tangentially related- does anyone have a good recommendation on an external CD drive that works well with macOS and has a good form factor and build quality?
I have an ancient thinkpad that I use a couple of times a year _just for reading cds_ and and have considered retiring it. But all the CD drives I see on amazon look like disposable crap.
Pick up an internal drive and get a good enclosure. Way better than any of the external junk on Amazon. Better yet get one of the LG bluray drives that support ripping 4k discs. Might need to flash the firmware. That’s what I use and it’s great and really fast for plain cds as a bonus.
Yeah, there are a lot of installer apps/helper scripts that assist with installing LibreDrive firmware for compatible drives on different threads on the forum. I was asking about other approaches to doing the same thing that LibreDrive/MakeMKV does.
Anything made by Pioneer these days is a good choice. That said, Pioneer just recently exited the optical disc drive market a month or so ago, so you'll want to pick up a drive while you still can. They tend to be pricier than your generic external disc drive, but they are dead reliable, and fully compatible with software like EAC and XLD.
I have the Pioneer BDR-XS07S slot loading external BluRay burner drive and it does a great job ripping audio CDs.
last year after having two consecutive drives crap out on me with both not wanting to eject discs or acknowledge discs that were in the drive and it has worked perfectly for me for this year. It has my strong endorsement..
When I wanted one for ripping music CDs to my M1 Mac I bought the cheapest used USB to CD/DVD drive on eBay. It's a LITE-ON eUAU108 and hasn't failed me.
While I've ripped hundreds of discs with mine, they do have some downsides. It can be a bitch and a half to get a disc out if it can't be read properly. Even drutil wouldn't eject such discs.
There's also no way to use mini CD/DVDs with them. Not that those were ever super popular but if you have any it's an annoyance.
I replaced my SuperDrive with an 5.25" internal drive in an external powered enclosure. I can always get unreadable discs out easily, have no problem with mini discs, and I'm not stuck with an extremely short USB cable.
A SuperDrive isn't a bad option but there's better available.
Scanned the whole thread to find this and if I hadn't, I'd have posted it myself. Hard agree.
We use them at every one of our business locations - even the ones where they don't own their own infrastructure. There, they re-sell AT&T's ADSL (which, um, is terrible, but sometimes all we can get), and whatever premium they charge is worth it 100x because they are an interface layer between us and AT&T's monumentally awful customer service.
At its root, I don’t think this question is really about the logistics of taking a sabbatical.
Something I didn’t fully recognize when I was burnt out: burnout is a personal emotional issue. At that time I (mistakenly) considered emotions a bug and not a feature.
So whatever direction you decide to go on the sabbatical, I highly recommend endeavoring to discover some emotional support and growth.
Online talk therapy has helped me greatly, but mostly the book I wish I had back then is “The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living”
I've been doing DevOps for a while now and have been struggling to put my finger on why at scale it turns out to be so...complex/underestimated/hard. This blog distills it down to an essence that rings true to me:
>To successfully get an application into production, you need to be an expert in the application itself, the deployment target and the deployment methodology.
I disagree that all that expertise only needs to reside in one person, but you've got to have a well functioning team otherwise. And the more facility each team member has with each of those domains the better your odds of success.
It's a matter of when not if some issue is going to show up in production that is going to require more than a proverbial reboot. If the team lacks, or its dysfunction negates, expertise in any one of these areas then the service is living on borrowed time.
Use of any abstraction (or software / management tool) = you exchange one set of problems for another.
This applies in daily life too:
You can mow the lawn, which takes your time / effort. Or you can hire someone to mow the lawn for you.
If you do, you exchange [spending time mowing the lawn] with [spend time to find a gardener + obtain money to pay him/her].
Which to choose? The set of problems that's easiest to handle. If you're short on cash but have the time, mow the lawn yourself. If you're a busy person with a 5-figure salary, pay someone to do it for you.
In programming (or more generally, IT projects) it works the same. But where it often goes wrong, is (usually under-) estimating the nature & size of a set of problems that another set of problems is exchanged with.
"Ooh we should move to the cloud! Flexible compute & storage, easy!". Result: "cloud" is yet another dependency, and turns out to bring complexity in itself. And problems (+costs) attached to it, may just be nastier ones than if things had been kept on-site.
So the art is not always to determine what's an optimal solution (for whatever measure of "optimal"), but to get an accurate picture of the sets of problems you're choosing between.
Sometimes it's wise to pick a sub-optimal solution, if it means picking a set of problems you understand. Versus a 'better' solution whose problems you don't understand (as well).
Or go with something that doesn't work great, but works now, and good enough. Vs one that works great, but only after you needed it.
I had a similar feeling about emails at my previous job. Turning off notifications didn’t really help, because when I’d see 15, or 50 emails piled up I felt this dreadful stew of emotions that I didn’t want to acknowledge and had no tools to handle. Leaving that job only partially helped me, it took weekly therapy sessions and introspection to figure out what was going on and to learn strategies to not get in the same predicament again.
Working at a FAANG you have benefit coverage to see a therapist. I highly recommend taking advantage of this to talk to a professional about the anxiety around Slack messages you are feeling.
If you don’t connect with the first therapist you find, try another. Your emotions are trying to tell you something, find someone who can help you figure out what the message is.
I have an ancient thinkpad that I use a couple of times a year _just for reading cds_ and and have considered retiring it. But all the CD drives I see on amazon look like disposable crap.