marco's µ.blog

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.

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:

  • Spin the Wheel - Pick Me (iPadOS)
  • NowPlaying - Liner Notes (iOS)
  • Pi-hole Remote (macOS, iOS, iPadOS)

• 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.