Jared W. Smith

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.

Very shallow wedge inversion on the way to being eroded on the 00z sounding from KCHS this evening. Looks like the warm front is starting to move ashore now; temperatures have risen a degree or two in the last hour.

Giving MarsEdit 5 a whirl from the new micropost screen.

I rescued my Tumblr account and unearthed this gem. A very young Charlie Brown, think he’s about a year and a half here.

So the Elon thing on the bird app seems to be going well. 😬

The first production commit to chswx.com in almost two years is a CSS fix for headers running into images. Look, it’s something. More to come.

Fediverse offers some interesting possibilities for syndicating @chswx content, such as alerts. I could theoretically set up my own server and then put certain classes of alerts into their own channels along with a catch-all. 🤔

Platforms come and go, but standards are (mostly) forever.

I’m surprised Apple didn’t delay Stage Manager until spring. My only guess is that they felt they had to get it in peoples’ hands and iterate from there. Vittici was pretty pointed, but constructive, in his criticisms.

Tidying things up over here on the ol' micro-dot-blog. Can’t imagine why.

Should hopefully see Beta 4 of all of the new Apple OS releases this week. Beta 3 hasn’t really been that bad. Some app crashes and restarts here and there on the phone, but overall, nothing too out of the ordinary in a beta cycle. iPad has been in good shape, with the occasional app crash and a few bugs in Stage Manager, but again, it’s been pretty solid all things considered. (Ventura has been really good so far, too, though it could still use some performance tuning and tweaks to Stage Manager.)

Thinking beta 4 is probably going to be one of the last times we see big changes in spots before turning focus to polish in August. If Apple is going to make feature cuts for 16.0, we’ll probably see that in the next 2-3 weeks.