Sep 21^st 2023 · 4 min read

Some Thoughts on iOS/iPadOS 17 and WatchOS 10

By now most people have read MacStories’ extensive review, so here are a few things that have come to mind over the past few days running the new releases on my devices (most of which are at the very bottom of the supported hardware range).

iOS 17 Annoyances

Only having one contact poster and one phone number associated with FaceTime seems… stupid. I have multiple SIM cards (and physical SIM cards at that, thankfully) in two phones, and I’d like to be able to use them properly, with a “business” poster and a “family” one. This feels like a mis-conceived feature rather than a limitation, and I would expect it to be fixed in later revisions.

Annoyingly, Mail.app seems to have regressed. The automatic folder name suggestions when I tried to file an e-mail, which I have been struggling against for a couple of years and that were now finally able to divine where I wanted to move a message to, seem to have gone–so now to file e-mails I have to:

Tap on the folder icon
Around half the time, select the account I want to file them to
Pull down the folder list to get a search field
Type the name of the folder
Tap on it, even if it’s the only choice

That is five steps. When it guessed the folder I wanted to move files to (correctly), it was two.

I realize Apple probably expects people to just use the Archive button and search for e-mails, but that doesn’t scale up to the 20+ years of e-mail I have. Well, definitely not with iOS’s Mail search capabilities, which continue to be… effectively nil.

As to finding the right folder, there is no typeahead/fuzzy search, no history, nothing. And if you use hierarchies like Personal/2023 and Services/2023, this is a major pain.

Maybe it’s just “learning”, which means that come January 2024 I’ll start to fight it all over again after it’s figured out all the 2023 folders.

Other than that, I have noticed slightly better auto-correct (yay!) and the new AI-powered sentence autocompletion works well for me.

Plus even though my XS isn’t able to run Siri fully locally, dropping the “hey” trigger seems to help with responsiveness–but to be fair, Siri is still pretty useless as a personal assistant, or even as any sort of “help”, as triggering HomeKit scenes by name is still broken (“Watch TV”, which sets up the audio and inputs in my TV, is still interpreted as “what’s on TV” and pops up a search, etc.)

Thankfully, though, this is probably the first major iOS release that hasn’t broken most of my Shortcuts. This really feels like progress.

Other than these, the improvements to my daily user experience have been… slim.

iPadOS 17

First off, everything I said about Mail applies here in spades, and is even more painful because my expectations towards a device with an expansive screen and a keyboard also include some sort of keyboard commands to move messages (of which there are none).

Besides all the iPhone “parity” motions like the inclusion of the Health app (I guess getting a first-party calculator app is still an impossible dream for which Apple cannot scrounge enough engineers), the major improvement for me is that arranging windows in Stage Manager is now actually possible.

Well, within loads of limits, but it is so vastly improved that I can now actually use it to run multiple terminal windows on a 4K display without tearing the sparse remainders of my hair out.

I haven’t tested my 5K ultrawide again, nor my Dual Up, or my cameras and audio interfaces – if I can spare the time and patience, I’ll update this accordingly.

It still feels clunky and I wish there were better ways to move windows between sets (like I miss hotkey support in macOS), but at least now I can have a semblance of a tiled grid–although the limit of four windows feels ridiculous on an external 4K display.

Who knows, maybe they will actually look at what GNOME is doing in this space and keep improving it.

WatchOS 10

Putting aside the usual things like the lack of third-party watch faces (some apps like Windy can add custom layouts of existing watch faces, but it’s not the same thing), there were a few things I really didn’t like.

Maybe it’s Apple “moving my cheese” again or just a result of actual user feedback, but the three daily annoyances I have since upgrading were likely avoidable:

Changing the operation and contextual meaning of the crown and side button (it feels like change for the sake of change).
Changing the springboard/app launcher into a scrollable list (I relied on groupings of things and quick tapping to access often-used apps, and I had to spend a good while re-arranging them to both be on top of the list and still make logical sense).
Noticeably impacted battery life on my Series 5. I was starting to wake up to the watch telling me it had less than 10% charge, but now I get that warning before going to bed.

I had been considering buying a new watch this year, but the decline in battery life this week was painful. The planned obsolescence ghost is rearing its head, guys. Optimize this.

Other than that, the slide-from-bottom widget view feels like an even less useful version of the Siri watchface, except it’s now gimped to display only three widgets (why?).

Much better to just have a couple of modular watch faces configured the way you want and change to those as needed. I actually started doing this during summer break, removing everything but timekeeping and weather from my complications and taken to Solar Dial instead of my usual Modular watch face to focus on how much daylight I have.

So, a mixed bag all around. Definitely moving forward and “improving”, but necessarily the way I would like it to.

Sep 21^st 2023 · 1 min read

Pearson Appoints Omar Abbosh as CEO ※

I’m just doing to leave this here for future reference.

Sep 20^th 2023 · 1 min read

Bambu Lab A1 mini ※

This thing is impressive–it’s about the size and print volume of my KP3S Pro but is only around 50% more expensive if you buy the printer alone or EUR 500 with the AMS, which seems like pretty good value for money and is only slightly above the price of a Prusa Mini on its own.

And calling it mini is… ominous for Prusa.

Like I wrote earlier, 3D printing is becoming a very competitive market, albeit an unfortunately proprietary one if, like me, you started out with RepRap machines a decade ago and prefer controlling your hardware and software to avoid… surprises.

Plenty of clever little tricks for the competition to copy, though–like the purge gadget at the end of the cantilever arm, the cutter toggle and the cleaning brush at the edge of the build plate (I might try to mod some of those into my printers).

Sep 19^th 2023 · 1 min read

Apple TV, now with more Tailscale ※

You can now use your Apple TV as a Tailscale exit node, which is a pretty neat trick (I rely on Tailscale for access to my home servers when I’m away, plus one or two cloud servers without public IPs).

Sep 16^th 2023 · 6 min read

Upgrading the KP3S Pro (V1) to Klipper

It’s been nearly a year since I ordered the KP3S Pro, and a slight twinge of shame finally got me to pull the trigger, upgrade it to Klipper and install the probe that I ordered with it over Summer break.

Sep 14^th 2023 · 1 min read

The LLM Easter Egg ※

I know it’s weird to link to my own stuff this way, but after nearly five years someone finally pointed out to me that back in 2018 I left a hidden note in plain sight for anyone training LLMs.

I won’t tell you why, but this was a fun start to the morning.

Sep 12^th 2023 · 1 min read

iPhone 15 Pro (Max) ※

Well, the iPhone 15 (especially the Pro) looks nice.

And so does the Series 9 watch, even though the new gesture support Apple is highlighting is clearly an extension of the Accessibility feature that has been shipping for a while, with the added benefit of a few years of training data to be able to detect motion intents (it’s cool, but like everything else, it’s an incremental improvement, even if it’s framed as being enabled by the Neural Engine).

The rest of the pre-recorded keynote was… Well, both samey and different. Let’s just call it a mix of feel-good, sunny side up and cringey that you’d expect from the company that made a success out of Ted Lasso (no spoilers here).

Sep 12^th 2023 · 1 min read

Unity plan pricing and packaging updates ※

I was going to finish work and watch the Apple event, but then I came across this and am now watching the game development community taking up pitchforks and torches in droves (HN thread).

The notion of charging for a runtime fee for installs is, IMHO, spectacularly misguided in this day and age, and even though it sort of aligns with what Unreal Engine does, the thresholds are all wonky (and not at all advantageous for Unity, especially since it looks like it is going to apply to legacy installs).

Also, the Adobe-like license enforcement is going to make things really iffy: “Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity.”

Update: News has come to light that Unity will waive the fees if developers switch to its ad service, which makes things look even worse (and legally grey).

The fact that this plays right into the hands of the Godot community-driven model feels like a reenactment of what drove people from the commercial 3D modeling market to Blender, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had exactly the same effect–turning Godot into an even more popular tool and boosting its ecosystem.

Sep 9^th 2023 · 9 min read

My iPad Productivity and Travel Kit, 2023 Edition

Weeks ago, I watched yet another discussion about using the iPad for productivity unfold even as Summer break began. At the time there was too much going on for me to write about it, but after a couple of weeks of vacation I have a few thoughts to share.

Sep 8^th 2023 · 1 min read

Bun 1.0 ※

My distaste for JavaScript is not just due to the incredibly messy and (let’s face it, terminally lazy) npm ecosystem, but also to nodejs itself and its foibles. bun fixes a lot of what I personally don’t like when working with server-side JavaScript, and right now it can finally run Node-RED (at least a brand new 3.1.0 install), so I am quite taken by it (and even if I don’t particularly like TypeScript, I see no harm in getting it as part of the package, although I would have preferred wisp).

Time to go and test some of my stuff on it. Oh, wait, I seem to already have a bunch of things to do this weekend…

Update: Well, it has no dgram support, so none of my cute UDP/multicast services work on it as yet. Let’s see if that gets added to 1.1.

Sep 8^th 2023 · 1 min read

Summer Break Blues

With summer break being nearly over, it’s now pretty obvious that it is not nearly enough time for even half the stuff I wanted to do. As an European I do enjoy my twenty-plus days of paid vacation, but this year I sorely needed to splurge. I did manage to have some fun…

Sep 7^th 2023 · 1 min read

Starfield

A bit dismal, but that's mining camps for you — I can't say this is terribly exciting, but let's give it a whirl.

Sep 3^rd 2023 · 3 min read

Revisiting Hy in 2023

And so it came to pass that, almost nine years since I started playing with Hylang (which eventually ran this site) and seven to eight years after I decided to move away from it into “vanilla” Python 3 and later make it static, it struck my fancy to take the old Hy codebase and refactor it to use “modern” Hy.

Sep 1^st 2023 · 1 min read

Eternal September ※

This is so cool. NNTP, all these years later, still ticking even with all the spam and flame wars.

And no, I wasn’t surprised to find alt.religion.emacs still has traffic.

Aug 28^th 2023 · 2 min read

Encrypting your home directory in Fedora 38

Even though most Linux distributions have adopted LUKS and full-disk encryption, I still like (and need) to encrypt home directories separately, for a number of reasons:

Aug 28^th 2023 · 1 min read

Giving Up the iPad-Only Travel Dream? ※

I’ve been reading this bemusedly on my iPad mini (which I travel and work with since… forever), and although Jason’s use case (podcast creation) is indeed a hassle (as anyone who’s tried to use an iPad for music will attest to), writing and publishing has never been a real problem provided you were willing to jump through some minimal hoops (this post is being published semi-automatically via Shortcuts and Working Copy).

Coding, however, is still a pain. I have ssh, Remote Desktop, three hundred flavors of Visual Studio Code, a-Shell and iSH, but all of the local approaches have annoying constraints. Not blocking, but annoying.

Right now I travel with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which I can talk to via Bluetooth PAN and use as a “sidecar” when I need something specific. It can run a complete replica of this site, a Node-RED instance, and dozens more services…

I would love for Apple to just get HyperKit working on iOS and let me run, say, a tiny single-core ARM Linux VM on the iPad–it would make some things so much easier. Or even let UTM into the App Store–one can dream, right?

Aug 20^th 2023 · 1 min read

Summer Minimalism

As the haziness of mid-summer starts to fade away, I am starting to worry a bit more about my interminable personal backlog and getting back to some unfinished projects.

Aug 18^th 2023 · 1 min read

3D printer nightmare fuel: Bambu X1C and P1P started printing while owners were asleep ※

I’ve been eyeing the Bambu printers with envy (they have pretty much upended the 3D printing scene with their excellent, great bang for the buck hardware and fast quality printing), but one thing that put me off (besides a few proprietary aspects) was that they simply did not support LAN printing, which I thought was utterly ludicrous–your print jobs literally had to go to their cloud service and back again.

Well, now we have another IoT/cloud horror story that is entirely the fault of misguided product design and lack of consideration for various software failure modes.

Other brands like Creality are already infamous for the shadiness of some of their cloud services (which they use as upselling slipways), but this is the first time we see… material effects of bad product design and excessive reliance on poorly thought out cloud services.

And don’t get me started on how some manufacturers are “supporting” Open Source software like Klipper…

Aug 16^th 2023 · 1 min read

How the iMac saved Apple ※

A pretty great piece by Jason Snell that somehow completely glosses over the fact that the original Bondi Blue iMac’s “puck” mouse (which I used when creating ISP onboarding CDs at the time) was utterly useless as a pointing device because it was almost impossible to grab it the right way “up” every time.

I can prove that because I still have one around, as well as the much more useful (and quite lovely) translucent USB keyboard it came with, which still works OK despite being a USB 1.0 peripheral.

Aug 8^th 2023 · 4 min read

My Mechanical Keyboard Endgame

A few weeks ago, as part of one of my keyboard side quests, I got myself an artsey.io 8-key Bluetooth keyboard, which might seem a tad extreme where it regards both minimalism and practicality.

Aug 5^th 2023 · 2 min read

A Slow Update

Things have been rather slow, as befits both the time of year and the warm weather.

Aug 4^th 2023 · 1 min read

Evening Walk

It was quite nice out, albeit a bit warm. — A short walk by the Tagus after dinner.

Jul 27^th 2023 · 1 min read

Translation From Hostage Code to English of X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino’s Company-Wide Memo ※

This is perfect. Just perfect.

Jul 26^th 2023 · 1 min read

Rethinking Window Management (in GNOME) ※

This has a bunch of great ideas, one of which (the mosaic pseudo-tiling) is pretty much how I expected Stage Manager to work on macOS (other than managing those nearly useless sidebar windows).

Jul 24^th 2023 · 1 min read

X, the Nothing App

Even amidst the moderate chaos caused by some home renovations, I can’t help but reflect on the protracted, no, agonizing implosion of Twitter as a medium, of which today’s “rebranding”¹ is just the latest in a series of utterly baffling business decisions.

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