Rui CarmoI keep telling myself that “boring is good”, and yet things have been so far from boring that a moderately calm week like the past one is an outlier. I’m still mostly unwinding from work, but some geekery has taken place, albeit not particularly exciting stuff.
For instance, I spent a few hours upgrading portions of my personal infrastructure and remedying various changes in the upstream container images, which was a good reminder that containers aren’t magical (particularly when upstream maintainers decide to break existing authentication and security mechanisms).
Desktop Computing
That reminded me that I have to start planning for my next desktop setup, hopefully for year’s end. My current setup is still my pokey i5 iMac with two extra displays, which makes for the most outrageous “thin terminal” ever (I use it daily to work via the corporate WVD/VDI farm, alternating with my standing desk for video calls).
This provides me with huge screen real estate (5K + 2x4K, all driven from the iMac), and is impossible to reproduce with M1 Macs, so my current line of thought has been roughly this:
- I hope Apple has a decent M2 iMac able to support more than one external display
- If not, I’ll just move back to a Mini and get a 49” ultra-wide display, which will give me roughly 2/3 of my current real estate at the expense of Retina sharpness
- Either way, I will likely either move my former hackintosh back to my desk or swap it for a brand new Intel Gen 11 NUC to put alongside any new Mac, so that I can have a Windows machine (or a VM) directly hooked up to a webcam
Since I don’t game (and am still quite happy with my xCloud setup), both the Mac’s integrated GPU and Intel Xe integrated graphics should be plenty, and the only real question in my mind is how Apple will try to cater to the desktop market. The new iMac and the mini are OK, but definitely not enough for my needs.
Music Gear
Speaking of needs, I’ve been trying to find a 61-key MIDI keyboard that would not completely swamp my desk (or dent my bank account).
I (finally) updated my KORG microKEY, which had been unable to talk via Bluetooth to my iPad since iOS 13 – this because the firmware updater only runs on Windows, and I still don’t use Windows outside work (other in a VM, that is). It is a 37-key “mini” keyboard, but quite comfortable and has the additional benefit of not taking up much depth or height (meaning that I can still tuck it under my iMac), and replacing that with a “big” keyboard might be too much.
But for some reason the desktop MIDI controllers I’m interested in don’t seem to support Bluetooth, which would make it a little simpler to use an iPad as DAW/sound module when I am away from my desk–and I am actually considering moving to the iPad exclusiverly for music making, so that’s becoming a pretty strong requirement.
The ideal piece of kit probably does not exist (and I might have to compromise and go for something with USB and less keys like the Arturia KeyLab Essential 49, which is nice if still a tad bulky), but at the very least searching for something suitable will keep me distracted from work.