Jared W. Smith

I think I am finally becoming a real Mac user: both my home and work desktops have gotten uncharacteristically cluttered with lots of random things. (Thank goodness for Stacks.)

Ida is getting it together at absolutely the wrong time for New Orleans, and it doesn’t look like much will get in its way at this point through landfall. I don’t like it one bit for a whole host of reasons, but especially because it looked once again like there was no plan.

Don’t like Ida for my LA/MS/AL Gulf Coast peeps. Please be getting ready now for a major hurricane strike with peak wind impacts in Louisiana — perhaps in the New Orleans metro area — and flooding impacts spreading much further out from the center of the storm.

I could do the easy thing, which is to just stick a local in the path to the PHP interpreter in my LDM ingest script, or I could do the hard thing, which is to Dockerize all of it. Take a wild guess at what I’m doing.

Wild Friday night over here doing a deep dive into HTML semantics. Pro tip: If you list “expert in HTML” on your résumé and I’m interviewing you, I’m gonna test that.

Kudos to Apple for reversing course on requiring the bottom-aligned address bar for Safari 15 on iOS. Giving the user choice here was the right call — a win-win for everyone.

What’s on my mind, volume 1, episode 1

What’s on my mind to start the week: ⚾️ Good for Reiss Knehr, getting his first major league win in a bullpen game for the Padres. I like his mettle. ⚾️ Thank goodness Tatis is back. San Diego desperately needs his bat — and his swagger. So far, so good in right field. It’s a nice luxury to have …

Album of the week: Shulamith by POLIÇA

Favorite tunes: Vegas, Tiff, and Matty. Love Channy Leaneagh’s vocals and the use of effects to really make them flow in as another instrument in the ensemble.

So far, so good with the fifth betas of iOS and iPadOS 15. Refinements are definitely starting, but there are still plenty of rough edges, which is to be expected at this stage. I’ve come to really enjoy the notification summaries — I added a midday summary to my slate, for a total of three — and …

Hybrid Black Halo box set acquired. I had to buy a SuperDrive to listen to and import these CDs. Completely worth it — Hybrid is quality.

The monitor update nobody asked for

I upgraded my Mac mini’s monitor yesterday. I ended up going with a 27” LG 4K IPS panel. First impressions are good. I’m hooked to the Mini via DisplayPort over USB-C. The USB-A ports are super-handy (and really a nice bonus), but are notably not rigged for high-power applications such as a charging …

Safari’s new design on iOS 15 is a no-go. I’m usually really good at adjusting to change, but this isn’t taking. I always expect the address to be at the top of the screen. You need good reason to break decades of convention, and this ain’t it. Hoping for relief in beta 5.

Rejected @chswx tweets/microblogs: “Do you really like long walks on the beach? Prove it.”

I think the time is coming to ditch my 4K TN-paneled monitor that I’ve got attached to my Mac mini. I don’t game, I live in text, and I am still unaware of anything better than an IPS panel for textual applications. (I honestly wonder how much eyestrain I’ve incurred because of the …

MacRumors reports that iOS 15 will route people around Flash Flood Warnings. At first glance, this appears to be an extremely smart application of the Dark Sky acquisition. It will be interesting to see if this only applies to Flash Flood Warnings or other warning types. It would also be interesting …

New shirt! A little more niche this go-around. Here’s a wearable love letter to meteorologists' favorite hunk of Java code anywhere, AWIPS.

Restart and Reboot Yourself (Again)

A year ago, I decided to retire my long-standing WordPress setup for my personal blog and set up a GitHub pages website via Jekyll so that I could accomplish the highly esoteric and somewhat impractical goal of blogging entirely through vim. (Quarantine goals — when we thought the lockdown period …

Safari's TOTP implementation in version 15 is pretty cool, though more websites need to adapt to make it truly useful.

Just installed Monterey on my MBP and am giving the new Safari two-factor authentication magic a whirl. So far, mixed results for autofill from websites, but it’s early. Where it does work, it’s phenomenal. This post by Dan Moren from Six Colors helps you migrate Authy two-factor codes …