Over the "holiday break," my new (to me) 17" MacBook Pro arrived and I started messing with it. I stuck to the Chromebox for a lot of stuff because I just can't stand using a laptop as a laptop unless I absolutely have to. But it's a wonderful machine. It arrived with MacOs "Yosemite" installed and I've stuck with that so far; I may upgrade to "El Capitan" once I'm fully comfortable with the machine.
On Saturday, two of the elements I needed to turn the laptop into a desktop machine arrived (ordered from Amazon via Purse): A wireless keyboard and mouse set, and a cable to connect the Mac's miniDisplayPort to my HDMI monitor. This leaves me maybe $100 away from a complete setup
The other two things I need for the complete setup are: Something called an "MST hub" to let me run two external monitors out of that one port, and some kind of cradle to keep the Mac in while running it in "clamshell" mode (I can probably do without the cradle, just need to come up with a substitute). Until a year or so ago, I thought running two monitors sounded kind of dumb. But once I started, I realized I never wanted to try to do things on a single screen again.
Right now I'm using the laptop screen as one of the two monitors, but that's not optimal -- it makes my desk crowded and that screen is a little smaller and a little further away from my eyes than I prefer. But the move is definitely in progress. Not just from Chromebox to Mac, but away from the Google ecosystem too.
I'm taking the latter move a step at a time. I produced this morning's Rational Review News Digest on the Mac, using TextWrangler (a Mac text editor) instead of Caret (a Google Chrome text editor). Today I plan to start "interviewing" web browsers other than Chrome and web mail providers other than Gmail for The Big Move. My guess is I'll end up settling on Firefox because I want to run Tor as well, but suggestions are definitely welcome on both browser and webmail.
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