Rui CarmoThe iPhone 17 Event
This time I actually forgot to watch the live event.
It was a moderately exciting week work-wise (in a positive way), but a recurrence of the highly disruptive habit people have of booking meetings the very next day or early the day after (even when any sort of effective work would take a day or so to yield finished results) made it hard to, well, do anything at all…
But there were a few things of note:
Over the past semester I’ve been gradually increasing the amount of daily exercise I aim for, and I’m getting new minor aches and pains every day that seem to stem directly from a continuous (but moderate) exercise streak. Between a compact treadmill I got at the end of January and a few other tricks, I slowly nudged myself to the point where I now need to pause work mid-morning and take a brisk walk, so that’s a good milestone to keep track of.
I got a LattePanda Iota in the mail along with a bunch of add-on boards, and initial impressions are great—I’ve put up a very short video on it and am putting the board through its paces. In the process I’m realizing things take four times as long if I have to capture video, which is one of the reasons it’s taken me this long to get even moderately serious about YouTube.
I am stubbornly pursuing two approaches to video editing—a cross-platform approach using Blender as a desktop editing and compositing tool (which is OK except that video stabilization and audio editing are too much of a manual process to be enjoyable) and, simultaneously, trying to use my iPad as a video editing station.
The latter is mostly winning solely because I can do it quietly on the couch (and bed) in the evenings (and nights), but I am constantly switching apps to figure out how best to manage media, edit voice-overs, add simple titles that I can have some control over, etc.
This has meant experimenting with various video editing techniques as well, and right now DaVinci Resolve is squarely trouncing Final Cut Pro on account of its image stabilization and having flexible, editable titles that weren’t designed by hippies with Victorian influences, even if its iPad UX was apparently designed for ants and I can’t seem to be able to record a voice-over directly in it (which is a pain).
My Authelia setup broke after a few months, so I spent a couple of not-so-entertaining hours rejiggering my Cloudflare tunnels and discovered selkies, which had flown under my radar until now. It works OK atop a tunnel (to the point where I can use this container image to run Obsidian remotely without a lot of fuss), but it’s still slower than RDP and for some reason the Remmina image has a weird runaway CPU usage bug.
I used it as a rather roundabout way to share my Linux desktops in video calls since (to my continuous frustration) Cloudflare’s RDP web client still doesn’t work with xrdp, so I spent a while trying to figure out a fix (to no avail yet). So right now I’m rebuilding my Azure Linux bastion to run… Windows (don’t ask).
As an encore, I updated my notes on my new Cudy access points with an arguably better “roaming” setup, the effects of which are only noticeable if you’re doing video conferencing as you walk around the house to check if all the windows are shuttered (ask me how I know).
I refactored one of my projects to use sqlite-vector instead of sqlite-vec with reasonable success, but that one’s still hampered by the need to use fastembed, and that is just dog slow on a CPU-only setup.
I absolutely love this. Never mind the quirky paper roll, the idea of having a fully open source inkjet printer I can tweak and maintain (and possibly get rid of the clunky, overpriced and creepily surveillance-centric pieces of junk HP sells) appeals tremendously to me, and I hope this comes to pass.
The announcement cast this as the ultimate all-in-one PC, and while that might be a stretch, the Raspberry Pi 500 Plus is indeed interesting.
The RGB keyboard is completely unnecessary (the Gateron grey switches and replaceable key caps are very welcome, though), and with 16GB RAM and an NVMe slot it has the makings of a nice “zero footprint” thin client/browser appliance, but the price point feels a bit off.
I’m watching the usual influencer shenanigans (teardowns, plugging in over the top peripherals, etc.) and there is a lot of 80s vibes in the mix, to the point where I am reminded of the Commodore revival since this would make a much better C64 equivalent.
If I get one, I’ll make sure to get a Dasher-style keycap set…
A hilarious satire of macOS Tahoe’s disastrous design changes as a fictional retrospective that compares them to other versions of macOS with a genial twist and a liberal sprinkling of mordant humor.
If, like me, you lived through most of macOS’s history, you’ll appreciate the references and the absurdity of some of the design choices that Apple made during that period, and how flipping time’s arrow can make them seem even more ridiculous.
Chef’s kiss, no notes.
A rather hectic week as work ramps up again and I start to progressively lose control of my calendar, but I’ve managed to slowly accrete some notes.
After a week living with the “26” software updates, I have a few more impressions:
Even though I haven’t reviewed any 3D printers in a while, I have started the long and arduous process of picking out something new since I need a more modern one, and have begun collating my notes on the Snapmaker U1, the Elegoo Centauri Carbon and the Flashforge AD5X while I wait to see if Bambu Lab revises their P1 range.
I’ve also printed a few PETG-CF replacement parts for my existing printers to make do while we wait…
I spent far too much time fiddling with Blender and DaVinci Resolve to no goal in particular.
Both appeal to my graphical design background in various ways, and both have node editors that are stupendously powerful—and fascinating rabbit holes I really shouldn’t dive into in the evenings if I want to keep sleeping enough.
That said, I’ve been finding a few interesting resources for either which I’ve added to their respective Wiki pages, and it’s always fun to refresh old creative skills.
I think it’s worth taking stock of where we are regarding LLM-assisted content, because this week GitHub Copilot was able to do something I actually value pretty much unprompted:
It took one of my legacy Wiki pages (written in Textile, which is still the format of most of my older posts), reformatted it into Markdown and generated a YAML table for the resource links on it—easily saving me 20 minutes to update it. And (this time) it didn’t make any mistakes (I was using GPT-5, which I currently favor because it isn’t chatty).
My actual prompt was “reformat this to Markdown according to repository standards”, and it then went off, looked at .github/copilot_instructions.md, figured out what templates to use, set up a task plan and converted the format as I like it.
This doesn’t seem like a very sophisticated thing (and I did take the time to write out how I prefer the conversion process to be done in the repository file), but it is so much better than the state of affairs this January that I think multi-step planning and execution is now reliable enough (for this kind of task) for me to finally give it a solid thumbs-up.
I also can now toss over an Obsidian note and prompt it to “reformat this for publishing and validate links”, which will tidy up all the front-matter, check spelling, grammar and links, and deal with image tags the way I prefer—so… great time saver.
In stark contrast, I vicariously decided a couple of months ago to use Copilot to tweak some things in the current site engine and… let’s just say it’s mostly gotten it right (sometimes surprisingly so considering how contrived some of the rendering logic is for handling dependencies between pages), but I’m still bashing out some of the subtle bugs it introduced when refactoring for batch database updates when indexing.
The one thing it did (that I would ordinarily never have bothered with) was to point out that word cloud generation (which I do to provide an OpenGraph preview for text-only posts) is computationally expensive and to recommend trimming some parameters, which helped during full site rebuilds.
So OK, it’s been helpful. It has not, however, saved me any time.
My new Wi-Fi is holding up fine with zero configuration changes since it’s been up (which I consider the best indicator of success), and I added to my infrastructure a 5-port version of the Sodola 2.5GbE switches I now use to fit a little nook where I needed more 2.5GbE ports.
Somewhere during that process and while setting things up on another switch, I realized there were some line errors on a port (good thing I have managed switches), and I decided to investigate.
It turns out that borg had been dropping off my Proxmox cluster randomly, which I initially ascribed to overheating but was actually a known issue with e1000 cards which causes entries like this to show up in the logs:
[ 861.075538] e1000e 0000:00:1f.6 enp0s31f6: Detected Hardware Unit Hang:
TDH <2a>
TDT <76>
next_to_use <76>
next_to_clean <29>
buffer_info[next_to_clean]:
time_stamp <100075666>
next_to_watch <2a>
jiffies <100088a81>
next_to_watch.status <0>
MAC Status <40080083>
PHY Status <796d>
PHY 1000BASE-T Status <7800>
PHY Extended Status <3000>
PCI Status <10>
Pulling the network cable and reinserting it causes the driver to reset, “fixing” it temporarily, but I searched the forums, and eventually added an ethtool invocation in /etc/network/interfaces to disable most (if not all) of the card’s hardware offloading features:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface enp0s31f6 inet manual
auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
address 192.168.1.20/24
gateway 192.168.1.254
bridge-ports enp0s31f6
bridge-stp off
bridge-fd 0
post-up ethtool -K enp0s31f6 gso off tso off rxvlan off txvlan off gro off tx off rx off sg off
I don’t think this is an issue with the switches at all (it does seem to be a well-known issue with e1000, and I’ve been having random disconnects from before I upgraded them that I attributed to summer heat), but it might be useful to somebody.
Nostalgia, in the inimitable style of Jamie Zawinski: “HTML email is probably my fault”. All of it is a great read–full marks, absolutely no notes.
Thank you, Jamie, for everything you did for the web, even if this date also commemorates when Netscape unleashed the horrors of JavaScript upon the world.
On a more personal note, I remember using this on both Sun and HP machines, which was pretty amazing at the time. I also remember the Collabra fracas, which I had some hopes for, but it was just not to be (tangentially related: Hula, which Jamie also had some opinions about).
Note: due to Jamie’s strong opinions about linking, you might need to edit the URL to remove
utm_fields, even though I use them to provide sites with referral source information and no individual tracking whatsoever. If you know Jamie, please tell him to chill out a bit. Thanks!
Oh boy. I’m betting this wasn’t on AMD’s bingo card for 2025, especially now that their Ryzen AI Max APUs are making a splash with things like the Framework Desktop and because the “Intel x86 RTX SoCs” really sound like a direct challenge to AMD’s APU line.
If you had any doubts about where the PC market is going, this should put them to rest. Apple’s M-series chips may have changed the game, but the rest of the industry is clearly doubling down on catching up, even if they have to do chiplet/SoC-style integration (with high bandwidth exchanges via NVLink) instead of entirely new unified memory designs.
Of course the AI datacenter angle is interesting as well, but I am much more invested in seeing how edge and client devices evolve in the next few years than in watching people burn money on massive server farms because of AI.
These are probably Meta’s worst kept secret, since everyone was expecting them to put something like this together for a while now.
The glasses are prohibitively expensive (let alone with prescription lenses), but I would love to try these out as I think the myoelectric band is a genius input method.
I’ve also been looking at the Even Realities models and they are both hackable and actually available where I live, so these are exciting times…
Following my little saga with the iPad OS beta, I upgraded a few of my Apple devices, including one of my Macs, to the final release versions of all the “26” operating systems, and… It’s even worse than I thought.
I’m now fully back to work, so there hasn’t been any free time for anything but finishing overdue posts. I have, however, managed to sneak in a few leisurely half-hours in the mornings reading work e-mail from my balcony before my calls start, which has been a great way to enjoy the lingering summertime.
As I’ve been writing about once or twice, I’ve recently upgraded my Wi-Fi after an attempt to use ISP-provided equipment to replace my remarkably long-lasting (and extremely reliable) Airport Extreme base stations.
A great visual walkthrough that reminds me I still don’t get how Apple can ship it looking like this. Like I said earlier:
If “design is how it works”, then Apple hasn’t really tested any of their upcoming releases.
I want the improved Quicksilver-like Spotlight, but I don’t want my desktop to look this bad—-even if they’ve toned down Liquid Glass to be a set of incoherent visual sprinkles, the overall design is just bad.
It’s also worth noting that Tahoe is the last version to support Intel Macs. Not that I’ve dabbled in hackintoshes in the past few years, but it’s still remarkable they supported Intel this long.
The way Apple has pretty much set the Watch Series apart from the SE is by shipping more health features, and this is a nice one for them to target, especially considering they bothered to make it available to older devices as well and are targeting to ship it pretty much worldwide.
I think a lot of people are going to be interested in this (I’m lucky enough to be reasonably sure I don’t have hypertension, but most people my age have some sort of concern around it).
Of course, like all things in this space, a lot of the actual measuements need to be taken with a grain of salt (HR and Afib have been spot on over the years, but sleep tracking and other things that, like this feature, rely on indirect inference from sensors designed to do other things naturally have difference confidence intervals).
I trust Apple more than anyone else to handle the data for this (given that processing will happen on-device), but I wonder how far we are from the dystopia where insurance companies are going to start asking for access to this kind of data when negotiating policies…
(I don’t like linking to The Verge ever since they went full-on paywall+subscriptions, but the gist of the matter is still readable and it was the first place I saw this.)
As regular readers will know, I am quite fond of the various Ryzen APUs that have hit the market over the past couple of years, and I take a look at them whenever I can, since they have proven to be quite popular options—partially because of the high core counts and partly because of their increasingly powerful iGPUs.
This time I actually forgot to watch the live event.
Summer break is now completely over, so I did my usual Summer “cleansing”—disabling notifications from annoying apps, unsubscribing from a few more online services, ditching a half dozen YouTube channels, and (surprisingly) keeping my Twitter/X account afloat. I also poked at BlueSky with a metaphorical stick, only to find it very much alive.
It’s been a pretty crowded couple of weeks—the most intense part of summer break: a few days at the beach, some in the countryside, plus plenty of walking and reading.
The 3D printing world has been abuzz over the past couple of weeks with this, and after watching pretty much all the (p)reviews I could find on YouTube, I’m very curious to see what the final product will perform like, and how reliable it’s going to be.
Their Kickstarter has pretty much gone through the roof (I find it quite tempting myself), and multi-material printing without the piles of waste associated with single-nozzle devices is clearly something people want–plus the price point is way more accessible than, say, Prusa (ok, fine, that’s a low ball).
I’m going to be watching this carefully over the next few months. The U1 isn’t a perfect fit for me as is since I’ve started using “harder” materials, but I do need something that can handle at least two materials for some of my projects, and on paper, this would be almost perfect with a top lid.
Late to the party on this, but still…
The new Android security measures are an interesting piece of revisionist thinking—“developer verification” is now set as the gatekeeper for sideloaded apps in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand by September 2026, with what looks like full side-loading lockdown coming 2027.
Regardless of the malware angle, this seems to effectively kill side-loading on Android in the near future, making it as hobbyist-hostile as iOS and very likely spelling doom for open ecosystems like F-Droid (which I rely upon to customize every Android device I get my hands on).
As someone who’s been doing Android development on the side for decades because Apple still doesn’t allow you to run your own software on the devices you own without stupid restrictions, this is very annoying, and a good reminder that regulators like the EU have been focusing on entirely the wrong things.
I wasn’t going to go anywhere near this because it is too close to actual politics for my taste, but Ben Thompson’s take on the U.S. government’s 10% stake in Intel is a great read.
A heady mix of long-term manufacturing woes and geopolitics, it still manages to raise a few skeptical eyebrows as it lays out how decades of strategic missteps have left Intel trailing behind rivals like TSMC, while also highlighting how chip production isn’t something you can fix overnight.
Nor, should I add, the actual success of their products—their top consumer CPUs have been plagued with issues over the last couple of years, and, rather ironically, their most successful products (by volume) are the new low-end Alder Lake chips that have been quietly flooding the Mini-PC market, even as AMD take the most profitable niches.
There’s a dry wit to Ben’s critique—government intervention might be the “least bad” option, but it’s hardly a cure, especially when national security and commercial realities clash and government itself is going through a credibility crisis.