Happy Fourth of July! We celebrated the holiday with a barbecue at our house; I smoked both spareribs and baby back ribs. My parents came over, as did Joe’s girlfriend, and even Teri, my former boss from Vineland, joined us. We all drank a bunch of white wine too. I didn’t get any good pictures of the ribs, because I was hustling to get them done, but Aaron and I nipped out to get some red, white, and blue pictures of our stable of cars. I was hoping to get out there for these shots closer to the golden hour, but it was a bit later than I wanted.

Mister Plimsoll

Longtime Apple tech writer Glen Fleishman recently launched a utility for the Mac called Mister Plimsoll. It’s a free utility that will alert you to when a drive on your Mac is about to run out of space, name for the Plimsoll line on a ship’s hull¹. I’ve struggled with my Mac Studio running dangerously low on space, and my attempts to understand why, exactly, have found me staring at DaisyDisk and noticing that my Time Machine snapshots are growing out of control. Mister Plimsol doesn’t help you deal with storage issues, but it its helpful in updating you that things are getting tight. I missed two Arq backups because of Time Machine snapshot hoarding last week. I set up Mister Plimsol to send me a text message when my Mac’s free space dips below 10% of the drive’s capacity.

Indirectly related, I found that my Spotlight index was larger than it should be, so I rebuilt that using a strategy that Kagi Assistant recommended (removing the boot drive from indexing in System Settings, and then adding it back after a pause). I used DaisyDisk to delete some of the Time Machine snapshots, which were taking up over 70 GB of space.

DaisyDisk

As I mentioned above, DaisyDisk is a great tool for visualizing your Mac’s storage. It helped me narrow down what was taking up the most space on my Mac, especially when I compared the internal storage to that of my MacBook Air. That was the first clue that something was up with my Mac Studio’s Spotlight Index: the Air had almost no data in its Spotlight Index, according to DaisyDisk, while the Studio was taking up gigabytes of space. I knew that I was using a fair amount of disk space for both MailMaven and MailMate, because I’m not content to use Gmail’s web interface, but DaisyDisk helped me see beyond what I already knew.

I’ve been using tmutil via the Terminal for years to manage my Time Machine snapshots when things got out of hand, but those instances were few and far between. Something with the Studio is amiss, though, and it accumulates a large collection snapshots.

If you purchased DaisyDisk on the Mac App Store, you can swap your license for a standalone license which enables you to delete snapshots. Probably worth it.

Kagi Assistant

Central to solving the Spotlight Index and the Time Machine snapshot problems I was trying to solve was Kagi Assistant. Sure, I’ve used ChatGPT and Claude, and I use (weirdly enough) Microsoft’s Copilot a lot, but Kagi comes bundled with Kagi Search, which is why I initially signed up for a subscription. I’ve come to rely upon Assistant as my go-to chatbot.