David Alison's Blog

Losing a child is arguably the most difficult challenge a person can face in life. When I lost my son Davey in July of 2016 I was plunged into the most profound grief and sadness I had ever experienced. In my 55 years on this planet I have been through a lot, however this made every other challenge I encountered seem trivial by comparison.

It wasn't just my son that died in a car accident on that hot muggy day in July. I died too. I instantly became a completely different person, changed to my core by an event that brought up all of those deep existential questions that I had previously just brushed aside. In the initial days I was in free-fall and found myself surrounded by hundreds of people that wanted to express their sympathies, doing everything they could to support me and my family.

The vast majority of my friends and family handled it with grace and compassion. A few were so overcome with emotion they blurted out things that only made my sadness more profound but as time …

When I started this blog just over 10 years ago it was to document what I was experiencing while adopting a Mac. My primary computing platform at that time was Windows and I was both a long time user and developer. My goal with the blog was simple: I was learning a new platform and wanted to share with others what I had discovered. The internet has always been a tremendous resource for me and I felt that I should do my part and contribute to that knowledge base.

That simple goal ended up serving hundreds of thousands of readers over the years. Though I haven't made a single post to this blog in over 4 years, hundreds of people still visit this blog daily based on search results for things like Time Machine errors, keyboard shortcuts, upgrading an old Mac hard drive to an SSD and setting up a MacBook for a college student.

I received messages from readers of this blog fairly regularly asking when I would return to blogging, but I always replied with "soon... I hope". My …

When I talk to people in person about Net Neutrality I generally get blank stares from all but the highly technology oriented people. Most folks don't know or care how the internet works. Ask the average person if they understand the internet and most associate it with a web site or email. They still say things like "The internet is down!" when their local connection is having issues.

There is nothing wrong with this blissful ignorance. Technology should fall into the background for most people. There are lots of things that work this way. Most people don't understand how water or electricity is produced and delivered to their homes. They turn on a switch and a light comes on. They turn a handle and water pours out of a faucet. The stuff just works (most of the time).

If you fall into this category you need to learn more about the Net Neutrality issue and how the internet we use every single day is about to be hijacked by the cable and wireless industry. It will impa…

After the near miss I had in losing a considerable portion of my personal digital library I decided to do something about it and look into a cloud based solution for keeping my files safe. I’m still using Time Machine locally to back up nearly everything, I just wanted a final line of storage just in case.

I’ve been using DropBox for years for my documents and miscellaneous files. I have several Google Apps for Business accounts that store my emails and shared docs and spreadsheets. The code I write is versioned and stored in GitHub. For the most part I live off the cloud already, the only thing missing was my large collection of family photos and videos, which totaled nearly 140GB.

iCloud is cool and all, and I love the way it keeps my little iPhone photos synced, but at $100 / year for only 55GB, this is a pretty expensive solution. I looked at a variety of different cloud backup solutions and found them to be ill-fitted to my needs. While many of them have plenty of capacity and are…

As I wrote last week, the SSD upgrade for my Mac Pro went very smoothly. There were two important things I found out after I started reading the comments from that entry:
An SSD is a good performance upgrade but the OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 provides incredible performance. Though quite a bit more expensive than a standard SSD, if you want the absolute best performance for a Mac Pro you may want to consider it. At 820MB/s it is over 5 times faster than the SSD I just installed. Hat tip to Eytan for pointing this out to me.After adding a 3rd party SSD to your Mac, you need to investigate TRIM support. Derek brought up the issue in the comments and I spent some time investigating it. What is TRIM? TRIM is effectively a garbage collection model for SSDs. There is some great information on it on Wikipedia’s TRIM entry. The bottom line is that without TRIM enabled the performance of an SSD will suffer over time. This is something you’ll want to address.

I contacted Crucial technical support …

I bought my Mac Pro 5 years ago and other than the hard disk failures I just had with my add-on drives, the machine has been rock solid. I’ve kept it up on every version of OS X that’s been available and it runs Mountain Lion like a champ.

Even though my Mac hasn’t slowed down with age, it feels relatively slow ever since I added my new 15” MacBook Pro with Retina display to the mix. Between the 16GB of RAM, stunning display and ridiculously fast SSD, the new MacBook Pro seemed to run circles around the larger Mac tower.

Upgrading the processors didn’t seem reasonable. It already has 12GB of RAM and for the way I use the machine that provides plenty of headroom. The one area I figured could see dramatic improvement was by swapping out the 320GB boot disk with an SSD drive. This was the route I took.

Finding the Right SSD I did a lot of reading on SSDs, looking at Amazon reviews and finding guidance from a variety of different sources where I primarily focused on SSD reliability. Sinc…