malvasia bianca

I’ve come slowly to the whole ad-blocker debate: all things being equal, I’m not an active fan of ads, but I accept them as a possible way for writers to get paid, and most of the time they’re not that bad. Sometimes, they do cross the line for me—I really don’t like the “around the […]

My iPad has been slow this year: it’s the first retina iPad model, which is three and a half years old, so no surprise that it’s showing its age. So, before this year’s event, I was sure I’d be ordering a new iPad; I was hoping it would do something interesting with force touch (maybe […]

At the beginning of the year, there was a spate of posts about Apple’s OS software quality not being as good as people would like. I didn’t chime in at the time, but: this has been annoying me for the last couple of years. And what adds to the weirdness is that the list of […]

Apple showed off the Apple Watch last month; they were the first company to really figure out smartphones, they were the first company to really figure out tablets, so are they going to do the same with smart watches? And, if so, what does that mean? We’re obviously quite some distance away from knowing the […]

It’s getting to Apple product announcement season, which means that there’s a decent chance that an appified version of the Apple TV will be announced. There’s a lot that’s obvious about it (it’ll run iOS, its hardware will presumably close the gap with iPhone / iPads), and there are some big questions (what’s the input […]

There’s one problem with the way I first set up my build system for Medium: I had no control over how the CoffeeScript files were ordered. In languages with linkers, this isn’t a big deal: within a library, the linker will resolve all the references between object files at once. But without a linker, ordering […]

A little over a year ago, I switched from Apple’s Podcasts app on the iPhone to Downcast, and I’m very glad I did: it was much easier to make sure that the podcasts I wanted were available when I wanted them, and to listen to them in the way I wanted. And, given that I […]

Over the last few years, I’ve become more and more interested in Apple from a business point of view. Some specific questions that I’ve been wondering about are: How is Apple going to defend and extend its place in the current phone ecosystem as the capabilities the iPhone provides become more and more mainstream? What’s […]

As I mentioned last month, I was thinking of hooking up my laptop to the TV so I could play System Shock on it. That idea didn’t go away; so I ordered a mini-DVI-to-HDMI converter and a lap desk. It took me a little while to get around to setting things up—I was playing the […]

I recently watched a video about the System Shock and BioShock games, and I was surprised how nostalgic the System Shock footage made me. I’d been tentatively thinking that I should play through the entire BioShock series (I’ve only played through the first game in the series), but now I’m thinking I should start off […]

Like many other people, I switched to Feedly as my Google Reader replacement. The import worked well; as part of that process, in the “Uncategorized” category, I found dozens of blogs that hadn’t published for years. I removed most of those subscriptions, but some of them I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of: And […]

Over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed myself using my iPad more and more during evenings, in situations where I would have used other devices in the past: we’ve only had one laptop for a while now, and while I used to try to grab it every other evening, more and more I’ve been […]

I upgraded this server to Ubuntu 12.10 last night. And, as is always the case, almost everything went smoothly, with the only exception being my memorization program. It’s a Rails app, and at least half the time I upgrade the server, something goes wrong with it. Usually, reinstalling Passenger does the trick; last time, I […]

For me, the most problematic app change in iOS 6 was the new Podcasts app. The new design made it harder to find which podcasts had episodes that I hadn’t listened to, required more tapping for me to change speeds, and, most unforgivably, didn’t give me a way to see the episode notes for JapanesePod101 […]

The startup that I’ve been working at for the last year, Sumo Logic, has now launched its product! Our product is a service for gathering, searching, and analyzing logs: if you have software that’s generating log files, you point our collector at those files and it will upload them to our service, at which point […]

A sentence which I have a hard time believing that I’m writing: for the last month or so, the default search engine on my two home computers has been set to Bing. Not because Microsoft has done such a wonderful job (though I’m more impressed with that company than I was five years ago), or […]

When Steve Jobs died, I felt I should write about him. Probably about Apple, really: I don’t know anything about Jobs, but Apple (the company and its products) occupies a surprising amount of my psychic space. It took me quite some time to get around to writing the post, however; and, when I started typing, […]

I don’t normally blog about current events stuff here: that’s just not the kind of blog that this is, and that’s not exactly a niche in desperate need of filling on the internet. But, to somebody in the tech industry who lives in the same town as Google’s home office (they’re about a mile and […]

At work, we went to Def Con last week; my first time there, an interesting experience. (Also my first time in Las Vegas; unsurprisingly, it’s not my sort of city.) I enjoyed just wandering around the conference, and several of the talks were quite good; my favorite was SSL and the Future of Authenticity, by […]

Some tangentially related notes on recent experiences reading books: When I was thinking about getting an iPad, I wondered what format I should buy books in. I was thinking the contenders were Amazon’s proprietary format versus ePub books (sadly largely with encryption in both cases); but when I actually got the iPad, I discovered that […]