Thanks for calming down a bit, Ruri. Please don’t feel that you need to make up for it with fan-service; Nagi’s got that covered.

(…and if there was gold in them there hills, we’d all be rich…)

This couldn’t possibly end badly…

ChatGPT can now buy directly from Etsy. I’m sure Sam Altman will guarantee refunds when it accidentally purchases 1000 handmade small-batch organic vegan jam jars (Made In China) instead of 1 blender cozy.

(I recently saw a nice little “handmade-in-California” bamboo desktop drawer set on Etsy, for only six times the price of the exact same Chinese item on Amazon…)

Dear Topaz,

A while back, I purchased a standalone, perpetual license for Photo AI. It said there was an update to download. This turned out to be a new product named Photo. Subscription-only. Yeah, no.

And every time I launch the old app, there’s a prominent “upgrade” button, and a splash screen with the words “your perpetual ownership and active license make you a Topaz Founding Customer, giving you access to the new app at no extra cost.”

… except the $199/year subscription, which currently has a $100 discount for the first year. Clearly they’ve been studying the cable-tv & Internet pricing model.

There’s also a strong push to get a “special” subscription that costs even more, but includes more apps that I have no use for.

Dear Apple,

This morning, I deleted 200 GB of data from my Mac laptop. Hours later, it still hasn’t noticed and insists that the disk’s nearly full. It doesn’t even show up in the “purgeable” field on the Get Info window. There is no way to determine how much space is actually available.

Well, there is, but it’s poorly documented: disable Time Machine backups. This quickly updates the “purgeable” space to the correct value.

It doesn’t do anything with that space. That requires a separate command:

sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots /System/Volumes/Data 20214748364800 1

That’s 200GB in bytes, because of course that’s the unit you should use on a device that ships with hundreds of gigabytes of storage.

And don’t forget to turn your backups back on after the cleanup. It will never remind you.

(the data in question was my Lightroom photo archives, which I copied over to the much-faster Mac Mini yesterday; once I had confirmed backups on both ends, I nuked the old copies)

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