UNT campus.
I thought the Warriors/Celtics series would go to 7 games and I still think that. Gonna be tough, though... Curry won't miss everything from 3 again. 🏀
2022-06-14
100° here all week. Nice article at CNN about wind and solar in Texas powering almost 40% of daily energy needs. Renewables don't have the glamor or craziness of the oil boom in Texas a century ago. They're just out there quietly doing their job. ☀️
2022-06-14
West Oak Coffee Bar from over the weekend in Denton. ☕️
Updated my profile photo for the first time in forever. The old shot was from a cruise we took about 10 years ago.
2022-06-15
We're discussing tweaks to Micro.blog Teams to make it more useful. Nice to review our plans and features every once in a while, but I like consistency and non-gimmicky pricing so much that I don't expect the basic $5/month plan to ever change. Doing our part to fight inflation.
2022-06-16
Watching the hearings. We disagree on a lot, but it's reassuring when members of the GOP do the right thing despite enormous pressure. Pence and his staff come out of this looking pretty good. 🇺🇸
2022-06-16
Finished reading: Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan. Excellent. Took me a while to finish it, but so glad I did. It's got all the facts but it's not a textbook-like history... You can tell it's personal for the author. Well researched, well crafted. 📚
2022-06-16
Watched the 4-part CNN series on Watergate this week. I always think I know about Watergate, but every time I read or watch something I learn new bits of how everything fits together. Also makes All The President's Men rewatches better. Happy 50th, Watergate. 🇺🇸
2022-06-17
Great update to Mimi Uploader from @samgrover:
Recent Uploads used to show only the uploads you make from Mimi Uploader. With the new update it will also show uploads made to your Micro.blog account from anywhere else.
2022-06-17
Made some tweaks to my check-ins site manton.coffee this week. Also imported my 2020 check-ins. Foursquare is down this morning, a reminder that I need to move away from their service.
2022-06-17
Got an email from Medium: "Your audience is growing. You have 1 new follower." I'm torn between thinking that this email isn't worth the bytes it was printed on, and just happy that they put "follower" singular and not "follower(s)".
2022-06-17
Me: “Yes, do that little thing.”
Traci: “Do you realize how much you quote Meet Me in St. Louis?"
Me: “Well… It's right in our hometown. Right here where we live.”
2022-06-17
Playdate has arrived! 🕹
We posted episode 518 of Core Intuition. Hints about MarsEdit 5, more new WebKit, old frameworks, find bar, and how companion apps make our own apps better.
2022-06-17
Coffee shop photos template
I take a lot of photos at coffee shops. For some reason this morning I thought it would be fun to create a page on my blog that just shows coffee photos. I already use Micro.blog filters so that whenever I include the ☕️ emoji in a microblog post, it assigns the Coffee category:
The next step was to create a template layouts/_default/coffee.html in my custom theme that would pull posts from this category. It grabs the latest 100 posts, then also checks if the post has a photo ("photos not equal nil"):
Finally, I created a template content/coffee-photos.md to tell Micro.blog to use that template when creating the web page:
Voilà! Looks pretty good.
2022-06-18
The story of Juneteenth is fascinating. I'll admit that growing up in Texas, I didn't know about it. I'm a novice, but to me it feels rich and deep, at once acknowledging the bad and the good, our history's shame and redemption. More states and companies should recognize it. 🇺🇸
2022-06-19
We rewatched Jurassic Park 1, 2, and World over the last few days, then went to see Jurassic World Dominion last night. Fun movie. I like the way they brought the old and new casts together. 🍿
2022-06-19
Got a hardcover of The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I had only read in e-book before. Want to re-read it after I get through some more of my current reading list. 📚
Stage Manager compatibility without precedent
I’ve been thinking about why Apple’s decision to restrict Stage Manager on iPad to M1-based devices has caused so much controversy. At first, I was slightly annoyed that my brand new iPad Mini did not support Stage Manager. It is the latest, fastest iPad Mini you can buy, released less than a year ago!
You could argue that the iPad Mini is too small to take full advantage of Stage Manager anyway, but that wasn’t Apple’s justification. A future iPad Mini will surely be powered by an M1 and have more RAM.
I think the root issue is that when people choose a computer to buy, they don’t expect the operating system to change significantly for different computer models. You buy a more expensive Mac because it has a larger screen, or is faster, or has more ports. You buy a more expensive iPhone because it has better cameras. You buy a more expensive iPad because it has the latest Pencil support. It is a hardware decision, not a software one.
If you walk into an Apple Store today and pick out any Mac, from a $1000 MacBook Air to a $6000 Mac Pro, you can be confident that every feature of macOS will be available, and that all Mac apps will run, even if pro-level apps are going to run more smoothly on the Mac Pro.
I can’t think of anything comparable to such a major feature as Stage Manager being limited by hardware across a current, latest-generation product line. Maybe the closest is when Portrait Mode was first available. Portrait Mode is nice to have, but it doesn’t fundamentally change how you interact with apps in the way that Stage Manager does.
So I’ve adjusted my thinking on this controversy from shrug, that’s a minor bummer to now thinking that Apple’s decision should be walked back. John Gruber too, while he wrote that he understands Apple’s thinking on this, suggested that there could be a compromise in future betas:
Given the uproar surrounding this M1 requirement for Stage Manager, I wonder if Apple will reconsider over the summer, and perhaps do something like support Stage Manager on more iPads, but only on the built-in display, and make external display support the part that requires an M1 iPad.
Users on non-M1 hardware will understand if Stage Manager is slower or more limited — for example, no external display support or fewer windows open at once — and those limitations will naturally drive iPad upgrades. But it’s a unique and confusing precedent to have fundamental iPadOS features limited by hardware.
2022-06-20
