Dear Santa, this would be the best toy ever.
I know I already own a three-year-old copy of V Collection and an Essential and that I can always use those, but the form factor (even if it has mini keys) and the sheer amount of shipping presets makes this an amazing little synth.
(And yes, before you ask, it would be amazing to have an iPad version of Arturia’s soft synths, even if simplified, but that is unlikely to ever happen under Apple’s App Store tax.)
Too bad it doesn’t have speakers and a battery like the Yamaha Reface series. And it’s on the pricey side, but I could always sell my OP-1…
If you’re anywhere near the intersection of Apple nostalgia, retro-computing and DIY electronics, This Does Not Compute’s latest video was probably on your radar. If not, the gist is simple: there is an 11 cm tall alarm clock shaped like a Classic Mac, and I grabbed one off AliExpress for roughly EUR 20.1
Even though I paid for it myself, I couldn’t help filing it as a review because, well… It’s just great.
I enjoy retro-computing but lack the time (and space) to restore vintage hardware, so I usually settle for emulation, and even then I find there is very little I actually want to re-live from those days.
Early Mac OS is the exception–it reminds me that user experience used to be much simpler and intuitive, which is why I still use the Platinum GTK theme and rant about modern UI now and then.
During college I worked daily on Mac IIs, and I was eventually given three broken Mac Classics, from which I scavenged parts to build a working one. That machine is long gone but I loved it and have always wanted to have something like it around, so earlier this year I built a “mini Mac” (a full-sized replica just wouldn’t be a good fit for my cramped office).
It runs After Dark screensavers, Prince of Persia and plenty of old software, while moonlighting as a Tailscale exit node. Still, it lacks audio and the exposed USB ports annoy me, so I’ve been redesigning the case and accessories at a leisurely pace:
I even modelled a matching mouse shell around a two-euro USB rodent, that I am still trying to get right:
The plan was to print both in the perfect vintage-colored PLA (which took me quite a while to track down), but the Maclock is such a good replica that it felt like the ideal shortcut.
It’s noticeably smaller than my printed case:
My guess is that the form factor is heavily inspired by the Pi zero version from 2022, which was of a comparable size, but the Maclock’s level of polish is just amazing.
I haven’t opened mine yet since the video goes into more than enough detail into the internals (one PCB stuck to the display, a battery fixed to the bottom, and buttons).
Also, it clearly wasn’t designed to be opened–an initial attempt with plastic wedges showed the plastic will score easily, so I decided to hold back until I get my second unit. But the details are lovely:
Even the sticker sheet feels premium:
The only thing slightly off is the stencilled grille on top, but overall this is a loving recreation. Apple should probably sell it as a licensed product instead of releasing Borat’s loincloth as an iPhone sock.
It’s an alarm clock. You can set the time, set an alarm, and it has an invisible snooze button on top that seems to be based on a capacitive touch sensor.
It’s fine. That’s most definitely not the point of it for me.
By my measurements the case should fit the original Waveshare 2.8-inch LCD used in the Pi Zero build–the visible diagonal inside the curved lens is roughly 7 cm, and my only concern is that mounting it might be tricky because of an asymmetrical bezel and relatively tight tolerances.
But my ideal upgrade would be a high-resolution monochrome backlit panel, which I would love to see as a product. If anyone knows of such a display around 2.5 to 3 inches with 384x512 resolution, please drop me a line, I will write a driver for it.
All the other parts I need have been sitting in a project box for a couple of years: audio amp, speakers, USB sound card and a Pi Zero 2W. I just need a way to lay them out internally before I crack the shell open and route at least one external USB port.
My plan is to 3D print an internal frame for the electronics and either just go fully wireless (which would require me to gut a Bluetooth mouse) or carefully cut openings for USB-A, audio and maybe a power button (or re-use the existing clock buttons).
A Dremel feels risky, so I’ll probably resort to an ultrasonic cutter (which I don’t have) or a heated blade–and that bottom panel with the fake ports seems like a good place to start.
But until the second unit and the display arrive, I’m going to be measuring this thing with calipers–there simply isn’t a freely available 3D model at this scale with comparable fidelity.
If Wonderboy Innovation Design Co., Ltd. is reading this: you’ve nailed it and made a lot of people very happy–but can we please have the STEP files?
I actually ordered two, just in case these get nuked from orbit. Three would have felt excessive, but who knows? ↩︎
It’s now cold enough for me to enjoy being inside, but sometimes I would prefer to have a bit more variety and not be stuck in front of a screen all the time. Still, there’s been some progress on various fronts this week…
Someone famously wrote, at the dawn of this new age that is all of three years behind us now, that AI would either be a way to get more things done or a massive multiplier of unfinished projects, and right now it looks like the latter.
Over the past week or so, I’ve built:
Rui Carmobun.autogen agent editor for quick prototyping.None of them are what I would call finished, but they are certainly useful–although I am still on the fence regarding whether AI has actually saved me any time…
After years (in fact, pretty much around a decade) of using Feedly as a back-end for Reeder (the “Classic” version, not the low-attention-span, overly “social” modern one that I am really not a fan of), I decided to set up FreshRSS as a personal news aggregator–not because I like its web UI (I don’t, and thank goodness I don’t have to use it all the time), nor because I like its implementation (it’s written in PHP, of all things), but because it works well enough as a Reeder back-end and affords me other advantages:
tor for geo-locked content) and readability-like full text extraction from stingy content providers.I have also published the source code for my feed summarizer, which also provides some pre-processed feeds to FreshRSS. With both inside the same machine, I can now have all my private daily bulletins and conventional feeds aggregated in one place, served up to my iPad, Nomad, etc., and my read status synced all my devices.
I’ve been thinking about improving the summarizer with vector search to have better semantic grouping (right now I’m just coaxing gpt-5-mini to do it), but I’ve come to the conclusion that generating embeddings is just too much to ask for the tiny machine running the show right now, and that it doesn’t warrant the additional complexity. At least for now.
As a minor note, I upgraded all my Proxmox nodes to 9.1 without any issues. I haven’t yet tested the new OCI support, but while spelunking through the forums I found out about ProxMobo, which is a refreshingly subscription-free and well-designed iOS app for managing Proxmox clusters, including support for receiving iOS notifications tied to Proxmox’s native alerting system.
I am still struggling with printing some functional parts, so I again spent entirely too much time not just reassembling and recalibrating both my printers but also planning some upgrades in order to make do.
That is getting old really fast, so I’m definitely considering getting a new printer.
This is a pretty awesome hack. I already use my iPhone as a “desktop” sometimes when traveling (you can use the Windows app to have full-screen Remote Desktop sessions on an external display and a pocket Bluetooth keyboard) and have been looking at Android’s upcoming “desktop mode” with some interest, but being able to run native iOS apps in windowed mode on an external display would be icing on the cake.
Of course Apple will never support this and will hunt down and remove any way to change the class number to enable it on an iPhone, because we just can’t have nice things—we can’t even think about them.
This turned out to be a much more exhausting couple of weeks than I expected, in various ways.
As someone who’s been living quite happily for with a Ryzen machine running Bazzite streaming games to our Apple TV, iPads and a Logitech handheld for over a year now, I found this quite interesting.
It doesn’t seem like their custom APU is that much better than the Ryzen Stryx Halo series, though (the 8060S iGPU seems substantially beefier), so it will be interesting to compare pricing (and availability) with mainstream mini-PCs.
I do love that they seem to be devoting nearly three quarters of the volume to a heat sink, though–that means they’re focused on making it as quiet as possible, which has been the main challenge for us (that Steam PC lives in our closet, plugged into our 2.5GbE LAN, because fan noise was just too distracting).
P.S.: I am not that excited about their VR headset, though. Foveated rendering is par for the course these days, and yes, it is quite interesting that they’ve merged Intel emulation into the ARM version of Proton, but the hardware proposition seems a tad off given that VR gaming has not exactly taken off in the mainstream.
A couple of months ago, DFRobot reached out to see if I wanted to take a look at the new LattePanda IOTA single-board computer–successor to the original LattePanda V1. I never owned a V1 myself, but I have found quite a few in the wild; they were popular with integrators for kiosk and digital signage applications. I was curious to see how the new model stacked up.
As someone who relies a lot on the Watch (especially now that WhatsApp works locally on it), I’d say we have officially reached the point where Apple is on the verge of actively harming their user experience for no good reason whatsoever. I honestly don’t know if this is bull-headedness or malicious compliance.
On the other hand, someone at the EU clearly prefers being in the limelight by regulating against evil US corporations in ways that affect very small parts of the general population rather than, say, go after Asian smart TV manufacturers that are present in millions of homes and resell data on Europeans’ TV viewing habits.
Update: John Gruber’s breakdown of the situation, which corrects my assumptions. I still think Apple could have communicated it better, though.
Like many people, I have a few older Mac laptops around, and with Apple discontinuing support for older versions of macOS (and, eventually, for Intel machines altogether), it’s long been in my backlog to re-purpose them.
During a few random lulls in work I finally went down the rabbit hole of building myself a custom keyboard. I had ordered most of the parts months ago, but only now got the time to clear out my electronics desk, dust off my hotplate, do a little soldering and begin 3D printing the case and keycaps.
Our worldwide usability nightmare continues, and I have thoughts:
Well, this was a “fun” two weeks. In short, I got blindsided by a large project and a bunch of other work things, including an unusual amount of office visits (almost one a week, which is certainly not the norm these days) and a lot of calls.
I have, again, spent far too much time wandering the chaotic wilds of Cloudflare’s web UI to set up a new tunnelled web application (a trivial proxy to be able to use my Supernote Nomad as a whiteboard from the Azure Virtual Desktop I live inside of), and to avoid having to go through the whole thing again, I decided to take some notes.
Remember Sky, the app created by the former Shortcuts team at Apple? Well, guess what: OpenAI did what Apple should have done and acquired them.
At the time it was announced I ranted on about how Apple had managed to mis-manage this kind of talent and vision for Mac automation so badly that they ended up leaving the company and not having any of what they showed at the time incorporated in Apple Intelligence, and I am sticking to my guns on that one–Apple clearly has a talent management problem, and the departure of more and more of their AI talent to other companies should be ample proof of that.
But Tim Cook and company seem to be perfectly fine with that (and the declining quality of their software) as long as they keep selling new hardware, because that’s all the innovation they seem to care about these days.
Apple will never acknowledge how badly Liquid Glass failed as a design concept, but at least they’re trying to make it more usable. And this time they’re not even trying to disguise it as an accessibility feature, it’s actually a top level setting that should never have been needed in the first place.
Well, if you can’t fix it then flaunt it, I suppose.
All I need now is a “kindergarten mode” toggle to deal with the five different corner ratios and extraneous whitespace in macOS Tahoe windows, and someone with critical thinking skills overseeing their UX team. Maybe that would finally convince them to abandon this entire “design by committee” disaster.
Nice to see Apple Silicon continues to evolve apace, although every year I have to add bigger pinches of salt to the performance claims.
I am interested in whether the GPU is finally up to snuff for gaming, and if the new Neural Engine will make a difference in real-world AI applications given Apple’s miserly take on what a suitable amount of RAM is for a “pro” machine–let alone the eye-watering prices they charge for storage.
But until someone else can actually compete in a way Apple feels threatened by, I don’t expect any changes in their pricing or product strategy, so… meh.
Still, I will be watching for Mac mini updates. Even though storage pricing is the mini’s Achilles heel, it’s still the only way to get a nicely compact, unobtrusive desktop Mac that isn’t completely over the top in price.
It’s been ten years since I joined Microsoft, and I’ve made it a point to mark the occasion (almost) every year, so why stop now?
Looks pretty, although the fact that it cannot beat a 5090 in inference should tip you off that it’s designed to hold a lot of RAM, not necessarily be on the bleeding edge of performance.
In my mind it feels like the modern day equivalent of the NVIDIA Shield–not because it’s for media, but because it’s a small, self-contained box that will expand NVIDIA’s footprint well enough, and is easy to set up and use: No fiddling with CUDA versions, no worrying about dependencies, no need to do anything unusual to set up your development environment.
But unlike a Mac or a generic AMD box, these are a pretty beefy commitment–almost a single-purpose box…
I have been rather too busy hopping from project to project to do anything but read and watching a little TV in the evenings, as well as a bit annoyed by more industry disturbances and layoffs.
I’m happy that sanity prevailed, although not in time to prevent me from getting a second (non-Synology) NAS–which I suspect is what many serious customers went out and did, if only to test the waters.
This was an amazingly bad own goal, especially it being absurdly obvious that their target audience would be knowledgeable enough to see through a lock-in strategy–they’re not selling shaving utensils with disposable blades, anyone who buys a NAS plans for expanding storage with the cheapest (or best fit) third-party disks.
The interesting thing for me here, having followed some of the less visible discussions, is that Synology was, if not openly hostile to some reviewers that criticized them, at least “more selective” of the influencers they partnered with, which seems par for the course these days but really doesn’t help restore confidence.
But as a customer, I welcome their change of plans. In the meantime, you can check out my small set of NAS reviews.