Jared W. Smith

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.

Went with the MacBook Pro 14” with the M1 Pro over the M2 Air. For the money I would have spent on the configuration I wanted for the Air, I’d be out several ports and a card reader, not to mention the brilliant ProMotion refresh rate. What a difference from my 2015 13” MBP!

The overlapping notification bug was indeed fixed in iOS 15.1, and thank goodness for that. What an annoyance. I’m still surprised it made it to the final release.

I hope that someone fixed the notification overlap bug with Summaries in iOS 15.0.2 and just didn’t say anything. That is beyond annoying and makes one of the tentpole features of 15 very difficult to use.

There’s a bad bug in the latest Keynote update for iPadOS (and probably iOS, too). If, on first launch, you open a presentation with font warnings, after dismissing the font warning box you’ll be presented with a totally unresponsive Keynote. You have to open a presentation with no font warnings (or start a new one) in order to get Keynote to get going, which I accomplished through the Haptic Touch context menu. Once that’s done, you are prompted with the “what’s new in Keynote” modal…which likely was the culprit for the whole thing. Ugh.

I received my iPhone 13 Pro Max on Friday. Here’s my snap judgements so far. (Please note that my complaints are solidly rooted in first-world problem territory.)

• ProRAW makes RAW capture so, so, so much more doable on the iPhone. On the iPhone 11 Pro Max, RAW photos would often overexpose horribly when pulled into apps like Darkroom. This is no longer the case and I am very happy.
• Getting the 256 GB model may have been a mistake given how much I like ProRAW.
• Low light performance is as advertised. It’s bonkers how good it is; after reducing the light pollution in post, the starfield in this photo is amazing. This was a 10-second Night Mode capture right out of the stock app which I tweaked in Darkroom.
• Condensing the TrueDepth system and getting a little more screen space back is a win, but the notch has never really bothered me overall. It’ll be interesting to see how app developers take advantage of the extra space. (I see Apple has declined to do so in this initial release aside from making the time and indicators larger.)
• So far, so very good with battery life. Here’s hoping there isn’t such a sudden decline in health as I saw on my 11 Pro Max.
• The iPhone 4 vibes are very real with this phone, right down to the placement of the antenna gaps in the outer stainless steel band. Kind of uncanny. (But it certainly performs well no matter how you hold it.)
• ProMotion has spoiled me on the iPad Pro, and it is so great to finally have it on the iPhone.
• One thing I will miss from my iPhone 11 is the lack of a bottom lip on the Apple Leather case. This not only made swiping up more smooth, it also gave me a good indicator as to which way was “up” when pulling the phone from the pocket. This is not the case with the 13 (and probably wasn’t with the 12, either, but I skipped that), and already I’ve run into a few cases where I pull the phone out, try to unlock it, only to find it’s upside down.
• iOS 15 is still buggy. I sure hope that Apple fixes the bug that breaks Apple Watch unlock while wearing a mask very soon. It’s quite inconvenient.
• The overlapping notifications bug was annoying in the betas. In the final release, and especially on new hardware, it’s unacceptable. I hope this is getting fixed in a point release, because it is so aggravating (to the point where I might have to miss notifications because I can’t get them to display).

All in all, the hardware is great. The software will get better over time (theoretically, anyway). Certainly a must-have upgrade on the X or older, IMO, especially since the Max and standard-size Pro have feature parity this go-around (unlike the 12 Pro and Pro Max).