Jared W. Smith

Personal nerd and poor financial decision milestones were achieved today: I got a VESA-mountable Apple Studio Display to pair with my M2 Pro Mac mini. This is my first-ever Apple desktop display of my own. It’s been just a few hours, and I haven’t had much time with it, but so far, so good. I’m coming from a 27" 4K LG monitor that I was upscaling to 5K to get more breathing room in the UI, and there’s definitely an improvement not only in text sharpness, but even in system graphics performance now that the GPU doesn’t have to upconvert every UI frame.

Interestingly, with the Studio Display supporting True Tone, I thought for sure that it would go into a color temperature mismatch with my secondary 24" LG 4K display. That’s not the case, though: the True Tone support on the Studio Display also extends out to the monitor that doesn’t support it. That’s pretty nifty, IMO.

I’ve not really used the webcam yet (though my tests show that the firmware updates seem to have helped at least in my environment). The speakers are excellent, though, and I’m looking forward to trying the microphone on calls.

Having the three USB 3.1 ports available is quite nice, with plenty of bandwidth to go around. I have both of my FaceCams (one a FaceCam Pro, another a FaceCam Mk. 2) plugged into the monitor now, and I’m getting hitch-free uncompressed video from both. In the previous configuration, the hub on the LG monitor only supported USB2 speeds because I was using DisplayPort-over-USB, so I got MJPEG compression from the Mk. 2. The Pro was plugged directly into the Mac. The other bright side here is that I was able to free up a Thunderbolt 4 port directly on the Mac.

If there’s one caveat, I think it’s the panel’s response time – feels like my LG was a little quicker in this department. But it’s not a dealbreaker as I really don’t do any hardcore gaming on this machine. I leave that to the iMac G3 in the kitchen. :)

The Hollywood Hills fire is showing up on the Fire Temperature RGB product from GOES-West. Not good.

Went out on a limb and joined Team Trackball (Logitech MX Ergo) over on the weather computer, where there’s limited room for mousing anyway. Getting the hang of it, though drawing on the screen will take some getting used to. The precision mode is nice, though, and may help.

Just a casual 85 MPH wind gust earlier northeast of Los Angeles earlier this evening. Unfortunately, the worst fears around wildfire conditions are verifying here.

I’m “oh my god I can’t believe that amazing CSS property is so widely supported” years old.

iOS 18.2 seems to have nuked all of my iPhone-to-Mac notification settings. Ugh.

In the process of making Micro.blog the center of my slice of the fediverse by migrating my Mastodon account following and followers here. Pretty excited about this – ActivityPub gives us a standards-based opportunity to think differently and break old habits around how we interact online.

Folks, it’s The Holiday Season™.

If I ever find myself back in academia, this is how I’m writing my papers. Only way I can truly feel like I’ve achieved the “in-school” mindset.

I’ve not been paying much attention to Threads lately, and the growth-hacking notifications have definitely been picking up steam. If there’s one thing Meta knows, it’s how to sound desperate when you ignore one of its platforms.

Instead of sleeping at a reasonable hour, I’m considering consolidating my personal fediverse presence on micro.blog to get the benefits of using my domain. Will want to migrate my Mastodon following and the like. Probably worth investigating during my holiday time off. (NERD.)

Cracked open the chswxbot parser this weekend for the first time in a while. Starting to add some more metadata parsing for each product. This effort begins with the coastal flood products, hopefully making those automated alerts more useful.

I also need to do some better character-limit wrangling with the influx of folks to Bluesky. You get used to having 500 chars available here. (I’ve already baked in the concept of variable limits, of course, so Mastodon’s support remains first-class!)

Milton and I don’t exactly see eye to eye.

And so concludes probably the most head-scratching tropical storm warning we’ve had here in quite some time.

This long day of meetings is brought to you by Purity Ring and coffee.

iPhone Mirroring in macOS Sequoia is very, very, very good. There’s not too much in the initial release of Sequoia and iOS 18 that I really care about, but this is one of those very nice quality of life improvements you didn’t know you needed until you got it.

I’ve been really impressed with how many of the details are just right. For instance, notifications that come through native to the Mac do not duplicate from the iPhone. That is huge in and of itself; could’ve been a real deal-breaker for folks! Being able to take action on notifications right from the Mac is a spot that Apple could have very easily half-assed, but they saw it through properly not only with opening the correct app on the mirrored iPhone when clicking on a notification, but also allowing for quick actions on the notification without invoking the Mirroring interface.

In future releases, I’d love the ability to invoke the Control Center from the Mac. I’d also like to see the notification about iPhone Mirroring being invoked collapse automatically when the phone is in StandBy mode. (It feels like it did this initially – not sure if I tweaked a setting that ultimately caused this behavior to change.) But beyond that…there’s not much I’d choose to improve at this point from my relatively limited (~2 weeks) experience with it.

If you are stuck on a “needs Apple ID settings update” error on a device while trying to enable Contact Key verification in iOS 17.2, disable iMessage on the affected device(s), enroll, and re-enable it.

Nobody asked, but I do have a small contribution to the 8GB RAM on MacBook Pro in the year of our lord 2023 discourse. (Coherence not 100% guaranteed.)

My first Apple silicon machine was a Mac mini M1 with 8GB of unified memory. I was quite pleased with its performance (and probably still would be!) especially compared to the 2015 MBP it replaced. However, I definitely ran into bottlenecks with my “pro” workflows with that little memory available. And when I hit those bottlenecks, it hurt: the system would become unresponsive, with beachballing and even the cursor becoming rather jumpy. It got to the point where I’d have to shut down Docker in order to run OBS, for instance…and I just grew weary of that limitation pretty quickly. (I’d at least feel like I could hit them, though, without feeling like the computer was about to launch into outer space, unlike the Intel machine!)

I traded it in for a Mac mini M2 Pro with 32 GB RAM when that model was introduced earlier this year, and I’ve not hit a hiccup since. I’ve been comfortable editing relatively complex GIS files, Docker containers, OBS…you name it, it runs it, and it runs it well. The Pro chip probably helps, but I know everything can fit because it’s got plenty of memory to work with.

I think there are a surprising amount of things that folks who get a base M3 with 8GB of RAM can do. I don’t totally poo-poo the notion that Apple Silicon can more efficiently manage memory, either – that M1 could certainly do quite a bit more multitasking more responsively than the Intel equivalent with the same RAM. And, of course, there’s the disclaimer that my workflow is generally out of the ordinary. But I still think that “Pro” means more than a base level of memory. Apple Silicon is pretty cool, but it can’t defy the foundational principles of computer science, either.

There’s a bug in rpm on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as some versions of CentOS Stream that can stop packages from installing. (Convenient, right?) You’ll see messages such as signature hdr data BAD when trying to upgrade packages via dnf.

This is how I ended up solving it:

• I’d try to upgrade rpm in place via dnf using dnf upgrade rpm. This would fail, but it would cache the packages.
• Note the path to the cached packages. On my system, it was /var/cache/dnf/baseos-9a27fc7471a8d219/packages/, but yours may vary.
• Use rpm to force install the rpm and rpm-libs packages:
  • rpm -i --force /var/cache/dnf/baseos-9a27fc7471a8d219/packages/rpm-4.14.3-26.el8.x86_64.rpm
  • rpm -i --force /var/cache/dnf/baseos-9a27fc7471a8d219/packages/rpm-libs-4.14.3-26.el8.x86_64.rpm
• Then, try your dnf install or dnf upgrade procedure again, and it should be fine.

My CoCoRaHS station recorded 61.37” of rain this past year, good for sixth wettest in Charleston County as well as in the NWS CHS CWFA. #chswx #climatology

‘23.

Never PGEN before coffee. #awips

Respectable elevated instability this morning from the 12z sounding from CHS supportive of some supercellular behavior if things really wanted to get feisty. Low pressure moving north of the area will move any severe threat with it, though. #chswx #fediwx

Trying external display mode on my iPad Pro (M1). It’s interesting…though probably more of a novelty than anything else. Early days for windowing on the iPad, that’s for sure.

It’s above 60°, so the ice cream truck is making the rounds.