I guess the MAC address guy is up next. 48 bits may not go so far if every light bulb is going to want its own.

Imagine if you were the guy who made the call on IPv4 addresses…

Falsehoods About Time

Having a background in astronomy, I knew going into programming that time would be an absolute bitch.

Most recently, I thought I could code a script that could project when Easter would land every year to mark it on office timesheets. After spending an embarrassing amount of…er…time on it, I gave up and downloaded a table of pre-calculated dates. I suppose at some point, assuming the code survives that long, it will have a Y2K-style moment, but I didn’t trust my own algorithm over the table. I do think it is healthy, if not essential, to not trust your own code.

Falsehoods About Text

I’d like to add “Splitting at code-point boundary is safe” to your list. Man, was I ever naive!

Well, Shortcuts comes from the iOS world and is a relatively recent addition to macOS. Automator originated in macOS and I don’t think it has made it over to iOS at this point?

That’s not even the full extent of it though. Before Automator, there was Script Editor, which could also create script applications, but that doesn’t seem to work so well anymore. Automator has become the preferred approach for that. But Script Editor is still around and is useful for looking up AppleScript dictionaries. These tell you if a given application offers special scripting support, and there are also a few general dictionaries like StandardAdditions that are worth a gander. I wish AppleScript existed for iOS.

And then there’s the command line approach of using crontab to open your files with the open command. And osascript lets you run any AppleScript from the command line.

Ah I think I found it. I need to go:

{
    "format_on_save": "off"
}

deleted by creator

It was more than just tab conversion. For example, it decided on its own that:

if(...) {
    ...
}
else {
    ...
}

would look better like:

if(...) {
    ...
} else {
    ...
}

I mean I guess I could live with that, but really? I imagine there’s some config where you can disable all this, but it just doesn’t seem worth some giant git commit every time I touch a file with the editor.

I tried it briefly. It certainly is a lot snappier than Atom ever was, I’ll give it that. Seemed to be pretty good with Python, but when I opened some C++ source, it went around reformatting my indentation and replaces tabs with spaces. I will have to see if there is a way to disable all that, as I found it obnoxious.

At least from a disk usage standpoint, I’m finding Sonoma is using less storage than its predecessors. This is a big deal for me, since I’ve been close to the limit on my boot drive.

I agree with you to an extent in that I would not want Siri producing a thesis every time I ask a simple question. But I think one thing that would help is if she remembered the last few things you requested and builds some sort of context around it? That’s what impressed me most about chatgpt. If it doesn’t quite give me what I’m looking for, I could clarify it and we’d eventually get there. Siri is like a person with severe short term memory loss, and much of my frustration comes from that.

Hey Siri, what’s the weather today?

Expect sunny conditions and a high of 27.

Hey Siri, so it’s not supposed to rain right?

It is raining right now.

Or you can get an M11 in an iPhone 8! (That’s actually a motion coprocessor, but I think Apple has moved away from that nomenclature in newer phones to avoid confusion?)

I got an Intel mini at work just before the M1s came out and then an M1 MBAir for home use. I have noticed the latter runs circles around the former, even with Rosetta emulating Intel. My main reason for buying the M1 was that I liked the fanless (and therefore noiseless) design and saw it as a good fit for home recordings on my multichannel mixer, but have been quite impressed with its overall performance.

Nice! Got it up and running on an M1 MBAir.

I’d say the only thing I noticed is the comments on posts don’t seem to be coming up for me? It does show the number of comments, upvotes, etc. and has a field for entering a new comment.

At any rate, it looks pretty slick overall :)

We have a couple of Synology NAS at the office (I forget the models). One is geared towards data sharing on the LAN and the other is used by our off-site employees. We managed to get a git server running which is nice, but that’s an interesting idea to use them for Time Machine. As it stands, we just issue everyone a personal TM external drive and call it a day, but I might look into this.

Oh man I just checked and I’m at 78% 😭