This is so cool to see. I owned the original LEGO Galaxy Explorer 497 set, and it was the one I loved the most (at least until I got into Technic).

We still have most of the custom bricks (like wings and landing struts), although the lunar plates seem to have been lost in the intervening years.

With the upcoming availability of xCloud on Samsung TVs, I’m reminded that Apple explicitly locked themselves out of this due to their preposterously insane requirements of having every streamed game reviewed and packaged independently.

With Game Pass eventually allowing you to stream games you purchased (i.e., technically off-catalog), that requirement sounds even more out of touch… And I can’t help think that Apple shot themselves in the foot here in more ways than one.

Good thing I decided to get an NVIDIA Shield and sideload the Android app nearly two years ago…

I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say this was the best WWDC keynote yet if you use an iPad.

After all, we got much better filesystem and window management features (including massively improved external display support and scaling adjustment), full iOS 16 parity and… a weather app.

Who knows, next year we might even get a calculator!

Federico realizes the Mac is, after all, a better computer than the iPad because (surprise) it is less restrictive about what you can do.

This is not even news, and somewhat cringe worthy, to be honest.

Even though most of the stuff I write here is actually written on an iPad mini (which is still the first computer I pick up in the morning and the last I put down before bed) and I do use it routinely for coding and accessing remote machines, I see the iPad as the modern equivalent of the Newton – a very personal (single user) computer that can help you manage most of your life (communications, notes, entertainment, even many creative activities) but for which Apple has failed to build software able to raise it to its full potential.

I endure it, but would swap it for a Mac tablet without a second thought.

This is genius. I’m quite curious as to whether this is feasible to do for tampering/presence detection (like whether someone has opened an utility closet and the like).

This has been a long time coming, but it’s here “now”, and is just one of the ARM-related announcements at MS Build (the other is Project Volterra, a Snapdragon-based ARM developer workstation, but I already have plenty of those…).

Since these are based on Ampere (not really a surprise to anyone), the core-to-RAM ratios are pretty nice for server applications, and I expect a lot of interesting solutions to be deployed on them.

I want to like this, seeing as it would make a lot of sense (such as things are) for me to get one, but with compute modules being sold out everywhere, ready access to vastly more powerful cloud (and local) resources and little time to tinker beyond a couple of hours a week, I just can’t justify it–especially since I gave away my Raspberry Pi 2 cluster last year, and just haven’t missed it.

But it would be really nice (budget permitting) to fill one with NVIDIA Jetsons since those would let me tinker with PyTorch in earnest (even if more slowly than a consumer-grade GPU).

Guess I need to become a YouTuber or something.

The way Google handled this whole affair was bewildering, and bordering on the incompetent–and surely worth an award of some kind for worst product management strategy ever.

Like many others, I switched away (in my case, to a mix of consumer Outlook and iCloud, to diversify providers and lower risk) and all I needed was to keep personal mailboxes, but I could have spared myself all the hassle.

I don’t think Google, actually likes having customers, but as an engineering-driven organization, I suspect that is just a backlog item.

A massive improvement (the multiple tapes feature is something I’d love to have, and hope some of it might be back-ported to older hardware), at the usual Teenage Engineering price point (€1999 right now).

I still love my classic version, but this is going to cause a stir for sure.

Well, there goes the iPod, down into the dustbin of history. I have two iPod Touch devices (one original, and a second or third-gen one), and they both still work – in fact, the more modern one is in daily use as a backup alarm clock.

While it’s true that the iPad mini might “replace” it in some ways (it did for me, in the beginning), the iPod filled a niche for people who have to use non-Apple phones but want access to the ecosystem, so I’m a bit sad to see it go.

People read so much into Apple’s patent applications.

And yet, sometimes I think some are just filed to either prevent competitors from moving into specific directions or… just to troll people who still expect the iPad to become a general computing device.

An open letter from Apple employees regarding returning to the office.

Two passages that immediately caught my eye, for distinct reasons:

This one is a very stark contrast to what I experience daily at Microsoft, where we dogfood Teams and Office collaboration on a daily basis:

We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely? How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products, if we don’t live it?

…and this one is something I’ve had an interesting run-in with myself:

How can we expect to convince the best people to come work with us, if we reject anyone who needs the smallest bit of flexibility?

There is a lot more to unpack in the open letter (including procedural and work-life balance aspects that feel foreign to me these days), but in an age when even very conservative, non-technical companies are allowing full remote or flexible hybrid work, the scenario it portrays is… out of touch, at the very least.

I definitely need to try this over the weekend.

I’ve spent a fair bit more time thinking about getting into gaming (escapism, I guess) and maybe even game development as a hobby, but this is also a good reminder I would love to see an xCloud equivalent of this instead of the janky browser UX.

Clearly, some folk have too much money on hand.

I’m more curious as to what this will mean for alternatives like Mastodon (I’ve got an account there but hardly ever used it) than whether we’ll finally get editable tweets, but don’t really think there will be much of an improvement either way.

Boy, this takes me back.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 40 years already. My first computer was a ZX81, but the Spectrum was what I used most during my teens in a couple of form factors.

Also relevant, and slightly insane: DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum. Yes, someone crafted a modern build chain to develop Spectrum software, Docker and all…

Pretty wild, and definitely not cheap for a portable mixer even if it does have a built-in synth and sequencer.