malvasia bianca

Since the discussion around the effects of generative models doesn’t seem to be going away, I figured I’d give in and write about my point of view of this stuff. Specifically, I wanted to talk about how I see some of the tradeoffs involved.   The first is the question of how much to worry […]

(Because this post is about cohost, I typed it up there; here’s the link to it on cohost.) I’ve been signed up for cohost for about four weeks now; what’s surprised me the most is how unlike Twitter it feels. And I don’t mean that in terms of me following a much smaller number of […]

A few months back, some friends of mine and I talked about the game Zombies, Run! in our game discussion group. It’s a game designed to get help you exercise by playing a zombie story as you go for a walk / run; it tracks your movement as you go, and can use that to […]

I hope that the way Apple runs its App Store is finally coming to a head; certainly the tone of the discussion around Apple’s behavior has changed this summer, though who knows what will actually end up happening. I also think it’s at least a somewhat subtle problem; so I’m writing down some notes on […]

For years, I’ve been using a laptop in the evenings when writing blog posts and what not, using an iPad for most of my other computer stuff at home (at least most of the other consumption-oriented stuff, though I did some of that on the laptop in the evenings too), and I have an iMac […]

The server that hosts this blog is one that I administer; it runs Ubuntu, so I’d been in the habit of doing an OS upgrade every 6 months, as Ubuntu releases a new version. I’d do an upgrade in place; most of the time it would work smoothly, sometimes it would be less smooth but […]

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, iTunes lost track of most of my music in the transition to Catalina, so it was time for me to find some other way to store my music. (With the criteria being that I wanted archival storage on my Mac and an easy way to keep copies […]

I’d been thinking for a while that I should move away from iTunes: Apple’s music focus is now on streaming from a library that Apple controls, not on maintaining a library that you control. And, while they sort of support syncing your music with their cloud technology, they explicitly say that they feel free to […]

A few random thoughts on Apple’s China mess: I’m somewhat sympathetic to Apple. Apple is a very powerful company, but China is the second largest economy in the world. Apple is a multinational company with hundreds of billions of dollars with revenue; I’m not convinced that it’s not reasonable to compare their behavior to the […]

I’d been vaguely thinking for a while that I should enable encryption here. I’d had it enabled for Memory (my spaced repetition memorization tool) since the beginning of that project, but with a self-signed certificate; getting real certificates for that and my other domains didn’t seem worth the cost, though. But then Let’s Encrypt came […]

A couple of weeks back, Apple remotely disabled some apps that Facebook had written: one that they were paying people to sideload so they could be spied on, with Facebook’s internal apps getting disabled as collateral damage. College-student me would have been horrified by this; present me is glad? The main difference is that, basically, […]

The iPad has been, in its own way, probably my favorite computing device ever since it came out: a sheet of paper that magically displays whatever you want it to. I’ve been on an iPad Air 2 for three years now; so it’s a reasonable time to think about buying a new one, and this […]

I didn’t have any interest in the Apple Watch when it first came out: I don’t get a lot of notifications on my phone, so I’m not going to buy a device just to shift them to my wrist, and I don’t have any desire in having a device that nags me to exercise more. […]

A year and a half back, I finally joined the modern world and signed up for a music streaming service. I did this for music discovery purposes: I wanted an easy way to try out artists and songs that I’d heard of but wasn’t familiar with, and I also wanted algorithm recommendations to point me […]

The iPad can be used in either portrait or landscape orientations. Different iPad interactions have different natural orientations: if the interaction involves video or (usually) images, then the natural orientation is landscape, because you want to fill up most of your field of vision. (So TVs are wider than they are tall.) But if it […]

When I got my new Mac, Sublime Text started occasionally crashing on me. And, while I do like Sublime Text more than Emacs for non-programming typing, I wasn’t in love with Sublime Text, either: it still feels like a cross-platform editor that wasn’t focused on presenting a clean interface. Also, at about the same time, […]

A few months back, I noticed that my desktop machine was using its drive a lot. (The machine, sadly, still has a magnetic disk; I’m just waiting for new iMacs to be released to replace it.) Poking around, it was the backups (Time Machine and Backblaze, which I highly recommend). So something had caused a […]

Random thoughts kicked off by the new MacBook Pros (or, really, by people’s reaction to them): It was really weird to see how strongly people reacted to the 16GB memory limit. I totally get being disappointed that 16GB is the cap: that felt low to me, too. But (and I wish I’d saved links) the […]

At the iPhone 7 launch event, Apple confirmed that they were removing the earphone, and justified it in the name of “courage”. Which was, of course, a ridiculous, tone-deaf thing to say; watching the blowback, though, I’ve come to the conclusion that they were at least correct in that making that choice did require courage. […]

A day or two after Pokémon Go came out, I decided to give it a try, so I downloaded and launched the game. (The iPhone version of the game, to be specific.) And, after being asked to enter my birthdate, I was given a choice of registering with a Google account or a Club Pokemon […]