Jared W. Smith

If it ain't broke...

Shiba Inus deserve so much better than this slander. Photo by Jaycee Xie on Unsplash The DOGE Boys are apparently going to rewrite the software that runs Social Security in six months, according to Makena Kelly’s reporting at WIRED. “Move Fast and Break Things” is such a scourge upon the software …

If it ain't broke...

Disabling Apple Intelligence suggestions in Messages...in a strange place

The actual way to disable these suggestions in Messages on MacOS: In System Settings: Apple Intelligence & Siri, click the “About Siri, Dictation & Privacy…” button. In the panel that opens, go to Messages. Turn off “Show Siri Suggestions in application”. (When I turned this off, an …

Disabling Apple Intelligence suggestions in Messages...in a strange place

The Apple Studio Display, A Few Years Later

A poor photo of the Apple Studio Display box.

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 …

The Apple Studio Display, A Few Years Later

Praise for iPhone Mirroring in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia

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 …

Praise for iPhone Mirroring in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia

Eight ain't enough

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!) …

Eight ain't enough

When dnf means "does not function" in CentOS Stream thanks to large signature headers

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: …

When dnf means "does not function" in CentOS Stream thanks to large signature headers

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 …

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.

The monitor update nobody asked for

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 …

The monitor update nobody asked for

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 …

Safari's TOTP implementation in version 15 is pretty cool, though more websites need to adapt to make it truly useful.

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 …

Safari's TOTP implementation in version 15 is pretty cool, though more websites need to adapt to make it truly useful.