This Kickstarter campaign is for a screen with the ability to allow for many, many different input options via a system of modular expansion boards.
Not cheap, but should be able to replace a bunch of adapters and displays. I’ve backed it!
www.kickstarter.com/projects/…
Currently listening: Causa Sui - “Homage”
The other day I had a customer bring in an optical drive with a disc stuck inside… Nothing too unusual about that, until I noticed something seemed off about the drive, which at first glance was an Apple SuperDrive. The housing of the USB plug was poorer quality, and the casing of the body of the drive was silver plastic, not metal. It was a fake!
Upon opening it, I found a 50-pin JAE connector to USB bridge with a battered looking drive from 2006. There was a sticker on the casing with a 2014 date code, so even “new”, the drive inside was 8 years old!
Currently listening: Grace Jones - “Walking In The Rain”
Love these wallpapers, my favourites include “Shippou”, and the “Pepsi Perfect” one…
Currently listening: The Beatles - “Revolver (2022 Mix)”
Certainly one of my “Desert Island Discs”, the 2022 version makes everything fresher and clearer - all of the instruments can be heard distinctly. There are details and subtleties that I’ve never noticed before - eg the yawn in “I’m Only Sleeping” - it was there, but somewhat “buried”.
At my store we use an older Intel NUC that we use to run PC diagnostic software and to recover/transfer data. It’s great having a “desktop” PC without taking up a lot of space. We’ve had quite a while now, so I wasn’t too surprised to see that Windows 11 isn’t compatible. After a bit of looking at the current available options, I settled on the Minisforum Neptune HX90G. It is apparently the first of these NUC/mini PCs to have discrete AMD graphics. Not that we need the power, but it’ll be nice to have! It’s currently on order, I’ll write up my take on it once it arrives and I have a chance to put the wee beastie through its paces…
Currently listening: The Naked and Famous - “Young Blood”
To me, one of the most interesting things when Apple comes out with a completely new class of device is seeing how they solve usability challenges peculiar to that type of product. For example, interactions with the Apple Watch touchscreen and side buttons have to take into account the fact the user will be covering most of the display with a digit.
That experience with creating new ways of doing things then appears elsewhere, for example the digital crown on the AirPods Max.
So, when the fabled Apple AR headset is finally revealed, it will be fascinating to see how the question of interacting with information and interface elements that will be presumably dangling in mid-air will be handled.
I think a fair bit of what one can see overlayed will be contextually chosen info and messages, rather than heavy UI, but surely somehow you’ll be able to make selections or dismiss things?
Imagine also, that the headset and its decedents aren’t just about directions, messages, and content consumption, but have a way for people to add hyper-localised information or tag web links to real world objects… Apple Maps is only the beginning. It’ll start with people holding up their iPhone, but the AR headset will be a lot more immersive. Add in what Apple has been doing with iBeacon/UWB (much more precise location data than GPS) and Memoji (overlaying on top of detected faces/objects), and there is definitely something exciting that Apple is working towards.
If the name of the first (high-end) headset is indeed “Reality Pro”, I think Apple eventually wants people to think “Apple Reality” when they think AR, not “Augmented Reality”.
Exciting times!
Currently listening: Pylon - “Cool (Extra)”
It may not really be suitable for those who suffer from motion-sickness, but this screensaver is a trip! It takes the old-school Windows “Starfield” to a whole new level. What’s nice is that over the last couple of versions it has been updated with Apple Silicon and high refresh support.
Currently listening: The Rolling Stones - “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”
I should be receiving the two that I ordered today, I will update this post once I have set them up and played around with them tonight!
Update: One indeed arrived at least. New smaller box, no shrink-wrap. Very familiar looking remote, just the change to USB-C for recharging. The Apple TV itself feels a fair bit lighter and the dimensions are slightly smaller, luckily the mount behind my TV still holds it fine for now.
The onboarding process is a little slicker in tvOS 16, straight forward and gets you up and running very quickly if you choose the option of holding an iPhone near it to save entering in the tedious details…
To be honest I don’t see a massive difference in how it runs, but that is about what I was expecting. The chip driving the show has gone from an A12 to an A15 - so that’s like going from an iPhone XS to an iPhone 13 Pro I believe. Also, this model supports HDR10 now. So, things do feel snappier, and the colours look a little better - how much of that is purely psychological I don’t know :P
All in all, most people won’t be upgrading from last years one anyway, so if you have one from a couple of generations back, it’ll be a much bigger jump.
Currently listening: Neu! - “Für Immer”
Nothing to write about this week, see you next week!
In what has got to be the coolest project I’ve seen in a while, this Kickstarter campaign is to create a replacement kit to convert an iMac (27-inch, Mid 2011) into a stand alone display with USB-C connectivity, or even allow the internals of a Mac mini (M1, 2020) to be installed inside. The existing main logic-board is removed from the iMac and a custom PCB and some 3D printed airflow guides replace it.
The reason this iMac model was chosen is it has developed notoriety over the years for a massive GPU failure rate, which results in either odd bright pink stripes, the entire display turning off, or an inability to finish the boot process.
It was always disappointing explaining to people experiencing this failure that whilst, yes this iMac can operate as a stand-alone display, that that still requires the internal GPU to be functional.
Now what this (Australian) team are developing will allow for an otherwise useless gorgeous display to live again - Major kudos! :)
I’m a backer, now to source a faulty one of these machines for surgery when the board finally arrives…
www.kickstarter.com/projects/…
Mmmmmm, prototype-y goodness!
Currently listening: The Sonics - “Have Love Will Travel”
Upgradeable! Modular! iFixit 10 out of 10 repairability score! I’ve been wanting a Framework laptop for a while :)
Orders finally opened up in Australia early September, and mine arrived earlier this week.
It’s very nicely put together, in terms of design and construction. The keyboard is great, and the trackpad is the best on a PC laptop I’ve used. The power button doubles as a nice reliable fingerprint reader (pictured). The units metal chassis feels robust and sturdy, a far cry from your typical cheap-feeling plastic laptops…
One thing I wasn’t aware of until after I received it was that the four recessed ports where you slide in the various extension modules are actually USB 4 (Possibly even Thunderbolt 4, just waiting on Intel certification) and means there would in theory be enough bandwidth to run a GPU externally in a chassis. Perhaps this could even be a desktop replacement :)
Next up, I’m looking forward to swapping over to the top-case with a transparent keyboard. Maybe an orange bezel too…
Currently listening: Big Wild - “Aftergold”
After a hiatus due to you-know-what, PAX Aus was back this weekend. Sure they had PAX Online the last two years, but it wasn’t the same! My daughter got some very cool earrings with Ditto from Pokémon, I bought a very light wireless mouse, and we all saw some cool new games. The crowd didn’t feel quite as big as 2019, and it felt like there were a few stands missing - Nintendo for example. Hopefully next year will be bigger again.
Currently listening: Public Image Limited - “Rise”
And by sometimes, I mean practically always. For a while now at my store I’ve been experiencing an odd issue, where the two OG HomePods I have for music in the retail area will randomly become unreachable from the front desk iMac.
Most mornings, we will hit play in the Music app and the wee AirPlay icon in the top right will become badged with an exclamation mark. We have to restart the iMac for that to work again, simply quitting and reopening Music for some reason is insufficient. We run UniFi equipment for our networking infrastructure, and I have tried altering a number of network settings thinking they might be relevant, but to no avail. The problem occurs whether the iMac is using WiFi or ethernet, both of which have a static IP (as do the HomePods), and recently I decided I wanted to try again to resolve this issue. What is odd is that, if you close the Music app in the evening, and open it the following morning, it works fine…
One solution I then considered was creating an AppleScript to automatically close Music in the evening. What I ended up doing was simply setting Energy Saver for the iMac to shut down automatically in the evening, and then start up in the morning. I think overall that is the simplest solution, but I would still love to work out exactly why the problem occurs!
Currently listening: DJ BORING - “Winona”
Last week I took the family on a road-trip to Adelaide, which was an absolute blast. Amongst all the fun activities and sights we had planned, one thing I wanted to do was visit the headquarters of Jolt Cola Australia. Jolt Cola to me is an important nostalgia cornerstone, reminding me of 90s LAN parties and the Melbourne 2600 meetings, where as a pimply-faced youth I’d hang out with a bunch of social misfits and irregulars who were as computer obsessed as myself.
The question was, given that the last Jolt Cola I had found had been in 2018 on eBay (and shipped from the USA at exorbitant expense), were they still around?
Not only were they still in operation, but I met the fellow in charge, who very kindly gave me an entire box of 15 bottles with a sampling of the 5 different variants and a hat! I purchased a few more bottles of the original flavour for good measure from OTR, a convenience store chain that actually has outlets in Victoria as well - so the closest Jolt Cola to me was in Stawell all this time, who knew?
Update: Turns out there is a much closer OTR in Alphington! Called them, they do indeed stock Jolt Cola :)
Currently listening: Jesper Ryom - “Pacer”
Nothing this week, back next week! :)
I’ve been trying out some more things this week with the Elgato Stream Deck, in particular adding in “Virtual Buttons” to HomeBridge, which then allows keys on the Stream Deck to control HomeKit devices. Here is the somewhat spartan guide I followed:
Essentially the virtual buttons and events (click, double click, and long press) become URLs, so having the Stream Deck open them as websites activates whatever action is then attached to that event in the Home app. Turning on the “GET request in the background” option in the Stream Deck configuration means it doesn’t open a Web browser.
Here is my current layout, there is plenty more I can play around with in terms of more automations, etc!
As Jason Snell says over on the always excellent Six Colors blog, designing interfaces is hard…
Currently listening: Passion Pit - “The Reeling (Calvin Harris Remix)”
Hidden behind my TV is an LED light strip we use as bias lighting. Powering that is the tiny Apple 5W USB Power Adapter which is then plugged into a Smart Plug that I recently replaced with the new version of the Wemo Smart Plug. This added Thread functionality, and it certainly it is the most compact Australian smart plug I have seen! It’s the first I’m aware of that is not too wide as to block the use of adjacent outlets. Thread means a quick response time through the Home app or Siri, and none of the annoying “No Response” status messages. Although in fairness, I’d say the vast majority of the appearance of that dreaded red text is the quality or settings with people’s WiFi networks, but that’s a rant for another day!
I know there have been plenty of people giving Wemo devices a thumbs down, in fact I had some of their Motion Sensors back in 2013 which I ended up selling in frustration and despair, but so far I am happy with this.
From right to left in the picture; Eve Energy, Meross Smart WiFi Plug, and the Wemo Smart Plug.
Currently listening: Django Django - “Hail Bop”
Under my house there’s a water filter for our fridge that started leaking recently. It turns out they mention on the filter that will happen if you don’t change it often enough, but I would rather a warning when the leaking is happening. Aqara have a sensor for water leaks, so I mounted a metal bracket and a soap dish below the filter for the sensor to sit in. The Aqara sensors are Zigbee, so don’t add to the WiFi traffic, and last up to two years on a CR2032 battery. I have a couple of their temperature sensors, one in my attic and one in my equipment rack, as well as a couple of their door and window sensors I have used for some outside gates, as I previously wrote about here:
All of these sensors talk back to an M2 hub, which I have wall mounted behind my TV, as it is out of the way and had a spare ethernet run there. I then have an ethernet PoE to USB adapter to power it.
I have had this leak sensor under the house now for a week or so, and I have since ordered another one, to keep an eye on another area under the house that has experienced some flooding over the years we’ve been here.
Currently listening: Big Wild - “Joypunks”
This weekend’s project was setting up an “H801 LED WiFi Controller”, or at least beginning the set up. It’s a small box with terminal blocks either end to connect it to power and an LED light-strip, and a PCB inside with WiFi connectivity and a micro-controller. Once configured with your WiFi network details, you can use it to control and automate an attached LED light-strip. What’s attractive about this model is the low-cost, hack-ability, and flexibility of how it can be used.
To begin, I pulled it apart and soldered on some pins to the board to allow me to connect a USB to TTL adapter to replace the stock firmware with “Tasmota”, which unlocks a bunch more abilities…
Something I found truly remarkable with the process is, the firmware flashing can be performed entirely within a web browser! Here it is on my trusty old Thinkpad T520. The mains power isn’t connected, as the board is being powered over USB during this process.
I then disconnected that adapter and the dip-switch on the board for the programming mode, hooked up mains power again, and joined the WiFi network that the H801 creates. I popped in the credentials for my IoT WiFi network, restarted again, and up it came.
The next step is to connect up a 4-pin LED strip I have coming in the next few days, and put it through its paces…
Currently listening: Funkadelic - “Can You Get To That”
My copy of “Shareware Heroes” by Richard Moss arrived this week. His previous book, “The Secret History of Mac Gaming” was an incredible look at how at so many times in the 80s and 90s the state-of-the-art in gaming was pushed forward by dedicated Mac enthusiasts who embodied the “Think Different” mantra, despite the weird relationship Apple themselves had with gaming.
This new book is a look at the rise and fall of the shareware model of games distribution, where the game was free to pass around and the expectation was you’d send in some money to register if you liked it. It allowed for a lot of creativity and experimentation in the games people would release. I’m sure it will be a similarly engrossing read!
Currently listening: Jesper Ryom - “Apolune”
My PicoBoot install was a success! Here is the original video I watched, and then followed along with in terms of the installation procedure:
Success in soldering is in my opinion as much about practise as it is the quality of the tools and materials used. Flux and a quality iron definitely makes a difference! I went with the same colour-coding for the wiring as per the above video to minimise the potential of confusion, one slight hitch was having lengths of wire slightly shorter than required meant I had to alter the positioning of the Pi inside the GameCube. Once everything was hooked up correctly, I tested powering the GameCube back on - first step was ensuring it still started! All was well, so I popped in the SD card with Swiss, and indeed, it fired up into an unfamiliar (to me that is) interface. Now to try out some Homebrew, etc.
Also, I have just gone through all of my previous posts, and added those nice Apple Music iframe preview widgets for all the “Currently listening” songs…
Currently listening: Cannons - “Hurricane”
After waiting for a little while for the access invitation, it has been a fun morning of generating images from text prompts - some beautiful, some nightmare fuel, and some just plain silly!
My personal favourite was this, from the prompt “artificial intelligence manifested as a compassionate super being, studio portrait with graflex lens”. It’s always good to brown-nose before the singularity to stay on their good side wink
Currently listening: POOLCLVB - “Space”
My kids and I have been having a lot of fun lately playing with this:
Poop + robot = poop robot emoji!
Turtle + poodle = turtle poodle emoji!
Currently listening: Ben Böhmer - “Beyond Beliefs”
One detail that I’ve not spotted previously, as I’ve only ever owned a single iPhone case with MagSafe until very recently - when you pop the case on, the animation onscreen matches the colour of the case!
Only issue is, that iPhone is my camera, so can’t get a nice photo illustrating this… Oh well :)
Currently listening: Cage the Elephant - “Broken Boy”
I remember the “good ol' days” when I first started using Dropbox in 2009 and everything was great… It felt truly magical to simply place items in a folder on one Mac and they appear on another… It was easy, it was fast (Australia’s internet infrastructure notwithstanding), and I happily recommended it to my customers. Over the years they added features, and those started to get annoying - every time you’d connect an iPhone, it would offer to copy all the photos for example. I can’t count the number of people I saw that ended up chewing through their local storage by virtue of unintentionally having their photos on the Mac twice over, once through iPhoto/Photos, and once through Dropbox, as a result of this.
The final straw for me was a couple of years ago when they sent me a very self-satisfied email about how excited they were to bump up my storage from 1TB to 2TB (not that I was even using 1TB at the time), “oh and by the way we’re increasing the cost per year”… They also changed the design of the Dropbox software to be more bloated and less consistent with the standard Mac UI. This all left me feeling well and truly over it, so I began looking for a different option. Now, Google Drive was not even something I would even consider (my change in feelings towards Google over the years is a story for another time), and iCloud Drive was not quite there yet in terms of features and reliability at the time, so I started using Microsoft’s offering called OneDrive. Overall, I was happy with that, but two things always rankled - firstly, if you had an alias for an item that was somewhere else within the OneDrive hierarchy the alias would not correctly sync - on any other Mac it would appear as a empty “Unix Executable File”, iirc. The other annoyance was the fact that so many special characters in file and folder names that the Mac was perfectly happy with would cause OneDrive to throw its hands up in the air and refuse to sync them. I understand it comes down to them having to ensure these item names will work on a Windows box, but imagine you’re bringing across a massive archive of items and you then have to fix a bunch of names manually to have them sync. These files have quotation marks in the name, this folder has a question mark in the name, etc, etc. Painful, to say the least.
So, after a couple of years, I recently began looking again at iCloud Drive again, and I made the switch a couple of months ago. The single feature they have added that has made all the difference for me is the ability to share folders from one iCloud account to another. It just needed time to mature, and now it is seamlessly part of the Mac experience - and no bloat!
Reading back over this, I sound like a right curmudgeon. I hadn’t intended for this to be such a rant, but feels good to have it off my chest :)
Currently listening: TSHA - “Change (feat. Gabrielle Aplin)”
A few years ago, I bought a GameCube to play a bunch of games from an earlier time in my life. F-Zero GX and Super Mario Sunshine = nostalgia :)
I had considered installing a mod-chip, but never really liked the shortcomings of what was around. Now there is a new, open-source option on the scene, called PicoBoot, which runs on a Raspberry Pi Pico.
I am waiting on the last few bits, and will post with my findings, but it is looking like a really great option already, and will only get better.
Currently listening: Coyote Clean Up - “Awesome Luv”