What's it all about, Alfie?

I thought about it for a bit, but the boost in performance, and the doubling of the memory were really the key points that made it a decision worth making. So I ordered it. A new M3 Max MacBook Pro - Black, 128GB RAM, and 2TB storage (seems silly to call it a disk, or drive anymore). And the target delivery date is around the end of the month. Not bad.

After watching the Scary Fast announcement, it was clear that skipping the M2 Max was going to make this jump a much more significant one, and I was right. Also, there's nothing really wrong with my existing M1 Max MacBook Pro, but the doubling of memory, and 50% increase in speed is going to be something I will use every single day.

The new Space Black color looks good, and I'm sure it'll be just fine with regards to the fingerprints mentioned in so many reviews, and it'll be nice to see it next to my iPad Pro that's similarly dark... it should be a nice addition. 🙂

This morning I'm very happy to see that the issue I've been having with macOS Sonoma 14.0 appears to be gone. I like the upgrade, for the most part, but what I'd noticed was that the memory usage for Safari and Safari Technology Preview would rise to the point of crashing the system. This mean that I had to have Activity Monitor running all the time to make sure the web pages that were getting too big were reloaded, or dropped, when their footprint got the memory pressure into the "yellow" - before it went "red".

I had expected that this was a dot 0 issue, and I was right - with the 14.1 update earlier this week, the memory footprint has started low, and stayed there - for a few days. Now I'll probably run Activity Monitor through the weekend, just to make sure, but I have a good feeling that this is something that got cleared up, and I'm not going to see a recurrence of the problem.

I have enjoyed macOS, and the Mac System long before Cocoa and Foundation, but this is something I am glad to see I was right about. They move forward, but pay attention, and fix the little things as they go. What a great team. 🙂

This morning, Twitterrific for iOS had problems logging in, and at first, I thought it was the 2FA I had applied to my account after a friend's account was hacked. The token on my iPhone expired, and I needed to re-authenticate my account with the 2FA, and yet when I tried to do that... nothing.

It was an hour later that I was still trying to find out what it might be, when I saw the news that Twitter had simply revoted the access tokens for some of the third-party iOS clients - while leaving the macOS clients alone. For example, Twitterrific for macOS is fine. This wasn't a mistake - it was intentional, and that's a shame. They chose to do this, and it's their company, so OK... but I can't imagine this standing - or maybe it's the beginning of the end?

I guess I'll see what Mastodon is all about...

This morning has been a Big Update morning to be sure... iOS 16.2, tvOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2, and macOS 13.1 all ready to go from Apple, and so everything I had went through the update. It's nice to get things up to date, not just because some of the things I've seen in Safari on macOS and iPadOS are iffy... but it's a chance to get some little surprises as well.

One thing that I've read about that I didn't really like is the new What's Up on tvOS... it used to be the things in my list, and now it's almost advertising for the things that some folks think I might be interested in. Not a huge fan, and would love to have a way to get back to the way it was. We'll see...

Until then, things are humming along, and it's nice to get it all done in an early morning. 🙂

This morning I needed to flush the DNS cache on my MacBook Pro, and so I looked it up, and wanted to keep it around, so here we are. 🙂 The problem was that a service I use had to change DNS mapping due to a change in Google Cloud, and the nature of DNS caching is to try and minimize the hits on the DNS Servers, but this makes it hard to "forget" a DNS entry... unless you flush the cache.

It's really not all that hard:

  $ sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

and after this, the DNS cache is empty, and all services will hit the DNS server for the IP addresses, and everything will detect the "move".

This morning I took the time to get macOS Ventura 13.0 up and running on my main laptop, and I'm glad I did. Lots of nice things are coming, and I'd updated my iPhone and iPad Pro to 16.1 yesterday, so today was the day for the laptop.

I did notice that Sublime Text launched much faster on macOS 13.0, and that the only wrinkle was that Safari Technology Preview wouldn't run, of course, so I had to download the latest version from Apple, and now it's back.

All in all, a successful morning.

About a week ago, I got my latest Moderna COVID Booster - with the Flu Shot chaser, and I wanted to get Walgreens, my Insurance Company, and my Doctor a chance for all the bits to be pushed around, so that I could update my COVID Vaccination Card in my iOS Wallet. Today was the day.

I had done this before, but it was a while back, and so I expected a similar smooth operation, and they didn't disappoint. 🙂 I went to my Doctor's website, they had a button to pull up the COVID Proof, and I could refresh the records to show all four shots, and then get a QR Code. Pull that up in the camera, and click the link, and Bam! It's in. Just as easy as I remembered.

But the surprise is that I was able to link my iPhone's Health App to my Doctor's back-end system and receive updates, etc. Now I know there will be plenty of folks saying this isn't safe, or secure, but honestly - nothing really is - not with computers these days, as I've worked with the devs writing this code... and if anyone is going to try really hard to keep it secure, it's the largish Medical Groups, and Apple - so I feel pretty good about it.

But it's really nice to do the Auth within the Health App, and get the 2FA, and then link my Doctor's records about me to my Phone. Why? Because when I need it most - knowing that I have a Doctor - like when I'm in an accident - will really help the folks trying to help me... even when I can't speak.

And the way it so smoothly integrated with iOS... maybe I'm just jaded from my work in the field, but that was done well... and with a lot of attention to details. Very nice. 🙂

After a very smooth initial set-up yesterday, this morning, I pulled up my iPhone 13 Pro, and completed the ordering of my iPhone 14 Pro... Space Black, and it's going to be here on the 16th - about a week. It's a yearly fun thing to do, and I always like shipping my current phone to my sister so she has something fun to get in the mail this time of year.

I mean, who doesn't love a surprise? 🙂

As always, there are a lot of things to look forward to, but the Camera is a biggie, as is the new Dynamic Island, or "What to do with the notch". I think it's going to be very interesting what they use that for.

It'll be a fun Friday!

Ever since moving to my new M1Max MacBook Pro, and moving to Apple Silicon apps, I've had one bug in VoodooPad 6 that's a touch annoying. I mean it's not horrible, but it was something that I hoped would be fixed. So I decided to let them know about it.

With the pandemic, and VoodooPad now being owned by Primate Labs, they haven't had someone to do all the upgrades and improvements that they'd planned, and I understand that completely. Times are challenging for everyone, and they want to update the app, they just don't have the people to do it right now, so it has to wait a little.

Thankfully, they responded, and seem to know what the issue was - adding support for Dark Mode, which is kinda odd, but I guess I don't know any of the inner workings of the codebase, or how Dark Mode support is handled, so I'll have to just be patient, and wait for them to update the app as they have time.

But it would be really nice to be able to save text colors... 🙂

I have been using the iPad Pro for two generations now, and my current model is the M1 iPad Pro, and during the pandemic, it has really proven to be a great Zoom, Meet, etc. box. It has a nice camera, and with Front and Center in iPadOS, it really makes it easy to have a good presentation, or meeting. But it's really so much more.

With the GitHub app, I can get PR notifications, review them, and merge them. With the GitHub Workflow Actions, we have continuous deployment, and that is really quite amazing to me. Of course there are the shells to boxes, and that is great, but even offline, there is so much to like about this machine.

It's rugged - compared to my MacBook Pro, and the screen is a lot easier to clean. I'm not saying my MacBook Pro isn't nice... it's just that in some respects, the iPad Pro is nicer.

What a really amazing device. 🙂