Today we find out if my iPad Pro is for sale
Did you know alcohol is a carcinogen?
I’ll be honest, I knew alcohol isn’t good for me, but in moderation I love a beer or a whisky.
I think I could slow down on the drinks though after reading this article.
🥭 ❤️
On being woke with conspiracy theory
”For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.”
Another piece from that NYT article
What if we banned the comments section of the internet?
Would the world be a better place if public comment functions were outlawed on the internet?
Imagine exactly the same internet, and social media, we know and love/hate today - the only difference being that you cannot comment on posts in a public manner.
You can still engage in private conversation with people, maybe even in groups up to 5 or 10. But above a certain number even group chats are banned.
The incentive is to split the broadcast of information, news, and opinion to either the masses, or micro-community.
Freedom of speech and freedom of broadcast is maintained, it’s just the comments section that is doomed.
Thoughts? Feel free to privately contact me or your friends about it.
What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia.
What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
– Issac Asimov
Start a Ponzi scheme!
Are you tired of your boring 9-to-5 job? Wouldn’t you rather be in Thailand toasting on the beach with your nomad homies?
Zoom slaughters the Apple Silicon Macs’ batteries. Every time I jump off a Zoom call I’m surprised at how much it’s dropped compared to regular usage. The circled part of this screenshot was a 25 minute Zoom call.
🍦❤️🐢
Pixelmator made my 11 year whale photo look a little bit better, about 10mb better
I dropped Pixelmator’s machine learning “zoom, enhance” feature called “ML Super Resolution” onto an 11 year old iPhone photo of two whales off the beach, along with all the machine learning colour grading options.
It’s still a low-fi photo, but now it’s a high-res low-fi photo.
Here’s the 35kb original.
And here’s the 11mb machine learnt super res version.
Not all iOS apps are terrible on macOS running Apple Silicon
Much has been written and podcasted about how terrible the iOS apps running on Apple Silicon situation has been a pretty poor show. But my experience has been above average.
I thought I’d showcase the apps I’d installed and used that were pretty good considering they weren’t developed for use with a keyboard and mouse/touchpad.
Despite being disallowed by the developers, a little .ipa workaround saw Instagram’s iOS app easily install on the Mac. The app is flawless from my using, scrolling, posting, and clicking around. The two glaring issues with this experience are that iPadOS’s dealing with iPhone-only apps is dismal, and that Instagram’s developers have a deep need to keep Insta off the desktop and tablet.
LumaFusion
The iPad’s and iPhone’s best linear video editor just works simply and beautifully on the Mac now.
Air Hockey (the OG)
When the App Store launched on the iPhone there was an intial blood rush of apps that took advantage of being able to develop applications on a colourful mutlitouch pocket computer. Air Hockey was one of the early releases and I remember showing it to a mesmerised friend. It plays beautifully!
DJI Go 4
I haven’t flown with it yet, but I’m excited by the idea of using my MacBook as a monitor for the DJI Mavic 2 Pro remote.
Qantas
My airline of choice has so far allowed it’s booking and account management app, and it’s inflight entertainment app to be installed on Mac and it’s mostly fine.
Overcast
The iOS apps that will shine on Apple Silicon Macs are the ones developed to the very spec of Apple’s Huamn Interface Guidelines and everything else ever preached at a WWDC session. So of course Marco Arment’s Overcast app works flawlessly, with a resizeable window, and it’s just a joy to use.
AirBnb
I don’t know if an app will be better than a website, but hey, AirBnb works.
Skip
My local coffee shop’s coffee ordering and line skipping platform of choice, Skip, works a beaut.
Cowbell
Sometimes you just need to be able to announce to people in the same room as you that more cowbell is required.
On top of this list I’ll add Good Sodoku, my little girl’s kindy social network - Storypark - and Lumy.
I’m only speaking for myself, but 2020 was going ok until I found out that when I think I’m putting wasabi on my sushi I’m almost totally actually putting horseradish and mustard with food colouring in it.
Instagramception #AppleSilicon
Stellar little Black Friday deal from Aussie Broadband: 250mbps down and 25 upstream for the price of 100/40 for a few months.
In a year where it’s been closed off to wasteful-on-holiday interstate and international tourists, Tasmania has declared itself 100% powered by renewable energy.
24 hours with a MacBook Air sporting an M1 Apple Silicon chipset
This is a black magic machine that is fast and beautiful and literally what I want in a computer.
The reviews are all true and accurate. Even for the bottom tier of Apple’s computer lineup, this is the speediest, most responsive Mac I’ve ever owned or used. Early in the year I moved to a Macbook Pro 16" to get the speed and responsiveness I’m getting from this MacBook Air, and the 16" feels like a dinosaur.
It’s whimiscal to be running iOS/iPadOS apps right on my Mac. It makes me wonder why it’s such a terrible user experience for iPadOS to run iPhone apps when it’s downright lovely on a MacBook Air.
The slow onward progression of security makes my audio apps by Rogue Amoeba feel like I’m hacking a mainframe, but we got there in the end.
The only thing to wait for now is for developers to move their apps from Intel to Universal architetures so they run even faster, and to see what on earth more professional, progressive, and well cooled Apple computers can look like.
I’ve gone from the highest spec’d portable Apple portable computer running an Intel processor, to what will undoubtedly become the slowest Apple Silicon Mac ever released, and it’s like I’ve gone from crawling to walking.
The future is bright for Apple computers.
Brisbane
The 2019 marriage statistics have been released and there’s been a bit of a drop ...
The latest Australian marriage statistics have been released, strap in for some nerdiness! Thanks to my Celebrant Institute colleague, Sarah for her help deciphering these numbers.
Saturday October 19, 2019 - that was the most popular day to be married in Australia last year. In the most popular season, whilst March was the most popular month, and all marriages were down 4.5% from 2018 to 2019.
The big change was that marriages by civil celebrants continue to increase, with 80.3% of all marriage ceremonies in 2019 created by a civil celebrant.
And the early data from the ABS shows an almost 32% drop in marriages for the first half of this year.
When comparing counts of marriages between April and June with averages for the same period over the past five years (2015-2019), in 2020 marriages were down 62%.
Quick side note, queer marriages were thought to have boomed in 2018 and settled down in number in 2019, but they’ve stayed about the same, from 5.5% in 2018 to 4.9% in 2019.
This is Olly and Emily and me in Port Macquarie on the 19th of October 2019, photographed by Mitch Pohl and you really ought to see their li’l motion picture by Bottle Brush Films
