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.

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.

An extraordinarily beefy review.

I like to keep tabs on Android (after all, I used to do custom builds of it for my own devices, and still fiddle with x86 builds now and then), but looking at this is like dipping into an alternate timeline – it looks enough like iOS to be familiar, and yet can do so much more even as its ecosystem, reference hardware and update policy all remain a broken mess.

And it’s been this way for so long that I don’t think even single-source reference hardware from a brand with actual global retail presence (and an end to Samsung-like pastiches) would be able to fix things now–or, indeed, ever.

(I have seen exactly zero Pixel phones in my neck of the woods over the past couple of years, excepting two Googlers I hang out with from time to time.)

Out of the rumor extravaganza that’s hit the news this week, this is the most interesting bit for me, since despite having bought an XS last year, the prospect of going back to a smaller, saner phone is vastly appealing. Of course, Apple doesnt care one whit what anyone thinks, but speculating about the bits that make most sense to us is a large part of the human condition, so there you have it.

As to the rest of the news regarding next week, I am actually surprised it took them this long to adopt the Pro moniker for the iPhone – it’s a coherent (for Apple) naming scheme that, at last, spans all their (major) product lines. And, of course, I’m quite interested in the rumors of an iPad Pro refresh, since I’ve held off upgrading my iPad mini 4 in order to see what would happen to the rest of the range.

But, overall, I don’t expect many surprises from Apple, either next week or next year. Unless we’re talking about a radical redesign of the MacBook keyboards, I’m not even likely to bother.

piku now has its own GitHub organization, after almost three years. It’s not as if I have any shortage of personal projects, but this one has become a bit more useful to other people than most (thanks largely to contributors like Chris McCormik), so I decided to take the time and split it off into a standalone thing.

It runs pretty much everywhere (any cloud, any kind of CPU) and can currently deploy Python, NodeJS and Java apps (as well as arbitrary binaries). Near-zero overhead, Heroku-like workflow, and just a smidgeon over 1000 lines of code (1087 right now), which means you can understand all of it in one sitting.

It also comes with comprehensive docs (which need cleaning up) and bootstrapping scripts, but most importantly it keeps saving me time whenever I need to deploy simple services, so I’d say it’s been time well spent.

I wish this had happened a little sooner (at least to save me the trouble of wrangling NodeJS a couple of weeks back), but it’s welcome nonetheless, especially with full Linux support tacked on.

There is also a durable Functions SDK in the works, so now I’ve got that to look forward to.

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?).