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.

Hardware

It’s the Mini. It fits into a coat pocket, has a regular headphone jack, a standard iPad resolution at higher dpi, and Touch ID. It just works, and is still the first device I reach for in the mornings to check up on news over breakfast (it fits neatly into dressing gown pockets, too), and the last I put aside at night, usually after a couple of hours of noodling on the couch.

It is unobtrusive, practical, non-threatening (in meetings and otherwise), the perfect size to use on an airplane (even for typing, at least for me), and the best iPad for me right now. In fact, for me it is the iPad, and has nearly always been the one iPad.

And yes, I would have loved a “Pro” Mini with Face ID, four speakers and more modern bezels – and will be severely incensed if that comes to pass next year, even it would be an outlier both in the tablet market and Apple’s product range.

Still, Apple occasionally does things that make sense to me, and getting one mid-product cycle (and less than six months away from the rumored launch of a new Pro) was a bit of a gamble.

So after much soul searching I invested in the 256GB LTE model to boost both its usefulness while traveling and its aftermarket value should I want to upgrade sooner than the four years that seem to be its new lifecycle.

Performance

So far I have only good things to say–the Mini 5 is indeed notoriously faster than the 4, and I can finally use Cubasis and a decent amount of AUv3 synths on my iPad without it choking in various ways.

Multitasking works fine, even if the physical display can feel a little crowded (which is actually also true for all other iPads with similar resolution). The only real difference is that it is smaller, and right now, outside the Pro, only the new Air (which shares its insides) has a smidgeon more screen real estate.

But I see this as a “focus” device, something that can afford me the luxury of doing the things I enjoy whenever and wherever I want, so multi-tasking is mostly for running multiple audio apps, doing research and listening to podcasts while I do other stuff.

External Displays

Since I only had a Lightning to VGA adapter, I got myself an upgrade to the HDMI one, and was immediately able to get Blink to use it as a secondary display at what seems to be full 1080p, which is more than enough for occasional hacking while traveling.

The only app that has come up short of expectations here is Jump Desktop, which can handle multiple remote Windows displays but just scales down, tiles and mirrors them on both the internal and external displays, which is… sub-optimal.

Then again, that is likely to improve as bigger iPads like the Pro gain more acceptance as workhorses, and since the APIs are the same, the Mini can ride on that success.

Alternatives

There were none, as usual. I did entertain the notion of getting a Surface Go, but it hasn’t been updated in a while and I am getting deeper and deeper into the iOS music ecosystem, so even if I decided to, say, run Ableton Live Lite on the Surface, the outdated Pentium CPU it ships with would probably hamper me – although it was a tempting enough scenario.

I also looked at the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6, but, outside from it having nice hardware and the possibility of using DeX to have a desktop-like environment, the ecosystem just isn’t there (and Samsung is apparently killing Linux on DeX, so… there was even less appeal).

The Pencil

I have spent very little time trying it for “artistic” purposes like editing music on the GarageBand piano roll (which was one of the main uses I had originally envisioned) or drawing diagrams in notes.

Rather, I have spent most of my time using the Pencil writing longhand on the Mini while on the couch and holding it in portrait mode, which works out beautifully well for me.

This because, thanks to a sheer stroke of luck, I was able to install the MyScript handwriting recognition keyboards I had tried years ago.

These are distinct from their Nebo app (which, to be honest, I haven’t tried yet simply because I prefer being able to input text into the apps I already have) and, sadly, are currently deprecated in favor of it.

But the keyboards work brilliantly for me in both English and Portuguese, so I have been gleefully writing longhand on just about every app I can from Slack to iA Writer – in fact, most of this text was drafted in longhand.

I can understand MyScript discontinuing the standalone keyboards, but in my view they are brilliant and eminently useful to the point I’d pay more for them than for Nebo…

But I must confess that after this experience I have to wonder what happened to the legacy support for handwriting recognition Apple kept churning out, and why they haven’t re-surfaced it after all these years now that the entire iPad range supports the Pencil.

I always wanted to post a copy of this — The classic Doonesbury strip that became synonymous with the Newton

I suppose they are still afraid of another Newton-like debacle, because the experience is simply great.

Here’s a little example of what I mean:

There wasn't a single "egg freckles" moment, and my handwriting isn't that great.

As icing on the cake, these keyboards also work in the new iOS 13 “pinched”/compact keyboard mode, which affords me a lot more screen real estate at the expense of cramping my handwriting a bit.

It would be awesome to have Graffiti (it’s still hard-coded into my reflexes even after nearly two decades without using Palm devices), but I’m extremely happy with my Pencil experience as it is.

Well, except for two things–it is slightly longer than just about any pen or pencil I’ve used in recent years (and thus slightly unbalanced) and I have no words to accurately express how I feel about the borderline asinine way it charges.

It’s so literally ass-backwards that I have to wonder what Apple were thinking.

But hey, I have a new Mini, and it’s my new “most personal” computer after over four years. And the Pencil only makes it all the more awesome.

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.

Rui Carmo
October 13^th 2019, in the afternoon · 4 min read

Deployment Pains

This week I found myself late into the evening wrestling with a Kubernetes ingress controller to get multiple TLS endpoints working in a cluster and realizing that I had spent all my free time dealing with something that ought to be a solved problem by now.

Rui Carmo
October 7^th 2019, in the evening · 1 min read

macOS Catalina is out ※

I am definitely going to wait this one out. About half of the folk I know is actually considering waiting for the .2 minor release.

Update: there seems to be a chance of data loss in Mail.app, which is borderline criminal in terms of QA. I have no idea what Apple is doing to macOS in general other than killing it with a million paper cuts…

Rui Carmo
October 2^nd 2019, at dawn · 1 min read

Pi 4 dual HEVC/H265 Playback ※

This is very cool, and a good (if not deep) overview of what you can do with the Pi 4 hardware.

Having built a few digital signage solutions atop the Pi (one of which entailed H.264 streaming to the original hardware and another which evolved into what is used yearly at Pixels Camp), the HEVC split display support is especially interesting to me, and I hope this surfaces someplace as a reusable solution.

Rui Carmo
September 29^th 2019, at late afternoon · 3 min read

Forced Perspectives

My regular complaint of not having enough free time turned against me last week, big time–I ended up being housebound for a few days due to a minor health issue (just in time to have a couple of major personal ones pile on, Murphy be damned), and took some time to unplug from work and re-visit my hobbies.

Rui Carmo
September 24^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

MultiCam recording on older iPhones ※

This makes perfect sense, and I would expect a few more features to be retrofitted to current hardware–we’re well past the time when it would be even borderline defensible to tie new software features to new hardware when older hardware shares the same architecture and design constraints.

Rui Carmo
September 20^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

Daring Fireball: iOS 13.0 Is Buggy; Wait for 13.1 ※

I wasn’t planning on upgrading until 13.1 anyway because I wanted to make sure I was running the same version on the iPad as well, but apparently that’s been moved up to the 24th, which is great news.

Rui Carmo
September 15^th 2019, at late afternoon · 3 min read

Post-Vacation Blues

So I went on vacation, started going through all my personal To-Dos, and… Got stuck on a couple and didn’t actually get around to tackle any of the beefy ones, and now I’m back at work. And, of course my schedule is a mess again–I’m booked solid to the far end of October.

Rui Carmo
September 11^th 2019, at dawn · 1 min read

Series 5 ※

Even with Android Wear devices having had a variety of always on displays from the beginning, the Series 5 is a bit of a surprise in the way Apple decided to go with that feature, and probably the only thing announced yesterday that appeals to me.

The rest (other than TV+ pricing for the US and no OS release dates mentioned on stage) was pretty predictable, and by no means life-changing: My iPhone XS is fine, the new iPad is just an A10 (and is great in other aspects), etc. I am still on the fence regarding getting a Pro or something else, and there were no interesting updates in that regard.

Also, good thing the Series 3 watch is still on the lineup - that means it will still have a few more OS updates.

Rui Carmo
September 9^th 2019, at breakfast · 1 min read

The Sunsetting Of Python 2 ※

This has been in the cards for so long and there has been so much (often uninformed) discussion I’m actually surprised the FAQ has an entry titled “I didn’t hear anything about this till just now.”

I switched all my projects to Python 3 gradually (targeting 3.5, a little over a year ago), and it’s been truly painless. Having used it since 1.2, I can appreciate how far it’s come and how things have changed since (literally) the turn of the century.

It’s still my go-to programming language, and I’m looking forward to PyPy and Cython improvements in ARM - it will never be the fastest language on the planet (I look to plain C, Go and Java for that), but its ecosystem still gives me the most bang for the buck with the least hassle, and that, I think, is the real reason why it’s been so successful over the years.