Surge Protection
I’m dealing with a significant amount of tech trouble lately. My Mac Mini M1 from 2020, my main desktop computer, bit the dust the other day. It’s been really challenging being without it. First it failed and entered DFU mode, and I couldn’t resurrect it myself at home. I limped along for two weeks, including shooting and editing an entire international architectural photo shoot all on the iPad, until I could find time to take it in to an apple store, where a tech there was able to restore it.
Awesome, back in business.
I set it back up, and got back to work, hopeful, energized.
2 weeks later, it fails to boot and I’m once again met with a blinking orange LED. I set it aside for a few days, until I’m able to make it back to to the apple store. This time, I get the bad news. Logic board is toast. We’re done. Nearly 5 years of faithful service, but now her poor little chips are wrecked.
What’s the cause? Most likely it’s due to the frequent power outages we’ve been experiencing here. Several times a year the power goes out unexpectedly. Normally our utility has them back up within a few hours, and it’s just a minor hiccup, and we’re back to whatever we were doing, after having a nice little break with no power.
But, microelectronics are not so trilled with power surges. I had my computer run through a surge protector, which I thought was going to protect it from any such problems. But, it’s dead now, and after a bit of research on The Wirecutter, I discovered that my particular brand of surge protector may not have been up to snuff. Turns out they can only handle so many surges, and it’s advised you replace them every two years.
So here’s my warning to you: Buy a Tripp Lite, and set a reminder to replace it every two years.
This is supposing you’re in an area as prone to surges as we are here. And given what’s going on in the climate, I’ll that that’s a lot of places. And, look into independent power, like solar with a battery system. I’m daydreaming about a setup with an Ecoflow where my tech is always plugged into a battery system with dedicated solar panels and mains support, so this never happens again.
—
Oh, so my current system is using using my 10 year old 2015 Macbook Pro for anything requiring a desktop environment (like making these blog posts, it’s a lot easier to drag and drop photos here than on my iPad Pro M4, which has become my defacto primary photo editing computer, since it’s the newest and most powerful device I have. I love this old laptop, but it can’t quite keep up anymore. But, it’s still working, and there’s plenty I can do with it. Like write this!
But, funny thing, I could have just written this whole thing on the iPad since I actually just resurrected a draft to finish, which didn’t involve adding any images. But the next post(s)! Those will involve some uploading.
This MBP also has a full size HDMI port, which I’m using to watch this great ODESZA concert on my monitor above. So, she’s still got a lot to give. She does desperately need her internals dusted and battery replaced, which I promise I’ll get to sometime. More important now that she’s back in the compute rotation.
—
What’s my solution going forward? Right now, the MBP will do anything that absolutely requires OSX / a desktop environment, my old windows gaming rig will remain just a gaming machine that can only play the least demanding of games, and the iPad Pro will continue to be the primary photo and video editing device.
Eventually I’ll pick up a new Macbook Pro, or a new Mac Mini, since the new ones have an insane power to price ratio.
In the mean time, I’m gonna need to start outsourcing more editing, simplifying my shooting and editing style, and/or learn Affinity Photo 2, which I would really like to do.
We’ll see what the future holds.
For the moment, I just wanna pump out some more backlog locations to the blog. So here we go, diving into that.