PSA: Disk Genius is a user-friendly disk cloning solution

The default free software recommendation for cloning a hard disk, Clonezilla, is actively and aggressively user hostile, like many programs from the world of Linux. But it's free, and comes with the special sparkle of being open source, so it gets recommended a lot.

This has led me to have many bouts of swearing and struggling with balky upgrades than I can count. But it seemed all the user-friendly alternatives that I could find were for-pay products that haughtily refused to clone a boot disk unless you forked over tons of money for the pro version.

Now, I have finally, finally found a free trial app that lets you clone a system disk, with no fuss or bother about size, without having to jump through an intricate dance of copying each individual partition and hoping it would still boot when all was done.

Disk Genius is one of those rare birds, a for-pay app where the free version is actually extremely useful and capable. It's almost never recommended for partition wrangling and cloning, because it's marketed as a data recovery app... but what it actually is, is a universal, do-everything tool for dealing with computer storage devices and the data on them, including cloning, partition resizing, and recovering lost data, lost drives, etc. And now, finally, I can tell clonezilla and its user-hating interface to not let the door hit its ass on the way out.
Disk Genius: one of those apps that you wonder where it was hiding from you all these years. A+. Highly recommended.

(no subject)

When the "cities plant male trees because they don't want to deal with cleaning up fruit, and this makes allergies worse" meme made its rounds a while back, I didn't think much of it, but now that I've read this thread, I went and refreshed my memory about tree sex.

The meme is wrong, but the thread linked above swerves too far the other way and ends up wrong as well.

Actually, species that have separate sexes make up about 1/5 of the trees in the Eastern US. When planting trees of those species, cities may choose to go with male trees only, but probably don't bother unless the fruit/seeds are large and messy but the trees themselves are desirable (selecting for the gender of tree adds to the cost, and cities are loath to spend more money when they can avoid it by just picking a different, non-messy species or not bothering to screen their plantings for sex).

Things to remember:
1. Plant sex is complicated.
2. Dioecious is a fancy greek term for species that have separate organisms for male and female reproductive functions. Nearly all animals we're familiar with are dioecious. Among plants, dioecy is relatively rare. The "urban male trees are responsible for your allergies" meme is talking about dioecious species, which are a minority among trees (1/5 in the Eastern US, 1/20 worldwide).
3. The only pollen that's an issue for those with allergies is pollen from wind-pollinated species, which would be many trees, most grasses, and various herbs (Flowers that look pretty are not wind pollinated). The pollen from male dioecious trees that have been deliberately planted because they are male and will not litter the ground with fruit is a drop in the bucket of the overall pollen load.

Nerdy tree sex tidbits:
4. Non-dioecious plants cover a lot of variety. They can produce one flower that performs both sexual functions (cosexual). They can have separate pollen and seed producing parts on the same plant (monoecious). Or, just to be different, they can have some combination of cosexual and monoecious bits on the same or separate plants (polygamous).
5. monoecious and polygamous trees cover the gamut from having sexual phases of life (eg, making pollen when young and seeds when mature), to switching from making pollen to making seeds and back again every year or every few years, to being boring and producing both each year.