Rui Carmo
July 3^rd 2020, at breakfast · 2 min read

A review of HEY Email ※

Like a bazillion people, I got an account but haven’t done anything with it yet, so this review is quite interesting.

The productivity nut in me appreciates the sane defaults and the mobile experience, but the ex-Exchange admin and former imap_sieve user keeps wondering how much further we’d have evolved if server-side rules had become more accessible to regular humans.

What really appeals to me, however, is the mobile experience.

To this day, I have my Mail.app “inbox”/default view set to a smart folder on my Macs (something that I keep expecting Apple to break) and Gmail filters that do a little of what Hey does to lessen the crud overall, but the mobile experience on iOS (across the vast majority of mail clients) is just crappy in comparison (or proprietary, or both).

If Apple hadn’t broken iOS mail and spent a little on server-side functionality, they’d have been able to do 200% of this for decades (VIPs and passive-aggressive Junk filtering don’t count).

Gmail has pushed a lot of server-side logic (content classification, suggestions, etc.) but has clearly lost their way as well (and don’t get me started on its mobile client or web UX), and, of course, IMAP doesn’t come with matching standards for server-side filtering, so the whole thing is a three-ring circus, and the client side has been on fire for decades now.

So yes, Hey has a reason for being. I just don’t know if it has a reason for lasting, because there is so much low-hanging fruit here that just about anyone else running an e-mail service can do the same, and the reasons they haven’t done so is: a) return on investment b) privacy implications and c) inertia (pick any two).

Ironically, I have a lot of similar features in the Office 365 webmail Interface (which is what I use to get work done, in Firefox, because it’s miles ahead of the Outlook desktop clients and doesn’t turn my machines into leaf blowers).

Five years ago I wouldn’t have expected to say this, but webmail can be done sanely in a corporate setting, and Microsoft has absolutely nailed it (if you’re in the ecosystem).

That aside, and given that I still prefer a native client for my personal mail (which requires far less grooming) I just don’t see how Hey can help me personally, but then again I’ve always been very opinionated about organizing (and prioritizing) things.

Rui Carmo
July 2^nd 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

Apple Lightning ※

This makes for fascinating reading. I was aware of some of the intricacies behind the connector from the very beginning of MFI, but it’s nice to see most of it in one place.

Rui Carmo
June 30^th 2020, in the afternoon · 6 min read

120-ish Days Later

It’s been a long while since I last wrote about my state of mind during the pandemic and almost as long since I posted some data, so I think this is somewhat overdue. And since today is also the last day of our fiscal year and I’m done with work for a few hours, I might as well use them for something that matters.

What The Data Tells Me

This is the simplest (and easiest to understand) chart I have put together. It smooths out the erratic raw data with a 7-day moving average and only covers mainland Portugal, but that’s where the action is regardless:

New daily cases in the Portuguese mainland - 7-day rolling average — Case distribution per region. Observe as the Lisbon region (where I live) takes center stage as people become laxer about confinement.

The Government is (understandably) concerned with the economic impact, and lifted containment too soon and in the wrong regions. I found it especially telling that cases in the Lisbon area started growing steadily from the 15^th of May onwards (that’s the local minima between May and June), two weeks (to the day) after the State of Emergency was canceled and shops re-opened (there’s a pretty decent summary of this in Wikipedia that is only missing a few minor things).

And as restrictions were further lifted in May 18^th and June 1^st (plus a spate of bank holidays starting on the 10^th), many people went further afield and the infection spread both in the Lisbon area and towards Algarve.

There were some localized hotspots (some companies, construction works, a few nursing homes), but I blame the spread on warmer weather, the emphasis on tourism (the Government is still trying to paint Portugal as a “safe” holiday destination), and, overall, lax behavior and early de-confinement without things like public transportation being able to cope properly.

And there is a noticeable shift in demographics as younger people start contracting COVID-19 in larger numbers (especially in the 20-29yo segment, which seems especially immune to common sense).

In general, we should have locked down Lisbon, regardless of consequences to tourism, and it was internal tourism that caused the spate of cases in Alentejo and Algarve.

But that didn’t happen, and we’re paying the price–today one of Lisbon’s key hospitals reported a new internal hotspot, with 11 doctors, 8 nurses and 12 patients infected.

About The Data

Before going further, let me get something off my chest.

For 127 days now, practically every day, I’ve gone out to the National Health Service website, grabbed the manually generated PDF they put out at semi-random times¹, copied the data by hand to this Excel sheet and refreshed this PowerBI dashboard (in Portuguese²), from which I took the chart above. And yes, I tried various approaches at screen scraping, the URLs are all over the place and it’s all hopelessly ad-hoc.

And I’m tired of it. And frustrated that, for one hundred and twenty-seven days, the Health Ministry has shown itself utterly unable to not just perform accurate automated reporting (because I keep finding errors and inconsistencies in the data almost every day), but also publish a proper API to let us get at the numbers.

All they have is a dinky Wordpress site and a dashboard that is a direct carbon-copy from the original OMS ArcGIS dashboard (they haven’t even kept up with the OMS redesigns), and which is also updated manually (and I know that for a fact because we keep catching it in mid-update, with incomplete values or duplicate rows).

I get that doctors have better things to do with their time. I get that the reporting chain is broken six ways from Sunday, and I most assuredly get that there are (or rather, were) other priorities.

But I don’t get that four months later they haven’t gotten their act together from a purely technical perspective, when it took me two whole hours to use free services to build that data table and that dashboard.

What I’ve Been Doing

We haven’t left the house for anything non-essential in months, which is taking its toll. Now that logistics and deliveries have normalized (and that we have a decontamination routine in place), there is much less need to, but it is impossible to stay indoors all of the time and I, for one, have found it near impossible to work for some days due to not having air conditioning in the office.

I also haven’t had a full nights’ sleep in quite a few weeks, due to a mixture of heat, allergies and various work-related topics that I might write about some day. I don’t really know when I’ll have vacations and am likely to keep working 10-hour days (or 12+ hours’ worth of “swiss cheese” meetings and useless 30m gaps between them), so most of my personal projects are stalled and I’ve focused on various home improvement doodads in order to feel productive.

(It’s really weird to use a 30-minute slot in the middle of a day crammed with wall-to-wall video calls to assemble IKEA furniture for your kids, but when that is the highlight of your day, believe me that you’ll feel entirely justified.)

Since normal TV is dismal and shows like Snowpiercer seem to have been serendipitously timed to coincide with the pandemic (and mirror a lot of the nastiness that has surfaced during it), I’ve kept playing games to relax around dinner time, but am trying to shift towards reading, since right now all I seem to manage is leafing through The Economist every Saturday and it’s just as depressing as the rest of the news.

Realistically, I expect this to take another year to shake itself out, and I fully expect things to get significantly worse–not in the next quarter, perhaps, but definitely about the time we swing into the New Year.

But at least things will be looking up by then, because we’re sure to hit rock bottom sometime soon.

Looking Forward

For starters, I intend to use July to recover from the past six months. Especially where it concerns the past week or so.

And I mean that in more ways than one, which is also why I’m posting this today–I’m drawing a line in the sand, as it were. Despite good progress at work in my new role (which is moderately good news for someone like me, who used to live for creative work and delivering actual product instead of dollops of slide-ware and high-brow strategy consulting), the overall situation is weighing me down a lot, and something has to give.

Where it regards putting my brains to good use (i.e., compensate for work with decent hobbies, preferably creating something), the situation is a bit different. I can’t practice music because it requires contiguous free time (and inspiration), and our podcast has filled in for that somewhat, but I need to do something new.

So I’ve been investigating things off my beaten track with some creative bent (mostly video production and VR, which are logical follow-ups to to games) and pondering taking up the challenge to develop a “serious” application for the Oculus Quest that was suggested to me the other day. I have the Android and Unity chops for it, but have yet to commit (it would certainly be “different” enough for me to enjoy it).

Besides that (and outside in general), the current plan is for the kids to have short outings (it’s impossible to keep them inside now that they’re on vacation as of this week), and as Summer progresses we will try to have some semblance of normal weekends. Far away from people, if at all possible.

That said, Portugal seems to have very few fundamentally stupid people (at least when comparing with daily news bulletins and reports of anti-mask, “freedom” protests hailing from the US) but is (by nature) a friendly and lax sort of environment.

That laxness (and the way the Government has managed the pandemic after the first 50 days, which were rather promising) means that Portugal is currently quite far from being mostly harmless…

Yes, you read that right, they manually create a PDF file in PowerPoint for the Mac and upload it to Wordpress, it’s all in the metadata. ↩︎
I’ve been meaning to build an English version, but given that I spend around 15 minutes a day just copying digits across when I should be helping out with lunch and minding the kids, that also hasn’t been very high on my priorities. When it’s done, I’ll update this post. ↩︎

Rui Carmo
June 30^th 2020, at lunchtime · 1 min read

The End of the Redis Adventure ※

Salvatore Sanfilippo is stepping down as maintainer after eleven years, but will still sit on the Redis Labs advisory board–which is a good thing on many regards, since Redis now has a community (and a business) to support it and new governance, and Salvatore has too creative a mind to be tied down to a single thing.

Redis is one of my staple architecture components (and many people have no clue as to what it can really do besides “caching”), and is of the best pieces of tech I’ve ever used, so I’m really thankful for his work.

Rui Carmo
June 30^th 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

Leaked benchmarks from the Mac DTK ※

Of course these figures would leak.

And they don’t look half bad, especially considering the benchmarks are for emulated code. I’m really curious to see both native ones (even if the A12Z is not going to be the actual CPU in future Macs) and how it stacks up to a Gen 10 i7 (which is the yardstick I’d use for an “average” pro desktop).

Rui Carmo
June 24^th 2020, at dawn · 1 min read

The End of OS X ※

This ties in nicely with my own perception, although most of the macOS heritage I’m concerned (and sad) about is on the UX side and not so much on the kernel/ecosystem side.

Rui Carmo
June 22^nd 2020, in the evening · 3 min read

macOS “Bug Sir”?

Okay, that was… weird. Both more “courageous” and conservative than what I expected, and a lot to take in, but here are some quick thoughts on the WWDC keynote and what it means for the Mac.

Rui Carmo
June 21^st 2020, in the afternoon · 14 min read

That Syncing Feeling

The main reason I ended up not cancelling my Dropbox subscription last year was awkward, and is simultaneously also the reason why this post has been an entire year in the making.

Rui Carmo
June 19^th 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

Hey, no. ※

This is well worth getting some popcorn. DHH is notoriously vocal, and even though Hey seems like a pretty weird and pricey take on e-mail, it is a beloved and geek-anointed one seeing as it shares the Basecamp philosophy, so of course it is going to garner a lot of highly visible support.

Every single indie app developer who’s been slighted by Apple (and a lot of corporate ones who rely on service subscriptions of any form to drive revenue) is going to rally behind this, and I, for one, fully agree with them (even if I do think Hey is going to milk this for all they’ve got and would prefer other champions, just because they come across as feeling overly entitled sometimes).

Incidentally, the App Store review policies (and the insane developer fees for individual users) are the main reasons that whenever I developed for mobile (back in the day) I did so for Android first, or stuck to web technologies.

Because there is zero incentive to have those headaches even for pro-bono apps. And that is Apple’s loss entirely.

They are reaping what they sowed either way, and what better timing to do so than when they’re being probed by the EU and a couple of days away from WWDC?

I’d like my popcorn buttered, please.

Rui Carmo
June 17^th 2020, at breakfast · 2 min read

Stratechery on Apple, ARM, and Intel ※

Another take on the upcoming “switch”, by Ben Thompson. well thought out where it comes to fabbing and core drivers of the transition, but perhaps a tad too optimistic regarding Apple’s role.

For the record, I don’t think the transition to ARM servers really hinges on developers suddenly switching to ARM laptops, if only because I’ve worked with ARM boxes of various sizes for over a decade and it still hasn’t happened yet.

So I find it somewhat amusing to think that Apple would be the catalyst for a “full transition” on the server side, especially given that it is more a matter of overall economics (supply chain, essentially) than anything else.

The truth is that ARM server hardware is exceptionally thin on the ground when compared to conventional servers. A hyperscale provider like Azure might deploy thousands of multi-CPU machines a day (admittedly not constantly), and sources them through massive procurement processes that comply to open, standardized specs like the Open Compute Project.

There is no such kind of standardization (or volume production) for ARM servers, at any level, and even considering that AWS deployed ARM servers two years ago they are far from being hassle free (and, somewhat telling, none of my friends who are on AWS has used them in production yet).

Another case in point is that Scaleway recently announced they would be phasing out their ARM64 servers, which I was testing out last year and which were apparently plagued with maintenance issues.

Again, standardization would have made it easy for them to swap out server hardware.

Switching to ARM is not going to be a “clean cut”, and Intel isn’t going to slowly fade away into oblivion. My money is on a messier scenario with AMD moving up the food chain (which they are already doing, steadily) and two to four more years of ARM server bootstrapping (which is already happening, but very slowly).

Apple may accelerate this motion, but as far as I’m concerned ARM is going to remain an “edge”/mobile platform for a couple of years, and I would be very surprised if it got 10% of the conventional desktop market (let alone the server one) sooner than that.

It’s still a chicken and egg, supply and demand problem, and we’re not going to solve it by having more ducks.

Rui Carmo
June 15^th 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

More on Apple moving to ARM ※

Like everything else about the upcoming transition to ARM, this is just educated guessing at this stage, and like many over-contrived conspiracy theories it makes a sort of weird sense, but I actually expect things to be a bit simpler.

Either way, with Summer setting in and loads of people still cooped up at home, speculation should reach fever pitch by the end of the week…

Rui Carmo
June 14^th 2020, in the afternoon · 13 min read

A Short, Nonsensical Sort of Gaming Vacation

Thanks to various idiosyncrasies of the Portuguese calendar, I was able to book a single day’s vacation and get a huge 5-day weekend “break”, which we spent generally relaxing, watching the rain outside (rain in June, yay), and generally doing nothing of consequence. And among other things, I decided to do some gaming (and was actually caught by surprise by the PS5 event, but that’s another story).

Rui Carmo
June 11^th 2020, at late afternoon · 2 min read

TIL: Toggle Do Not Disturb (With a Single Click)

During a brief discussion about PliimPRO, a menubar app to quickly set your Mac to a “safe” presentation mode, I learned that you can turn off desktop notifications by simply Option-clicking on the Notification Center icon on the menubar, without even having to open it first:

It's that simple. Just option-click, no need to open the menu first.

But that’s not all. Meandering even further along those lines, I realized that it would be trivial to build an Automator workflow to write a “presentation mode toggle” via AppleScript, and here it is for future reference:

if (do shell script "defaults read com.apple.finder CreateDesktop") is "1" then
    -- Get open apps
    tell application "System Events" to set openApps to name of every application process whose background only is false
    -- Do this for every open app
    repeat with processName in openApps
        tell application "System Events" to tell process processName
            set visible to false
        end tell
    end repeat
    -- Mute audio
    set volume with output muted
    -- Hide desktop icons
    do shell script "defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false; killall -HUP Finder"
    -- Enable Do Not Disturb
    do shell script "defaults -currentHost write com.apple.notificationcenterui doNotDisturb -bool yes; defaults -currentHost write com.apple.notificationcenterui doNotDisturbDate -date \"`date -u +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S+0000'`\"; killall NotificationCenter"
else
    -- Unmute audio
    set volume without output muted
    -- Show desktop icons
    do shell script "defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true; killall -HUP Finder"
    -- Disable Do Not Disturb
    do shell script "defaults -currentHost write com.apple.notificationcenterui doNotDisturb -bool no; killall NotificationCenter"
end if

And yes, this is a trifle gauche and overly liberal in its use of killall because it’s 2020 and Apple has let AppleScript degrade to such a point that most modern functionality is impossible to script directly without side effects (and also NotificationCenter seems to ignore SIGHUP, but that’s another matter entirely).

For good measure, you may want to add a “Change System Appearance” toggle after this script in your Automator workflow (you can pick Light, Dark, or Toggle Light/Dark):

This is a little hidden gem in Automator.

This obviously doesn’t switch wallpapers or do “smart” stuff like restoring hidden applications (I’d rather restore them myself, honestly), but is a pretty quick way to clear your desktop (and I used it to record the GIF above using Claquette, a great little utility I love and that I recently found via Michael Tsai).

Update: A little while after writing the above, I found the Pliim author has a public gist with a slightly different technique, and that the original app is on GitHub.

Rui Carmo
June 10^th 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

Haiku OS R1/beta2 Release Notes ※

I’ve been keeping track of this for a long while, partially because I actually bought BeOS a long time ago and liked the approach behind it, and partly because I keep wishing they did an ARM port for the Raspberry Pi–an idea that was (ironically) repeatedly shunned over the years due to “lack of popularity”.

Which is kind of sad, since with a working WebKit browser, a pretty decent user interface and an emphasis on simplicity, it would be an amazing OS for the Pi (as well as a great way to revive older laptops).

Any working ARM port has yet to happen (and other things like laptop-grade power management are apparently still MIA), but it is nice to see progress regardless, and I ~~will eventually fire up a KVM instance to check this out.~~ just booted it on an ancient Eee PC and it does work reasonably well if you’re very tolerant of the browser limtations and UI conventions.

Rui Carmo
June 9^th 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

Bloomberg on Apple’s Upcoming Transition to ARM ※

Wouldn’t surprise me in the least to have this announced at WWDC, and for the transition to last anywhere between 6 months to a few years, accelerated by App Store binary updates (bitcode or not).

Laptops are most likely to be first, as usual, and an ARM Air would be a thing of beauty, power and grace (now that they’ve fixed the keyboards).

“Big iron” like the Mac Pro, though, is in awkward situation. But Ryzen-powered desktop Macs are not likely to be a thing, regardless of rumors to that effect. Unless, of course, Intel’s deal with Apple is due to expire… But there’s no such thing, right?

So I expect to be running a Linux desktop (with a Mac mini “sidecar”) by this time next year–which is sure to be an interesting journey, especially now that AMD is on the verge of launching new APUs with Vega graphics.

(Life would be so much simpler if there were decent Radeon GPUs out there for ITX cases… I’m willing to start doing hardware reviews of those, if anyone’s interested.)

Rui Carmo
June 8^th 2020, in the evening · 2 min read

Return of the Bliki

Yesterday, spurred by the re-emergence of Zettelkasten through a set of new tools such as Obsidian, I decided to reacquaint this site with its early origins as a personal Wiki and turned on Wiki-style backlinks again (you’ll find them at the bottom of every page that is referenced somewhere else).

Rui Carmo
June 7^th 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

Lenovo's 11-inch Chromebook 3 ※

I was actually excited about this (due to my love of tiny, flexible and fanless machines) until I clicked through and saw that the display panel is still the crappy 1366x768 “nearly HD” resolution that plagued (and, in my view, severely curtailed the usefulness of) netbooks.

It’s been nearly a decade and small form factor machines with simple web connectivity (which would cater to 80% of regular people’s use cases) are still kneecapped by poor displays.

Rui Carmo
June 2^nd 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

"For the first time, I don't love it" ※

A well-written take from someone who skipped The Great Keyboard Nightmare Years and is comparing a new MacBook to the 2013 Air.

The webcam bit hits the nail in the head, but there are a lot of excellent points being made here. Port placement, the touchbar, and basic ergonomics have all been issues with the “ultra slim” designs, and now that they’ve “fixed” (read: regressed) the keyboard, this seems like a great list of things to address in the next redesigns.

(It is certainly ironic that I am typing this post on a Surface Laptop 2, which has none of those problems whatsoever, except that the headphone jack, although being on the left side, is not in fact close to the front–there would be no room for it there given its tapered wedge shape…)

Rui Carmo
May 29^th 2020, at dinnertime · 1 min read

Baking Bad

No, I haven’t caught that particular bug and am not baking bread at home. In fact, that couldn’t be further from my immediate concerns right now, since after spending a week cooped up in my office with 28C inside and with another bout of allergies (which made it doubly hard to breathe, let alone work).

Rui Carmo
May 28^th 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

8GB Raspberry Pi 4 for $75 ※

With this, an official 64-bit OS and the ability to boot from an external (much more reliable) drive, the Pi is looking more and more viable as a full-time entry-level desktop machine.

At this point, I think the only thing holding it back are the CPU and associated thermals - it is still slower than low-end Intel chips, but not by much, and it is interesting to consider that the price point is now moving into Z83ii territory.

(A 4GB RAM/64GB EMMC Atom x5-Z8350 retails for $150, and you get moderately decent storage, a PSU and a Windows license for that price)

Rui Carmo
May 23^rd 2020, at dinnertime · 2 min read

More Elementary

A few weeks before the pandemic started I fixed the touchpad on the ancient Acer ES1-111M we had lying around, upgraded its RAM and turned it into a moderately useful “couch computer”. For good measure, I also installed Elementary OS 5.1.4 Hera on it, and I’ve been using it ever since on a near-daily basis.

Rui Carmo
May 23^rd 2020, at lunchtime · 1 min read

Using OneNote as a Wiki

I’ve been using OneNote for years, but this eluded me throughout all of that time:

You can easily link to pages in the same notebook by just typing [[Page Name]].

OneNote will auto-link and remove the square brackets if it finds a match, or underline with a dotted line and create a new page if you click through.

So far I haven’t found a way to link across different sets of subpages, but this is handy enough.

Rui Carmo
May 23^rd 2020, at lunchtime · 1 min read

Catalina and online executable checks ※

I have been tracking the fallout from Alan Odgaard’s post about Catalina and this seems like the sanest take on the subject so far.

I am, however, more than a bit annoyed that someone at Apple thought it was a good idea to design things this way. I mean, how insane is it that your Mac “phones home” whenever you run a new unsigned binary?

Besides the potential for failure (Apple has historically been mediocre at doing online systems, except for the iTunes/App Store, which is finely honed and cached up the wazoo), the potential for data gathering is serious enough that I can see Macs being banned from use in public sector clients outside the US (development or not).

And even if it can be argued that this caches results and normal users will mostly run things from the App Store and seldom notice any delays, it is something that ought to be surfaced properly for developers and power users alike.

It’s perfectly understandable that iTerm users get bitten by this, but why isn’t the system terminal added to the Developer Tools pane in System Preferences, Security, Privacy automatically (and consistently)?

If I ever upgrade to Catalina, I expect to get bitten by this during the very first day…

Rui Carmo
May 17^th 2020, at dinnertime · 2 min read

Beneath The Surface

Nothing much to report on the creative front. Work has been exhausting, but it has also taken another unwelcome twist: As it gets progressively warmer, my Surface Pro 4 is collapsing slowly under the effect of near-constant video calls, and has already shut down on me once.

Rui Carmo
May 19^th 2020, in the afternoon · 1 min read

WSL2 to get GUI and GPU support in Windows ※

More interesting stuff to play around with in Windows. I still prefer to install Linux directly on my personal hardware, but I can see the appeal for this, and have no trouble imagining useful scenarios.

Apple is looking more and more isolated by the day.