A certain kind of person 

By David Roessli

Posted in daily

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During ’s Apple Event, Apple presented a great movie clip on the people behind the Mac that reminded me of the Think Different campaign. Beautiful.

Apple introduced its first Macs based on the M1 system on a chip (SoC) which kinds of blows my mind. The speed and battery-life boosts Apple is claiming are impressive. I can’t wait to read the reviews.

Looking at the specs, it got me wondering if the M1 chip can only handle 2 Thunderbolt3/USB4 lanes. The three Macs they introduced all had the same number of USB4 ports : 2. The Mac mini offers a couple of extra USB-A ports (horizontally aligned), which is significantly less than the previous model, and a bit poor for a desktop computer, no? It’s consistent with the cheaper Intel models it replaces though.

The M1 is a “first step” into a “family of chips” that will power future Mac models.

All RAM configurations top up at 16Gb, which also might be a limitation of the M1 chip. I’m excited to discover how apps will perform regarding to their memory usage and requirements. We have to unlearn all our Intel based ways of thinking.

Early days. Exciting times (well, sort of).

I was happy to see Panic’s Nova featured in the event, while no being part of the App Store 😊 and John Hodgman closing the show was a blast, and a fun nod to another popular campaign from Apple.

2020-11-18 : the reviews are coming out. Mindblowing.

Recent Logs — or the next 10 entries

Well, they might not be all that recent. You'll find the older entries in the archives.

  • Apple One is not (necessarily) worth it out of the US
    Posted in daily on

    Apple launched its Apple One service bundle on October 30th, which brings together apps like Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade and some extra iCloud storage.

  • Apple Airpods Pro replacement program
    Posted in daily on

    Apple has finally acknowledged tha Airpods Pro issues I described earlier this year and has launched a AirPods Pro Service Program for Sound Issues.

  • Subscription is the new black
    Posted in thoughts on

    I don’t know about you, but I am starting to feel subscription fatigue. There’s a limit to how many I can add to my credit card.

  • Name Mangler : a hidden favourite Mac app
    Posted in daily on

    Name Mangler by Many Tricks is a life saver when you have batches of files to organise and rename, and it’s super fast (and revertible). These actions could all be performed on the command line or via a shell script, but it’s so much faster to launch Name Mangler and get on with whatever you are trying to achieve.

  • Protein Spotlight gets its comic strip
    Posted in thoughts on

    Last year, Vivienne approached me with the project of adapting a collection of Protein Spotlight articles into comic strips, both in English and French versions. The Geneva-based cartoonist aloys lolo was to create them on a monthly basis and eventually publish a book as well as set of posters. Could these comics be easily adapted into Protein Spotlight’s existing website?

  • Both AirPods Pro replaced
    Posted in daily on

    I was at the Apple Store this morning exchanging my right AirPod Pro suffering from the same symptoms than the left one early March.

  • That kind of cat
    Posted in thoughts on

    We chose her name on a pebble beach at Hermance in June 2007. We were on a family outing selecting pebbles to decorate the tiles of our bathroom. The children were 6 and 8, the original iPhone was about to be launched in the US, and I my digital camera was an 8MP Ricoh GRD (I was probably still shooting film).

  • Defer to the most cautious person in your presence
    Posted in daily on

    Rachel shared a couple of guidelines she picked up last week that I find helpful in terms of decision-making, and explaning, around COVID-19 safety when interacting with other people. Having to make decisions without good data about the risk leads to all sorts of behaviours.

  • All skies and water
    Posted in thoughts on

    Back from a few days off sailing and sleeping on our boat around Nyon, Allamand, Thonon-les-Bains and back.

  • Sharing CSS code between a selector and a media query
    Posted in daily on

    While trying to optimise my SCSS code, I realised that it wasn’t possible to use @extend in a media query.

More entries »

Recent Links — Pinboard

I've been using Pinboard (and del.icio.us before that) on and off to save my links ever since 2005. Here are the latest links I saved. You'll find all the others on Pinboard.

  • Debugging CSS

    An ebook with lots of tips and techniques on how to debug CSS the right way with easy and studied methods.

    Tagged with: book / css / webdev
  • AlphaGo - The Movie

    The feature-length documentary AlphaGo is now available to stream for free on YouTube

    Tagged with: deepmind / AI / movie
  • Best Barefoot Shoes and Sandals for Running, Hiking, Walking - Xero Shoes

    Like your body, our SOLE is the foundation of everything we do. Letting your foot move naturally, plus giving you just-right protection, support, and comfort…

    Tagged with: travel / shoes / wear
  • TripMode - Stop wasting mobile data today

    A favourite macOS utility: easily control your Mac’s data usage on slow or expensive networks. Stop wasting money on limited data plans.

    Tagged with: mac / utility
  • iSH Shell app

    iSH Shell app lets you locally run a Linux shell environment on iPhone and iPad

    Tagged with: utilities / ios
  • Meet Face ID and Touch ID for the Web | WebKit

    This blog post extends the content of WWDC 2020 “Meet Face ID and Touch ID for the web” session by providing detailed examples to assist developers’ adoption of this new technology.

    Tagged with: security / webkit

More on Pinboard »

Cambodia — via Bangkok and the Gulf of Thailand

Screenshot of the homepage

So, we are off to South East Asia again. This might be the last time (or not) Emma comes with us. Mathias is off to Myanmar solo, and to Indonesia with Célia this Summer, so we decided to explore Cambodia, eventhough it’s the wet season.