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.

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 find Focus modes extremely helpful. Syncing Focus state across devices solved a problem I didn’t realize I had until I added the iPad to the mix back in June, when my phone would be on Do Not Disturb but I would forget to set the iPad.

I’m running the dev seed of Monterey on my 2015 MBP, and had a bit of a scare last night when I went back to it and it was powered off. I fired it back up, but it promptly went into a reboot loop every time I tried to log in. Shutting the machine down and powering back up took care of it, and the installation finished successfully. I’ve not spent much time with it since then, though. Here’s hoping the public beta goes on a little smoother today on the M1.

Hoping for a watchOS 8 public beta today as well. Battery struggles are very, very real on beta 4 on my Series 4, so here’s hoping those rough edges start to smooth out on beta 5.

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.

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 TN panel.)

Trying to decide if going ultrawide is worth it at this point, or if I should just stick to a standard wide IPS display with a second monitor rotated into portrait as I have today. If I go ultrawide, I can take the secondary monitor (which has an IPS panel) and move it over to my AWIPS workstation, replacing another older TN panel. On the other hand, I recoil at the price of high-DPI ultrawides, so I might just do the swap.

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 to see if it applies to flood advisories as well. We often see impassable roads here with a Flood Advisory in effect because Flash Flood Warnings in my county warning area are reserved for the most serious flooding events.

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