Want to get back to the 5GB iCloud Free Storage account after you have upgraded to the 20GB Price Tier?

iCloud write up

Want to get back to the 5GB iCloud Free Storage account after you have upgraded to the 20GB Price Tier?

on the Phone go to settings

choose iCloud

choose change storage plan

choose downgrade 

choose 5gb Free

choose to Delete Photo Library (this is a big mistake and will disallow you from being able to purge your library and start over)

receive warnings about how long your photos will be available for I think it's 25days from your downgrade date.

go to your OS X Computer, with Safari, log into iCloud.com and go to Photos. Select a photo and try to delete it, impossible the Trash Can will be greyed out.

Also of note there will be a yellow error message at the top of this page telling you about your 20 something day timer. You are essentially in a black hole. With the exception that you can download photos if you have to.

Help!? How do I purge?

On the Phone, because Deleting Photo Library is a mistake and sends you into a 25 day waiting period in which you can’t purge your Photo Library…

Call Apple Tech Support, it took me 7 times to get through.

Explain a bunch of things to them and that you want to purge your Photo Library. Have them tell you the following:

go to iCloud Settings

go to Storage (okay, whatever)

go to Manage Storage (yes manage storage)

click on iCloud Photo Library

click re-enable photo library (its way down at the bottom a text link)

Now log into iCloud.com from a computer running Safari, NOT Chrome, and go to Photos.

Click-select one photo to check if the Trash Can Symbol will no longer be greyed out? If it is able to Delete, you can proceed.

Try to click-select delete all 7,000 something photos. I don’t suggest this seemed like overkill and the web app did not like this. Refresh the page, see all the photos still there.

So, try to find the sweet spot of photos to select that will actually delete. For me it was around 600.

Click-select photos. Click a photo at the start of a selection zone, hold shift and click one roughly 400-700 photos away, you can repeat without using your selection and get a proper updated status of number of photos selected. Click the “trash can” and wait until the bottom of the screen reads that there are x number of fewer photos. Very important to keep your eye focused at the bottom of the page where you will see some javascript-status-type notification about how many photos are in there, and if it’s working on deleting or finished, or what.

Reload the page after each try to make sure your deletes are actually deleted. A good way to get your bearings is to see what the total number of photos is in the repo.

Now that your iCloud.com Photos are set go ahead and purge out your settings on your devices.

Grab your Phone

iCloud settings again, enable everything BUT keychain

Switch to the computer

go to Internet accounts

enable all options in iCloud (except keychain back to my mac find my mac)

speaking of iCloud settings, go to Photos section. Tick iCloud Photo Library and My Photo Stream.

open Photos.app

quit Photos.app

diable all Photos settings

open Photos.app

quit Photos.app

go to settings in Photos.app tick off iCloud Photo Library sub of Optimise Mac Storage and My Photo Stream

try not to be concerned with the Downloading 6,254 items statement

Quit Photos.app

Run disk permissions

Disable all Photos Items in iCloud and in settings within Photos.app

Quit Photos.app

Quit Internet Accounts

Delete actual Photo Library found in ~/Pictures/Photos Library

Enable the aforementioned settings in Internet Accounts settings

Run Photos.app, and create a new photo library (since you erased the former one) and in Photos.app settings use the aforementioned settings.

Check sync settings on iPhone. Untick all photo related settings on iPhone. Watch photo library number of items return to the actual number of photos on the device.

Now turn on all proper iCloud Photo settings on your device.

Now everything is working as expected however in the Photos.app settings pane the iCloud Photo Library is still reporting a massive download of 6,253 items when iCloud.com/photos is correctly reporting there are 83 photos.

Hoping a restart fixes this. Actually a restart doesn't fix this. The issue is all of the photos in the Trash bin are still there because you have not chose to Empty Trash from iCloud.com Photos in your browser. Do this. 

Then run Photos.app on your MacBook. Click over to Preferences and now it will report a proper amount of photos needed to sync. 

How to properly setup your cloud accounts on iOS and OS X General idea. Turn everything on in all accounts which you use. The things that are junk will reveal themselves and you can delete content in junky areas you don't use. Example, can you say Googles Notes sync. Nobody uses this. Since its enabled, go to your notes and clean it up. Erase all the random Google notes and your iPhone hits the web. Cleaned up on your phone, cleaned on the cloud. Breathe a sigh of relief.

General idea. Turn everything ON in all accounts which you use. 

The things that are junk will reveal themselves and you can delete content in junky areas you don't use. Example, can you say Googles Notes sync. Nobody uses this. Since its enabled, go to your notes and clean it up. Erase all the random Google notes and your iPhone hits the web. Cleaned up on your phone, cleaned on the cloud. Breathe a sigh of relief. 

Which device do I use?

I have a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 6s (regular size). Smartphones have gotten so good that there is now so much overlap between the two devices that it can be confusing what to do on what device. Here are some guidelines. 

iPhone 

Siri is a still a gamble, but it is good for exactly one thing. Press and hold the home button and say 'weather'. 

What about 'call so and so'? Sorry Merlin Mann. I tried to use my telephone like it was 2015 but it thought I wanted to 'call restorative yoga' instead. 

Let's get back to hey Siri, enable it. Check. Say hey Siri. Check. Have a brand new iPhone 6s understand that you are initiating a query, sometimes. Meh, maybe I have to retrain the voice model, or better yet just give up. 

Evernote

Thank god for the iPhone being able to run any and all of the common calendars tasks and email servers. Productivity apps are still in their infancy and have cross platform repercussions that heavily effect how you use your (laptop) computer or computers. 

Say you like iCloud mail? Well it looks like you are enabling your iCloud account and setting up a profile in Mail.app on you El Capitan system. Like gmail? Well you can pipe that through your Mail.app as well, but what if you like Contacts not getting imported and strange new fields co mingling between you iCloud account and gmail account. Well you shouldn't have checked off that switch. Hmmm.  Verdict avoid and use Google Chrome. Does this remind you of your parents broken Windows PC with Firefox installed on it because Internet Explorer mysteriously stopped working one day? Probably, but what does that tell you?

Let's get back to Evernote. It's entirely its own ecosystem and runs identically on whatever device in which its being used. Things are in the same places on iOS OSX, webapp and Windows. I haven't looked for it on Linux. Their EULA states that they don't data mine, but even if they do/did I would feel comfortable using it. I have camera phone pictures of receipts from at least four years ago still showing up in the Evernote "file system" I cobbled together years ago. Which is a pretty game good track record considering the following: 

I have screwed up and lost files in my Dropbox account tens of times over in that timespan. 

God knows what has happened in my OneDrive account. 

OwnCloud installation that I kept for all of one day. 

GoogleDrive has things in it, but what they are or how long they have been there is something of a mystery to me. 

Flickr, which I tried but gave up after an album or two. 

iCloud Drive because on El Captain they promised us it would be different this time. Hello $.99 a month sign up to utilize. I could write another post on this scam alone. Does apple really need $12 a year from everyone?

So all and all that leaves us with Evernote

It works because it's a closed system, it works cross platform because it's the same everywhere. It works because you control what you put in it. Let's elaborate on that. 

The Gmail problem. 

Remember ten years ago how you used to send your self files as attachment to your gmail account. That was fun and slick and innovative right? Kind of. But then you got six trillion spams and applied to 12 jobs, and won some crap on eBay (or sold some crap on eBay ) and then couldn't find your awesome file or note you sent to yourself anymore. Probably because you deleted it because you realized you overwhelmed yourself.  Well you did the right thing by doing that, that was a stupid idea in the first place, shame on you. 

Would you out you important photos, scans of receipts, noted you took while on the phone with a client comics you wanted to read, hot babes phone numbers in with an uncontrollable stream of information? No. That's why you don't put that stuff in your Gmail. Win Evernote. 

What about NVAlt and Notational Velocity and DevonThink?

NVAlt is very neat and fast from a end user perspective. But I have a computer and a phone. And wtf does the NVAlt database do? And what happens if I sync to Dropbox wrong. And what happens if I move things around in the NV alt file folder the way I want them. Well chances are any of these slips of the knife could completely fuck up all of your notes. No thanks. If your a zen master when it comes to self control and don't really need your notes on you phone in sync with your OSX computer then maybe this is for you. 

DevinThink. 

I originally learned of this from MacPowrUsers podcast. And in theory it's awesome. But in reality Evernote makes more sense. 

Evernote is free in most cases. $5 a month for high use. (Which is something like a 2-3 year payout after purchase using DevonThink for all of your platforms and then getting it to sync.)

Evernote syncs with all your devices because their sync is obvious. When you create a new notebook you are asked, "do you want it to be a cloud synced notebook?" If you don't you can use the software to store however much your computer can hold for free. I'm not entirely sure how you would go about backing up that info (manually, outside of Evernote's  cloud) but it would be a cool thing to look into. 

DevinThinks UI makes me feel like I am working on some sick hybrid of that MacOS7.5 Lotus CC Mail program from 1995 and Macromedia Director. 

How to Setup an Open VPN Box

Three major components to get this one working: 1. OpenVPN, 2. UFW 3. Client.ovpn File

First let's take care of installing OpenVPN on your NIX based OS. This is a DigitalOcean centric tutorial which I followed, and henceforth followed with my DigitalOcean box, but presumably it would work on anything running Linux. Boot up any old Ubuntu Box. I built mine on the back of a DigitalOcean, Ubuntu, WordPress on 14.04. Your going to have to read two tutorials, one to install OpenVPN on your box, and the second one you can just skim, its to learn a little about UFW. Follow the first tutorial here to setup your keys, install OpenVPN and install and briefly configure UFW: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-14-04.

The following info can either be obtained by sifting through the comments of the above article, and  or reading various man pages or just reading my blog further. So heres a key thing they left out above, immediately following the tutorial, reboot your server or nothing will work. Kinda important yeah? I hope you know how but if you don't a garden variety sudo shutdown -r now works.

Gather up your collage of Client.ovpn, ca.cert, client1.crt, and (be careful exposing your) client1.key; put them in a safe place.

Assuming you want to VPN your OS X Machine, go ahead and download Tunnelbick (open source) (Downloads) and point it to your Client.ovpn file. Connect and you're now browsing in an encrypted manner. Congratulations.

How To Quickly Spin Up a SASS Project with Gulp.js

Until SASS is officially supported (see the future) we are going to have to use preprocessing tools, which is fine by me because the tools are rockin' these days. Prerequisite is that you have Ruby installed on your system because I'm going to use gulp-ruby-sass which leans on the sass gem. Enough chit chat, lets spin up a project. $gem install sass

npm init (press OK a million times)

npm install gulp --save-dev

npm install gulp-ruby-sass --save-dev

Make a gulpfile.js

var gulp = require('gulp'), 
sass = require('gulp-ruby-sass'); 
gulp.task('styles', function() { 
return sass('sass') 
.pipe(gulp.dest('css')); 
}); 

$mkdir sass && mkdir css

$gulp styles