Greetings, Earthlings. This week we sent out an extra round of email publicity about our newest book, Glenn Fleishman’s Take Control of Securing Your Mac. If you haven’t picked it up yet, please do! It will go a long way toward helping you keep your Mac and its data safe.
Next week we’ll release a smallish update to my book Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal, freshly updated for compatibility with Big Sur and M1 Macs. We will also have a couple of very tiny updates to other books.
Right now, my main focus is on writing the new edition of Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac to cover the latest operating systems, hardware, and software. It is an immense job, especially because the whole story about whether and how to make bootable duplicates (and then, later, how to actually boot from them) has changed dramatically in recent months. I’ve been experimenting with a new Thunderbolt 3 external SSD on my M1-powered MacBook Air, and…wow, it’s interesting, which I mean in the worst possible way. So, many experiments and a great deal of writing lie ahead. I can’t accurately predict how long it will take me to finish this update, but it will be done as soon as I can manage.
After that, well, the queue of books I have to update is very long. It includes, but is not limited to (in alphabetical order): Take Control of 1Password, Take Control of Your Digital Legacy, Take Control of Your Online Privacy, Take Control of Your Paperless Office, and Take Control of Your Passwords. In addition, Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac, and Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac are all outdated, and I have special plans for dealing with all those topics.
Almost every day, someone writes in to ask when one of the above books is going to be updated, reminding me (as if I were not already painfully aware) of how much has changed since the last version. Please believe me when I say I’m not sitting around watching Netflix and eating popcorn all day. I have (as detailed in various blog posts over the past several months) a very challenging home and work situation, and I’m doing the best I can given those constraints.
Meanwhile, my official Take Control to-do list has grown from a low of 83 items to 88, and boy oh boy would I love to fix all those bugs and add all those new features to our website and resolve all those nagging issues with our books, but again… there are only so many usable hours in the day, and they’re all full.
There have been some vaguely positive-sounding hints that a tiny bit of relief just might be barely visible, through binoculars, on the distant horizon. Which is obviously not saying much, but it’s more than I’ve been able to say in a long time.
See you again next week.