Rui Carmo
December 12^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

Catalina 10.15.2 Update ※

No mention of fixes to the Mail data loss bug (which as far as I know wasn’t even acknowledged, although it was widely reported). I’m sticking with Mojave for the holidays. Or Springtime. Whenever they feel like fixing heir desktop OS, really.

On other news, iOS 13.3 is out, so I think we finally got a stable release there. Third time’s the charm, right?

Rui Carmo
December 8^th 2019, at night · 5 min read

Three Months With The Series 5

For a number of reasons I don’t have the time or inclination to go into tonight, a few months ago I got myself a new Apple Watch, and I’ve been collecting assorted tidbits of my impressions thereof until there was enough to make a more substantial post than the usual fanboy crowd.

Bigger

I moved from a 38mm Series 3 (already running WatchOS 6) to a 44mm Series 5, and the first impression was that I had strapped an ancient cathode ray TV set to my wrist.

That was due partially to the physical size change, and partially to the much increased display area (the 40mm already has a lot more usable pixels than the 38mm as well, but the bigger form factor makes for a nearly 2x increase from what I was used to).

The size was a bit of a concern initially, but even with the sports bracelet (there isn’t anything else in stock in stores around here) it didn’t get caught in shirt cuffs, so it turned out to be fine in daily use.

It wasn’t an easy choice to make (I’ve always preferred smaller, slimmer watches), but improved readability and battery life took precedence.

Cosmetics

All my Apple Watches have always been space grey aluminum, for both weight and price concerns. I also prefer the sober look, although I found myself looking at the shinier variants every now and then.

This time, besides my usual favorite (the black Milanese loop, which I like for both aesthetic and comfort reasons even though it is heavier than the watch itself) I also got myself a bunch of Chinese knock-offs of the sports bracelet in various (reasonably sober) colors, plus a couple of sportier tones.

I’m hardly a fashionista, but the Milanese loop was kind of annoying in Summer and the black sports bracelet isn’t very comfortable at the beach either, so I’ll be trying those out in the sand next year.

But a part of me still wishes the watch was round. We may live in the future and appreciate the data it displays, but none of the gimmicky analog watch faces make sense for me on it, and I’ve settled on Infograph Modular as my default watch face.

That face does have a significant (and strangely short-sighted) drawback for me, though. it won’t let me swap out the date complication for another time zone, which is something I just cannot fathom since it seems to be possible on nearly every other watch face…

Overall Impressions

First, the good bits:

I like the always-on display and the way it manages brightness (very dim when partially obscured by a shirt cuff, perfectly readable when uncovered, and very bright when active). There have been exactly zero times when I could not glance at the watch and check the time or one of the complications.
There are significant delays between getting a haptic notification and the always on screen updating to show the little red notification dot, which means that Apple is really prioritizing battery life.
Automatic workout detection (especially for outdoor walks) works a lot better for some reason (I assume CPU). I haven’t tested fall detection (although I’ve enabled it), but in general the watch seems to be much smarter about kinetics and activity tracking.
The ECG feature is way more than a gimmick (for me at least), and does a decent enough good job at capturing variations in QRS and any changes in the occurrence of P waves). Getting a nicely formatted PDF in the Health app whenever you capture one is just icing on the cake.
Siri is very responsive (and loud), and despite remaining somewhat limited, it works OK. But it seems to be completely unable to run any kind of useful Shortcuts from the watch, and that remains a sore point, for I miss when Workflow (now Shortcuts) was able to run simple scripts on the watch. I used that to prompt me for menus and numbers to include on pre-formatted SMS messages or invoking Web APIs and getting a notification with the results, and I miss it a lot more now that I have a bigger watch face to tap on.
It is much faster than what I was used to, obviously, and the most notable aspect for me is that The TOTP tokens I keep in 1Password (for now, until Secrets gets around to implement a WatchOS app and I can finally switch over) are instantly accessible.

The not-so-good bits are mostly about gaps and bugs in third-party apps, but there are a few doozies in there:

I still can’t really get a grip on my calendar on either the built-in one or Outlook–the wonderful timeline mode that I had on my Pebble is something I sorely miss, but not being able to see anything beyond a single day’s appointments (or Calendar’s pretty but useless monthly view) is a major frustration.
You still cannot pair a Watch with an iPad. I know it probably will never happen, but we could have handed down my Series Zero to one of my kids (who are still far from owning a cell phone), if only for the sake of keeping it in use.
I really miss having Google Maps on the Watch. Apple Maps is still unaccountably–no tragically–bad in Lisbon, and Google’s decision to stop supporting Apple Watch still rankles.
The Home app is still pretty much useless on the Watch. Fortunately I can control most of my HomeKit devices via Siri, but the device-at-a-time approach is just ridiculous on this big a display.
WhatsApp notifications still suck at displaying media, and they don’t seem to have any interest in fixing them.
Responding to notifications is still a crapshoot in many regards–Apple still does not allow us to fully customize the order of canned responses or made it easier to dictate/swipe proper replies, which is annoying (especially when “Yes” is the tenth reply on the list for some reason).

Why some apps still haven’t made a comeback (or decent updates) when the number of Watches continues to climb is a mystery to me, but other than Google Maps and a nicer Uber app, most of the essentials I need are there.

Battery Life

Battery life has been great overall, considering I wear the watch round the clock, get both Teams and WhatsApp notifications on it throughout the day and also sleep with it.

And, of course, the LTE model is not available in Portugal, so I don’t even have the option of spending more battery (which I would not be interested in, honestly).

My 38mm Series 3 charged during my morning ablutions and trickled down to 20% over 24h most days (except on very busy ones), and comparatively the 44mm Series 5 has been able to match or exceed that over the past few months with ease, without any special settings other than noise monitoring off and brightness a smidgeon below average, plus a daily routine of enabling Cinema Mode when I’m going to bed.

The net result is that I sometimes wake up with over 40% battery remaining, which is pretty nice indeed.

Which reminds me: I have no clue why Apple hasn’t bothered with any kind of automation for switching off the display during the night, in the same fashion as Do Not Disturb.

It feels like a glaringly obvious feature even if they haven’t decided to tackle sleep tracking this time around (I’m still using AutoSleep, and it works just fine for me, as well as fitting in nicely with the other complications I have on Infograph Modular)

Final Thoughts

I wasn’t really expecting to upgrade this year, and it wasn’t for the always-on display, but the device now feels more whole with it somehow. I will be somewhat disappointed when Apple does something grubby like adding official sleep tracking features to the next iteration only (in somewhat the same way they “forget” to back-port new features to older iPhones even though they would be just as feasible there), but I really like this year’s upgrade and expect it to last me quite a while.

Now all we need (somewhat like the iPad, but with a narrower scope) is for the software to catch up until it is an awesome time keeping and navigation device instead of a glorified health tracker with rather uninspiring and inflexible watch faces.

Rui Carmo
December 5^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

Elementary OS 5.1 ※

I’m still running Elementary on one of my laptops (and, since it’s based on Ubuntu LTS, on the house KVM server) and it is still the nicest, most user-friendly Linux desktop I’ve ever used. Zero hassles, smooth upgrades for the past three years. It just keeps ticking along.

Nice to see them shipping sane, useful and well thought-out incremental updates that (unlike modern macOS) actually improve the experience and don’t break things.

Rui Carmo
December 3^rd 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

Oxide ※

I’m not quite sure what to expect from this (it has smatterings of a “post-cloud” backlash, if such a thing were possible), but Jessie Frazelle and other luminaries have ganged up to do hardware for on-premises deployments.

Having kept track of the Open Compute Project and the massive scale of global data center deployments for many years I can’t avoid being skeptical about this, but it promises to be interesting to keep track of for the people involved alone.

Here in Portugal, at least, most SMEs doing on-premises stuff can just rent out cheap blade servers and drop literally anything on them, so I just don’t see a profit angle.

But I’d love to see someone deliver power-efficient, modular ARM servers that ran a managed Kubernetes stack out of the box. I just don’t know how big the market for that kind of thing would be.

Rui Carmo
December 2^nd 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

Paw, a macOS API tool ※

I’m linking to Paw not because they gave away licenses during Black Friday (full disclosure: I got one), but because native, quality macOS apps deserve support and praise in this age of junk cross-platform Electron-based “apps” that try to shoehorn another Chromium runtime onto your machine.

Plus I use this kind of thing regularly, and it’s nice to have a native macOS tool I can rely on. You know what to do.

Rui Carmo
December 1^st 2019, in the evening · 2 min read

Red Season

The past month went by in a (quite literal) daze, and much to my disappointment I did not manage to do much reading or anything related to music other than spending some time noodling with Notion - not the note-taking app, but the music composition one, which is terrific and has a moderately decent library of orchestral sounds.

Rui Carmo
November 28^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

webOS on Raspberry Pi 4 ※

Surprisingly enough, I had zero idea this was going on.

Using the Pi 4 as a reference platform is interesting, but I wonder if I could get it to work on older boards (with the touch screens I have lying around) to build a home automation console…

Rui Carmo
November 27^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

RIPE runs out of IPv4 addresses ※

I had a ringside seat for this during the nearly twenty years I worked in telcos, and find it fascinating that carriers and home gateway manufacturers still can’t deliver quality IPv6 service. It isn’t as if we didn’t have enough advance warning.

And, of course, The Register commentary doesn’t disappoint.

Rui Carmo
November 21^st 2019, in the afternoon · 1 min read

Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup ※

This matches what we’ve experienced this year, but the emphasis on iOS and the latent minefield that Catalina has turned into do not bode well for the Mac.

Rui Carmo
November 17^th 2019, in the evening · 5 min read

The Pencil, and the iPad Mini 5

After a bit of soul searching (and the realisation that I would spend less than half the cash), I ended up getting myself an iPad mini 5 for my birthday, plus an Apple Pencil. And guess what, the Pencil stole the show.

Rui Carmo
November 17^th 2019, in the morning · 1 min read

MacBook Pro keyboard is just the old, good keyboard ※

Fantastic news, and proof that if there is one aspect of hardware design where there is merit (and reliability) in traditional approaches, it’s basic mechanics. This is finally a keyboard people can trust.

Now let’s see if Apple can stay focused on things that actually matter to pros (like, maybe, easily serviceable laptop hardware?) and roll out a 13” version by next quarter.

Rui Carmo
November 16^th 2019, at late afternoon · 4 min read

Power Moves

The plight of the self-made home automator is fraught with setbacks, weird workarounds and lots and lots of tinkering, and mine is no exception.

Rui Carmo
November 15^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

1Password Raises $200M Series A ※

Many of my more jaded acquaintances see this as a sign of 1Password’s upcoming “death by revenue management”, which seems likely given their trajectory so far.

Like I’ve written before, there are plenty of alternatives out there, including the iOS keychain and Firefox’s own password manager, but very few that I could switch to without a second qualm (Secrets comes really close, but I have come to rely on having TOTP tokens on my Apple Watch and that’s the one feature I’m really hung up on).

Rui Carmo
November 13^th 2019, at late afternoon · 1 min read

The 16-inch MacBook ※

Now all we need to do is wait for the new keyboard (which features an actual physical Esc key and a decent cursor layout) to ship on something that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Rui Carmo
November 13^th 2019, at lunchtime · 13 min read

The Follies, Part One

Around this time every year, nostalgia kicks in and I am reminded of my telco years. I’ve written about that period before (The Blue Packet was an allegory for the Vodafone 360 debacle and Template For Small Countries merely one of the poignant moments I witnessed there), but as it happens I have a tangible souvenir of those years:

Rui Carmo
November 10^th 2019, in the afternoon · 1 min read

General Magic ※

I remember the Newton era and had an inkling of what General Magic was trying to do (there were some screenshots in BYTE at the time), but I had no idea of how prescient they had been and of who they actually were (other than Andy Rubin, whom I had read up on when we were launching Android handsets in Vodafone Portugal).

This is easily the best documentary I watched this year, and heartily recommend it–you will never look at smartphones the same way again, and by the time the end credits roll you’ll be left wondering if something like General Magic will ever happen again in our lifetimes.

Rui Carmo
November 6^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

Heartbreaker ※

It is a poignant sign of the times that Microsoft is already shipping quality desktop-grade ARM hardware (even though it is pricey and limited in software compatibility) whereas Apple can’t yet ship something with a decent keyboard and a finished version of Catalina (or iOS, for that matter).

That said, regardless of how much this advances the status quo, I would definitively pick the Surface 7 instead as a go-anywhere development machine. The road to ARM is paved with good intentions, but it’s going to take us a long while to make a full switch (and I’m betting AMD will have something to say in that regard as well).

Also of note, and as a sort of quick follow-up to my last blog post: @dhh spent a week using Windows, and it makes for an insightful read. I agree with most of what he wrote, but then again I’ve always hedged my bets and am used to tackle the dull grind of transitioning (daily) between platforms.

Rui Carmo
November 4^th 2019, at night · 1 min read

Azure Arc ※

Well, this is going to be fun. Azure Stack was always a very hard sell, but being able to centrally manage all kinds of infra and data services (as well as deploying them to Kubernetes) anywhere, with a common security model? That is something corporates are going to be really interested in.

Of particular interest to me (due to my current role as a data architect) is this bit: Customers now have the flexibility to deploy Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale where they need it, on any Kubernetes cluster.

Let’s see how it pans out. There were plenty more announcements during the Ignite keynote, but this is sure to have been the hardest to figure out by the uninitiated, and is the most interesting to me.

Rui Carmo
November 3^rd 2019, in the morning · 5 min read

My Current Take On Apple

I thought I’d write a bit about Apple for a change, seeing as the Mac was the whole point of this site to begin with, and the lack of an October event didn’t stop them from launching new stuff. But they didn’t launch the stuff I wanted, so I’m going to do what every random person on the Internet does these days, which is to rant on about things from a totally egotistical perspective.

Rui Carmo
October 28^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

Looping Music Seamlessly ※

I absolutely loved this, especially because it gives me a few ideas for both handling noisy data and doing some audio processing of my own.

Rui Carmo
October 26^th 2019, in the morning · 1 min read

A Disturbance in the Force ※

So my colleagues in the US just won the JEDI contract, which is going to land inside Azure Government Cloud – a set of Azure regions exclusive to US institutions (including, inclusively but amusingly, “tribal governments”), and the NYT has what is probably the best writeup right now, including a blow-by-blow of the process.

It was pretty obvious that this would end up being either about Azure or AWS (what with Oracle’s ramshackle datacenter network and IBM’s decline into managed obsolescence), but it’s going to be interesting to watch the fallout in several fronts. There are a few insightful comments over on Hacker News, but as usual there is a lot of fiction (including actual mentions of Sci-Fi series) rather than fact in there, so YMMV.

But what I am really interested in is the humungous, gaping void that is the European cloud provider landscape (i.e., anything more sophisticated than barebones VMs).

That and whether or not the EU (which can be agonizingly irresponsible and borderline illiterate technology-wise, as borne witness by cookie popups everywhere) is even going to realize that it exists, and how far behind Europe is terms of cloud computing…

Update (Mov 1st): Well, someone finally woke up, it seems. I am not in the least surprised to see both the French and the Germans as the main backers of Gaia-X – but it is such a quintessential European thing for them to be the most vocal about it that I expect little to happen in the short term…

Rui Carmo
October 21^st 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

Rebble with a Cause ※

I still have an original Pebble someplace, and to this day it was the only smartwatch that actually got calendaring “right”–its timeline view was an excellent bit of UX that Apple completely ignored (they even killed doing “time travel” with the crown recently, so it’s pretty much impossible to have a decent overview of your day at a glance).

It’s good to know bits of it live on, although realistically it is extremely unlikely to ever recover and come back as a commercial product, regardless of the brilliant engineering involved.

Rui Carmo
October 20^th 2019, at late afternoon · 3 min read

Indoor Activities

Autumn seems to have caught up with us, even if it feels like it’s just blundered inside and cannot make up its mind as to whether it locked the car (it’s rained a bit this weekend, but rather perfunctorily, and the sun has shone through on a few occasions).

Rui Carmo
October 17^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

Google and Ambient Computing ※

The Google event this week barely registered in my mind (not out of any bias, but simply because all the announcements felt very “meh”), but Ben Thompson’s post adds a little depth to it.

However, I can’t help but wonder if large tech companies are just blurring into essentially the same kind of unfocused, all-encompassing, uninspiring offerings.

There seems to be a gigantic void of creativity (let alone any actual meaning) in the tech industry these days, and I think that speaks a lot to the lack of impact FAANG’s initiatives have in real life (i.e., outside the tech hype circle).

Rui Carmo
October 15^th 2019, at dawn · 1 min read

New Pythons ※

Even though the Python 3.8 release is getting all the news coverage in the Python universe today, PyPy 7.2 is a lot more interesting to me since it has full 3.6 support and some of the fixes I’ve been waiting for.

I’ll be updating my runtime images when I can find the time.