This week: new WiFi authentication method, house plans progress, Urbane Ivy recommendation, Neovim exploration, IVF treatment update, and innovative home elevator discovery.

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

• Last week, while traveling, I connected to a WiFi network that uses WPA Enterprise authentication for the first time. The UX on macOS was quite different when you connect to such a network. Plus, discovered another reason not to switch to Linux, the Linux folks couldn’t connect without a bunch of us helping to discover the right configuration, whereas the Mac just worked™?.

• The first stage of our house plans are almost ready. It’s going to be a G+2 construction, with the second floor devoted to two office spaces for both of us. We debated quite a bit about having the second floor, but ultimately decided that for remote workers like us, a separate place to work should also be part of the house.

• Another plug to Urbane Ivy. They have been great to work with, very responsive, and open to suggestions and changes, and very knowledgable about the stages in construction. I’ve said this before, but competent experts make a huge difference in any engineering field.

• I’ve been watching a bunch of Neovim, Lazyvim and terminal configuration videos on Youtube and thought I’ll try out a few this weekend. I’ve been pretty happy with VS Code, and “the bloat” is largely unnoticeable when I’m on my desktop Mac Studio. When I’m traveling though, the Macbook Air struggles just a little bit when debugging and running Docker. The Vim folks also seem so fast when editing code, and that seems like a life skill that I should pick up. I’ve tried to get into Vim before but it always seemed so fugly, but now it largely seems like a solved problem.

• The doctor has asked us to continue IVF injections for a couple of weeks more, and come for a scan on the 19th. The daily injections and travel for that is taking a toll on Ammu, so we found a nearer hospital (less than 5 minutes drive), and will try it out from today on. Let’s hope that things continue to work out for us! ??

• Was searching for home elevators, and came across this entirely battery-operated lift company called Swift. They have something similar to regenerative braking where the batteries get charged when the lift goes down, and emergency power as well. I called them up to enquire, and they just started up operations in India this year. We’re not planning to build the lift on Day 1, but I wanted to ensure that the plan allowed for space space for a good lift.

• I’m interested in the Vision Pro only for its ability to project a virtual Mac desktop. If the technology ever advances where this can be done without eye or head strain, I would genuinely love to ditch my widescreen monitor setup. I also discovered Immersed, which seems to have wider and more screens than what is natively supported by VisionOS now. I would also love to have Mac windows floating in a genuine 3D space so windows overlapping wouldn’t necessarily obscure content behind it.

Links of the Week

• Luggage Losers. Air India has consistently been in the top 3.
• Doggo seems like a nice modern alternative to dig.
• 37 Signal’s Writebook, a free downloadable product you can install on your own servers to host your own ebooks. I’ve always wanted to build a product like this, and even started a few times.

Subscribe