I’m seeing a lot of people being excited, today, about putting in their orders for the first visionOS devices. Although it would be easy to dismiss this as simple Apple fan dribbling, their excitement is sort of hyperbolic. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” says one person, talking about how now is theContinue reading “Just Say No to AR”
Category Archives: Grumpy Old Man
The Mysterious Fix
And now that we’re home and I’ve got a decently fast and wide connection (compared to the ship)…I’ve spent a bunch of time rebuilding and testing my various layers of Docker images. And guess what? Ubuntu “jammy” with OpenSSL 3 compiles my stuff just fine. *sigh*. Again, the lesson here is that people who writeContinue reading “The Mysterious Fix”
Hell Is Certain Other People
So, there’s this basic tactic of the pitch man: promise to tell the customer something interesting, but then go off and talk about other stuff. Periodically, the other stuff gets interrupted with a reminder that if the customer keeps listening, they’re about to get the really great thing, but first, there’s this other stuff toContinue reading “Hell Is Certain Other People”
More Disconnection Thinking
Here on the ship, we have satellite Internet. This means that, at a good moment, I’ve got round-trip ping times to google.com at just over half a second (~660ms) and download speeds that seem to average around a megabyte per minute. Furthermore, access to the satellite Internet is on a paid basis, so you haveContinue reading “More Disconnection Thinking”
Oh, Xcode
Okay, so, Mastodon. Yay, there’s a web interface! Great, but…do you know anyone who wants to interact with, say, Twitter, via the web interface and not some app that makes it easier to deal with? Right. Enter Mastonaut, except it got started before SwiftUI was really a thing for macOS, so it’s all AppKit andContinue reading “Oh, Xcode”
Conflict
I am gonna surprise precisely no-one by saying, I do not like conflict. I’m conflict-avoidant. I don’t like having to confront someone and tell them they’re wrong, or that I don’t like what they’re doing, or anything even close to that. That means, of course, that when I’ve finally got the determination to enter conflict,Continue reading “Conflict”
Thug History
I’ve been listening to a lot of history books, courses, and podcasts and here’s what I have learned about the Roman state, both republic and empire: it was run purely on the basis of raw power. That’s a nice family you have there — yeah, I’ll take it. Whatever I can do is what isContinue reading “Thug History”
Never Ending Commerce
Is it ever not cinnamon scented pine cone season? Asking for every grocery store in Northern California.
Effort “humps”
You know what makes me hate processing the mail and paying bills? Calling a billing phone number only to get a robot voice tree that starts out telling me the business hours … when I am calling during those business hours. Then, making me jump through a bunch of hoops to pay a goddamn bill.Continue reading “Effort “humps””
Put a Computer In It, Part…A Jillion
Got an email just now, from the marketing department of a company that makes some server software that I occasionally use. The notification of new email popped up on my screen, with a snippet of the body saying that cyberattacks are increasing in sophistication and volume, so I should…presumably, the rest of the email wasContinue reading “Put a Computer In It, Part…A Jillion”