Apple released macOS 12.3 2 days ago and this article at MacStories talks about Universal Control

John Voorhees at MacStories had this excellent article on Universal Control.

Personally I am not sure I will ever use it, thought it sounds very cool. The thing is I currently run 2 27″ monitors, an iMac Pro and a second display, and for an possible Mac Studio I have been considering moving up to 2 Ben Q 32″ displays. As it is, I have no room to fit my iPad on my desk and will have less with bigger monitors, still would be nice if I was running just one monitor.

Charlesoft has updated it’s Mac archive utility Pacifist to 4.0.2 with Apple Silicon and Monterey Support

Charlesoft has updated it’s awesome Mac Archive app to version 4.0.1, it is a complete rewrite in Swift with Monterey and Apple Silicon Support.

It’s features include:

  • open a wide variety of file archives, including:
    • macOS .pkg package files,
    • .dmg disk images,
    • macOS asset catalogs,
    • Mac OS 9 Installer Tome files, and
    • .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .xar, and .yaa archives,
  • examine and extract individual files and folders,
  • inspect install scripts and other package resources to make sure that a package is trustworthy before installing it,
  • analyze existing installations on your system, to help you determine who installed a particular file on your system,
  • view archive contents straight from the Finder via QuickLook,
  • view and extract files from archives via your choice of a slick GUI or an automation-friendly command-line interface, and even
  • inspect the contents of .zip files (and other supported types) over the Web without downloading the entire archive first.

I love that it lets you go into an installer and just extract what you want from it. This is such a powerful tool for $20.00 and I have owned various versions for years.

OWC Blog has it’s top 20 Monterey Tips

The Rocket Yard, the OWC Blog and Steve Sande has it’s top 20 tips for MacOS Montery. Worth a gander for sure.

I would love to upgrade to Monterey, but so far I have heard only that Adobe Video versions 2021 and 2022 work with it, and the head editor at the company I am working at is still working with 2019. I was actually surprised that 2019 still worked on Big Sur, but it d\id, but I only upgraded to Big Sur very recently.

And it is usually always safer to wait for the .1 released, though it sounds like Monterey is doing pretty well so far, with a few niggles because of it’s built in VPN that screws with some programs.

ProVideoCoalition has released a 2021 Video Workstation Buyers Guide

Damien Allen at PVC has released a 2021 Video Workstation Buyer’s Guide with both Mac and PC options.

As with all PVC Articles well worth a read if you are looking for a new machine this year.

The Mac world is really in so much flux with only consumer oriented Apple Silicon M1 chips released so far. Personally I am so looking forward to what pro Apple Silicon will do, but will certainly have to wait for that.

Other World Computing on How to Set Up a Mac for Video Editing

Other World Computing’s Rocketyard has a great video and post for setting up an Editing system. Now of course as a company that sells products they are going to recommend their stuff, but since I mostly use their stuff anyway…

Still it is a little dated since it recommends and iMac Pro (which is EOLed) and a top of the line Intel iMac will likely be faster anyway.

Apple has updated the available graphics cards of the Mac Pro with 3 new high end AMD cards

In a fairly surprising move, Apple has changed out 3 video cards for the Mac Pro and added 3 new models. You can see them at the Mac Pro Specs Page. They are an AMD RADEON PRO W6900X with 32 GB of RAM for $2400, an AMD RADEON PRO W65900X with 32GB of RAM for $5600, and a AMD Radeon Pro W6800x DUO with 64 GB of RAM for $4600. These are all very pro level current generation cards and should give a noticeable improvement to the graphics for those with a Mac Pro, and they all add 4 Thunderbolt 3 slots and can be linked together for more graphics power (and expense)

I am glad to see that Apple is still doing some things to update the MacPro, now lets hope the rumors are true and they update the CPU one time before moving on completely to Apple Silicon.

Jason Snell at Six Colors is right, you’re not backing up enough

Jason Snell at the awesome six colors blog has a great article on the fact that you are not backing up enough.

And it is true, you need to be backing up in every way possible and with local and cloud based copies, just in case something happens.

I use both Time Machine and Backblaze and even with that I can’t backup everything. I don’t have a drobo to be able to backup everything locally (my video is on a RAID 5, so if a drive fails I should be able to recover that, but even my Backblaze took the better part of a year to backup everything I had set to backup.

Losing a drive one or a whole computer will be the lesson to get you to start backing up, but you need to backup as much as you can and as often as you can, preferable constantly!