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.

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.

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!

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 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.)

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.

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 pad.

Picture quality is great and does the job well for me. Text looks great, which is what I was gunning for, and the viewing angles are exactly what you would expect from an IPS panel. Looking forward to putting it more through its paces this week.

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.

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 to Safari. it is a little tedious, and depending on how your Authy is set up, it may require a little trial and error, but it works – a massive timesaver especially since I don’t plan on additional migrations to Monterey or iOS 15 for a while yet.