de-CRIMPing

Posted by Paul Korm
Nov 7, 2015 at 02:32 PM

I reach this stage periodically—a machine reaches end of life or dies, I’ve known that’s coming so I’ve been migrating my work to a new machine but only bringing along the software that was needed for active work in progress. And then one day the old machine expires and I leave the old software behind.

The cycle happened again recently. My MacPro expired after 9 years—the last year spent limping along and crashing. I’d transferred my active work and related software gradually to a Mac laptop and by the time the Pro died and would no longer boot, I just moved it to the basement and closed the door. I’ll harvest the SATA drives eventually and archive the data. But I won’t touch the software because I either have new versions of the programs on my laptop, or I found I didn’t need something and never installed it on the new machine.

It’s easiest to de/un/exCRIMP one’s software library if you avoid software that saves data in any kind of proprietary format that can only be read by that software. That’s why I like markdown a lot. It’s also helpful to realize some work is just not worth it. For years I compulsively tagged all my images in a Bibble library, and then Bibble died (or something like that; it just became unusable on new versions of OS X). I stopped tagging at that point because it how fragile proprietary library formats are.