Category Archives: Product Reviews

Windows Wizard ™ Adds Mac to My Toolbox

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M4After 35 years of Windows from the very beginning and considering myself a good step above power user, I bought my first Mac. An M4 Macbook M4 Pro. I am now bitextual.

Motivation was my 7 year old PC struggling with Adobe Lightroom Classic AI and reading the great experiences of newer Mac users with same. Even though I have no other reason to upgrade or change out my PC laptop.

I have 266 apps and utilities on my PC. Took my 143 days to build from scratch researching, testing, installing, configuring and adding plugins as needed and desired. I am actively looking at and for equivalent apps and utilities for the Mac. I am in about a month and maybe 60% complete.Going quicker this time. Perhaps because I better know what I want, need and desire.

Some things have positively amazed me. Hardware, speed, lack of a lot of maintenance like editing the Registry (Mac has none), monitoring Event Viewer, etc. But some things just baffle the hell out of me how Apple has gotten away with inferior functions all these years. Being a glass half empty kinda guy, let’s look at a few of those and along the lines I’ll pop in with a few places the Mac is a clear winner.

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FINDER!

I don’t get it. In Windows, I set a size and screen position. ONCE. And then arrange my columns and widths. Once. Done.

I can get ONE finder window to remember size and location. Subsequent do not. No matter what I try in setting my view as lists, column widths change with almost every folder or share opened. It drives me batty!

NETWORK DRIVES!

I Windows, I map a Network Drive ONCE. I check connect at login. I am done. Every time not only when I login, but when I UNDOCK, return and REDOCK those shared drives are there. Done

Mac not so much. There is the Open at Login and they will, but then each mapped drive opens a separate (and different sized) Finder window. I have to manually close. But worst of all, if I undock, take the laptop somewhere else for any period of time from seconds to hours, return and redock..The drives will not automatically reconnect. Has to be done manually.

To be fair, there are two utility apps to deal with open at boot or login and reconnect after a disconnection, but both have their own issues. Neither as functional as Windows out of the box. No wonder Mac is such a small part of the business computing community. What ARE they thinking? This is not rocket science.

And just to finish this thought., Mac requires each USB device to be separately ejected before undocking or removing. So with a Thunderbolt doc and 4 USB thumb drives and External Drives, I have to disconnect first or get hit with a nasty note for each when I forget.

Windows does this automatically. I can undock and drives disconnect. Redock, reconnect.

ARGGGH.

To be fair, there are some great things. Retina screens, hardware and yes, parts of the OS. But more about those later. And more about those apps and utilities that have no Mac equivalent I can find.

More to come…

Alltown Fresh-Updated

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UPDATE: 1/23/25

Alltown never replied to my inquiries and I am now realizing just how difficult it is to avoid supporting companies that contributed to the election of this president. I renewed my membership with Alltown Fresh.

Now, I will still boycott those companies like Nestle that truly rape this planet with little concern for all life. Or companies that blantantly lie and take advantage of their captive customers. But alas, cannot avoid all and I think Alltown does enough with quality and style to “pardon” them and rejoin.

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Slightly edited from message sent to Alltown via Web Page Contact and my posting at Facebook.

Alltown

I go to a local chain I love called Alltown Fresh. Best quality convenience store I have ever seen, fresh, chef cooked in front of you healthy, organic and quality food. Great coffee with best machines I have ever seen that grind beans for each cup. Top Tier gas at decent pricing. Good Rewards Program. and a decent car wash. What’s not to love? In fact I go out of my way with a 20 minute 5.7 mile trip (each way) to the closest location near me.

It appears from what I have read that Exxon Mobil has contributed to Project 2025. Alltown, or parent Global Partners. is a refinery and their gas is Exxon Mobil. I just sent this:
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Hi folks,

I LOVE Alltown Fresh. I think it is brilliant and well executed idea and business model and I support you in every way I can as often as I can. I have come this close to buying stock.

I learned today that Exxon Mobil contributed to Project 2025. I would like to know your involvement with same. I’m afraid if you did as well or as part of Exxon Mobil I will have to curtail my involvement with Alltown and Global Partners.

You, of course, are free to do as you see fit. BUT, to give you a taste of my dedication, I buy NOTHING associated with Nestle or Pepsi products or Chik-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby. When politics invades a product I love, I reluctantly leave them behind. You will be the hardest to abandon.

Appreciate your reply.

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I truly hope they are not supporting Project 2025. Will update this post when I receive their reply.

Update: Took about 3 days and several attempted methods to contact Alltown before they replied with “…thank you for your message. We appreciate you as a customer and are happy to hear that you love our store and all it’s offerings. We will pass your message along to the correct person. Thank you.“

That was 3 days ago and no further contact. No reply is itself a reply.

I shall wait another 3-4 business days and reach out one more time.

Update July 18, 2024: Sent the following and closing the issue:

I have not had the courtesy of a reply to my message here and also sent through Messenger in FaceBook. Not even a “this is not something we discuss with the public”. Ghosting. Message copied below.

Consequently I must assume you do support Project 2025 as no reply is a reply.

Tomorrow morning I shall close my account here. Unsubscribe. Remove your app and reluctantly never do business with Alltown again. Sad. I shall also post on social media my experience with this subject so my friends may be aware of what I suspect to be your position as well as the lack of your reply other than a Messenger “thanks for the kind words – we will forward to the appropriate person”.

The tale of customer service…

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Comcast Xfinity 510x209 (Custom)I have had to deal with numerous customer service reps – some with Xfinity and some with others. It is not enough to say thanks for being a loyal customer nor thanks for your patience, but MUCH more important to learn to say “I don’t know” rather than guess and likely guess wrong. I have known more than 90% of those I have talked to. It is frustrating.

I once trained my salespeople that when a customer asks a highly technical question they might know the answer and really be asking “are you going to lie to me?”

Xfinity fails multiple times on ever saying I don’t know, but will find out and with solving user issues.

Thursday the Internet went down at 1:59 AM. TV was fine. So either past the splitter or an error in the CO. At 7:00 I spent quite some time with a really nice tech rep who swore it was my (customer owned) Gateway (easy excuse) when I knew it was not. But lacking any other choice, I decided to go buy a new gateway.

5 minutes later the Internet came back 🙂

I assume my provisioning at their router at their switch was bad and I now had a new IP address. As you might know, this does not change often- the assigned IP from the switch to my gateway on the WLAN. Sometimes stays for years.

The problem is, the geolocation of this new IP is different everywhere depending on what site including Google is trying to determine my location! On some I am in Palo Alto correctly. Many more in Vacaville and the pizza joint there will not deliver to me 🙂 And, in MANY more KANSAS as the IP address only shows US, CST and it chooses Kansas. Really Bad. ipdata.co shows this when you check my ip: 98.xx.xxx.xx. IP2Location.com shows Palo Alto properly. I cannot find who is picking up Vacaville.

Tech Support Carla last night told me all gateways come with an IP address and only the gateway manufacturer can change it 🙂 Antonio, bless him said it gets changed in windows and who was the manufacturer of my computer??????? Obviously they have no idea the difference between LAN and WLAN and they love to guess – incorrectly.

Frustrated. I’m not in Kansas anymore 🙂 Nor have I ever been.

Antonio was Tier 2…

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OK, gets odd that some browsers properly pick up my location and some do not. So each browser might use a different API for geolocation. On the ones that find me in Kansas I downloaded an add-on that allows you to spoof your location. In my case, instead of spoofing I use it correct to the proper location. The disadvantage of this is that as a laptop, I have to turn this off when I travel and use a different IP address and back on when home near my router. So a kludge, but a workaround.