Neat Stuff Weekly - April 6th, 2020

Hi all, I hope you’ve been keeping well. Nothing to say in terms housekeeping this week, so let’s just get on with the show:

I’ve been running out of storage on my Macbook Pro for awhile, and I was looking for a way to get more storage without sacrificing speed. Well, here it is: A Thunderbolt 3 enclousere for an NVMe solid-state drive. With this baby and an internal NVMe (sold separately, but not overly expensive), you can add more storage to any Thunderbolt 3-compatible device and enjoy speeds upwards of 2000 MB/s. And yes, I mean megabytes—for reference, your standard SATA3 connector in your desktop computer transfers at 6 Gb/s, typically around 600–750 MB/s. NVMe drives are crazy fast.

Not only is this baby fast, it’s also tiny. It’s just a bit longer than a business card and only about 1cm thick. It gets a bit hot, but I haven’t had any overheating issues with it yet. I appreciate that I can just throw it in my pocket or with my other on-the-go computing accessories.

While I said that I was running out of space on my Macbook Pro, I ended up using my TREBLEET enclosure for a separate purpose: Booting Windows 10 from an external hard drive. Since the speeds on this hard drive are so fast, I used Boot Camp to install Windows onto the SSD, and now I can just reboot when I need Windows applications or if I just want a change of pace. For a total of around $300 for the enclosure, an SSD, and a Windows license, I can now leverage the hardware of my Macbook to run Windows with no noticeable loss in performance, and without using any more of the space of my Macbook’s hard drive. I think that’s pretty cool.

If your computer has a Thunderbolt 3 port and you don’t want to sacrifice speed, you can pick one of these enclosures up at the link below.

If you’ve never tried making a mind map before, I’d highly recommend that you give it a shot. It’s a pretty simple way of taking a big idea and breaking it down into smaller actionable bits. You take a concept—a project, for example—and then you branch off of it with ideas, themes, concepts, etc until you’ve dumped all of your thoughts and you have a sprawling, branching diagram. The purpose is to take something seemingly impossible or difficult to accomplish, and then get to a state where you know what to do.

For a long time, I’ve searched for a decent application that would let me create beautiful mind maps. Lo and behold, MindNode arrived to fill that gap. Well, they’ve been there the whole time, actually—I just didn’t have a macOS device, and MindNode had a pretty steep price tag. Now, they have a reasonable free tier and a low monthly-cost (~$2) subscription model, so it’s not as painful to justify using.

Once again, unfortunately, this is an Apple ecosystem-only application, so if you would like to use it on a Windows PC or an Android phone, you’re out of luck. The next alternative would be XMind, which looks similarly sleek, but they require more money up-front for their subscription. You can use it free, but expect to get frustrated by pay-gated features.

At any rate, if you have the opportunity to use MindNode, I recommend trying it out. Mind mapping has helped me with all sorts of projects, so I think you’ll find it useful as well. You can check MindNode out below:

Here’s a fun hunt for the week.

Many of you know that I have a passion for mechanical keyboards, so behold: A cast-iron keyboard case. This thing is gorgeous, and—as I can only imagine—stupid heavy. I’d love to get my hands on one of these things, even though I don’t use staggered keyboard layouts anymore.

And before you ask, yes, it does need to be seasoned before use. Check it out below at TheKey.Company.

That’s everything for this week, folks. Please reach out to me if you have any feedback, or simply just to tell me that you like what you’re reading! Keep staying safe out there, and I’ll talk to you all next week.