Spacing Out

From "out of space" to "spacing out" - I bet you can tell it's still more of the same story, just me playing with titles. Yep, my laptop is nagging me that I'm still out of space. 

Sigh....

More purging needed. I need to figure this out, or Rich tells me that the next step is upgrading my hard drive. I'm sure Apple would explain patiently how my laptop is so obsolete that it can no longer be upgraded. They pulled that with the last laptop, and I wound up spending a lot of money as well as losing a lot of files because the new OS uses a different word processing format. It wouldn't have been a problem, I found out, had the old one enabled my exporting files to pdf format. Fortunately, the old one still links to my printer, so I can get hard copies of the old stuff, but that means anything I still want to access on the new laptop, this one that's running out of room, will have to be printed out, retyped in to this one, and saved here. I did a quick scan of those files this morning and I really like and/or need many of those files. For one example, there is a 4 page list of all my southwest pottery acquisitions with a brief description and the artist if known. Many of the items have illegible signatures on the bottoms and I'm clueless without that paperwork, aside from my having organized them together under a pueblo designation and haven't moved them since.

Trust me, they need dusting!

But there has been more progress on clearing out stuff since my last post. It's part of why I haven't posted for a few days. First, I've been going through photos some more. Of course, it seems that the more I delete, the more crowded the system gets. Yes, I know my system holds deleted photos for 30 days, quite sure that I will change my mind within that time and reclaim those nearly lost treasures. Well, I still have over 6,000 photos there. I've been slow about purging out pointless trip photos from last summer. I also did a whole lot of redundant and pretty awful shots from the back yard while cooling my jets during the covid quarantine. I don't need semi-weekly updates on how a particular plant progresses. Sure, it's nice to have them available in order to pick through which 5 of the 50 tell the necessary story, more if I'm propagating it. I'd been doing a pretty good job of purging, noting there were over 3,000 photos in the 30-day trash. I also, upon very confidant prompting by Rich that it must be available, finally located the tab for deleting everything currently in the photo trash file. It's kept separate from all other trash files, and I hadn't needed to go that deeply into the program until now. 

That did such a good job that I went and deleted another 300+ trip photos before my laptop started nagging me again that it was too full! OK, permanent delete of those too.

But I still needed more to be cleaned out. What to do next? Now I'm sure many of you are snickering, well aware of lots of ways to clear out old junk. I even have a passing familiarity with a process whose name I can't recall that reorganizes stuff on the hard drive so the empty spaces between bits and bytes get pulled out so it's more efficient in storing what's there and can find and use the newly opened spaces speedily. Maybe some of you can even supply the word I lack so I can pursue that option as well.

(Hint-hint. Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?)

But I did note that I can clear my search history. Before starting, however, I had to wait for another time when Rich was mentally available, as in not involved in his own complicated project, to quiz for how to do it without deleting the wrong things. I don't care if folks I've bought something from three years ago can no longer find me to plaster my pages with their targeted ads. I do care if PayPal recognizes it's me when I pay for the next whatever I choose to purchase online. After clearing that by Rich by checking/unchecking various options, I hit the button and watched it take 10 seconds to delete what I'd just told it to. Must have been full!

Of course, I had to pay a bill this morning online, and the site I was on wasn't sure it was me doing it. Oops. So I'll be going back through most of those and making sure the ones I want still know who I am. Luckily I write down every login and password, now that I've finally been convinced to quit using the same one for everything! They take up a full page in size 11 font! Took me a full minute to locate the info needed to log into Blogspot! That's one of the few which hadn't "suggested" I change my password 15 times. (I've got some prime cuss words for those companies I insert into their passwords!)

So far today, however, I haven't gotten that too-crowded message. I've no doubt it'll recur. So I'm going back to purging photos after I finish this...  uhhh, after lunch. Haven't had that yet. I figure there are still a whole lot to delete in there, and now that I'm back into making jewelry it's time to start adding photos again.

Eventually maybe I can load that latest security upgrade for Apple stuff that my laptop has been refusing to put in. After all, that's what started this. Well, aside from those photos.