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Scrawlspace

This is scrawlspace. I scrawl in this space. Do not expect coherence or permanence here.

2023-06-12: The week after WWDC

Pretty good week, really.

I’m happy there’s a larger-screen Air.

No idea if the Mac Studio still makes too much noise, but it’s nice to see regular spec-bump updates.

I’m happy that the Mac Pro remains an item in their lineup, although Apple, so far, has ceded ground to people who need to put like six GPUs in their computers to have them crunch data. Then again, like Ternus said in The Talk Show, supposedly there’s things you can do with 196 GB of RAM that’s shared with VRAM that you can’t do on whatever Nvidia is capable of shipping.

Couldn’t care less about Contact Posters. You know those people who care about things like “where to go to see and be seen” mentioned in “I am sent three Condé Nast Traveler issues” back on 1/13/2023? This feature sounds like it’s for them.

Voicemail transcription sounds handy for people who aren’t me.

Check In sounds like a good idea.

NameDrop sounds minor-league handy.

Not a fan of “continue the file transfer over the Internet” functionality in AirDrop. If it’s big enough to step away from while you’re transferring, then it’s big enough to make a serious dent in your data plan.

Not sure I like having yet another thing to watch for when I’m typing to make sure I’m not getting an accidental autocorrupt that nonetheless has perfectly normal words in it.

Hooray for Dictation becoming even better.

The engineer time spent making Journal would have been better spent fixing bugs.

StandBy sounds neat. I don’t have a stand like the one pictured, or a phone that will stick to it, though. And I don’t even want a red clock going all night, so there’s that.

I don’t get all that many false-alarm Siri activations except on my watch. Still, cutting the wakeword down to a mere “Siri” seems…maybe it’s a marked improvement for languages where “hey so-and-so” isn’t a thing?

Downloadable maps? Nice.

I’d cheer for widgets on iPadOS but I don’t really use the lock-screen widgets on my iPhone. Like, they’re there, but I don’t really pay any attention to them.

I think it’s cool that I’ll be able to get a big-ass picture of Mars on my iPad.

I wonder if the multiple-timers thing is exclusive to watchOS and iPadOS, with the phone and real computers missing out.

If I get Health data on my iPad, I’m going to have to cloud-sync it. Sure, Advanced Data Protection, but…ehhh…

The PDF support in Notes seems interesting. It’s no replacement for LiquidText, but it’s nice to have a lightweight option for most people.

I’m not a Stage Manager guy except when I want to look at three different windows on my iPad at the same time. Say, Music, OmniOutliner, and Excel in the kitchen.

Sonoma: Nice part of the state, but it continues with Apple’s turn towards soulless abstract wallpaper. Give me stunning aerial photography like we got for Catalina and Big Sur.

I’ll keep my widgets in Notification Center, thanks.

I watched someone else play Death Stranding a few years ago, so I’m not itching to play porter myself.

The presenter overlay stuff seems meh.

Profiles is a feature that’s important for people who develop websites. Having this should make testing websites in Safari easier, so I’m glad this feature got added.

Web apps? I might use this.

Adaptive Audio sounds handy, especially with Conversation Awareness.

I’m not sure I want twisting the watch’s crown to actually do things. I’ve tried the Siri Suggestions face and some of the suggestions are, to put it bluntly, whack.

I don’t cycle on anything that moves, but this sounds cool.

I could definitely use downloadable topographic maps.

I wonder if Screen Distance will nag at me for having the phone too close.

Apple Vision Pro seems neat but uncompelling. I don’t think I’d use one much even if I were given one as a present. Then again, it doesn’t really have any third-party apps yet.

⁂

OK, that was me going through the keynote transcript and using that as a memory aid for the opinions I had a week ago. Now for the Platforms State of the Union, skipping over the things I don’t have much to say about:

The watchOS 10 redesign seems…big. From what I understand, lots of things look kind of bad on the Apple Watch Ultra and maybe this redesign will fix that, as well as make a bunch of other things better.

Speaking of, LOTS of people in these videos are wearing Ultras. Like, almost everyone in these videos has an Apple Watch on, and maybe ⅔ of them are wearing an Ultra. I like having an unobtrusive, lightweight watch on my wrist while I sleep, but having a big ol’ chonker on the wrist doesn’t look weird on them.

⁂

After the Keynote and PSotU, the annual on-video The Talk Show happened. What surprised me was how tall these men are. John Gruber, the host, is, as far as I know, something like 6′3″ (1.9m). The only guy who wasn’t within an inch of Gruber’s height was Greg “Joz” Joswiak, and he’s “only” probably 6′ (1.8m).

It’s interesting to see these sort of events happen, especially if you’re at least kind of aware of the constraints everyone’s under (mostly Apple-imposed). Apple people have an ironclad policy of not talking about future products under any circumstances, so that throws out a lot of otherwise interesting questions. Joanna Stern will dutifully ask the questions that are most important to her audience (“When will we be able to set multiple timers on the iPhone?”) but Gruber won’t do that because he knows the answer he’ll get already, and most of his live audience knows that. Heck, he even mentioned that this year in passing. While these events are undoubtedly mostly Apple PR by other means, it’s interesting to see Gruber lob the hardest softballs he can to try and get something interesting out of his guests. Sometimes, the interesting bits aren’t even coming from expertly-crafted prods, though — hearing the guys explain the philosophy of the Apple Vision Pro (you use it to connect to people — people close to you, and oftentimes physically close, as opposed to putting you in an immersive world far away) kind of confirmed my suspicions on how they’re going to pitch this in a world where they’re definitely not first to market and all sorts of other VR things, at least on paper, have lots of the same things on their checklists.

The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2023

Advanced Data Protection for iCloud

2023-05-13: Harry gives a better shave than Jeremy

When I started shaving, I used a two-blade Gilette Sensor Excel. It served me well for a while, and then their Mach 3 came out. While the three-blade design was OK, I couldn’t get a straight edge on my sideburns. I switched back to the Sensor Excel.

A few years ago, I started to look around to see if there were any better, newer razor designs that come out, and I picked up a Harry’s starter set with a handle in DON’T SHOOT ME I’M HUMAN NOT A DEER orange. This new razor was fantastically better than my old Sensor Excel, mainly because a single blade would last me 8–10 shaves, which at my frequency works out to a blade replacement once every two or three months. The Sensor Excel, by contrast, would only last a week, or one shave, before starting to nick my face. I think part of this is because I could store the Harry’s in a drawer with a blade cover instead of out on a high ledge exposed to steam every day, but I didn’t really care enough to try and figure that one out.

The Harry’s blade was better in other ways, too. While five blades may give you a ragged edge, you don’t need to use the five on your sideburns when the single blade on the tip is available. It was also plain more comfortable to hold. Really, the Harry’s blade was an upgrade in every way.

More recently, I wanted to try out a Jeremy’s razor. I got their starter pack and let it sit in my closet for months because I was still using a perfectly adequate Harry’s blade.

After three shaves, I can confidently say that the Jeremy’s razor isn’t as good.

The Jeremy’s razor is significantly heavier and smoother than the Harry’s razor. While this makes it feel nice and expensive, I have to take extra care to grip it carefully in the shower to make sure that I don’t accidentally drop it on my foot. Furthermore, while the dark green is nice, it’s harder to see when I have my glasses off compared to the DON’T SHOOT ME I’M HUMAN NOT A DEER orange that Harry’s offers.

What’s worse, after every single shave with the Jeremy’s razor, I’ve cut myself. Not enough to have to use my styptic pencil to stop the bleeding, but a cut is a cut.

I’ll probably donate the Jeremy’s razor and any remaining blades after this. While it’s nice to have options, the quality difference is too large.

https://www.harrys.com/en/us

https://www.jeremysrazors.com/

2023-05-12: The The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild soundtrack hits different when it comes on CDs instead of in the game

(There are all kinds of spoilers for BotW here, including both gameplay and story. None of them are earth-shattering, though.)

While Tears of the Kingdom is actually out for me right now, I wanted to wrap up my previous Zelda experience. In the run-up to the TotK release, I watched someone else play BotW with a couple mods enabled. This got me in the mood to play the game myself a little bit again, and I also wondered if I could get the soundtrack. Way back when, when I first got the game, I looked into getting the soundtrack, and decided against. When I looked at the entry on Amazon a bit (maybe years) later, only scraps were available at ridiculous (three-digit) prices. However, when I checked the final time, they were down to normal levels…but they were all imports, and all the printing was in Japanese. I still have access to at least one computer with a CD-ROM drive, so I bought the thing.

“This is a popular disc set”, I thought. “Certainly the disc services will have English track names for all these things, right?”

Turns out, I was half right. Gracenote CDDB, which is what iTunes uses, had English entries for all five discs. It did not, however, have identical English entries for all five discs in the set, so two discs seemed, to iTunes, to be from a different album.

Meanwhile, Exact Audio Copy uses FreeDB for disc metadata. FreeDB had only one entry each for all these discs. The snag? They were all in Japanese. Maybe one day after I’ve retired I’ll go back and change the metadata for all of them to their English equivalents.

(At this point, you might be wondering why I’m ripping to FLAC in addition to ALAC. It’s because while ALAC is the format of Now, FLAC is the format of Now and Forever.)

Interestingly enough, there wasn’t any exact-match disc art for this CD set in the iTunes Music Store database. I settled on what was almost certainly a fan-made version of the game’s cover art, done in the style of van Gogh’s Starry Night.

4096×4096 suitable cover-art JPEG, hosted on somebody else’s CDN

 ▲
▲ ▲

After ripping it all and making gross adjustments to the metadata, I finally had a listen…

Breath of the Wild takes place in post-apocalyptic Hyrule, 100 years after Calamity Ganon wrecked the place. This gives the composers license to have a fairly sparse soundtrack most of the time, like when you’re traveling around Hyrule. Before I started watching and playing the game again, I could probably only think of a handful of music bits, and only mostly after some prompting:

a short piano…phrase? when you’re out and about
the above-ground battle music
the very melodic Spooky Woods music, as used in the Lost Woods and the forest surrounding Thyphlo Ruins
the part during the ending-credits music where it just abruptly wrenches from one kind of music to another, like two different tracks got smashed together without any transition
the music that plays in shrines
the vague notion that the shrine music for “ok, the ordeal was all just in the getting down here, have an item and a Spirit Orb” was somewhat different than the normal shrine music
the underground-guardian fight music
the “a full-sized Guardian has locked on to you” music
Hestu’s dance music, complete with his maracas’ POP at the end
The Hyrule Castle music, both indoors and outdoors
the part of the riding-a-horse music that’s a callback to previous Zelda games, or at least its existence

Well, with five discs of music, there’s a lot that I didn’t recall.

The wrench in the end-credits music is also present in the main theme. That’s right: disc 1, track 1, one minute and six seconds into the track.
There’s a lot of special music for cutscenes.
There’s a lot of special music for what happens on the Great Plateau, where you start the game. The old man? He gets a lot of his own music.
After a second listen, I remembered the piano music that plays during Sheikah Tower climbs…but not the woodwind bits.
The different Blights of Ganon have slightly different themes.
The different “hit four different spots on the Divine Beast” parts all have slightly different themes.
The different memories’ individual pieces.

Plus, since this is a mere soundtrack instead of something that can react to what you do in game, some other things are a bit weird:

The Hyrule Castle music transitions between indoors and outdoors only once, not whenever you pass an indoor/outdoor transition.
In-game, the music needs to be able to wrap up battle music at almost any time. In the soundtrack, the wrap-up of, say, shrine battles can happen only once, so that’s all you get. Similarly for when you get off a horse.

Other things are just weirdly different for no obvious reason:

The POP of Hestu’s maracas is absent in the soundtrack, but the beeping of a Guardian that’s noted your presence is present…and happens in alternating ears. All that said, the stereo separation is significantly muted when playing the soundtrack on speakers instead of on headphones, which is not something I did at all while playing the game.

Oh, and:

The “Shrine of Trials: Start” introduction is its own track. At nine seconds long, this would have made an absolutely fantastic Windows startup/logon sound when I was younger and that sort of thing was fashionable.
Some of these tracks sure do have long chunks of silence at the end. Like, multiple seconds’ worth.
The music for Lurelin Village, an entirely missable fishing town, only shows up on the soundtrack after the fight-Ganon, beat-Ganon, and closing-credits music.
The DLC music is here, too, all on Disc 5. I wonder if I did the right thing by waiting as late as I did. For all I know, the earlier disc set that I missed out on didn’t have the DLC music — and there are some bangers in there.
Interestingly enough, the advertising music for the game isn’t in the game. The 2017 trailer music is way more…epic than just about everything in the game proper, save for boss-fight music. Even then, I’m not 100% sure. The BotW soundtrack kind of went off and did its own thing, and this piece clings closer to the Zelda canon.

2023-04-23, but technically the day after: I saved the galaxy, whoop de doo

I got around to finishing Metroid Prime Remastered. I ended up sitting on the Ridley fight (this isn’t a spoiler; if it’s a Metroid game, and Ridley shows up, there’s probably gonna be a Ridley fight) and the final-boss fight for several weekends, as one does when he has all sorts of other things competing for his time and attention on the weekend.

I’m really not the kind of person who seems to enjoy wandering around anymore. I got super duper mega lost in Metroid II: Return of Samus, even going as so wrong as to try backtracking to previous levels down the central tunnel, but these days I’m satisfied to just follow a walkthrough for most of the game. In-game time ended up being 20 hours or so, giving me a helmet-off ending. I most emphatically did not finish scanning every single enemy, so there’s an extra-good ending that I’m going to have to look up on the Internet that was recorded by someone who’s way better, or at least persistent, at video games than I am. I beat the final boss with single-digit amounts of health left, and if I’d tried to scan it, I would’ve had to try at least once more, and possibly more than that.

I wonder how I’ll end up playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I enjoyed wandering around Hyrule in Breath of the Wild, but I don’t think the new game will be quite as freeform as the previous one and I don’t have the free time that I used to to just wander around Hyrule and do stuff.

I’m still very much tempted to try and postpone getting into Tears of the Kingdom until some DLC comes out for it. Breath of the Wild had great DLC (many of the outfits and definitely the Travel Medallion), and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity had a number of great quality-of-life improvements in its DLC, including making baked apples purchasable and adding in extra-hard enemies that could be farmed for stuff. Oh, and that Ancient bo/nunchaku thing was just plain fun.

The only question is “what would I play until the DLC comes out?”. There’s a 2D Metroid out that was released on the Game Boy with the L and R buttons. I could play that. Because it’s emulated, I could savescum my way through it and get the experience well enough, although after not completely falling in love with both Metroids Prime and Dread I’m not sure it’ll capture my attention for that long.

All that said, I probably have 4″ of books that I want to go through, and a couple of them are at least as brain-bendy as _A Brief History of Time_, at least according to what I remember.

2023-03-14: Good luck finding an interpreter for that one, boys

I was bored today and away from my usual sources of entertainment, so I decided to futz around with my phone.

I ended up going into the Health app to see if there’s anything I could usefully update in the Medical ID screen.

Age is automatically taken care of. Bumped my weight up a bit, since I’m getting fatter. Noticed that there’s a new-to-me “add primary language” option that I hadn’t set yet.

Let’s see what’s in here, shall we?

“Preferred and regional languages” include English and Spanish. I wonder if I’d get the same things if I lived closer to Quebec.

Now then. Now for the “All spoken languages” list…

Afrikaans (Afrikaans)

I’ve heard of that one.

⋮

アイヌイタㇰ (Ainu)

Huh. Didn’t remember this one being written in a script that looks like katakana.

⋮

English (English)

Looks familiar.

⋮

esperanto (Esperanto)

OK, now this is getting pretty indie. I wonder if we can go indier.

⋮

‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i

Probably just about as indie.

⋮

la .lojban. (Lojban)

Perfect.

⋮

上海话 (Shanghainese)

This is a step back from indieness but I figured the only not-Mandarin dialect I’d see in this list would be Cantonese. Not my best guess.

⋮

⁂

I thought about setting the option to “Lojban”, but on second thought I don’t want to send paramedics on a snipe hunt for an interpreter when I’m unconscious and can barely manage anything more than “coi rodo” anyway.

2023-03-06: Cupertino roulette

AirPods have an option on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS to automatically connect to playing devices. This means that if you stick your AirPods in, whatever gizmo you’re looking at will make your AirPods its default device, with other devices on standby. This sort of thing tends to work decently now that all my Apple gizmos seem to have an idea of which one I’m looking at.

At any rate, I wanted to have something playing while I took a fifteen-minute break to farm dust bunnies from underneath my bed, so I just stuck a pair of AirPods in my ears and squeezed to play.

The winner ended up being my iPad, and it played Moby’s “Alone”, on repeat-one, which was the last thing I was playing from Music on it.

Background information:

Apple Support, “Switch your AirPods to another device”

2023-02-25: I save you from reading something boring

I’ve been in the process of writing a Metroid Prime Remastered text-only Let’s Play, but decided to throw it into the round file. Really, the only interesting thing about it is that the default controls are:

push the left stick up to make Samus look up
push the joystick right to make Samus look right

My first reaction, of course, was

AAAAAAAAAA

as this is the opposite, twice over, of what I’ve gotten myself used to playing Breath of the Wild and Splatoon. So I go into the game’s settings and look for a way to swap these and

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

because there’s no way to change this for the default controls (which I guess are tuned for modern-controller FPSs). After slowing down a bit and trying to use slow, deliberate movements to re-train my brain in not one, but two axes, and aim my get-info reticle, I

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

and then I saw a pterodactyl-type thing overhead and wanted to get a better look at it and

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

So yeah, hours of fun. I’m a lot less awful at it now that I’m fighting intact space pirates, but I went back to finish up Majora’s Mask a couple days ago and the controls were superlatively intuitive, like I’d been playing with controls like that for decades. I’m worried that the next time I go back to Tallon IV, I’m in for a lot more

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

because I was deacclimating to up-is-up-and-right-is-right while I was saving Termina from some annoying imp with a mask.

2023-02-02: A thought I just had

It’s often quite easy to register one’s displeasure with someone else’s idea, but oftentimes orders of magnitude more difficult to craft something that might help him see the error of his ways.

2023-01-26: It would’ve taken fifteen minutes tops

I wanted to update my CV a bit.

From my laptop.

It’s stored on my desktop.

Obviously, something I should be SSHing in for.

What’d I call that fzf alias? The one I use for changing directories?

Why are all these subdirectories of .git directories showing up in the list?

Finally here.

I already use vim.

I should use something fancier.

Kakoune is a thing.

The text is past the right side because tabs are eight columns in this thing.

Hmm. Argh.

This config file format is inscrutable even with the completion popping up.

I can’t figure out how to set the tab width.

Good thing I use Prettier on this thing anyway.

OK, this seems to help. I could’ve used it fifteen minutes ago:

“The first two hours of Kakoune in two minutes”

OK, this isn’t awful. Maybe.

Let’s try Helix.

Oh right, its themes pretty much all require 24-bit color, so I need to switch to iTerm2.

…I’m already in iTerm2. But over SSH.

OK, ayu isn’t bad.

Right, this thing doesn’t support soft wrapping.

I can’t get it to automatically load the file after I run Prettier in the whole directory.

Whatever, I made the change I was going to make. `git commit -m`, baby.

Which post-Vim editor was the one that showed me lines that were changed in my working copy, again?

(This post was authored in Visual Studio Code.)

2023-01-22: Computers are still bicycles for the mind, even though people use them for pretty much everything else

Prior reading:

Solderpunk, “Do you even compute, bro?”

Probably everyone in Geminispace has heard Sturgeon’s Law and most can probably recall most of it just from seeing the phrase “Sturgeon’s Law”. While “90% of everything is crap” is the part that everyone knows, what’s lesser known is that he’s claimed, rightfully in my view, that the remaining 10% makes science fiction a genre worth the time and attention that it gets.

I think the same is true of computers and bicycle-for-the-mind computing. Most of the time, computers aren’t used for augmenting humans and instead are used for communication tasks of varying levels of importance. However, the times when I pull out the actual mind bicycle — oftentimes Excel, but not infrequently Ulysses (many people swear by Obsidian instead) — I’m struck by how these sorts of tasks would break my brain with their difficulty if I were thrown back into the technology level of the early 80s before spreadsheets and ⌘F became common technologies.

So when I read the following in the above-linked article, I could only marvel by how utterly false it was:

But we have to realise and accept that when considering the destructive ecological footprint of the modern computing landscape, *that* kind of personal computing is a tiny fraction of a percent of the whole. To a first order approximation, nobody on Earth does that kind of computing.

Is most computing a distraction from more worthwhile hobbies? Almost certainly. On the other hand, I posit that all independent adults use their computers as bicycles for the mind at least some of the time, and that many independent adults (and more than a few dependents of varying ages) use their computers as bicycles for the mind for most of their workdays and a not-insignificant part of their non-work days where they’re busy managing their households with tools that are way better than a desk calculator from 1985 and a paper double-entry ledger.

References:

Ulysses, a text editor

Obsidian, a personal wiki

2023-01-13: I am sent three Condé Nast Traveler issues

Somehow, I got three issues of Condé Nast Traveler. The first issue is for December 2022, the second is for January/February 2023, and the third is “An Insider’s Guide to Qatar 2023”. Not all at once, mind; they dribbled in over the course of months.

The two normal issues turn out to be roughly half ads, by page count. The Qatar issue is either all ad with extra ads, or mostly not-ads, depending on your point of view.

The Editor’s Letter for the December 2022 issue was nicely touching. Here’s how it ended:

Wherever you choose to be, I hope you can find a party to your liking—and if there’s none to be had, I encourage you to make your own.

All the normal articles manage to present travel as a flowing, effortless, dreamlike state. Even, to a limited degree, the one about skiing on liftless mountains in Norway (hike up, ski down).

80 pages in, I am struck by the second occurrence of a phrase — “where to see and be seen”. “Where to go to be seen” is not something I think about much, if at all.

86 pages in, the circulation numbers are listed. There’s a column for the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding 12 months. In that column, it says there are 702,781 copies in total. 538,105 are paid, while 130,718 were given out free, like this one. On row (i) it says that 80% were paid for.

The January/February 2023 issue has “advertisement” on the front cover. I’m quite sure how this differs from all the other issues, but I suppose we’ll see.

Oh. This front cover is actually fake. It’s attached to the real cover with rubber cement. This underlying cover does not have “advertisement” on it, so I suppose the whole thing contains the normal amount of advertising in it.

I had thought that advertisements with lots of body copy were a dead art form, but advertorials still survive in magazines like this.

Page 46 describes a spa that specializes in fasting. The authoress is put on a diet consisting of vegetable broth only, with a rice cake to keep on her person at all times to keep her from passing out if she gets dizzy. In sharp contrast to my own experiences fasting, she spends three days, mostly sleeping, after which she is better than normal and goes on bike rides. Maybe I should consider using Epsom salts as a pre-fast laxative and back-engineer an alkaline powder to get the results that she did. Usually, a whole day of not eating wrecks my sleep and I wake up after a maximum of five hours even though my body needs at least 7½ to function properly.

On page 94, another alien phrase waves to get my attention:

Sants-Montjuïc, […] which still feels like a genuine, un-Instagrammed community going about its daily business.

I can only wonder what a thoroughly Instagrammed community is like. Maybe it’s one where all the shops sell too-fancy-by-half milkshakes with half of a candy store mounted on top, or similar culinary visual spectacles.

Finally, the Qatar issue. I hear they had a bunch of soccer games there recently. This entire issue is sponsored by Visit Qatar.

They mention putting saffron and cardamom in your coffee. I suppose it’s worth trying once. The saffron probably doesn’t work all that well with the instant cold-brew crystals I keep in the pantry, though. At any rate, I only keep the cold-brew crystals around for when both microwaved tea and Starbucks drive-through are both too slow.

Eighty-eight pages later, they have managed to convince me that I would not be totally crazy to vacation in Qatar. I’m not sure if that counts as mission accomplished, but it’s not nothing.