Rubenerd

Earlier this month I lamented the direction Apple was taking with their Retina displays in two areas:

1. Modern Mac laptops don’t default to 2× scaling for Retina anymore, presumably to fudge a higher perceived resolutions.

2. The new MacBook Air physically can’t be set to 2× Retina.

Marc Edwards succinctly explains why setting your Retina Mac display to anything other than 2× is a Bad Idea™:

The Display pane in System Preferences includes “larger text” and “more space” options. These can be used as a solution, but if you do, macOS will render the entire screen to a virtual canvas, then bitmap scale it up or down to the desired size. The result is blurry pixels, higher memory usage, more work for the GPU to do, and shorter battery life for laptops. You want to use the “default for this display” setting, if you can. It’s better quality, faster, and gives longer battery life.

He also included this handy GIF that illustrates the shimmering you get when running at non-2× scaling, for those who are still unconvinced.

An anonymous Slashdot contributer shared this fascinating Atlantic story by Kate Wagner:

Let me describe what I hear as I sit in a coffee shop writing this article. It’s late morning on a Saturday, between the breakfast and lunch rushes. People talk in hushed voices at tables. The staff make pithy jokes amongst themselves, enjoying the downtime. Fingers clack on keyboards, and glasses clink against wood and stone countertops. Occasionally, the espresso machines grind and roar. The coffee shop is quiet, probably as quiet as it can be while still being occupied. Even at its slowest and most hushed, the average background noise level hovered around 73 decibels (as measured with my calibrated meter).

Sounded like paradise to me, right up until the decibel output. I need white noise when I sleep, and the gentle droning of people, crockery, and coffee machines is just about the most magical audible concoction in existence. I’m writing this during my lunch break in our quiet office, which is counter-intuitively less conducive to thought than the coffee shop across the street.

But I hadn’t considered the volume of the sound. Coffee shops in Sydney tend to be quieter than Singapore, but are still loud. The Starbucks in the building alongside Wheelock Place was practically a booming concert hall. And I still went there!

Kate attributes the shift to modern design trends:

Restaurants are so loud because architects don’t design them to be quiet. Much of this shift in design boils down to changing conceptions of what makes a space seem upscale or luxurious, as well as evolving trends in food service. Right now, high-end surfaces connote luxury

There definitely seems to be a shift towards cut stone and metal cladding. The byline of her article comments that minimalism has replaced plush opulence; I’d say its possible though to be minimal and clean without employing these garishly reflective sound surfaces.

I’d say Fate/Grand Order is my favourite mobile game, but to be fair it’s the only one I’ve ever been able to get into. I loved that I could summon the servants from the original Fate/Stay Night that left such a lasting impression on me more than a decade ago.

Mashu and Umu are my favourites, but I was secretly excited for the day the English version got Ishtar, the servant broadly based on Toosaka Rin. She was my favourite character from the series, and Unlimited Blade Works was a spectacular, fitting tribute to her story arc.

Ishtar was also a five star servant, so I figured the chances of rolling her were somewhere between nothing and zero. Still, I saved my saint quartz, and rolled twice without any expectations. In the words of Star Trek Voyager’s Tom Paris: no dreams, no disappointments!

Fate was kind to me.

Our conservative prime minster, on record, during parlimentary question time:

Those opposite haven’t delivered a surplus budget from the year Taylor Swift was born in 1989, and now they want to shake it off, Mr Speaker, as if there’s some sort of way of walking away from their failure to deliver a surplus when they were in government, Mr Speaker.

These aren’t words of confidence, they’re the last gasps of someone utterly out of their depth, grasping for anything to humanise himself.

I almost feel sorry for him.

IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty had choice words for Silicon Valley companies, as reported by Bloomberg:

Without naming company names, Rometty pointed to the “irresponsible handling of personal data by a few dominant consumer-facing platform companies” as the cause of a “trust crisis” between users and tech companies, according to an advanced copy of her remarks.

And we all know the companies to which she refers.

Rometty’s comments, given at a Brussels event with top EU officials Monday, echoed recent statements by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who in October slammed Silicon Valley rivals over their use of data, equating their services to “surveillance.”

It is.

… urged governments to target regulation at those companies.

Legislation isn’t always the answer, but it increasingly feels like the only rational outcome for immature companies unwilling to regulate themselves. I say unwilling instead of unable, as it’s entirely a choice they’ve made.

IBM meanwhile has seen revenue decline since Rometty took the CEO role in 2012, largely due to falling sales in existing hardware, software and services offerings. She has since been trying to steer IBM toward more modern businesses, such as the cloud, artificial intelligence, and security software.

I’m like a broken record on this point by now, but this is the rub. Being a good privacy actor isn’t rewarded with profits. That’s the core economic issue that needs to change.

Apple has announced its Apple Entrepreneur Camp, for organisations founded and lead by women. I think it’s a terrific idea. From the landing page:

Research shows that women face unique challenges in technology, especially when starting and leading companies. That’s why we created Apple Entrepreneur Camp, for organizations founded and led by women. Our goal is to help these entrepreneurs as they work on the next generation of cutting-edge apps and to form a global network that encourages the pipeline and longevity of women in technology.

Naturally this irritated a certain vocal group keen to ignore the first sentence. It’s incredible to me those who claim to be rational actors ignore evidence; projection is a powerful thing.

And the best thing is, if you don’t like it, you don’t need to buy their products.

Greg Jericho’s Grogonomics column this morning had this gem:

One of my favourite paradoxes in regard to conservative politicians is their strongly held belief that the private sector, not the public sector, creates jobs; and yet, whenever there is the announcement of some new public infrastructure project, they will clamour over themselves in high-vis vests to proclaim how many jobs it will create.

Chocolately is among the first things I install on any Windows machine I find myself forced to use. The *nix world has thoroughly spoiled me with package managers, so to use a system with wizard installers isn’t so much foreign as an absolute affront.

Chocolately works in a similar vein to apt or yum, in that it installs packages into system default locations. For example, if I install Firefox as per below, it’ll be put into Program Files:

PS R:\> choco install firefox

This works, but I far prefer the BSD approach of having all your packages under its own tree. There are many benefits, including being able to blow away the whole tree and still have a bootable system. FreeBSD places your ports in /usr/local/bin by default; NetBSD and its ilk do the same thing with pkgsrc.

Even better still is the macOS Homebrew system. It takes the next logical step of placing every package in its own tree, so you don’t end up with dependency hell. Drive space is cheap, so why not?

Scoop is a package manager I learned about yesterday that takes this Homebrew approach for a suite of *nix tools. So you get this:

PS R:\> scoop install sed

I wonder if there will be a Homebrew Cask alternative for GUI applications soon? That’d be cool.

Speaking of overhearing lyrics in coffee shops, this was from “Gimme what You Got” by Don Henley:

A man with a briefcase can steal more money;
Than a man with a gun.

I’d extend it to online database in lieu of a briefcase.

I didn’t recognise the song, but picked up his voice immediately. He’s probably most famous for singing about New York minutes. I’ve been told anything can change within one of those.