“There’s always been this myth that really neat, fun people at home all of [a] sudden get very dull and boring and serious when they come to work, and it’s simply not true. So if we can again inject that liberal-arts spirit into this very serious realm of business, I think it would be a worthwhile contribution.”
I love this quote from Steve Jobs. With my own ageing my work persona has become less serious. I have no desire to be dull and boring.
This special guest episode of Hemispheric Views features the wonderful Scot Hacker, author of The BeOS Bible. We talk about the past, present and future in this great extended episode covering BeOS, photography and writing books.
Djeran is definitely my favourite season in Perth. Perfect amount of warmth, I’m not getting sunburnt, and relatively little wind. I love it.
I just became moustachioed!
I’ve liberated the archive of tweets from my @andrewcanion account, and set them free. Unfortunately the larger @canion archive remains on my local storage only. Thanks @manton for building this feature into micro.blog.
Hits all the Mario tropes, and I got a few chuckles along the way. Mainly one for the kids, though.
Tomorrow I am flying to Karratha to commentate the NBL1 basketball game between Geraldton Buccaneers and Perth Redbacks. It will be streamed live at 7pm (+8GMT) if you want to watch. 🏀
A basketball movie about business - my kind of film! Would have benefited from some tighter editing, but it’s always a pleasure to watch Damon act.
I’ve been watching this video of hit songs via kottke. My two takeaways: the 1980s was the era of epic bangers, and strong sexual innuendo in music video clips arrived around 2005.
Finished reading: The Dry by Jane Harper 📚 I ruined this excellent whodunnit mystery by taking far too long to read it. Shame on me.
I was excited to rewatch this movie, until I saw the opening credits where both Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were listed as Executive Producers. Urgh.
Using an iPad in Centre Stage with a Studio Display is kind of compelling. I’ve just been bouncing between apps, servers, local servers, etc. With Spotlight to jump between it doesn’t feel terrible.
On the Hemispheric Views Discord I diagrammed my cable connections after my recent setup change. I thought it would be fun to post it here, as well.
Today I restructured my computing setup. For about 2 years I’ve been running a MacBook Air M1 as a satellite device, keeping my 2019 Intel iMac as my centralised ‘home base’. The iMac had a nice screen, 40GB RAM and apart from at boot, never felt slow.
To the iMac were connected a bunch of devices, including a Stream Deck, JBL speakers, an EVO-4 audio interface, and a Time Machine drive.
Today, I got sick of the whole setup. The slow load time and the flakiness it was showing with regard to iCloud Drive sync pushed me over the edge.
I’ve promoted my MacBook Air to ‘home base’ status. I’ve retired the JBL speakers, Stream Deck and Time Machine drive.
For the time being, I have access to a Studio Display, which I’m using as a great monitor. If I lose access to this, I can see myself buying another (perhaps even with nanotexture glass). The MacBook Air feels faster with a bigger screen!
The iMac isn’t entirely retired, although I’ve moved it into a retirement home, setting up a new computer desk in my front ‘library’. Now I can choose my computing location - study or library. It might be nice.
In all the changes, I considered promoting my mac mini to ‘home base’ but the fact that I bought it with only 8 GB RAM, and the noise that its attached 4-bay Thunderbay drive array made meant that idea was short-lived. That machine is back in the closet running as the headless media server once again.
My Intel iMac annoyed me one too many times. The closet/server M1 mac mini has been promoted to the production environment. Biggest loss? Going from 40GB RAM to 8GB. ☹️
Why do all modern washing machines have such obnoxious beepers?
This was bad. What were the contract terms that got Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan on board?
A great reflection on what is truly important in life. Supported by great cinematography and the audio treatment of the dialogue is lovely.
This article was originally written for the June 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus.
Another WWDC has come and gone, and Apple have released the M2 and a new MacBook Air to go with it. Apple’s hardware continues to be refined and it’s hard to argue that they are not knocking all their new machines out of the park.
The thin and colourful iMac, the Studio with ports on the front, MacBook Pros and now the Air. Add on beautiful iOS devices and every piece of Apple hardware looks (and works) brilliantly.
Apple software, on the other hand, is not going well. I don’t know whether to blame the new design guy that took over from Jony Ive, the business managers who are trying to create consistency across platforms in the name of efficiency, or that SwiftUI seems to be entirely incapable of acting as the supporting infrastructure for feature rich applications (or even utilities).
The latest kerfuffle arrives in the form of the proposed “Setting” application in macOS Ventura. It’s ugly, it’s not optimised for the platform it’s operating on, and it feels like a regression from the “Preferences” panel that came before. Given that the Preferences panel was universally seen as “not great”, it is a sad indictment on Apple’s current ability to build good user-facing software that the rewrite is turning out to be worse.
There are other examples, such as the vertical orientation of notification panels in macOS, the notifications system on all platforms, and even larger software efforts such as GarageBand never embracing podcast editing, Podcasts app continuing to be average, etc.
The strange thing is, Apple is insanely great at developing low-level core frameworks. That they transitioned the entire macOS fleet to APFS without anybody realising is amazing. They built Metal - which goes chronically underused by game developers - but still they did it. Rosetta emulation is a masterpiece to aid the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon.
I suppose no company can ever be perfect. Apple is doing great on the engineering side: highly technical work and manufacturing process management. They are not doing great on the softer design side. I think they need to take a new approach to software design, and that probably starts by changing their vision of what good software looks like. To me, it doesn’t mean everything looks like an iOS element. To me, it means embracing complexity where that complexity is beneficial to the user. There is no point making something look simple, if in using that simple design things get harder.
I have the Brother HL-3170CDW laser printer. It prints. I like it. Nilay is right 🖨️