Album of the week: Shulamith by POLIÇA
Favorite tunes: Vegas, Tiff, and Matty. Love Channy Leaneagh’s vocals and the use of effects to really make them flow in as another instrument in the ensemble.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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Rejected @chswx tweets/microblogs: “Do you really like long walks on the beach? Prove it.”
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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.
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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.
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New shirt! A little more niche this go-around. Here’s a wearable love letter to meteorologists' favorite hunk of Java code anywhere, AWIPS.
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Restart and Reboot Yourself (Again)
A year ago, I decided to retire my long-standing WordPress setup for my personal blog and set up a GitHub pages website via Jekyll so that I could accomplish the highly esoteric and somewhat impractical goal of blogging entirely through
vim. (Quarantine goals — when we thought the lockdown period would only be about 2-3 weeks — were naively lofty.)And as it turned out — as so many of my attempts to write on a consistent basis about something other than weather often do — it died on the vine after only five posts. I had the best of intentions, but some habits are hard to break.
I’ve had good luck with syndication for @chswx here on micro.blog. There are certainly kinks to work out, especially as it relates to how WordPress handles images and how that translates over to the service, but it has been pretty solid. But, still, some habits are hard to break. I’m trying, though.
At the same time, I’ve wanted a place for a while now to briefly comment on links or other things that I’ve found useful. However, when considering the cost-benefit analysis of spinning up and maintaining another WordPress install to handle that, it was like…nah. (And yes, I know about WordPress.com’s hosted offering. It’s good! But too much for what I’m trying to do here.)
So, here we are at
micro.blog. I’ve transitioned the domain name over, so jaredwsmith.com now resolves here (in case you haven’t checked your address bar ;)). I’m happy about this move for many reasons:- The micro.blog client is good for posting quickly from the hip. I like that.
- $5/mo to handle mostly infrequent long-form writing peppered with a lot of short-form stuff is well worth it for not having to keep up with security patches on a self-hosted service. (And, it keeps the lights on here — micro.blog is a really important project for the indie Web!)
- I get to use my all-time favorite blogging tool again in MarsEdit.
- I get to write long-form within iA Writer and save the drafts up.
In other words, I get to use really good software to do my writing, it is easily exportable and stays with me forever, and I don’t have to deal with patches (yet can customize the living you-know-what out of this!) And, if I wanted to, I could still use
vim.With the environmental stuff out of the way, it’s once again back on the breaking-old-habits train. See you there?
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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 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.