Every week for the last 10 years, with very few breaks, I’ve written a Tip for Mac users. I publish all the Tips at MacTips.info. There are almost 600 Tips in the archive now. For a couple of years the Mac Tips and Eudora Tips overlapped, meaning I wrote 2 Tips per week.
Over time I’ve added screenshots and videos, and extended from just ‘Mac’ Tips to include iPhone, iPod and iPad, as well as both Apple and third party software.
No one pays me to write the Tips, and no one pays to read them, though ads on the site do now cover domain name renewal, hosting and now VaultPress backups. Once in a blue moon someone kindly makes a donation and I buy myself a hot chocolate.
At some future time I expect my rate of ‘pay’ for writing the tips may approach 1 cent per hour.
And, since it takes me several hours each week to plan and create each Tip, I sometimes wonder why I do it at all.
This comment today on Sweep your Mac clean answers that question:
An appreciative comment on MacTips.
Miraz, thank you for the tip on OmniDiskSweeper.
I’ve been puzzling over my Incredible Shrinking Hard Drive for awhile now, and this utility very quickly highlighted the culprit: OSX Planet, a defunct desktop picture utility, had been saving a screen capture every 10 minutes — since 2008 — all day every day, into a folder in User/Library/Application Support.
Each file was less than 1.5 MB, but there were over 46,000 files I couldn’t easily find otherwise, and I regained more than 57 GB of a 120 GB drive.
It’s heartening that I could help Dennis free up almost half of his hard drive space. 57Gb is a lot!
It also shows the power of ‘little but often’. 1.5Mb every 10 minutes for a couple of years grew into 57Gb.
Which also means: if we can save a little money every day we can eventually accumulate an amount worth knowing about. And if we save a little bit of electricity, a little bit of water, reduce our rubbish by a little bit every day, it mounts up over a year, and over a population.
We often want instant results, but some things are worth waiting for.
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Your article reminded me that it would be a good thing to thank you for all the times you’ve helped me over the years with your Mac Tips. It’s a good thing to realize that we should not take each other’s help and guidance for granted. So, thank you, Miraz, for all your work and effort on behalf of your readers.
Thanks Virginia. It’s a pleasure to know I’ve made a difference.
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