The commoditization of CI/CD is a thing these days, and I, for one, welcome our build automation overlords. Or, rather, more overlords.

This is becoming a very crowded market: I used GitLab CI since the very beginning, have a bunch of things in Travis (which I’ve been moving to Azure DevOps, namely my multi-architecture Docker pipelines), and everyone seems to be running Jenkins on-premise (it became the de facto standard, despite its temperamental nature and sharp edges)…

So for me the real issue these days is not whether you should use CI/CD or which tools to adopt, but whether you actually take advantage of it in your internal processes.

Also, I’m really curious as to what this means for the Azure DevOps free tier, (since this is actually running a fork of the same agents and appears to be running on Azure compute), but that’s anothet story.

An interesting read, and a timely reminder that there are a lot of traditional, background (almost legacy) services that can be exploited on any mobile device.

The Visual Voicemail bits were especially interesting to me, since I was involved in getting that to work at Vodafone and I always felt the entire thing was a bit of a hack (for which our voicemail provider - Comverse at the time, if I recall correctly - happily charged us an insane amount of money, but I digress).

Considering they are operating in a super-saturated market, the YoY results for this quarter are still remarkable, no matter what the naysayers are raging on about it being “below expectations”.

If you take the long view, yes, the iPhone isn’t selling as much (no smartphone is, in general, and especially not this time of year). And there are some lines doing (surprisingly) better than others. But demand has shifted, and it’s pretty obvious that Services is where growth needs to be.

I’m still skeptical that Apple gets services in general, though.

I’ve been using the 2.80 betas for a while (and Blender itself on and off for decades) and it never ceases to amaze me how long it took them to make left-click select the (sane) default.

If you’re using a Mac with a beefy Radeon GPU (a rarity these days, but likely for my readership), AMD has an updated ProtRender plugin for 2.80 that you might want to look into (although it seems to render some materials differently than Cycles on other GPUs).

This is a severe blow to Qualcomm, although the purists in the industry have always been critical of Intel’s stuff.

But even as the underdog in a highly competitive segment, Intel’s tech is still a great way for Apple to become even more vertically integrated.

And there was much rejoicing throughout the land, for people would be able to trust their primary input devices once more.

There have been hints (and there will be no end of “no more TouchBar/better keyboard” jokes) but this is both interesting timing and probably long overdue.

Like Gruber points out, Apple’s product pipeline and planning cycle is long enough for the effects to be latent, but it is still something to worry about in this age of relentless business operations Tim has brought to the company.

After all, if both your software and hardware innovation starts petering out, you lose your competitive edge.

Or, like Steve would have probably said, your soul.

I’ve done this via Wi-Fi, obviously, but a direct Ethernet-over-USB connection is something I never tried from an iPad, and it should also work with Lightning devices (and the right dongles). And its been possible for ages, so I’m partially kicking myself for never having tried it.

Would be nicer to do it via Bluetooth, though, and, in a perfect world, to something that was the same size as the Zero but with more CPU.and RAM–or, you know, to an actual UNIX userland inside the iPad…

Update: It was much easier than I thought to get Bluetooth PAN to work for Raspbian Stretch and Buster alike. here’s a gist with the required config, works great to SSH to pi.local (which gets automatically announced via Rendezvous).

This is awesome, and a very welcome upgrade. I wish they’d added some on-board storage instead of the extra HDMI out (2GB of RAM and a little flash would have been the sweet spot for me), but 4GB RAM is way above what I expected for this iteration, and if I could spare the cash I’d buy a half-dozen and build myself a new cluster.

But this will be a killer solution for digital signage (time to dust off the stuff I wrote years back for Codebits and PixelsCamp, perhaps?).

Considering that Docker Desktop has been feeling largely neglected for a long while (I subscribe to a handful of long-standing bugs, and keep having to remove the auto-start registry keys it insists on leaving behind), this is a good thing.

But the best thing for me is that, with WSL 2, you have zero need for it if (like me) you live inside a terminal, and I wish the same were effectively possible on the Mac (which it mostly is, but I don’t want to maintain my own HyperKit hacks).

Having read about (and watched videos of) iPadOS, I still get the feeling that this is much ado about a few little tweaks (again, Apple sweating out the details and doing incremental improvements) rather than an actual breakthrough.

I think the main reason for that is that I have a profoundly different take on what “work” means than Federico–like one of my friends said the other day, there is a lot more to the “work” that we do than, say, wrangling Markdown documents, and to this day there is, for instance, no generic web development story for the iPad (very few scripting languages, no way to run anything “normal” locally, etc.), nor a full featured “knowledge worker” setup (you can’t use most professional Office features locally on an iPad, and even corporate e-mail and calendaring is still a pain).

All we really have are cute workarounds, and excellent (but often short-lived) third-party apps that fill some gaps for some of the people, some of the time.

It’s a new start, yes, but still a way off from the status quo.

This is pretty much all I ever wanted, including native mouse support (as an Accessibility option, and apparently limited to USB only for now) and SMB file access.

Amazingly, my iPad mini 4 is still supported, which is an extra nice touch.

I honestly found Apple’s wording to be dishonest, period.

The $99 developer tax is the sole reason I only developed mobile apps for Android even though I use Apple devices first and foremost–not because I can’t afford it, but because I find a lot of it purely insulting (the limitations in sideloads, the hassle of having to rebuild your personal apps periodically, and, of course, the “added value” of the largely inhospitable developer documentation).

My kids write iOS apps in Pythonista, Scriptable and Swift Playgrounds and the eldest actually writes Python with Cocoa bindings, but helping him evolve beyond that and setting up a “family” developer account seems like a first world problem I don’t want to have, especially if I have to pay $99 for any of it.

Honestly, I don’t think the fee is even a good deterrent against junk apps, since the App Store is already full of them and the app review process (which is a legend unto itself) seems wide off the mark there.

But I would love for the developer program to be recognizably worth anything at this point. I just don’t see the incentive for hobbyists to develop for iOS (or the Mac), and we pay enough for the privilege of using the devices, with all the compromises inherent to iOS at this point.

Why keep those barriers? And, more to the point, why lie about them?