It’s that time of year already, when all the new Apple OS versions come out! As always, it’s best to let others jump in first, as it takes some time for bugs and incompatibility glitches to be worked out by Apple and the third-party software developers. That said, I generally find myself jumping in on day one as the temptation is too much, there’s typically a feature or improvement that I want to take for a spin :)

Edit: Oh wow, try moving around the magnifying loupe on the iPadOS Preview splash screen - such eye candy!

I ordered a replacement battery via eBay for a Dell Latitude D600 I have in my collection. It’d be hilarious to charge it up and lug it into Starbucks to sit there computing 2004 style with Windows XP! Apart from that, having a working battery meant that I could apply a BIOS update (from A13 to A16).

Looking forward to the new goodies that Apple will announce in a couple of days, I’d say the iPhone 17 and Apple Watch Series 11 are a shoe-in, but given I noticed on Amazon that the Belkin AirTag holders now say “Style Name: Old Model”, I’d say there is a new AirTag coming as well…

Friday night, I saw “Weapons” in the cinema, it’s swooped past “Sinners” and “Mickey 17” to become my favourite film of the year… I love a good “overlapping different characters POV all adding to an understanding of the bigger picture”-type film, plenty of classics use that approach. Thankfully the trailer only reveals a fraction of the story, and I won’t say any more as it is well-worth seeing without being spoiled!

Currently listening: Orlando Weeks - “Way To GO” - No offence to Peter Gabriel, but IMHO this works so well over the end credits of Wall-E.

This week, I went through the process of setting up “Copyparty” through Container Manager on my Synology NAS. I have set it up as read-only for the main folders, and I have also set up a write-only folder called “drop box” (bear in mind that’s a reference to old-school classic Mac file-sharing, not to Dropbox). Periodically I’ll do a one-way sync of the main folders across from my primary archive, rather than complicating matters by potentially making changes on either copy and having to then perform a two-way sync.

I have already tested Copyparty on my beige Power Macintosh G3 Minitower through Classilla, as well as Internet Explorer v5.2.3 for Mac - the former was happy with the standard version as well as the basic version, the latter only worked with basic version. Neither worked with HTTPS, not that I was expecting it to!

Next up, I’ll be configuring FTP access within Copyparty as well and testing that, as well as trying it on even earlier hardware/software combinations.

I’m quite happy with Copyparty so far, it’s great having another option to bridge between the old and new worlds :)

Currently listening: Terranova - “Concepts”

I still use RSS for keeping up with a bunch of sites I read, and since at least 2010, I’ve been using Reeder. With their new version going to subscription only, I have now installed NetNewsWire on my iPhone and Mac. I just checked and I bought NetNewsWire v2 way back in May 2005!

With the imminent release of iOS 26, I’ll be going through all my frequently used apps and replacing ones that don’t embrace the new UI - I did the same when I got an iPhone 4 and there were apps that didn’t add improved interface elements suitable for the retina screen. It’s extremely jarring when the vast majority do, and then you have a couple of laggards…

I watched the movie “Sinners” recently, it’s probably my favourite of the year so far, although “Mickey 17” would have to be a very close second!

So, craziest thing happened yesterday evening - I was checking out the “Now or Never” Festival in the CBD with my family, and I swear I walked right past Ninajirachi - the artist of the song I put down as my “currently listening” song last week. I looked it up, and sure enough, she is on tour and playing last night in Melbourne, so there is a darn good chance it was her! What are the odds?

Currently listening: Bakar - “Lonyo!"

I was recently helping a customer of mine rationalise their file collection; they had 9 external hard drives with connectivity ranging from FireWire 400 up to USB 3, and many, many duplicates from over the years of manually backing up and a number of failed consolidation attempts. I used “Carbon Copy Cloner” to copy all of the contents on to a large drive, then used an Application called “Hyperspace” that makes clever use of an APFS feature to enable eliminating the extra capacity used by duplicates without actually deleting them - they all transparently point back to the first copy. It ended up saving over 1.8TB, which was a huge help in slimming down the space needed!

Currently listening: Ninajirachi - “iPod Touch”

This weekend’s retro fun has been playing an old game called “Porrasturvat” (Finnish for “Stair Dismount”) which I first played back in about 2003. I randomly thought of it during the week, tracked it down, and have been playing it this morning… It’s more of a software toy, or a rag-doll physics sim where you’re pushing a little guy down the stairs, trying to max your damage score… Yes, sounds kinda wrong, but it is fun and addictive!

Currently listening: LASTCENTURYVIBEZ - “Atmospheric Unreal Tournament ‘99 Jungle Mix”

This week I came across copyparty, which is an Open Source file server that supports a very wide range of protocols and clients, I will be setting it up soon and testing it with some old Macintosh machines I have. It looks like a good option to share files between the old-school and new-school worlds as it supports FTP, which, whilst a poor choice for running over the modern-day internet due to everything going over the wire in plaintext, will work back on pretty much any machine I have that supports Ethernet networking - so even some late 80’s hardware!

Here’s the Github page, I’ll post once I’ve played around with it. Particularly impressive work considering it was created by a single person!

Currently listening: Arabian Alien - “GUN POWDER - بارود”.

I’ve finished all of the Audio CDs, Movies, and TV Shows, and I’m now working my way through my Books. Much easier when they have the ISBN barcode…

When I’m not doing that, my wife and I have been watching the latest season of Strange New Worlds - my fav Trek since Enterprise I’d say, with Lower Decks a close second!

Currently listening: Omar Apollo - “Done With You”

Still working on my Book/CD/DVD/Blu-ray database, up to 2.5K items now and counting! It’s all in a Numbers spreadsheet, once I’m done I will be exporting it as a CSV and then importing that into Collections. As I have mentioned previously, it’s a super handy app which nicely syncs between the Mac / iPhone / iPad versions.

I recall having a much smaller catalogue of some of my media back in the day using an app called Delicious Library, I bought the first version in early 2006. It was certainly from that magical era of peak skeuomorphism - the app window was a woodgrain bookshelf with all the front covers arrayed across it :)

Currently listening: “Deep House & Coffee Party in Buenos Aires | Mat, Alejo & Lothar”

OK, so I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole that began with redoing the asset tagging of those storage boxes… I had created previously a database of all my DVDs/Blu-rays, which has been handy, and I then thought, wouldn’t it be great to also have all of the CDs and Books? So, started working on that as well, then in terms of having a unique ID for each item thought “Hey, I should just scan in the barcodes…” This ends up with me plugging in an old Symbol LS2208 barcode scanner into my iPad Air with a USB-C to USB-A adapter - it works! - and then scanning in so, so many barcodes… Still working on it, but the end result shall be a glorious example of organisation and the danger of the ol' sunk-cost fallacy :)

Currently listening: DJ Bailey - “Intelligent Drum Bass(1996)"

I have been using a small thermal labelling printer called the Phomemo M110 for a couple of years now and it’s really quite good - I just recently got some 80mm x 50mm labels for it which I’m using with the IKEA Samla boxes to redo the asset tagging on a bunch of my physical storage. A great solution!

Currently Listening: Pulp - “After You (Soulwax Remix)"

I was browsing RedBubble today and there has definitely a sharp rise in the amount of low-effort AI generated artwork on the site lately. I consider it a shame as this trend means I’ll be less likely to bother browsing RedBubble in future, and therefore less likely to purchase their stickers and t-shirts. What’s worse is that it almost feels unavoidable - it’s certainly part of a wider trend across the internet.

AI has the capacity to do great things, and the quote that really sums up my view on the situation comes from Joanna Maciejewska’s tweet: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

Currently listening: Jack White - “Archbishop Harold Holmes”

There’s an episode of Serial Port they just put up that’s a good watch, it’s all about resurrecting a 1990’s era BBS hosting program called Impulse… I discovered computers just a couple of years too late to catch the BBS era alas, but I’ve an affinity for them anyway. I bought a WiModem232 years ago to allow some of my older machines to connect to WiFi and then to BBS’s over the internet. Retro fun!

Currently listening: Aaron_park - “Step Change House”

This unified OS page is a reminder that Apple views Liquid Glass as unifying all the different OS types… It’s a continuation of a path they’ve been traveling down for a while now.

I’m looking forward to trying them all out once they’re ready for release, and I’m sure the next few years will see tweaks to improve legibility and bring all the experiences even closer!

However, I am not looking forward to waiting on all the app developers to update their icons - I’m sure there will be a few laggards that mar my otherwise perfect “new look” iPhone home screen :P

Currently listening: Stealing Sheep - “Found You”

This weekend’s somewhat ludicrous project: trawling through 20+ years worth of my email, looking for serial numbers of software I’ve purchased, and adding them all to a Collections database. Useful to have the end result, but I realise this is not how normal people spend their time :P

Saddened to hear about the recent passing of Bill Atkinson. He was one of the original Mac team, and the guy behind HyperCard, which is still very dear to me. Apple never really knew what they had with it, if they’d added network support we would have had the WWW in 1987. Can’t believe they only removed it from sale in 2004!

Currently listening: DJ Seinfeld - “U”

I was thinking back recently to 20 or so years ago, to when WiFi was the hot new technology and how wardriving was a thing. This is what it looked like, if I recall correctly:

Currently listening: Mostly Hairless - “90s Style Ambient Jungle Mix Vol. 2 🕹 Low Poly DnB 🕹”

I’ve been watching quite a few classic films recently, and in no particular order, here are the ones I’d recommend:

“Suddenly” 1954 - Frank Sinatra knocks it out the park as a bad guy :)

“Kiss Me Deadly” 1955 - There’s a scene near the end where the femme fatale opens a box, as soon as I saw it - OMG! I swear Lucas and Spielberg were inspired by this for the bit in Raiders when they open the ark…

“Shadow of a Doubt” 1943 - Not my favourite Hitchcock, but still worth a watch.

“A Man Escaped” 1956 - Does so much with so little! “A captured French Resistance fighter during World War II engineers a daunting escape from a German prison in France.” (IMDb synopsis).

I’ve been watching my daughter play “Hogwarts Legacy” a bit recently, and it’s incredible the level of detail and sophistication of the world that the player explores. My favourite thing so far (other than there being many cats to say hello to) would have to be the inclusion of an “Arachnophobia Mode” - this replaces the spider enemies with these hilarious looking things on roller-skates!

Currently listening: KH - “Looking at Your Pager”

I have been trying out Kagi Search recently, finding it to be an improvement over DuckDuckGo so far. I don’t mind paying for it, I just hope there are enough people for whom that’s the case to keep them afloat!

Back in the 90’s and early 00’s, there was a different Kagi which was a payments processor for shareware. I bought a few apps that way, but they closed in 2016.

Anyway, back to the current Kagi. I’m sure I haven’t even scratched the surface of the features and abilities, but I look forward to becoming familiar with them over time.

Currently listening: Rui Tang - “House and Indie Dance on a Tuktuk”

Just a short note this week - I mentioned recently about that Elago iPhone 16e case that makes it look like an iPhone 2G. The iPhone 16e supports wireless charging, but doesn’t have the MagSafe magnets. One handy feature of this case is it has integrated magnets which makes the iPhone 16e compatible with MagSafe. All you miss out on with this approach are the fancy MagSafe animations.

Last Thursday was the 10th anniversary of the original Apple Watch launch day, and Apple dubbed it “Global Close Your Rings Day”. As well as a Limited Edition Challenge Award inside the Fitness app for closing your activity rings on the day, Apple also gave away a physical badge at its stores. I picked one up yesterday, the staff member who I asked initially didn’t know what I was referring to, but he asked someone more senior who showed him which of their special hidden table drawers contained them - I joked when he gave it to me that it felt like ordering a secret menu item!

Currently listening: Aaron_park - “House music to listen to while cooking”

I spent part of the Easter long weekend looking at a beige PC tower from 1998 that had recently been donated at my Store.

It has 384MB of RAM, and would appear that the system was upgraded in 2001 to a Celeron 1GHz, most likely alongside an OS upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP.

I first gave it a good internal clean out, as it was very dusty! I then erased the two hard drives and installed Windows 98.

The experience of using something of this vintage is quite different to modern machines - beeps, noises of fans and drives accessing, flickering read lights, etc.

Even the idea of putting in a CD-ROM to reinstall an OS feels now like such an anachronism…

Now I just need to find and install all of the appropriate device drivers! :)

Currently listening: Vic^ - “The Hidden Gems of Atmospheric Drum and Bass”

Elago has released a case for the new iPhone 16e that makes it look like an original iPhone 2G!

My favourite detail is that the serial number on the back is the date of the MacWorld 2007 keynote where the iPhone was first shown publicly.

The first call that Steve Jobs made at that event (so, the first ever public call from an iPhone) was to Jony Ive (and then Phil Schiller joined in, making it a conference call), but the second was a prank to a Starbucks near the Moscone Center where he ordered 4,000 lattes to go :)

Currently listening: Oli Parker - “Disco slap tongue black flugelhorn” - more a demo than a track, but impressive skills (and very funky!)

I am very happy to say that the wonderful city of Melbourne, Australia has been my hometown for over three decades now, but one odd thing with our fair city is the marked lack of an Apple Store in the middle of the CBD. Many world-class cities have one in a high profile new building, or a beautifully renovated old building. For over two decades now there have been rumours of Apple opening one in Melbourne, but the closest we got was the proposed Fed Square site, which would have involve Apple knocking down and replacing an existing building. Thankfully due to public outcry, it didn’t go ahead.

To see what the store that never was would have looked like, I noticed recently someone has created a beautiful series of renders.

The same person also created the nifty Bandbriete app, which lets you catalogue all of your Apple Watch bands, assuming you have enough of a collection to warrant needing to keep track of them, as I do!

Currently listening: TV Girl - “Taking What’s not Yours”

Somehow I missed this until now, but in macOS Monterey, Apple added the terminal command “networkQuality”. This displays the download and upload speeds of your internet connection, as well as a metric called RPM that Stuart Cheshire (the Bolo guy!) came up with at Apple.

Handy if fast.com or speedtest.net aren’t your thing!

Currently listening: Chillhop Essentials Spring 2018 - worth a re-listen after all these years, still a great compilation…