This seems like something that should have been A Thing five years ago, but is only now just appearing: Orion is an app for the iPad that lets you use it as a second monitor for any device with a HDMI out port—things like digital cameras or video game consoles, for example. The obvious choice here is a digital camera; I’d love to try this with a camera up on a 10′ pole to preview the image, for example, or to really take time to compose an image and see what it looks like before hitting the shutter button. Brought to us by the folks who built Halide, a more powerful (but somewhat obtusely designed) camera app for the iPhone. One caveat: it requires iOS 17, as Apple finally built external webcam support into that release.
This is really interesting for a Mac user: Apple has introduced something called Safari web apps in macOS 14 Sonoma where you can save a webpage as a standalone application in the dock which shares no browsing history, cookies, website data, or settings with Safari. It’s helpful for sites where you have multiple logins and avoiding explicit tracking within websites.
While we were waiting in the TSA screening line in Puerto Rico, I noticed a sign that mentioned fliers could use a digital ID on their phone in place of a physical card, and remembered that Apple was offering this service through the Wallet app. I’d tried to set it up months ago but got stuck in a loop, so I made a note to set it up when we returned home.
The process was pretty simple; you shoot a photo of the front and back of your ID and send it through their system for verification, and a few days later get an email that notifies you of approval. Apparently you can bring the ID up and tap it on a smart device to verify your identity. I’d imagine the number of these smart devices is small, but my guess is that this is another look into the future.
On a somewhat related subject, I used my Apple Card to pay for all of the charges for the trip and this new laptop, and through the cash back feature of that account, I’m seeing the balance in my savings account there slowly creep upwards. I’m going to experiment with adding some additional cash into that savings account, as it’s the highest yield account I have (fuck off, Bank of America) and see how things go.
I’m very much enjoying a modern computer running modern software which allows me to take advantage of all of the new bells and whistles. Regular readers will recall that I’m a master of nursing out-of-date equipment along way past its expiration date. What I’ve got now is a laptop with a day’s worth of solid battery life that will recognize my Apple Watch when I’m wearing it, and wake itself up without me needing to log in. For that matter, when I don’t have the watch, I’ve now got fingerprint unlock—something I’ve had on my work machines for several years but never at home. My AirPods are smart enough to know when I’m close to it, and if I start watching a video or sitting on a call, it’ll ask me politely if I want to connect them instead of just taking over. Finally, something I haven’t messed with too much is Sidecar, where I can hook my iPad up to the laptop and use it as a second monitor. I haven’t really been getting my money’s worth out of the iPad, but that’s something I need to double down on, because it is a super-useful tool for illustration.
As I get older, I’m terrified that years of poor decisions and loud shows will leave me deaf. Dad’s hearing was getting bad, although Mom seems to be holding steady. Via Daring Fireball, here’s a handy guide to using AirPods as an inexpensive hearing aid.
I’m giving my new MacBook Air a test spin now that I’ve got the basics up and running, and so far I like it. It’s light, it’s fast, the keyboard is much improved over the old butterfly design, and I love having Touch ID on the keyboard. It took a little time to integrate into my Apple ecosystem, as initially my passwords didn’t sync properly as they should have. The solution was to log out of iCloud on my iPad and the Air, and then log back in to each one, which solved the problem. I’ve got a copy of the Microsoft suite installed, Dropbox is humming away syncing my files, and I just have to sort out one email address to get the Adobe suite up and running. Beyond that everything else is working as advertised, which is great. It’s amazing to have more than an hour of battery time again; I’m going to have to buy a spare USB-C to Magsafe 3 connector to have a spare on hand.
Meanwhile I bought and installed a tiny wireless repeater and installed it in the den, where it should be widening the range of our wifi out to the driveway and beyond. One of the most annoying things about setting off on a trip in the car has been having to drive out the driveway and down the street to pull over and then get directions from Google; the signal out there was just strong enough to stay connected but weak enough that it never loaded. It took a couple of minutes to set up but now that it’s in there, there’s much better coverage on that side of the house, as well as upstairs.
I drove up to Hunt Valley on Saturday morning with a box containing my Powerbook 160, tools, and new parts. I bought all the components needed to repair the LCD screen and get it back up and running, and talked to the guy who handles Mac repairs for the Computer Museum housed in the building I used to work in. Walking in the door, everything looked the same up until I got to the big open area in back which used to be filled with cube squares from one side to the other. Now, the front half is an extremely impressive museum filled with computers of all shapes and sizes, and the middle section was lined with worktables covered in electronic gear of all shapes and sizes, and men milling around with tools and puzzled expressions.
Where my old cube had been now stands a display wall with the entire line of colored iMacs, under which a huge assortment of other models sat: a 20th Anniversary Mac, lampshades, portables, and original 128k Macs. Funny to think that back then I was the only guy in the building who insisted on using a Mac to build websites, surrounded by men selling PCs over the phone.
In front of that display sat an original Lisa, and next to that is an original Apple I, hardwired by Woz and probably worth more than my house. The rest of the museum is amazing, with everything from closet-sized UNIVAC units to tiny calculators and everything in between. I ran into my old boss Bob, who runs the place, and we caught up briefly.
Then I found the fellow I’d talked to and he showed me how to replace the bad capacitors on the LCD board, deftly removing them with a precision soldering iron and replacing them just as quickly. He had to repair one contact pad with a jumper, but within about a half an hour he’d put all of the new components in and handed me back the board. I found an empty table and reassembled the unit, then plugged it in to hear the happy Mac startup chime. After a moment I saw the screen come up but then saw that the backlight looks like it’s faulty, as I could see the display when I adjusted the contrast but it wasn’t as bright as it should have been.
So I’ll have to do some research on what could cause that problem, and chase down a fix. Then the next step will be to swap out the ancient spinning hard drive with a solid state CompactFlash card, and possibly a hand-wired battery. Next time they have a workshop, I’m going to bring my Powerbook 1400 up to see what he thinks about the display on that one.
I’ve got a long car ride coming up this weekend and knew I was going to need to prepare some music for the journey. Driving up to Mom’s house on Thursday evening I fortified myself with a strawberry mint lemonade from Panera, which also happens to contain 260mg of caffiene. I have to avoid coffee anytime I’m out these days because the diuretic in it tends to work all too well; I’m clearly getting old. But the music situation was also key—after awhile podcasts get boring and I need something to keep me awake. Before you ask, I’m resisting cloud services because they chew through our data plan, and I’ve got a shit-ton of music catalogued on the server downstairs.
I’d ordered a new battery for our ancient iPhone 4, which has been my primary iTunes device for years, and when I went to install the replacement the four-prong connector soldered to the motherboard snapped off neatly in my meaty fingers. So I drove up with my decommissioned iPhone 6, which I’d spent less time filling with music, and which suffers from an annoying display bug that doesn’t group music in albums together in albums.
Back at home today I went through some different hoops to try and connect it to the server in the basement, which is running OS 10.7.5 (the last one compatible) and iTunes 10 in order to add more music. Both of these date to about 2015. Predictably, the iPhone 6 was not compatible. I dicked around with trying to restore the iPhone to an earlier iOS but that went nowhere. I tried a few apps that claimed they would transfer music to the iPhone, but that went nowhere ($40 to move files off the phone, but not to move music to it. What happened to all those handy file management apps back in the days of the iPod?) Finally I hooked it up to my old work tower and found a way to get music moved over through iTunes there—but none of this should have taken this long.
I guess time has made all of my home infrastructure completely obsolete even though it’s still functional. I’m going to use the old work tower as a server now that it’s decommissioned, and eventually I’ll have to figure some other solution out—a NAS or other more modern disk storage unit. But for now, it’s still humming along down there, waiting for a 2nd gen iPod and a couple of CDs to rip.
I’ve always done my own IT support for work as long as I can remember. My first real paying job was at Johns Hopkins, where I took over a loosely-organized island of Macs and learned how to optimize, upgrade, and network them all until they were singing in harmony. For a lot of reasons that was my favorite part of that job, actually. From there I took my skills and applied them to various situations, inside bastions of PC’s or design firms filled with Macs—but rarely did I ever need to call on the IT department. At my current gig the whole backend system is a Microsoft implementation, and despite their assurances my Macs would be fine using Sharepoint (“it’s just as good as Dropbox!”) Teams (“it’s just as good as Slack!”) Onedrive (“it’s just as good as Dropbox!”) or whatever service they rolled out, the reality never met up with the promise. There was always some reason why their service wouldn’t work correctly: it completely brought my Mac to a crawl, files got corrupted on their way back to my machine, or there wasn’t enough space on the Sharepoint drive and I was always having to ask them to give me more space.
They fielded a SSO system through a kernel-level nannyware system that’s now keyed to the serial numbers of the company Macs they’ve issued, which means that if I wanted to upgrade them anywhere past MacOS 10.14 the nannyware would immediately take over and install itself automatically, without any option to bypass. I held off for as long as I could but they’ve now got the wireless network in the office tied to SSO as well as printing and a bunch of other services I can’t do without, so I bit the bullet and upgraded my work machine to MacOS 13.3 a few weeks ago. On Friday I had to update my password, which worked fine from Mom’s house. This morning I’ve been locked in an endless loop where I can’t access my machine to access the reset to access my machine, which is the definition of modern technological stupidity.
The modern OS is very nice, and has taken some getting used to, but I like it. Things are peppier, the browsers work better, and there’s some software I use that I’m now able to upgrade to a modern version. The nannyware is there, and I have to use a secondary login to install apps on my own machine (grrrr) but generally speaking it’s OK.
With that experience fresh in my mind, it’s probably time to upgrade my personal machine—a 10-year-old Macbook Pro running a 5-year-old OS. Once I’ve finished paying off our vacation trip, I’m going to bite the bullet and buy my first personal Mac in 13 years. I’ve got it narrowed down to either a 13″ or 15″ M2 MacBook Air. Everything I’ve read says there’s not much point in paying the extra money for a Pro, and nothing I do on my personal machine requires the extra cost. Plus I’ll be able to pair it with my watch and use Sidecar to work more closely with my iPad on illustrations, which I’ve not done much with lately. And I was able to get a sweetheart deal on a lifetime Microsoft Office account for $60 a few weeks ago, which won’t run on this old machine.
I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to fix things in the last six months, and often that involves some exotic tool I don’t already own. My habit has been to immediately start typing a-m-a-z-o-n in a web browser, but I’m also trying to either gang up orders so as not to be wasteful or find local alternatives. I keep forgetting Harbor Freight opened a nice clean store in Catonsville a few years ago. While I was browsing the aisles yesterday for a new timing light, I stumbled across a small tool for opening the back of a wristwatch, which got me excited; my LL Bean wristwatch has been sitting on the dresser for about a year waiting for battery service, and I just haven’t gotten around to sending it back in. I always knew there must be a simple way to get the back off at home but never really did the research. For $7 I figured I’d give it a shot. Within 2 minutes I had the back off the watch and the number for the tiny replacement battery in hand (which explains why it only lasts for a year or so before dying); this I will have to source from Amazon, as most local home supply and drugstores don’t carry the particular size.
The second thing I looked for was a replacement battery for Jen’s old iPhone 4, which I’ve been using as an iPod for five years or so. There are pros and cons to this strategy: the connector is an ancient 30-pin design from ten years ago. The latest iOS it can run is 7.1.2, and the interface for iTunes in that era was hot garbage. It’s only 32GB, which limits the amount of music I can load. Meanwhile, I’ve got a 64GB iPhone 6 sitting here, but the version of iTunes on iOS 12 is buggy and likes to split songs from a single album up into individual albums, which is annoying as shit. The battery in the 6S is pretty much dead. But I’m going with repairing the iPhone 4 because replacing its battery involves no ju-jitsu or suction cups potentially cracking the display as with the 6. A new battery was $20 with delivery, which I just can’t beat.
Fuck! I almost forgot to mention: I got an email from my old employer, System Source, about a swap meet and workshop they’re hosting on July 21. I’ve got some old gear I could possibly sell, but what I’m very interested in is enlisting the help of a knowledgable person to help me fix my old Powerbook 160, which needs the monitor recapped in order to function properly. I paused during COVID because one of the parts was out of stock, but I’m going to see if I can order it and bring the project up there for someone to help me with.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and why you should. I’d like to set this up among all of the devices we have here, but we run a lot of older gear that won’t be covered under this seup—and the idea that if I do enable this, we’ll lose some functionality on things like the Apple TV or this old laptop doesn’t thrill me.