Today Apple released the updated 13 inch MacBook Pro. As updates go it was pretty tepid. The lower end version is essentially unchanged, still shipping with 8th gen Intel processors, but now with more base storage and the revised Magic keyboard. The magic part is that it’s not prone to fail like the butterfly keyboard. The higher end models include 10th gen processors, but are otherwise pretty much the same as well.
This has led people to speculate that another update is coming later this year, that may include a larger display and other niceties. We shall see.
The important thing here, though, is that with today’s update, Apple is no longer selling any laptops with the butterfly keyboard. From the introduction of the new MacBook in 2015 to today that means that users have been suffering through one of the worst keyboards to ever be fitted into a laptop for five years.
Watching Apple’s flailing attempts to fix the design (multiple times) was painful. And nothing could fix the actual typing experience that some loved, but many actively disliked, or even found uncomfortable (raises hand).
At long last, though, the butterfly keyboard is dead. Hopefully it has taken along with it the obsession with thinness over function that seemed to have Apple designers in its thrall. Yes, the butterfly keyboard was thin. It was also terrible. I still find it amazing that it made it into an actual shipping product (ironically that first product, the new MacBook, was killed after only four years).
Anyway, good job, Apple, for finally purging the butterfly keyboard. But next time don’t make your users suffer through years of a deeply flawed product, OK?
I didn’t intend to stop doing workouts and here it is almost two week since my last one. I am bad. And fat. But it is time to stop morphing into a sloth and morph into a slightly less pudgy human, and so I metaphorically dusted off the treadmill and did a workout tonight.
I made one small tweak–I set the speed to 6.0 (10 km/h pace) instead of the usual 6.5 pace. I was surprised at how different it felt. At 6.5 I have to hold onto the handgrips nearly the entire time, as the treadmill is pulling hard, trying to whisk me off the back. At 6.0 I can hold on with a loose grip and walk without holding at all, though 6.0 is probably near the edge of where that is possible, as I don’t feel entirely steady walking hands-free at this pace.
Overall, I felt fine. The slower pace helped and the 30 minutes went by quickly, even though it still took 30 minutes. The notable differences in the stats are pace (slower treadmill means slower pace, though I was comfortably under the official 10 km/h pace), fewer calories burned (naturally) and a lower BPM (also unsurprising, but nice to see it dropped as much as it did).
Maybe next time I’ll so a mix of speeds. Maybe I’ll actually try jogging. Maybe I won’t wait almost two weeks before doing something again. The world is full of possibilities.
Speed: 6.0 km/h (6.5 km/h)
Incline: 10
Pace: 9:47/km (9:31 km/h)
Time: 30:04 (30:04)
Distance: 3.07 km (3.15 km)
Calories burned: 251 (296)
BPM: 132 (141)
And as of yesterday, it was worse, when I tipped the scales at over 178 pounds for the first time in 12 years.
This is what a full month of working from home looks like, where access to snacks is easy and constant. This is what a pandemic does to my waistline. It expands it.
Looking back since the actual start of WFH on March 18, I can see most of the damage was done in the last 10 days of March, when I quickly packed on more than five pounds. Through April my weight has regularly gone up and down, so ending with only a one pound weight gain seems pretty decent, considering I had put few controls on my eating.
That will change in May because I am now only 10 pounds shy of the overweight version of me that was told by a doctor at a clinic in 2008 that I was a year away from Type II diabetes on my present course.
Some things are different now, of course. I do generally eat much better than I did back then. I still run or work out on the treadmill (though that waned in this last week) and I’ve eliminated sugary drinks from my diet (and am starting to drink more water).
Still, 41 pounds of fat is a lot of fat. I am fat. Jeans are no longer comfortable. I slovenly wear sweatpants and pretend I’m being hip, somehow. I know I need to cut out the snacking, so some exercise every day and get that slim ‘n sexy figure back.
On another positive note, with campus shut down, I was guaranteed to go donut-free for the month. And shall do so again.
Here’s to a slimmer ‘n trimmer May.
The fatty stats:
April 1: 176.3 pounds April 30: 177.3 pounds (up 1.0 pounds)
Year to date: From 171.8 to 177.3 pounds (up 5.5 pounds)
And the body fat:
April 1: 22.5% (39.6 pounds of fat) April 30: 23.1% (41 pounds of fat) (up 1.4 pounds)
On the way to Burnaby Lake, I took this shot of some flowering trees. Pretty!
And a bonus shot of a sign on an electrical box in Lower Hume Park, near the intersection of East Columbia Street. I have no idea what the bird thing is, other than a bird. Thing. It looks like something Picasso might have sketched. It also seems to be suggesting that if you have a key, you still shouldn’t open this. No!
“I understand it could be helpful to open this.” – Donald Trump
Nic and I went for a stroll around the southern half of Burnaby Lake today, taking pictures, enjoying nature and, of course, avoiding people.
The weather was mild, but cloudy and this probably scared a few people off. The majority of those on the trail seemed to be mindful to keep the 2 meters away, or at least as best they could manage, as much of the trail isn’t even 2 meters wide. There were a few dopes, of course, and a surprisingly large number of cyclists. The entrance to the park had a giant sandwich board in place basically saying TAKE YOUR BIKE ELSEWHERE. YES, YOU. But a lot of people are clearly ignoring these signs, perhaps because they think there is no enforcement right now–which may be true, as I did not see any park people or vehicles.
I did see greenery, water and ducks, some of which are below.
First, the standard shot of Burnaby Lake, taken from the bridge at Deer Lake Brook. You can see the baby lily pads popping up all over, as well as the general greenery filling in along the shore.
Next is the little pond adjacent to the lake with a partially sunken log that is popular with ducks. The pond is smaller than usual as we haven’t had much rain for a few months. But the ducks were still there.
This pond is nearby to the other one and nicely captures the fact that the area around the lake is marshland.
And there were a number of these signs dotting the sides of the trail reminding us that we live in COVID times. As I said above, people were generally pretty good about not getting elbow to elbow, though there’s always a few dingbats out and aboot.
Nic was using his telephoto lens to capture amazing shots of birds. Meanwhile I managed this with my iPhone 8:
If I crop as much as I dare, you can see this:
It’s not great, but at least you can tell they are birds. They preened for a bit, then took off, probably because we were standing there staring at them.
Overall, it was a nice outing and the cloudy weather likely worked to our benefit, keeping crowds down. It would have been great running weather, so I may vow yet again to try next weekend to get off the treadmill and into nature and all that.
I’ve noticed a few glitches in Firefox lately, namely it sometimes doesn’t load my pinned tab on start-up (Gmail) or my default site (this very blog). It also seems less snappy than before. It’s possible these problems are related to extensions. For example, I use FVD Speed Dial to replace the new tab page with a pile o’ thumbnails for websites I frequent. I find this works way better for me than bookmarks because I can use two distinct visual cues to quickly choose the site I want: location of the thumbnail (they don’t shift around) and the actual look of the thumbnail (usually a miniature representation of the site). But I have so many of these that Firefox actually takes what feels like a long time to load up.
So last week I decided to again try Microsoft’s Chromium-based version of Edge. It now has Collections, which are basically parts of or entire sites that you can name and group together. I thought this might make a handy substitute for the speed dials and it actually is pretty nice.
But then, while doing work (actual paid work, as I’m still working from home) I noticed in Footprints (the system we use for managing incidents) it would not link knowledge base articles to tickets, requiring me to either not link (bad) or manually generate the link and paste it in (tedious). I just gave up and stopped using Edge.
There might be a fix for this issue and I can work around it, but I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m getting tired of fixing things that don’t work for reasons unknown, and workarounds aren’t that great, either. I want things to actually function properly, without a song and dance. I don’t expect perfection, but I do expect all the basics to behave as you’d expect.
So Edge has been kicked to the curb again. It’s too bad, in a way, because it is pretty snappy, and has some unique features (like the aforementioned collections). On the other hand, though Microsoft claims to care about my privacy, they are a giant corporation and while not as loose with ethics as Google (who basically inverted their famous “Don’t be evil” motto), I’m not sure I entirely trust them, either, as ads are definitely a part of their business in a way they aren’t for Mozilla (or Apple, but Safari sucks and it’s not on PC, anyway).
I’ll probably try Edge again at some point, though. The collections idea intrigues me. And the snappiness was nice.
Side note: For some reason have highlighted products in bold, in a wacky throwback to John C. Dvorak’s old columns in PC Magazine.
EDIT: I did try Edge again, just now (the morning after) and in a CBC News story there were big gaps in a story that I assumed were ads being blocked, but no, it was Twitter embeds. I verified that Twitter is the one tracker on the site blocked by default (by Edge), so I set it to allow tracking. It still won’t show tweets. On the one hand, it’s Twitter, so what am I really losing? On the other, if I want to see tweets, it should just work if I say, “Thou shalt allow tweets.” Even the usual routine of clearing cache and cookies, disabling ad blockers, restarting thew browser etc. has no effect. Edge, you stink!
EDIT, The Sequel: I switched over to the Mac mini to do some things and on a lark decided to try Edge because I am a glutton for punishment. Two things:
Twitter embeds are working on the CBC News site. Weird, but good.
Collections, which are supposed to sync across different systems, do not appear to be syncing, so boo. It may just be syncing slowly, though (hopefully not syncing into the depths to never be seen again).
Bonus third thing: I keep trying to spend more time on the Mac, because it’s where my main writing app is, and keep failing because I can never get mice working the way I want. This tasks me as Kirk tasked Khan. I’m hoping I get a better ending (than Khan).
EDIT, The Sequel to the Sequel: Tried a bunch of typical troubleshooting steps to get Collections to appear/sync on the Mac but no go. Alas. It is hard to turn off the li’l troubleshooter in me, but I will try for now.
While I was on the Mac I also tried the Logitech MX 720 mouse again, both on Bluetooth and with the receiver, after doing a firmware update. And it’s still kind of juddery and glitchy instead of smooth, noticeably worse than the Microsoft Sculpt mouse on Bluetooth, so this does appear to be a Logitech thing. Too bad the Sculpt mouse is so basic. Also I feel a bit dirty using a mouse with a dedicated Windows key on a Mac.
I’ll try yet again next week (update: on PC, that is).
I actually took this on April 23, but didn’t post it then, so pretend I took it today. As I’ve taken photos of the many flowers blooming in the neighborhood, it seems that tulips are the most popular, as they are everywhere. I suspect it’s the variety of colors that draws a lot of people to growing them. That’s just my guess, though, I’m no flowerologist.
I was not overly active today, so decided I better hit ye olde treadmill to make up for it. It was fine. I seemed to sweat more than usual. The stats almost look like I forgot to fix my copy and paste, but my pace and distance were in fact identical to the last workout. BPM was up a little, but not a lot, and I burned off a few more of the million calories I need to go through to get back to my usual weight.
Baby (elephant) steps…
Speed: 6.5 km/h
Incline: 10
Pace: 9:31/km (9:31 km/h)
Time: 30:04 (30:03)
Distance: 3.15 km (3.15 km)
Calories burned: 296 (284)
BPM: 141 (137)
