marco's µ.blog Profile Photo

marco's µ.blog

[🧪👨🎓] [🚴💨] [👨‍💻]

RetroGaming

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week twenty-three, 2024

    In continuation of week 22, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the twenty-third week of 2024:

    • 🔑 As the Safari integration of 1Password is getting worse and worse - at least for me it is so buggy, that I have disabled the Safari extension and moved my passwords to Apple’s Keychain1 - I am looking for alternatives. I actually don’t want to store my passwords only with Apple, either. I feel too locked in there. But using 1PW in parallel with iCloud seems weird to me in the long run. So, I looked around and for the emerging passkey front I ordered a Token2 security key, which arrived this week. According to its description, it “combines hardware-based authentication, public-key cryptography, TOTP/HOTP, U2F, and FIDO2 protocols to protect your accounts.” To make a long story short, this post-password world is still way too complicated for me. OTP/HOTP, U2F, and FIDO2?! 🤯 The token stores passkeys but also 2FA codes, and I never know what exactly where and when. Sometimes passkeys alone are enough to log in, sometimes I have to enter an additional 2FA OTP, sometimes - as with Mastodon - the 2FA seems to be the passkey and I still need a username and PW! For the token2 to work, I have to touch it, enter a 6-digit code on my Mac, and then touch it again. That’s much more cumbersome than just putting my finger on the touch ID sensor of my Macbook. On my Mac, I can access the stored passkey (but not all or just the OTP tokens, I dont know) on the token2 only very awkwardly but at least via Chrome’s settings page. OTP codes can be accessed via the iPhone app but not the passkeys. WTF?! I don’t understand anything. In addition, my most important accounts still don’t support passkeys. Parallel to this, the macOS version of ProtonPass was released this week, and the annual subscription could be purchased for 10 €. What the heck, I thought, and I purchased it. The Mac app seems, like 1Password, to be an Electron app, and it feels like they just released a web wrapper. It is still far from being a viable alternative. Maybe I have to hope for the rumor mill come true and enjoy Apple’s standalone password manager starting this fall? Anyway, I could not agree more: A Passwordless Future Needs Portability.

    • 🚨 There was a bit of fuss this week about the app Bartender for macOS, which I have highly appreciated so far. I uninstalled it and have been using Ice since a couple of days, as mentioned. It works flawlessly.

    • 🗺️ Organic Maps: Offline Map on the App Store now also supports iCloud sync.

    • 📚 Sequel, the manager for a variety of media, received a major update. I am actually very happy with Booktracks, Gamery, and TV Forecast, but I started testing the app again. I am not yet sure if there is a place for an additional, more general app.

    • 🌐 I also tried Surfed again because I actually find the idea of the app very cool. However, it somehow did not reliably record my history and synchronize it between my three used devices. This led to me not finding the things I was looking for, so I will let the subscription expire at the end of the month.

    • 📶 Little Snitch shows network usage in the menu bar on my work computer. If you are looking for a free alternative for just this function, you can check out ‎Scaler Bandwidth Monitor.

    • ⏲️ I have been using Rocket for a long time, but Horo - the best free timer app for Mac from the same developer had slipped through my fingers until now.

    • 🍏 Apple already announced the 2024 winners and finalists - Apple Design Awards. Congrats to ‎Crouton: Recipe Manager on the App Store. (I only wish there was an import feature for Mela, the app I currently use.)

    • 🤖 I’m Not Anti-AI spoke to my soul, and since I’m already mentioning Michael, I was very pleased with his mention in the Junited post 🥰.

    • 📸 I learned that on macOS, you can open an image with Quick Look by hitting the Space bar and then just select all recognized text (⌘A) and copy it (⌘C) to your clipboard 🤯.

    • 🧸 I had to stop collecting LEGO sets due to space constraints and definitely must not buy the Evercade Alpha Bartop Arcade System.

    • 🎮 However, I couldn’t prevent myself from acquiring a Nintendo N64 console. Thanks to 2x Line Doubler and RetroScaler N64 BlueRetro Wireless Controller Bluetooth Adapter, I can now play Mario 64 with my Nintendo 64 Bluetooth Controller. Please don’t ask why I don’t just do it via Nintendo Switch Online, EmuDeck on the Steam Deck, or simply my iPhone with Delta 🤷‍♂️.

    • 🎨 Speaking of which: more awesome skins for Delta: Delta Pocket - Transparent Edition.

    • 📱 And: Nintendo 3DS Emulator for iPhone Released in App Store With Caveats.

    • 🔋 If you don’t trust macOS’s built-in battery management, don’t use AlDente, and are looking for another application of this kind, you might want to check out BatFi – maximize your Mac’s battery lifespan. BTW I have decided that the built-in function must suffice for me.

    • 🔋 Same topic, different area: AirBattery - Get the battery usage of all your devices at once! I noted it down in case AirBuddy stops working someday.

    • 🌐 If you ask nicely, you might be able to test a new web-based feed reader: An introduction to Sublime Feed.

    • 💻 Johnny Decimal brings Ellane the command line of macOS. If you want to dive deeper afterward, I can definitely recommend Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal.

    • 🛠️ I had planned months ago to finally dive into to the Gridfinity system. Somehow, I never had the time to pick out the right base plates. Thanks to the “reminder” from Marcus and the hint about these baseplates, I just started with one desk drawer. I already knew it, but oh, how awesome is that! I definitely won’t get out of this rabbit hole anytime soon. BTW thanks to Gridfinity Extended, you can easily click together all sorts of things with OpenSCAD.

    • 🎙️ MacStories has added two new podcasts to its family. The pilot episodes were entertaining. However, based on their teasers, I honestly expected a little more than using the Reminders backend in Fantastical or playing games on the iPad with a controller to get the hosts out of their Comfort Zone 😈.

    • 🗣️ German-speaking readers should try the dialect test from the Swiss Tages-Anzeiger, which has made its rounds on the web. I’m still unsure how they fake it, but the precision of the results is amazing.

    • 🇪🇺 This weekend are European elections. Go vote! (And vote for a democratic party!)

    • 🍏 Next week is the WWDC. It will not be a bug fix year once again. I hope so much that Apple can resist the urge to integrate pointless AI functions into every little app. (I just want a PDF reader that doesn’t mess up my annotations and a more stable system in general 😢.)

    • 🙋‍♂️ I’ve received my fist feedback email to a blog post I wrote. Friendly shout-out to Darren!

    • 😮 Apart from that, this week in my filter bubble I learnt once again that we are all just people with feelings and that they can be hurt very quickly. I hope that the apologies were sincere and, above all, that they are accepted. Being able to forgive is also a very important trait in a tolerant community.

    Have a great week! 🙋‍♂️

    1. whatever they are calling it now ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week twenty-one, 2024

    In continuation of week 20, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the 21. week of 2024:

    Have a nice week! 🙋‍♂️

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week fourty-eight, 2023

    In continuation to week 47, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in week 48, 2023:

    • 🦠 My wife was plagued at the beginning of the week with severe headaches and especially nausea. The Corona test was negative. However, on Friday it turned out that she did have Corona, for the first time (proven) since the beginning of the pandemic. She is now slowly getting better, but it has really knocked her down. Let’s hope the children remain spared, who have already had it several times, though. Now I am the last one in the house on whom the virus has not yet shown up on a rapid test. Let’s see how much longer.

    • 🤷‍♂️ Somehow I can’t decide right now whether I should publish my weeknotes in full length on weblog.lol or micro.blog. So far, I have done it on weblog.lol and only created the shorter posts on micro.blog1. But there are so many nice tools like Micro Publish, MarsEdit, and iA Writer to publish directly on mb. I’ll just put the post on both platforms for now and think about how I will handle this in the future by next week.

    • ✏️ Speaking of iA Writer, a really great editor that I use far too infrequently, was just released in Version 7. It has a very interesting approach regarding “citing”2 in Markdown files3. There is also a call to implement the syntax extension in Obsidian.

    • 🎙 And speaking of omg.lol. The last episode of Hemispheric Views was not as absurdly funny as the App Defaults episode, but Adam was a guest. I always find it very interesting to hear what he has to say and am looking forward to his 25 days of omg.lol.

    • 🖥️ This week at Indie App Santa, MacWhisper, probably the best-known Whisper client, was available for free. With Hello Transcribe, there seems to be an alternative that I have not yet tried myself.

    • 🖥️ Also using LLM, but not for transcription, rather for translation, is Easydict: Easydict is a concise and easy-to-use translation dictionary macOS App that allows you to easily and elegantly look up words or translate text. It supports a bunch of different services.

    • 👨‍💻 I started evaluating MediaMate: Fresh visuals for Volume, Brightness, and Now Playing. It has a nice Notch UI for now playing. Have not tested how it plays together with Notchmeister, though.

    • 🕹 Started playing Stray. It is a welcome, quite peaceful change after the 100+ hours fighting as Aloy.

    • 🕹 This week, I actually finished my first Mario game: Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (GBC). I played the cartridge on my Analogue Pocket and thanks to Save States, I have finally managed to see the end credit scene. With every other Mario, I gave up along the way at some point, even though I probably started them all.

    • 🕹 There are not only seemingly 23,342 different retro handhelds, but at least 42 new ones are added every week. I had not heard of the Evercade EXP until now. You cannot play copies of your own ROMs or original cartridges here, but classics are reissued as cartridges for this system. Interesting concept, and there’s even Duke Nukem!

    • 👰 I found it interesting to read how much fuss was made about this one bride photo. But probably because we no longer know or can assess what is real at all. I always wonder how my children are supposed to learn which statements in the form of a photo, a video, or an audio recording they can still trust. But that might also be the reason why many people only dive into their own filter bubble and generally dismiss everything as fake news that is too complicated for them or contradicts their own ideas and blindly believe what they want to believe. This is probably actually the biggest challenge we as a society are facing right now, alongside the climate crisis of course.

    • 👱 Speaking of audio recordings, I couldn’t resist having my iPhone create my own voice. I dutifully read aloud 150 sentences in English. At the beginning, I thought it would never end, but it went quickly towards the end. My iPhone then calculated a lot overnight and the next day I was allowed to try it out. The voice definitely sounds like me. But for my taste, it is significantly too slow. I don’t know if this is generally the case or because I tried to speak as clearly as possible in a foreign language. How do people find it whose mother tongue is English? (I generally find it strange to hear my own voice, which of course makes the whole thing even more absurd.)

    • 🔑 I really need to reconsider my password strategy. 1Password and Apple’s Keychain just don’t cooperate well anymore on my systems, especially when Passkeys are involved. Autofill with 1Password is frequently broken, and you can’t have both enabled. Perhaps I should designate my 1Password vault as the master (or as a backup?) and save duplicates in Keychain to use for autofill. I’m really unsure. I feels strange to have all my passwords in two separate “clouds”.

    • 📺 Even though the subscription price is personally a little too high for me, because I’m actually trying to reduce subscription costs, I signed up for the Play 2.0 trial. I really like the new channel features and together with Vinegar, it helps me get over paying 24 € a month for a Youtube Prime Family subscription, which is actually way too expensive for my taste.

    • 📺 I’m really looking forward to Slow Horses Season 3, but before that, I want to finish The Bear with my wife. Then there’s Loki S2 and the new season of For All Mankind S4 waiting. Advent will definitely not be boring.

    1. Micro.blog is a service for which I have a kind of love-hate relationship (although this is greatly exaggerated). I want to love the service, and Manton seems to be a really nice person; the community and idea are also great. However, I always feel like mb is so fragile that you only have to look at it sideways for it to fall apart. Something is always not working and it seems very oddly cobbled together. It’s supposed to be a simple service but often it ends up being totally complicated and confusing. I never know if I’m just too stupid to tick the right boxes, or if I’ve stumbled upon another bug again. ↩︎

    2. They call it “text from AI tools”, but it’s more ore less citation in the end. ↩︎

    3. I really do like their other Markdown based app iA Presenter. There are a couple of similar apps already, like Deckset and Hyperdeck, but iA’s implementation is awesome as usual. ↩︎

    ∞

    What caught my attention in week fourty-seven, 2023

    Adam told me to stay on the path, so I’m trying to motivate myself to get back into the habit of writing down what has interested me throughout the week. So, here comes week 47.

    • 🎮 I finished playing Horizon Forbidden West. It was my first computer game in years, and probably the first AAA title in decades that I actually watched the end credits for. Usually, I start playing and then eventually stop. (Why should it be any different with video games than with other areas of my life?) I invested over 100 hours into Forbidden West, and whether or not that was a waste of time is for each person to decide, but I had a lot of fun. Over the past two weeks, I used the Playstation Portal. This accessory for the PS5 is essentially just a (pretty good, but unfortunately not OLED) screen with a built-in, very good controller - nothing more and nothing less. It allows me to play on the couch in the living room while my wife watches one of her shows. (My wife doesn’t like me playing games on the TV in the living room when she’s present.) The Portal suffers from the same weaknesses as Playstation’s Remote Play itself: even with very good Wi-Fi coverage and the PS5 connected to the router with a cable (and properly configured), there are regular artifacts, slow downs, and sometimes even stuttering. I really hope that Sony gives its Remote Play implementation a little bit more attention and love now that they sell a dedicated device for this feature. But ultimately, I’m quite satisfied, and the hardware is really well-made. (The lack of Bluetooth support doesn’t bother me at all; I wouldn’t want to constantly pair BT headphones anyway, and I actually have some very good headphones with a headphone jack that are happy to have found a new use.)

    • 👾 Recently, my Powkiddy RGB30 also arrived. The handheld device was highly praised by a bunch of youtubers and the 1:1 screen is really great for GB, GBA, and GBC games. I also really like JELOS. HOWEVER, the hardware quality and customer service of this device and this company are extremely poor. The device arrived defective, with a stuck shoulder button. I had to contact Powkiddy multiple times to get a response. They casually suggested that I could try opening it up. Opening up a device that is only a few days old, still under warranty, with a spatula and screwdriver is not exactly what I had in mind. I actually managed to open the case and free the button without causing major damage to the device. Shortly after, another shoulder button got stuck, and then the first one again. And if that wasn’t enough, the card slot eject mechanism also broke. All within one week. I really don’t feel like having to dismantle the device every two days just to play a game for a few minutes. Powkiddy mentioned that I could send the device back to China at my own expense and then get a refund - yeah, right. Never ever again! 😡

    • 👾 Speaking of retro gaming, while setting up the RGB30, I stumbled upon the pico-8 Fantasy Console and was immediately impressed. I wasn’t aware of the extent of this community. There are so many nice games, and almost all of them are free. You can play them on macOS, a variety of other operating systems, and even on retro handhelds. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s also the TIC-80. Oh boy!

    • 🖥️ During the Black Week, or whatever this discount rally is called, I made my way through the impressive list of over 400 apps for macOS and iOS in the Indie App Sales 2023. Fortunately, I already own the ones that interest me most and “only” bought three additional small apps this year:

    • Nevertheless, it’s an impressive list that also includes many Mastodon developer accounts that I didn’t know about before. Definitely worth looking into.

    • 🖥️ I also noticed the Apps campaign: 10 applications for you and your Mac. It really only lists great apps. And even though I use Moom, I’ve bought a single Mac license of Lasso and both play quite nicely together.

    • ⌨️ Launchbar, the launcher I’ve been using on macOS for almost 10 years, recently had noticeable delays when launching. It was impressive how my muscle memory was trained to expect to be able to perform actions immediately after pressing cmd+space. It was so bad, I took a look at Alfred and Raycast again, but thanks to the nightly build Version 6.18.5 nightly (6247), everything is back to how I’m used to it 😅

    • 😍 Oh, and definitely not to be left unmentioned is this insanely awesome App Defaults movement that Robb unintentionally kicked off and wonderfully shows off.

    • 👖 Furthermore, I enjoyed “the walkthrough explaining the inner workings of the ship that made the kessel run in less than 12 parsecs”, saved ASCIIFlow in my bookmarks, and pants whose pockets may not be worn out by the phone after a few months.