware

Jason Snell wrote a great piece for Macworld about the need for a Mac product-design renaissance. I couldn’t agree more. With all of the opportunities afforded by Apple silicon, I would love to see the Apple design team untethered to come up with the next great iMac and laptop designs.

Microsoft has made some very intriguing designs over the last few years for machines that run inferior processors and an inferior operating system. Can you imagine how great it would be to see out-of-the box thinking for macOS and Apple silicon?

My dream iMac is at least 27” with a slim bezel design and a hinge, like the Microsoft Surface Studio, so that when vertical, it is a Mac, but when tilted down into drafting table mode, it is a giant iPad. Designs like that are now possible. Let’s hope we see them.

Automators 67: Automated Communications



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In this episode of Automators, Rosemary and I attempt to automate as much communication as possible, from email to messages, TextExpander to Shortcuts, and Drafts, there are plenty of ways to get stuff in!

This episode of Automators is sponsored by:

  • DEVONthink: Get organized — unleash your creativity. Use this link for 10% off.

  • Sync Up, a OneDrive podcast: Takes you behind the scenes of OneDrive.

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Get Powerful Document Management Tools with DEVONthink 3 (Sponsor)



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I’m pleased to welcome DEVONtechnologies as a MacSparky site sponsor. DEVONthink is the Mac’s power tool for documents. Just a few of the things I use DEVONthink for include:

  • A reliable repository of research documents. DEVONthink will hold as many documents as you can throw at it. It makes import (and export) easy so you can have all that power without feeling trapped.

  • A research assistant. DEVONthink uses artificial intelligence to analyze and connect your documents in ways that may not otherwise occur to you.

  • An OCR Tool. Everything you store in you DEVONthink Pro library gets OCR’d. It just happens.

  • An Automation Tool. DEVONthink lets you build powerful automation subroutines into your library to help tag, move, and organize documents.

One of my uses for DEVONthink is legal research. I dump legal cases, statutes, regulations, and law review articles in DEVONthink whenever I’m working on a thorny problem and let DEVONthink grind on the documents before I do.

DEVONthink supports multiple sync methods and lets you even use your own sync password so everything is encrypted. If you’ve got an iPad or an iPhone, you can access your DEVONthink data there too with DEVONthink to Go.

You can think of DEVONthink as your paperless office. You can automate your workflow from capture to filing, editing to publishing. It stores all your documents, helps you keep them organized, and presents you with what you need to get the job done.

Interested? MacSparky readers can get a 20% discount on DEVONthink. Use the code MACSPARKY2021 at checkout. This offer ends on March 31st, 2021.



Boxing in the News

I have always been pretty good about not letting social media get in the way of being productive. For whatever reason, I don’t easily fall into the Twitter infinity pool. I discovered in 2020, however, that this super-power does not apply when it comes to the news. Between COVID and everything else 2020 brought, I found myself spinning into multiple hours of reading and consuming news coverage too many times. I thought I had it licked by the end of the year, but last week relieved me of any such delusion.

The Trouble with the News
A certain amount of knowledge of current events is important and can be helpful. From watching the news, I have been inspired to donate money and time to worthwhile causes. I also think it is important, on a personal level, to understand what is going on in the world. When I was growing up, the news was typically a half-hour program viewed by networks as a civic duty more than a profit center.

That has changed however. Now there are fully 24/7 networks on whatever band of the political spectrum you want. These networks are built around the premises of sucking you in and keeping you there. It is very much a profit thing, and they are good at winding you up to stick around for that next segment/hour/day.

While some news is good, too much news is bad. There comes a point where you stop learning about current events and instead become zombified by them. Too much news can poison you.

So I’ve started taking steps. First, I put a box around the news. I try to keep news consumption down to 30 minutes a day. There are lots of ways to do this, but one way I’ve found useful is the Reuters app on the Apple TV. You can log into it and get the day’s news boiled down to as little as 10 minutes. It then gives you a summary of national and world news, and once it finishes, it finishes. It doesn’t ask you to stick around.
Another practice I’ve been working on when watching the news is to do a little internal check-in once I turn the news off. “How am I feeling right now?” “How agitated am I?” “If I’m wound up, is there anything I can do to make a difference?” I also try to disconnect after watching the news. I’ll go make some music, pull some weeds in the garden, or take the dog for a walk. Then I can get back to work with a clear head.

If you’re like me and susceptible to the news infinity pool, take some times to build your own box for the news.

Backup 2021


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Backups! The thing that us nerds love to talk about, right? Not really. I talk about backup so much because I often hear the horror stories from listeners and readers that compel me to remind everyone to keep backing up. The good news is that it is easier than ever. So how am I doing it in 2021?

Backing Up the Mac

My Mac, my precious, is the center of my computing world. This is the machine I spend the most time at every day. It has a 2TB internal SSD from which I do all active work on. That’s enough room to store my Photos Library, all client files, and all working files on whatever Field Guide I’m currently working on. It is my most important data. It is also too small for all my ones and zeros, so I have an attached external SSD that is in an OWC enclosure giving me an additional 4TB of data. I’m currently using about 3TB of that, making my working digital footprint just south of 5TB total, all on internal and external SSD.

I should mention that last year that number was closer to 7TB, but I did an audit of what files I actually still needed and ended up throwing out a lot of old files. When my kids were younger, I ripped a lot of DVDs. Small kids watch the same movies over and over again and frequently seem to have peanut butter on their fingers, which is not very DVD-friendly. They’re older now, and they are not quite as interested in the Barbie Princess movies as they used to be, so those and a lot of other files went to the digital graveyard. This saved a ton of space. I also did legal work on some disputes that had real data-heavy file storage. I contacted those clients, returned the data to them, and then removed it from my own system, again reducing my overall data footprint. I am not advocating throwing away files that you need but instead looking closely at those files that you keep to see if you really need them or not. The bigger your digital footprint is, the more complex the backup system gets. By thinning down my library, I substantially decreased the complexity of my backup system.

If you need 20TB of data, by all means keep it. But if you don’t, backing up can be a lot easier with a smaller load.

At any particular time, there is a curve for hard drive storage in price. Ideally, you want your backup to fit within that sweet spot where it can be contained on an affordable drive. If you have more data to back up than will fit on the current affordable drive capacity, you’ll need to split your data or look at a more complex NAS system. One of the reasons I spent time ditching files was so I could keep it simple. My data needs are just under 5TB right now, and there are several affordable 5TB storage options. I’ve bought three separate Seagate portable 5TB drives. They are small and light, and they are USB-powered. I also own a single 4TB version of the same drive. So what am I doing with these drives you may ask? The answer is, redundant backups.

Time Machine

Time Machine remains an excellent way to back up your data and recover individual files if things go wrong. I’ve got a single USB cable running under my desk to a powered USB hub, which in turn connects to the 4TB Seagate drive. With a Time Machine drive that doubles the capacity of my internal drive, I get everything backed up with some historical data as well in case of emergency. I need to pull a recovered file out of Time Machine only a few times a year, but am always grateful it’s there when needed.

Scarif (Attached Archive)

I also have one of the 5TB Seagate drives mounted under the desk. I back up data from both the Mac and attached SSD to this drive. These aren’t clones but instead just all of my user data. Everything ranging from iCloud and Dropbox data to the Photos Library and other non-cloudy bits. This includes all user data, all the working files for all Field Guides, all of my old ripped music, and everything else that made the cut but doesn’t need to be on internal storage. I use ChronoSync to copy all that data onto the Scarif drive using ChronoSync’s “Backup” feature. ChronoSync is able to back up the data as needed and always keeps Scarif current. With this done, I always have two copies of everything right at my desk.

About Mounting Drives Under the Desk

I’ve heard from some readers that mounting drives under the desk leads to unwanted vibration. I think I dodged this bullet because I mount them with attachable Velcro tape. The drives are so light that the Velcro is fine to hold them, and it offers a buffer. Either way, they are entirely unnoticeable when working on top of the desk.

Archive 1 and Archive 2

The two remaining Seagate drives are not attached to the desk. I keep one set aside in the house and the other one offsite. Once a month, I connect whichever one I am in possession of and make a backup of the entire Scarif backup onto it. Then, I leave it with a family member who lives nearby. Archives 1 and 2 are always in rotation this way, and I’ve always got a backup nearby if the earth swallows up my home. I keep meaning to give these drives Star Wars planet names, but I haven’t got around to it yet.

The Belt and Suspenders

I also pay $60 a year to Backblaze for an online backup of my Mac. Backblaze backups include connected drives, and I do have it back up both the internal drive and external SSD. I don’t have Backblaze back up the attached archive drive (Scarif), which seems silly.

So overall, that’s a lot of backup. At any time, I have copies of my data on the internal drive, the Time Machine drive, the attached archive drive, the two rotating monthly backup drives, and the Backblaze servers. Put simply, I don’t expect to lose data any time soon.

In addition, I’ve got a couple of older, smaller drives that are no longer in the rotation, but on which I’ve put some extra copies of my Photos Library and some other key data, because the drive is sitting here, and I can’t help myself.

Backing Up the Other Hardware

I am much less frantic with the rest of my technology. For me, the battle is won or lost with my Mac backups. For my laptop, I connect it to an external Time Machine every few weeks. For my iPad and iPhone, I just rely on Apple’s iCloud backups.

What About Clone Drives?

You may have noticed that I’m not running any regular clone drives of my machine. I don’t do that as part of my backup regimen. I do have a few extra drives that occasionally get a clone backup on them. I usually do this before installing operating system upgrades an
d betas, but I don’t really consider those part of a backup system.

For me, being able to keep the data footprint down to 5TB really simplifies things by allowing me to use the drives instead of a NAS. For the foreseeable future, my goal is to keep my data within those limits. I just hope manufacturers can grow the capacity of those smaller drives faster than I collect data, given the way every year these drives only get bigger.

Mac Power Users 570: Mac Security



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From the beginning, Mac OS X was designed with security and privacy in mind. But over the years, Apple has worked to make both the Mac’s software and hardware even more so. In this week’s episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I cover what’s what when it comes to Mac security.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • TextExpander from Smile: Get 20% off with this link and type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

  • Indeed: Get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post.