I have bought a JBL Flip 6 Bluetooth speaker to replace a seemingly dying Bose SoundLink Mini II. The Flip is good for its size and price, but the SoundLink is just…better. Possibly worth the price difference better.
I perversely hope Dramatica keeps failing to show any visible progress in making a 64-bit release of their fiction brainstorming software, because it might eventually kick me into making my vaguely-sketched-out alternative.
The weather is (usually) one of Florida’s (increasingly few) saving graces.
Safe and secure under an ancient oak tree, but definitely not on a schedule.
In a quest to see if a problem I’ve been having with a wifi-enabled A/V receiver is actually the house wifi, I’ve switched out my old router for two Eero Pro 6s. It’s too early to be positive it’ll fix the receiver, but everything is a LOT faster suddenly.
I demoed the active speakers I’m considering replacing my home theatre system with, now that I have no space for surrounds, and it’s really good—but the local dealer has a 25% restocking fee if I do an in-home audition and take it back. I want to support local stores, but…yikes.
I saw someone post a screenshot of Mark Zuckerberg announcing “Meta Verified” and genuinely thought it was Zuckerberg dryly trolling Elon Musk, not a real product.
Not thrilled with Akamai killing the Linode brand. The product is the same for now, but it’s hard not to get Joyent/Textdrive flashbacks here, as they kept pushing their low-end customers out the door in pursuit of bigger and bigger fish.
Time to begin the Update All The Things dance. I have content caching enabled on my Mac Studio to theoretically make this marginally faster, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a difference in practice.
I was in a Best Buy with a Magnolia Hi-Fi substore in it and an employee—who actually knew about hi-fi—suggested Best Buy was “sunsetting” that concept. If true, that’s a shame; they carry KEF, Arcam, and a few other good but hard-to-find audio brands.
I’m slowly edging toward the idea of replacing my 5.1-now-3.0 home theater setup with a two-channel audio system. Despite the temptation, probably not just two HomePods (no matter how I slice it, they’ll be a step down sound-wise). But what?
Every time I take the iPad out with me for serious portable computing, I’m reminded why I like it—with the Smart Folio keyboard (no, not the Magic Keyboard) it’s so light and versatile. But it is just so easy to smack into OS/software-driven limitations.
Hanging out in the International Drive/Sand Lake area of Orlando. Way back when, I didn’t have the context to interpret this as “the Vegas Strip without the casinos,” but it is—all bars, gift shops, boutiques and celebrity chef restaurants.
I’m currently carrying my iPhone 12 without a case, and it feels positively illicit.
St. Petersburg, Florida, is so cool a city in some ways. If only we could replace Ron DeSantis with someone more liberal, like Joe Manchin. Yes, I know what I said.
Are some folks seriously pulling a Twitter-esque performative outrage dance of “how dare they call their Mastodon app ‘Ivory’?” Do we have to do this? Look. Tapbots makes robots. Ivory is a robot elephant. So it’s obviously artificial ivory. You’re welcome.
Just as a heads-up again, if you’re following me from Mastodon, it’s better to follow my actual Mastodon account (@chipotle@mstdn.social) now that I have one, not my Micro.blog account.
I finally remembered this Mac has Stage Manager, so I just enabled it, and after about five minutes of use I can definitively say I have no idea what’s going on here. It’s multiple screens! It’s a one-window interface! It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping! What? Huh? What?
I’m sure not every British TV show has credits set in Gill Sans. Just, like, 95% of them.
As much as I’ve migrated a lot of my life back to the Mac, it’s still really fun to be able to use the iPad in portrait mode with an external keyboard for writing. Maybe I’m secretly hoping iPadOS 17 will pull me back to the iPad as my out-in-the-world device.
After my return to California, my totally scientific empirical analysis is that “woke” states make better beer. Sorry.
If you’re looking for a decent macOS Mastodon client, your options are:
- Ice Cubes
Seriously, right now that’s it. Get into the Test Flight. testflight.apple.com/join/tqI3…
The downside of returning to the Bay Area for a week is that it makes me acutely aware of what I’m missing now.
The more I poke at the idea for this application, the more I think there’s something there—but it’s a dilemma whether to try and make it a web app, or a real Mac app. (Or first one and then the other? Argh.)
The hotel I’m staying at in San Jose this week has cardboard sleeves for their coffee cups with the Wawa logo on them, and I am really curious about that given there are no Wawas within at least a thousand miles.