TECH

Digital spring cleaning

I have time on my hands (a lot of free time) so I have been tidying up my workspace and devices (physically and also electronically i.e. data).

In Japan the custom is to have a big clean before New Year, to start the next year on a good note.

However in the west Christmas and New Year is more of a time for laziness and relaxation (unless you are cooking the turkey), so we do the big clean in spring!

Anyways I am a Mac person so there’ll be more on that later.

a Mac person - a person who prefers Apple to Windows (and pays the penalty!)

a coffee person - prefers coffee to tea

You get the idea, right.

a football (US), soccer (UK) person

a dog person

Windows

Some free apps from Piriform and there is also a Cloud version

CCleaner - apparently CCleaner is the number-one tool for cleaning your PC.

It protects your privacy and makes your computer faster and more secure!

CCleaner Browser - a browser with more privacy*

Defraggler - speeds up your PC by assembling fragmented files on your machine and organizing them more efficiently. Defraggler does the hard work, so your computer doesn’t have to.

Recuva - recover pictures, music, documents, videos, emails or any other file type you’ve lost. And it can recover from any rewrite-able media you have: memory cards, external hard drives, USB sticks and more!

Speccy - the place to start if you need to know what’s inside your PC. See a quick summary, or dive deeper into every aspect of your PCs hardware so you can make informed upgrade and purchasing decisions.

Unfortunately the site isn’t in Japanese, but everything is simple and clean.

Mac

You can get a version of CCleaner for Mac which I do use but I prefer Titanium Software’s multifunction utility Onyx. 

Here’s the blurb “OnyX is a multifunction utility that you can use to verify the structure of the system files, to run miscellaneous maintenance and cleaning tasks, to configure parameters in the Finder, Dock, Safari, and some Apple applications, to delete caches, to remove certain problematic folders and files, to rebuild various databases and indexes, and more.”

TL;DR 

It speeds up your Mac and saves space.

Browsers

If you use Chrome or Firefox there are some good extensions to install to find duplicate bookmarks and links that no longer work. 

Maybe like me over time you have gathered more and more bookmarks, and a lot simply don’t work (they are called ‘broken links’).

Safari is a bit more complicated - you could just go through manually, another way is to export from Safari, import to Chrome, run the above extension to make a clean set and then export and reimport to Safari.

Talking of browsers, the new Brave browser is great, you can get unmatched speed, security and privacy by blocking trackers and earn cryptocurrency rewards by opting into our privacy-respecting ads and help give publishers back their fair share of Internet revenue. 

It also includes a cryptocurrency wallet.

Strongly recommended, download and try it with this link.