This week: illness, travel for IVF, an Apple event, and the movie Golam.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post.

What’s been happening

• Posting this a day late as this week I had the double whammy of falling sick plus traveling for the IVF embryo transfer. I lost a couple of days of work, and for the first time in a long while, I broke my rule of not working on the weekends. I’ve not really caught up yet, but I chugged through a chunk of code in the last couple of days.

• Speaking of the IVF treatment, I’m in Kochi now with Ammu, and we’ve started prep for our fourth embryo transfer attempt. This could very well be our last try, so here’s hoping it succeeds ??Here’s a photo of both of us just before all of this started:

• I bound Command+Home and Command+End to tile windows left and right in Magnet. Should have done this a long time back! It looks like this functionality is native in the next version of macOS.

• It was Apple event week, and I stayed up late to watch the event on Monday. The highlight is of course the AI announcements, but there were a bunch of “competitor catch-up” features like the above-mentioned window tiling (Windows has had this for a long time), and on iOS: T9 dialing, placing icons anywhere, a customizable control centre that apps can hook into, themed icons, widgets on lock screen, and native app lock (that works amazingly well with FaceID). Most of this (with the big exception of themed icons that looks fugly) has the Apple fit and finish that you won’t find on any Android skin, so it’s nice that we’ve finally got it. I’ll reserve word on the AI stuff until it’s actually here in a developer beta. The closest thing to AI now is the Math Notes feature, and that’s really quite cool.

• Living near the equator means I don’t really observe long and short days but noticed recently that sunset was really late (closer to 7PM). No wonder, solstice is June 22. 

• The Tim Cook and MKBHD interview segment on the Magic Mouse was so, so cringe. I’m embedding it here because you really have to see it to believe it. Perhaps Tim Cook has to say these things, but hopefully he doesn’t believe it. I do feel that the hate against Magic Mouse is outsized: it charges in less than ~15 minutes, and I used it as my daily driver about 7 years back without much trouble. But the ergonomics comment is just wishful fantasy-land thinking.

• All Apple OSs have a language setting of English (India), but I changed the default language to English (US) on my laptop. Should have done this a long time ago as the Indian version inherits the archaic UK spellings. Makes no sense especially when I’m in IT. You can still set the Region separately to India, and the Siri voice to an Indian English voice, which is lovely.

• Saw Golam (the l is pronounced with a retroflex like Allah) this week in the theatres. It’s an okay story, but it feels more like a stylish Tamil or Telegu film, and while the “plot twist” is interesting, there’s a whole lot more “tell” rather than “show” and that downgrades it this to can’t recommend.

Links of the Week

• I came across this article about how TB should have been cured a long time back, but it hasn’t yet because we lack money. It’s one of the ways our capitalist-centric world is absolutely failing us.
• Notes on Nationalism was written by Orwell a long time back, but it sounds as it it was written for today’s world. So much of it resonated that I bought a print edition copy (found this via Kottke’s Nationalism isn’t Patriotism).
• Ammu sent me Ten things you should know about a word, and it’s incredible how much is you can delve deep into even the simplest of things.
• It’s DHH’s Textmate videos that inspired me to switch to the Mac, and now the man himself has switched to Linux, and built Omakub to make it easier for other folks to do it as well. A lot of it is very similar to the configuration I made for myself when I switched to Linux a while back. I switched back to Mac only because of Apple Silicon. The performance and battery life of Apple laptops is currently unmatched, but I’m using a desktop again after a long while, and with a bunch more watts, Intel and AMD chips (& more importantly dedicated GPUs) easily pull ahead.

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