Technology

My hot take on Apple’s March 8, 2022 event

A list!

  • iPhone SE: Unexciting but necessary update. Bumping the price by $30 seems like classic Apple penny-pinching, but is more likely due to the addition of 5G. The design is looking a tad dated, but for people who prefer Touch ID, this is it.
  • iPad Air: I don’t know why anyone would buy the 11″ iPad Pro now. This should be the “regular” iPad but Apple is pitching it exactly as if it was a “Pro” model. Muddled marketing at its best. Yes, there are differences between this and the 11″ Pro, but they are mostly meaningless. I almost wonder if Apple is going to kill off the 11″ model altogether. They seem to like equating “Pro” to size (which is dumb).
  • Green iPhone 13: It’s green. Do new colors midway between models really goose sales? I guess they must. Also, the sizzle reel showing off the color was almost disturbing with its jagged, sharp-edged imagery that also included a praying mantis because I guess they’re green?
  • Baseball on Apple TV+. Timing is embarrassing, with the season start in limbo due to a labor dispute. Also, boring. Sorry, baseball fans.
  • Mac Studio: Basically a phat Mac mini, but given that the Intel Mac mini lives on in the line-up, this is not intended to be a replacement for a higher end Mac mini, but its own thing, an in-between machine that sits between the mini and the Mac Pro. I think Apple got this mostly right. The top end model is expensive, but cheaper than the current Mac Pro, so I guess that’s some kind of progress. Apple actually put ports on the front. The world did not end. Why did it take decades for Apple to get over its form before function fetish? I don’t know. But this is a solid little powerhouse.
  • On the other hand, the new Studio Display is overpriced and loaded with dubious features (does it really need a good sound system with spatial audio?) The worst aspect is the included stand is literally the terrible tilt-only stand used on the 24″ iMac and if you want something height-adjustable (you know, like every other monitor on Earth) it will cost $400 extra ($500 Canadian). This is obscene and disgraceful. I honestly don’t know how Tim Cook can justify this kind of consumer-hostile bullshit. A height-adjustable stand is table stakes, not a premium extra. Absolutely disgusting, the nadir of everything Apple has come to represent at its worst. I think it casts a pall over everything they announced. Yes, I have strong opinions on this!

Overall, I am getting kind of tired of these events. Really, everything could have been a press release, none of it was particularly noteworthy. The Mac Studio is nice, but not really a revolution, it just demonstrates that Apple can sometimes move beyond its conservative timidity with its product lines. And even now people out there will be crying that it makes the line confusing and no one will know what to buy, etc. Bah.

On a scale of 1 to 10 Polishing Cloths, I rate this event 4 out of 10 Polishing Cloths.

The Verge’s unique grading curve for laptops

Review: Dell XPS 15 review: too hot to handle

From the above review:

Also from the above review:

To clarify, this is 8.5/10, not 8.5/100.

I can only guess that if the laptop didn’t run loud, hot (over 100°C at times–which is to say, the temperature at which water boils) and had poor battery life, it may have rated 11/10. But I suppose we’ll never know.

Instagram: Don’t fear the dark (pattern)

In case for a brief moment you thought the people behind Instagram weren’t committed to being awful, check this TechCrunch article on how they have changed the daily time limit option so that the minimum time before you can have the app warn you to take a break is now 30 minutes, instead of 10, and also made the longest option (3 hours) the first one at the top of the list.

I don’t know that the people designing this stuff actually believe they’re fooling anyone, but they are bad and should feel bad. I can’t wait for everything Meta owns to crash and burn.

Instagram quietly limits ‘daily time limit’ option

The MacBook Pro Pro

It just occurred to me that the MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro chip can be called The MacBook Pro Pro. I kind of like it, it sounds cute. It also underscores how Apple is bad at names.

Meanwhile, I am still mulling over my Mac situation. After getting DisplayLink (mostly) working with my M1 MacBook Air, I’m seeing my options as:

  • Do nothing
    • Pro: Zero cost
    • Con: All the fiddly bits with using the M1 Air remain
  • Trade the Air for an M1 Mac Mini
    • Pro: Minimal increase in cost, supports two external displays without hacks like DisplayLink, takes up less space
    • Con: Can’t pick up and go for when I want a portable machine. To be fair, the last time I used a laptop outside of home was over two years ago and the Air has never left my desk.
  • Trade the Air for a MacBook Pro Pro/Max 14″ model
    • Pro: Supports multiple displays without hackery, can still be used on the go if needed, more powerful system for video editing, modeling and drawing, all of which I am doing a lot more of now
    • Con: Expensive, unlikely to utilize the actual laptop part, so the snazzy mini-LED display would be largely wasted, may encounter first gen issues
  • Trade the Air for a higher-end Mac mini
    • Pro: All the advantages of the M1 Mac Mini, but with more power
    • Con: Doesn’t actually exist yet, will be more expensive

Options I’m not considering:

  • Any iMac. Despite the simplicity, I already have two QHD monitors and don’t want or need an all-in one computer
  • Mac Pro. Way too expensive, obsolete as it runs on Intel chips and any replacement will be, if anything, even more expensive still
  • Entry-level MacBook Pro. Right now it offers little over the M1 Air and a newer version sounds similarly non-compelling, an awkward compromise between the Air and the high-end Pro laptops.

There’s a rumored Apple event for March 8th, which is supposed to reveal the newest iPhone SE (mega-boring–sorry, SE lovers!) and an updated iPad Air (also boring as it’ll just be a spec bump). Vague rumors suggest some kind of Mac will be revealed. I’m hoping it will be the higher end Mac mini, so I can see what the premium would be over the current M1 and decide if it’s worth it. If not, I may go with the Pro Pro. Because it’s Pro.

DisplayLink dilemma done and dealt with

Well, mostly.

I decided to take another run at getting both monitors working with the DisplayLink USB adapter on my MacBook Air (previous attempts here) because I am a silly person.

I started by downloading the latest DisplayLink drivers and…that was the solution, actually. With the new drivers in place, both monitors began working. Hooray!

But…when I put the MacBook Air into clamshell mode, the “main” monitor suddenly stops displaying. It might be a refresh rate issue, but it could also be one of a million billion other things, and it’s working well enough now that I’m considering this issue sufficiently resolved.

Now that I have dual monitors working on the Mac, I can better evaluate using the configuration and I can’t help but feel that macOS still trails behind Windows in terms of things like multiple monitor support, as well as window and file management. A lot of the systems feel like they were designed 20-30 years ago and haven’t really changed much since then. Sure, even in Windows 11 you can still find legacy bits dating back 20 years or more, too, but it’s usually just some semi-obscure outdated icons, or an old-style dialog box. The actual systems in place are modern.

On the Mac, you have weird decisions like making the dock only appear on one screen in extended mode and having to click near the bottom of the active screen to move it over.

But man, the fonts render so nicely!

(I’ll have my comprehensive Mac vs. PC post up soon. It’ll be like living through the 90s again!)

Obsidian + iCloud Drive + Mac + PC = Bad

I have been reasonably pleased with Obsidian as my note-taking app so far. The interface is minimal and gets the job done, even if the UI doesn’t look at all native whether on Mac or PC.

I’ve been using it primarily on my Windows 11 PC, as that’s my main machine, but have also used it on the iPad (no issues) and Mac (no issues, but with a big fat asterisk, as I will explain right after this parenthetical).

Where I have run into problems is with the sync when using iCloud Drive.

My main vault (folder) for Obsidian is on iCloud Drive, and it works fine on the PC, saving and updating seamlessly. If I open the vault on the Mac, it also works fine there (as expected, since iCloud Drive is an Apple service).

The problem arises after a few specific steps when using Obsidian:

  1. Access files in vault on PC
  2. Access files in same vault on Mac
  3. Access files in same vault again on PC

When Step 3 happens, Obsidian will pop up a message saying it is downloading files or indexing files. The latter is a one-time operation, per the pop-up.

Notification dialog (of doom)

Downloading files happens each time when a file is presumably changed in Obsidian on another machine. Note that I tend to close Obsidian on one platform before accessing its vault on another, though this is not strictly speaking necessary. The issue happens when I do not have the vault in question open before Step 3. I haven’t tested with the vault still open on the Mac before opening it back up on PC.

After downloading, the vault on the PC will now show the original file, along with one or more duplicates, with (1), (2) etc. added to the filenames. These files will not open and clicking on them will pop up the Automatic file downloads dialog again, like the circle of life except in this circle nothing actually happens and everyone probably starves. It’s a mess. Here’s a shot of how the file appears in the vault list:

No opening permitted!

If I open the Obsidian folder in iCloud Drive where this vault lives, Windows 11 will indicate that it has a sync pending. The contents, as expected, reflect what Obsidian is reporting:

Double-clicking one of these files will try to open it in iA Writer, which is set as my default Markdown editor in windows. This dialog appears:

I don’t sync so!

If I return to the vault on the Mac, the two files are gone. They don’t show in Obsidian, and they are gone from the related vault folder in iCloud Drive. Something is clearly happening when the vault is accessed on the PC after being accessed on the Mac where the sync is failing. Maybe it’s a limitation of iCloud Drive. I’m not sure.

I tried a few experiments with new vaults, and found I could replicate the buggy results easily.

My current solution has been to create a folder on the PC and share it over the local network with the Mac. This seems to be working so far and has the added security of keeping things off the internet. This means I won’t be able to access the vault from the iPad, but that’s an acceptable loss.

I want to blame Apple for this, but I’m not sure who the real culprit is. It does make me hesitant to use iCloud Drive for anything other than basic file storage, though–certainly not for file-sharing. Part of me wants to dig deeper into this to determine the cause, but working on the file shared locally through my own network is probably a better solution, anyway. If this also blows up, I’ll update this post.

In conclusion, technology has a ways to go. I’m pretty sure Steve Jobs would be yelling at someone right now if he were still alive.

UPDATE, May 26, 2022: Since I have forsaken using Obsidian on the iPad, I decided to move the main vault to OneDrive, where in the subsequent months it has worked without issue on both Mac and PC. So now I am a bit more willing to give Apple the stink eye.

Whoa Nelli

Ah, Christmas eve. It’s quiet as I type this, the temperature has dropped to zero degrees, and a big chill is forecast for the next five days. Environment Canada summed it up thusly:

Wind chill values: below minus 20.
Temperatures: Near record cold temperatures next week.

I have my winter woolies ready!

But tonight, before tucking in, I became annoyed enough at the narrow scroll bar used on outlook.com that I sought a remedy.

This was a terrible mistake.

To elaborate a bit, Firefox normally uses regular width scroll bars on sites, but sites can use thin ones if they choose. They may look sleek but are hard to see and harder to manipulate and really, just dumb.

I did find a remedy quickly, in the form of a Firefox extension that lets you override the browser settings to go with a permanent “wide” scroll bar. Despite the name, it’s just the regular width we’ve all known and loved for the last hundred years. It worked great. I was pleased.

I should have stopped there.

Instead, I noticed–as I was on the Firefox extensions page–that I had a whole slew of updates available for my extensions. most are disabled, but a few of the active ones also had updates, including the speed dial I use for the new tab page, called NelliTab. I have discussed this extension before and quite like it. It wasn’t until later that I noticed the update came out today–December 24th–and that the dedicated developer might have been drunk on spicy eggnog (edit–the update actually came out on December 6th, I misread the install date as the date of release).

Why do I think this? After installing the update, NelliTab stopped working. It would only show a serene blank page. I did all the usual troubleshooting, but nothing worked. I then went with the nuclear option–I removed the extension, then added it back. This reset its settings, but it would not take long to tweak it back to my liking.

This appeared to work–the extension popped back up and all my bookmarks were in place, but without the icons that make them easy to scan. For most sites, NelliTab will grab the site icon after you’ve visited the site once, so over time, all sites will show an icon in NelliTab. Except that wasn’t happening. Again, more troubleshooting. Nothing I did would fix this. Without the icons NelliTab is worse than a list of bookmarks because it is more difficult to scan. I cursed myself for updating.

I decided to go with the even more nuclear option: a restore point. Fortunately, I had one from just two days ago, when I installed the update for DaVinci Resolve. With some trepidation I chose it and waited. I waited for some time. I waited long enough that I became concerned.

But finally, my PC rebooted, and everything looked pretty much the same, as expected. I loaded up Firefox to take in the wonder of my now-un-updated NelliTab page. Except it was the exact same broken page as before. The restore point did nothing except take up time.

So, I’m not sure what to do next. If I do a refresh of Firefox, it’s going to affect everything, which will be a major pain in the patootie. There doesn’t seem to be a way to step back to a previous version of NelliTab, though I haven’t investigated this in detail yet (it’s getting late).

SPECIAL REPORT: I interrupt this post to inform you that a big ass stink bug just started casually strolling across my desk. What the hell. I can’t remember the last time I saw one. I didn’t even know what it was until I looked it up. I know a lot more about stink bugs now.

I put it in a glass covered with plastic wrap. It climbed up the glass and then sat attached upside down, to the plastic wrap. Reading up on them, it seems there are pros and cons to having them around, but mostly cons and so I put it in the freezer, as an entomologist said that’s the best way to get rid of them. I suppose it’s humane, sort of? I still feel bad. But I have this weird feeling that if I just tossed it outside it would make its way in again and breed or something. Something stinky. Anyway, I’m sorry, stink bug!

We now return to the Firefox extension crisis already in progress.

I’m writing this post in Edge because I can’t bear to use Firefox with a broken NelliTab. That almost sounds like a country song. I feel like this is a country song, a sad one. I’ll take another crack at fixing this tomorrow, hopefully imbued with the magical spirit of Christmas to help me.

Remember, kids, if something is working, DON’T UPDATE IT. I have re-learned this harsh lesson once again.

UPDATE: I looked through a pile of new tab/bookmark extensions (and still have oodles more to look through) but found none that really work the way NelliTab does. This makes me sad. I have manually added icons back to the sites I use most often in NelliTab as a band aid solution for now, and also submitted a bug report to the extension's Github page. We'll see how it goes, but for now I'm still using NelliTab.

The battle for multiple displays on an M1 MacBook Air, Chapter 1

Right now, I am caught between two worlds. Specifically, Mars and Jupiter. I’m stuck in the asteroid belt, send help!

Just kidding.

I use both a Windows 11 PC and an M1 MacBook Air. Both are very nice machines and perform well. I think Windows 11 has caught up in many ways to macOS in terms of appearance and UI, and even surpasses it in some ways (window management remains much better, as I’ve noted before).

I would be Windows-only save for one thing: my fiction writing is done in Ulysses, which is a Mac-only app. Now, it’s true that my fiction writing has been moribund (very, very moribund) for the last year or so and if I had no intent on changing this, I could just put aside the MacBook Air for the fabled time when I’d actually need to go back out into the world with a laptop again.

But I am intent on actually trying to revive my fiction writing and I’m too lazy to look for or switch to another writing app, so I’m keeping my Mac–for now, at least.

My previous setup was a single 27″ monitor and it worked well for both PC and Mac. Switching between the two was not instant, but it was pretty easy and only took a second or two. I added a second monitor, which has been glorious for my Windows 11 setup. However, for ?reasons? Apple deigned to make its initial Apple silicon offering, the System on Chip (Soc) known as the M1, only work with a single external display.

This means I can only use one of my two 27″ monitors with my MacBook Air and I am sad.

But wait!

You can use a DisplayLink adapter or dock to sneakily connect more displays via USB. It’s confirmed to work with all M1 Macs (it’s not needed for the newer M1 Pro and M! Max SoCs, since they support multiple external displays). I procured one of these devices, specifically a StarTech USB-A to HDMI DisplayLink adapter. I downloaded the latest DisplayLink drivers (also required), connected the adapter to a free USB-A port on my CalDigit 3 dock and…it didn’t work.

With both monitors connected, only one or the other would work, neither would work at the same time (the “permanent” monitor is working via USB-C to HDMI).

Thus I began troubleshooting.

It’s worth mentioning here that the reason I went with a DisplayLink adapter as a solution is because it would be the cheapest way to get a multi-monitor Mac setup going (about $100). The next cheapest option would be to trade-in or sell my Air and get an M1 Mac mini, which supports two external monitors because it really only supports the same number as the Air, but since it doesn’t come with a display, it can actually display to two external monitors. This option, no matter how I might finagle it, other than winning the lottery, would cost more than $100.

Troubleshooting involved a lot of the usual stuff. I won’t go into details. It was bad enough that I suffered through it. No one else should suffer through it by proxy.

In the end it’s still not working. I have one thing left to try–switch the “permanent” connection from HDMI to DisplayPort, but this would upset my PC configuration, which is working just dandy, so I am loathe to do it. I might, if I manage to reach the right balance of bored and desperate.

For now, my Mac work continues to be single monitor, with the second display dimly showing my forlorn reflection and nothing else.

I have considered getting one of those new MacBook Pros by selling my Air and using other monies I have from previous trade-ins, but there’s no getting around it costing a lot more than $100, and it would be serious overkill for writing. I rationalize it by saying I’m getting into game development now and video editing and it would be useful for those things. But my PC already works well for those. But it is now and shiny and solves a problem, and so I ponder, occasionally glancing up to that forlorn figure looking back at me.

tl;dr: DisplayLink is definitely a hack when it comes to M1 Macs. This isn’t the technology’s fault, really, it’s Apple’s strange and arbitrary regression on monitor support for their first batch of Apple SoCs. Still, it’s important to remember what you may be getting into before making the leap, as I did.

Also note: All PCs happily support multiple displays without any trickery!

I end with a repeat of this:

That darn cloud: A technology reminder

One of the reasons I chose to try Obsidian as my new note-taking app is that it works with plain text files and stores them locally, meaning there is less likelihood of file corruption due to weird syncing/internet issues. As they put in on their site:

In our age when cloud services can shut down, get bought, or change privacy policy any day, the last thing you want is proprietary format and data lock-in.

With Obsidian, your data sits in a local folder. Never leave your life’s work held hostage in the cloud again.

Taken from the Obsidian site

But they also state:

Your notes live on your device, period. You can encrypt them or back them up however you want; it’s your decision, not ours. Plain text files let you do various sync, encryption, and data processing on top of it. Obsidian plays nice with Dropbox, Cryptomator, and any software that works with plain text files.

Here they suggest you can back up or sync files–if you choose–using whatever suitable service you may have access to.

I chose to use iCloud Drive, because it lets me sync between the three devices I’m likeliest to use Obsidian on:

  • Windows 11 PC
  • MacBook Air
  • iPad Pro

It has worked fine so far. But then it didn’t. Ack. What happened was I restarted my PC (because Windows 11 still requires reboots after most updates for reasons) and when I reloaded Obsidian, it began to sync files and folders, and to also index them, which it promised was a one-time operation. It then seemed to cough up a hairball on one file I had open previously (my random newsletter) and started creating non-working duplicates of it. It renamed the original file. It was just generally weird.

On the iPad and MacBook, things seemed to be working normally, so it appeared to be a Windows-specific issue. I managed to create a local version of the files and folders on my C: drive and that is working as expected, but on PC the iCloud version is still behaving weirdly. I might try duplicating the local version and see if that works.

My main point here is that the makers of Obsidian are right–while data failures are possible on local storage (SSD could suddenly die, for example), when your stuff lives in the cloud, you increase the surface area for failure/corruption and can potentially lose your data forever if you don’t have any local backup.

This has been a good reminder for me, albeit a somewhat unwelcome one.

I’m still deciding how best to maintain my Obsidian vault. Local network storage might be a way to go. We’ll see.

Welcome to 1993 (again), courtesy of Grandpa Apple

Apple has awarded the 2021 Mac Game of the Year Award to…

Myst.

Yes, the same game that came out in 1993 for the Mac. This is a full 3D version of the game, but it’s still got all the same puzzles, so it’s really just a nicer-looking version of the same game that came out 28 years ago and ran on System 7.

Is it fair to say this sums up gaming on Macs? Not entirely, but more than a little. Kind of embarrassing, considering there were better contemporary games that could have been highlighted. Apple is devolving into the corporate equivalent of the dad-soon-to-be-grandpa who’s grown conservative, has questionable taste and likes his food packaged and processed, not that hippie natural stuff.

Using Obsidian to try to keep myself organized

Not actual obsidian, though it would be totally cool if I could find some way to make an igneous rock keep my life organized.

In this case, it’s the Obsidian note-taking app, which promises “a second brain for you, forever.” This sounds suspiciously like promising immortality, but I’ll settle for just keeping all of my notes in a single location, so my current and only brain has an easier time remembering to find things.

Why Obsidian. Well, let’s face it, it’s a new (to me) app and I like new toys, so I had to try it out. There’s a mobile version that can sync over iCloud Drive, allowing me to make notes from any device, which is convenient. So far this doesn’t sound much different from other note-taking apps like OneNote or Evernote, but Obsidian also uses a plain folder structure and text files, so everything is portable and accessible through simple apps like Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac). Because nothing is proprietary or stored in the cloud (unless you choose to put it there), your data is secure and yours alone. Obsidian also supports Markdown for quick formatting and has some features that promise to expand it beyond just a random collection of notes, such as:

  • Backlinking. Obsidian allows you to easily create links between notes, expanding what notes can do.
  • Plugins. Both core and community-made, extending the capabilities of the app.
  • Graph view. This visually shows relationships between notes.

Really, if I can just stick to Obsidian for all my note-taking, that would be a huge improvement over having to search for notes in OneNote, Ulysses, iA Writer, Drafts, the iOS Notes app, Notepad, Notepad++ and whatever else I’ve used over the years. None of these are bad programs–some of them I really enjoy using! But scattering my notes over all of them just makes it harder to find things, and stuff gets lost or forgotten. Or both. Lostgotten.

We’ll see how it goes, but I am cautiously optimistic that this is the beginning of some actual organization on my part and will usher in 2022: The Year of Really Fantastic Organization.