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Ode to a 2020 MacBook Pro

Time for another one of these posts. This upgrade is not as catastrophic as a battery explosion like last time. It does have a slightly dumb story to it, though.

So yesterday, I was supposed to fly to New Orleans. If you’ve known me for a few years, you know Louisiana is one of the last states I have to visit, and I’ve been trying to go there for a while. And every time I book a ticket to New Orleans, something catastrophic happens. The first time I tried to visit, I booked a ticket on September 10th, 2001. That obviously didn’t work out. Then I tried booking a trip in the summer of 2005, and that August, Katrina showed up, and I had to cancel again. This time, it looked like we were going to make it, but Sarah caught COVID last week, and I had to cancel a third time.

I’ve wanted to update this 2020 Mac for a while, but also didn’t want to, because it’s an Intel, and I don’t know what software on this machine requires an Intel processor. I know VMWare does, but I haven’t used VMWare in forever. It seems like every time I fire it up, they’ve upgraded a major version and mine doesn’t work anymore and I have to give them another hundred dollars. Meanwhile at work, I’ve been on Apple Silicon for a year and a half with no problems and a decent speed increase. And the 2020 has been slowly aging out. Firing up Photoshop or Lightroom almost always kicks in the fans, and even basic Safari usage is getting pretty sluggish. So I’ve wanted to make the switch, but I keep dragging it out. But with a huge negative balance on my Amex and a week of staycation where I’ll be confined to my office, it felt like now was the time.

* * *

Whenever I retire a machine, I always think back to what I got accomplished with it. And this machine is somewhat depressing, because a good chunk of its tenure was when I “quit” writing. The Failure Cascade is the only book I released while on this Mac. There were also two zines, and a bit of writing that was unreleased. During the time I wasn’t writing fiction, I did finish two master’s degrees, and that required a ton of writing. And since I “unquit” writing, I’ve done a fair amount of fiction writing, and hope to get something released soon.

This laptop did travel a lot more than any of my other machines, even though there were a few years at the start of the pandemic where it never left my desk. But since 2022, it’s been to Sweden, Iceland, the UK, Qatar, India (twice), the UAE, Poland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Spain. In the US it went down to LA twice, Reno, Vegas, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Hauling a full-sized 15-inch laptop (and sometimes two of them) wasn’t pleasant. But it was nice to have everything with me when I was on the road.

I still wish I would have gotten more writing out of this machine, though. I guess that gives me a goal for the next one.

* * *

I went on the Apple store online on Friday night to do the deal and go buy a new MacBook Pro, but they did not have one in a store with a 2TB drive. I ordered a custom build, and it said it would take two weeks. Today I was at the mall-not-mall in Emeryville for lunch and decided screw it, I’ll just get the 1TB version.

The latest iteration is the 14-inch Nov. 2023 MacBook Pro. It’s the Space Black model, with the M3 Pro 12-core CPU/18-core GPU. It has 18GB unified memory and the 1TB drive. I decided on the 14-inch after hauling around a 16-inch on all those long trips. I think I can sacrifice a little bit of screen size for a much easier haul. The new one is almost a pound lighter, and maybe two inches of width and an inch of depth smaller.

So the upgrades on this machine… aside from the architecture change (I’ll get to that), there’s a display that’s twice as bright with a higher refresh rate; an HDMI jack; the return of MagSafe, with its own port; the ports go from Thunderbolt 3 to 4; a built-in SD card reader; a better camera; better WiFi; real function and Esc keys; the ability to do Spatial audio; and a huge increase in battery life. (It says “up to 11 hours” on the old one and “up to 18 hours” on the new one.)

Missing on the new model: the Intel chip; the AMD Radeon Pro GPU; the Touch bar (good riddance), and one Thunderbolt port. The HDMI port is on what I consider the wrong side, since I keep the thing sideways on the left side of my desk. Same with the headphone jack, although I seldom use it these days. (It’s nice to have, though.)

The compute stuff is huge. Looking at the Geekbench score, it’s between double and triple the performance. GPU performance is also doubled. But the ML inference score, the ability to run data points into a machine learning model, is insanely improved, something like twenty times faster. I don’t even know or understand exactly what the Neural Engine or the Media Engine do, except my old machine didn’t have them. And now I have the ChatGPT app on the Mac, which I can use for my KonGPT.

* * *

Of course, the upgrade was a major pain in the ass. I always forget this, but you need a real, honest-to-god Thunderbolt cable, and Thunderbolt != USB-C. I spent hours churning away on various iterations of upgrading the old machine, updating the new machine, doing backups to disk, and trying to get an Ethernet cable to work. It turns out that trying to migrate from an external drive is roughly as fast as trying to type in all your old documents by hand. Using Wi-Fi is an order of magnitude slower than that. I eventually did some magic dance between the two machines to get Ethernet running directly between the two, and then it took about two hours to pull over everything. I also bought a real Thunderbolt cable for next time, although I’m sure I will lose it.

The new machine is humming away. I’m actually on it now. It’s always strange to swap in a new machine, but I’m at the old screen, old keyboard, old trackball, and the same background images and icons and junk on the desktop.

I haven’t taken it through its paces yet, and I’m still solving little problems one by one. But even saying the word “Lightroom” in the same room as my old computer would make the fans jump to life. Now, going to a photo in Lightroom instantly generates the preview from RAW without any hesitation.

Sarah’s testing negative and is mostly better. I’ve got a week of staycation. I need to get back to writing today. In July, I managed to write and hit my quota every day, so I’m getting back to it.

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Book layouts in Apple Pages

I do my book layouts in Apple Pages. Yes, I should be using InDesign. No, I don’t want to pay $35/month for something I use once a year. Apple Pages worked okay for layouts until version 5.0 came out in 2013, when they tried making the OSX and iOS versions have parity with each other, at which point they removed hundreds of features from the desktop version and said, “everything in the desktop version works on your iPhone!” (This, coupled with the move away from Intel, makes me fear the future, when there is no real Mac anymore, and they just have expensive iPads with keyboards, and they are useless for real work. That’s another rant.)

Anyway, Pages has evolved in the last seven years, and now I don’t have to keep an antique copy of Pages 4 to do layouts. I’ve done two books this year, mine and Keith Buckley’s, and Pages has more or less worked for them.

Here are my tips on how to lay out a book in Pages. This is not a complete guide, but maybe it will help you avoid any problems.

Basics:

  • I write in Scrivener, then either copy/paste all of the text into Pages, or export to a .DOCX and open that in Pages. I’m sure you could write the whole thing in Word or Google Docs or even in Pages. Whatever works.
  • I usually set everything to Body (see below on setting it up) and then go back and fix headings and first body paragraphs and such.
  • After you do this once, make a template of that doc with all of the text scraped out and use that next time.
  • I lock down all of my text before it comes to Pages. The spelling/grammar in Pages is better than Scrivener, but it’s still pretty piss-poor. I hate to endorse this, but Google Docs has a far better spellcheck because it’s constantly being trained on millions of words of text per second. I usually paste my locked text into Google Docs, do a check, and reconcile everything in Scrivener.

Numbering and sections:

  • Document (the upper right corner button) > Document > Facing Pages gives you different left and right page layouts, which is what Pages broke forever.
  • Always use section breaks, not page breaks. (It’s a bummer there’s not a keyboard shortcut for this.)
  • In Document go to the Section tab, and set Section starts on to Right Page. (If you set this once before you change your page breaks to section breaks, it will ripple through the rest of the book. If it doesn’t, you might need to set this manually in every section.)
  • You’ll have a bunch of front matter sections (title, copyright, TOC) and then the actual chapters. In the section where chapter 1 starts, set that to start at page 1. The first page of the first chapter should be 1. Leave page numbers off of every section before this. (Technically, the cover page should start with i, then go ii, iii, iv, etc (lowercase) through all the front matter, but you don’t need to get cute and show those numbers unless this is an academic journal.)
  • In each section on Document > Section, it should be Match previous section and numbering should be Continue previous section. You should also set Left and right pages are different, and Hide on first page of section.
  • Also on the above, you should set Section starts on to Right Page. This will result in every odd page being on the right, and every even page being on the left. This also means every chapter starts on the right page, with an odd number. Yes, this will result in blank pages. Books have been printed this way since the sixteenth century. Pick up any book that wasn’t self-published by someone in MS Word and look at the right page number. Trust me on this.
  • …But, if you have a blank left page, this will screw everything up in Pages, of course. Blank left pages won’t count against numbering. So page 15 has text, page 16 is blank, and the next chapter starts with page 16 on the right.
  • To fix this, you need to restart numbering with the correct number of the left page on the first page of the chapter. Don’t do this until your book is fairly locked down, because you’ll just have to redo it every time you add or delete a page.
  • I always create a Header & Footer – left and Header & Footer – right and assign them accordingly. Put author name in the left header, title in the right. I’ve also seen book title left, story or chapter title right.
  • I usually left-justify the left page number and right-justify the right. Marie, if you’re reading this, feel free to tell me I’m wrong here. I just noticed every David Foster Wallace book you designed centers them, and every one before you doesn’t. Maybe left/right went out of style in the early 00s and I didn’t get the memo.
  • By the way, my “bunch of front matter” (and everyone else’s) is the following sections:
    1. A right page that’s just the book title and nothing else.
    2. An “also by” section on the back of that page.
    3. A right page that’s just the book title and author name. Maybe your press name and logo, but whatever.
    4. On the back of that, the copyright info and notice.
    5. Starting on a right page, The TOC.
    6. Also starting on a right page, any introduction, publisher’s note, preface, dedication, or whatever else. (Nobody ever reads any of this, so don’t waste your time. Trust me, I wrote book introductions.)

For the Title style used at the start of chapters:

  • Delete any blank body paragraphs above or below the title. Each chapter should start with a single Title paragraph, then the body text. Don’t add a bunch of blank paragraphs to add space.
  • Click on a Title. In Format (upper right button) go to Style tab, and set After Paragraph to the point size of your Body style (probably 11)
  • The Before Paragraph doesn’t work for the first paragraph in a section. (But you can use Pages on your phone! It’s great!)
  • A hack: Go to Layout tab. In Borders & Rules, set a top border of a single line. Make it 70 pt wide, then set its color to white. Select the top position, then put in an offset of 50pt. (If you could simply make this offset 130pt, that would be great, but you can’t for some damn reason.)
  • After fixing the title once, make sure to update the Title style (a button will appear next to it when you make changes) so changes percolate to the rest of your Titles.
  • I shouldn’t need to tell you that your titles should be sans fonts and your body text should have serifs.

Body text stuff:

  • Go to an indented (i.e. not-first) paragraph and update Body so that’s the default style for all of your body text.
  • Set that style to use justified text.
  • Make a Body-first style based on Body that has no indent. Use that for the first paragraph of each chapter.
  • I always assign a shortcut to that style to make it faster to use. I usually set Title to F1, Body-first to F2, Body to F3, and a Body-centered to F4.
  • I’m not into Drop Caps, but if you like having the first letter or first word of your chapter four or five lines tall like a Gutenberg bible, they finally fixed this in Pages. Go to Format > Style and there’s a Drop Cap option. Pick a style and set this in your Body-first style.

I’m probably forgetting stuff. And I’m sure I’ve pissed someone off by saying not to use a sans font for the body text. Also, I wrote this at the end of 2020. If you’re reading this in 2027 and none of it works anymore, it’s because Apple has changed everything seven times. Anyway, hope this helps.

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general

Day 167

I don’t really know how many days into the lockdown we are. I suppose I could figure it out. I also suppose I could update more here, instead of just when something breaks. But there’s not a lot otherwise going on.

So remember last year when my iPhone 8 blew up? Almost exactly a year later, the replacement started swelling again. I wasn’t planning on upgrading for a while because I was fully paid up on the old one, and I figured the year-old replacement would last until Apple came up with a reason for me to get a 12 or a 13 or whatever. Well, there’s my reason. I bought an iPhone 11 Pro, and paid far too much for it. The Apple Store near me is open in a limited fashion now, so I did an in-store pickup, where I showed up at an appointment time, stood out on the sidewalk, and got the phone brought out to me. I bought it straight-up instead of dealing with any of AT&T’s byzantine payment plans. That part was easy enough.

The migration, which is supposed to “just work” did not work. It took me four tries, about a half day. I thought I’d just sync the old phone to my Mac, then plug in the new phone and restore to it. I don’t know why it took so many tries to get this to work. One thing I noticed after my first fail is that the cable I bought a year ago and the cable that came with the phone were different. They are both Thunderbolt (aka USB-C) to Lightning, but there’s some internal difference. The same thing happened with the laptop last May. There’s some subtle difference between USB-C and Thunderbolt, or there’s some difference between data cables versus charging cables versus fast-charging cables versus… whatever. And of course all of the cables are white, and look identical. I found out that some of the newest cables have a very light gray number on them, like instead of the RGB value of #FFFFFF for white, it’s #FEFFFF, and you need a jeweler’s loupe to read it, and then you have to google the value, and it’s on the seventh page of results because the first six are rumors about the next iPhone or something.

The new phone has a larger screen, but is about the same size. It has Face ID, which is fairly useless. First, it can’t identify me with no glasses, or with a mask on. Also, I’m in the habit of grabbing my phone and unlocking it while it’s still in my pocket or on the way up, and that’s impossible now. I also can’t unlock it while it is on the dashboard of my car. Also, I bought the battery case, so the phone is far too heavy and thick. I am almost sure I will drop it in the near future. And the gestures to use it with no home button are annoying.

The new camera is interesting. It has a portrait mode, which simulates a low depth-of-field lens, which is nice. It also has a wider lens, which is good for landscape photos. There is a night mode, which might be useful if I ever leave my house at night again, which won’t be any time soon. Overall, the camera stuff is neat, but for this price, I could have bought a nice DSLR or mirrorless camera.

* * *

Another Apple semi-fail is that the Airport Extreme I bought a few years ago was showing its age, or maybe having Sarah work upstairs full-time was requiring better WiFi coverage. I have bad luck with routers and they always seem like a perishable product; after two or three years, they just go rotten, and no firmware update or restore will make them better. Apple doesn’t make routers anymore, so after much research, I ended up with a Ubiquiti Amplifi HD. It works, but I’m not in love with it. First, it took a few tries to get it started. (They insist that you reboot your cable modem during setup, which makes no sense, but it didn’t work until I did, so I guess that’s my fault.) It uses a cutesy phone app for all configuration, and I’d rather have an actual browser-based admin. I also wouldn’t mind better logging or something (I’ll get to that in a second) but it seems to work fine. I have the router downstairs, and the mesh stations in the living room and upstairs, and it has roughly doubled performance up there, so mission accomplished.

* * *

On to the next problem. Right after I got the new phone set up, Comcast started complaining that we were close to our data cap of 1.25 Terabytes. They’ve waived the cap for the last few months because of COVID-19, but now that COVID is completely cured and everyone has returned to the office, they’ve started charging people for going over again. Wonderful.

This started the anxious exercise of trying to figure out how we’re using so damn much bandwidth. Of course, plugging in a new phone meant it automatically had to redownload every app and a bunch of big updates, so that’s probably fifty gigs. And as I looked at my machine, I realized my Backblaze cloud backup was then uploading that fifty gigs of updates, so I got double-taxed on it. I installed a copy of Bandwidth+ and Little Snitch to try to figure out where all of my data usage was coming from, and man that is horrible.

First of all, Apple is downloading monster updates constantly. Every little point release of iOS or MacOS is at least five gigs of data, and on my desk, I’ve got three different devices. And like I said, those are all getting backed up. (I stopped doing that, so that’s some savings.) But it’s also amazing how much a Mac will change over the course of a day. I started scheduling my Mac to back up at midnight, and it would send a few gigs of data up. Then I’d wake up, do nothing for nine hours, and Backblaze would say it had a half-gig of updated files ready to back up. I’d look, and it was all crazy iCloud stuff, the Mac recording Siri suggestions even though Siri was deleted, tons of deltas on files in the calendar and email programs that had been doing nothing. I have no idea how to stop any of this, but with two Macs in the house doing this, there’s like ten percent of the 1.25 TB right there.

Another thing with Little Snitch – ok, so this is a program that will fire up an alert every time anything tries to make an internet connection, and then you can set up automated rules to allow or block certain things. It also shows you what programs are using the internet, and tracks their usage. (My router problem: I wish I could do this for every machine in my home, like at the router level. I know if I spent two grand on a pro Cisco router, I could do this. But my little consumer one won’t.) Anyway, it is amazing how much some programs hit the outbound connection. Like if someone in my house even says the word “Adobe” I get a dozen outbound connection requests. Creative Suite is basically a piece of malware that happens to have an image editing program in it.

Facebook is also particularly bad. Even though I think I’ve disabled whatever video auto-play is in FB, it will hit this one video CDN continually, preloading things it isn’t showing me, to a tune of a gig per every few minutes. I know, quit Facebook. But it’s amazing how blocking that CDN saved me a ton of grief. Even better, I spotted the CDN that auto-loads those annoying videos that pop up any time you go to any news web site. Life is much better after I blocked that thing.

Oh, about the data cap. After much research, I found there are a few options to remove the cap. One is to straight-up pay them $30 a month. The other is to lock into their new xFi router ecosystem, and rent a new modem, and they will remove the cap for $25 a month. I currently rent an older modem of theirs for $14 a month, so they sent me a new router, which I will immediately put into bridge mode and ignore all of their new features, which probably don’t work. I hate to pay that $11 a month, especially with how high the bill is already, but $11 versus obsessing over this every time I launch my browser is worth it.

* * *

Not much else is up. I’ve spent a lot of time walking at NAS Alameda and have a ton of photos I should probably organize someday. Other than that, it’s been work, work, work. I have another “vacation” coming up, so maybe I can do something productive that week.

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general

Ode to a 2017 MacBook Pro

So I was in a meeting yesterday, looking over at my Mac, and the lid didn’t seem to be closed all the way. My only thought was the usual “Apple doesn’t make them like they used to” and I ignored it. A few hours later, at the end of my work day, I went to unplug the laptop and go sit on the couch and write, and I noticed the side of the laptop was popped open, and the battery was swollen.

God damn it.

I got this machine at the very end of 2017. At the time, it was the top-of-the-line 15-inch MacBook pro you could buy from the Apple Store inventory without a custom order. It was great and slim and bigger than my last one, and way too expensive. I moved everything over, went on a trip for Christmas, and when I got home, it was completely 100% dead. No battery, no lights, no plugging in a different power cord, no magic reset NVRAM bullshit, it was flat out DEAD. I went to the store and after much bitching, a manager gave me a brand new one, and a “sorry, that happens.”

I’ve never been 100% on this machine. It had the magic touchbar thing, which is completely useless, except there were no function keys or escape key anymore, so I had to use it. I shut off the other shit, because I constantly hit it while typing. And the typing is bad, too. In the quest to make it thinner and cooler, they put in this dud keyboard that felt like typing on an Atari 400, and even a piece of dust would break a key. There was also the lack of any ports other than TB3, which required a new set of dongles. The machine always felt creaky and weird, like I’d accidentally bend it at some point. I also had some random weirdness with macOS High Sierra, and never dared move up another version.

So anyway, swollen battery. I looked up how to replace it, and it’s a 58-step procedure that involves a heat gun and re-epoxying parts and brain surgery-level disassembly. Nope. Normally, this is where I’d cart it off to the Apple Store, since it’s still under warranty. Not an option during SIP. I called Apple, and my only option is to mail it in and wait a week or ten.

I didn’t want to upgrade. I was hoping to get at least three years out of this machine. But I needed a computer immediately. I ended up going to Best Buy’s web site and buying a new machine, then driving out to Pleasant Hill and doing the weird touchless curbside pickup. You reply to a text to tell them where you’re parked, and a gloved and masked worker comes to your car, looks at your ID, then puts the box in the trunk. Very weird.

The migration went predictably bad. The old and new machines couldn’t see each other on WiFi. Using the Thunderbolt cable to connect the two computers doesn’t work, because there are 167 different types of cable with the same exact connectors, and the “power” version of the cable isn’t data-ready or something. I thought I should just use the backup drive, but before I could do that, the system said it needed to download ten gigs of updates, and it futzed with that for an hour. I plugged in my CarbonCopyCloner bootable clone of the old drive, and it sat for six hours, then crapped out in the middle of the night because it was trying to copy the entire backup, including every file I’ve changed or deleted in the last three years. I restarted it, and six hours later, the files were more or less there.

Then began the real problems. First, I jumped forward to macOS Catalina, which means every 32-bit app on my machine is now broken. Then the barrage of “xyz wants to use your address book” and “abc wants to write to the hard drive” and “123 wants to see your location.” Some damn thing kept asking for my keychain password. It took seven tries to get iCloud to log in. I couldn’t get it to “trust” my iPhone. Adobe’s app manager got stuck in a login loop until I completely uninstalled everything Adobe and started over. The IR remote receiver I have didn’t work anymore. Etc etc etc. I think I’m about halfway stable now, but expect at least a week of fuckery until this calms down.

I seriously think this might end up being the last Mac I buy. We’re entering a dark period like the mid-90s, when Macs were twice as expensive, twice as slow, didn’t use any standard peripherals, and crashed constantly from a bloated OS. The current macOS keeps getting more and more stupid, as they try to unify with the mobile OS and push services more. Rumor is strong that Apple will dump Intel in the near future and move to their own ARM processor, which will be just like the PowerPC days, making Windows emulation impossible.

The problem is, what do I buy instead? I’m too tightly coupled to my other mobile devices. And Windows is horrible – I use it every day on my work machine, and it’s not an option for me. Going back to Linux seems unspeakable at this point. I almost feel like buying a typewriter at this point.

The new machine seems okay so far, now that it is stabilizing. The keyboard is improved somewhat, and feels closer to my 2014. The screen is slightly bigger. The build quality feels a bit better. Same drive size, same memory. More CPU, more cores, and I think the battery is better, but I haven’t gotten that far into it yet. I’ve got to figure out what to do with the old one, when the world is normal, or I give up and mail it in.

And usual reminder: BACK UP YOUR MACHINE. It saved my ass this time, yet again. CarbonCopyCloner, external drive. Anyway, let’s see if I can get more stuff done on the new machine.

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general

iPhone grenade; Sundays; the life and death of long reads, etc

This week’s excitement was that my iPhone 8 blew up after about a year and a half of service. I’d noticed a bit ago that the 3D touch feature wasn’t consistently working, especially on the left side of the screen, but chalked it off to the fact that iOS has far too many tricky gestures and oddities where if you don’t click exactly at the right thing in the right direction for the right fraction of a millisecond, instead of fast-opening two apps, you delete one, or open the camera, or start playing music, or whatever. And the battery did slowly lose its mojo, but that’s every product with a battery these days, and I have a battery case, so it didn’t bother me.

Well, suddenly the other night, the phone doubled in thickness, like a double-stuff oreo, and the screen split from the rest of the case. The phone still worked, but my immediate fear was that it would catch fire or grenade. I was out when it happened, so I powered down, drove home, carefully fired it up, and then backed it up to my machine. I went to the Apple store (with a paperback book to kill time) and within an hour, they replaced it with an identical model. The swap and restore seems to get less and less painful each time I upgrade, and the only pain was copying over 120 gigs of music, which took a few hours, along with other sync and backup activity.

A few takeaways: before I drove to the mall, it was impossible to get ahold of anyone at the store on the phone. You have to go through a ridiculous phone tree for support; you can’t make an appointment online, at least within fifty clicks. I put the phone on speaker, and after saying “manager” a dozen times, the phone rang for five minutes straight. Once a human answered, mentioning the battery situation got me in fast, though.

The other takeaway is that it seems that as Apple products are in this war to get as thin as molecularly possible, they have developed some serious reliability issues. It’s all anecdotal, and I’m sure Apple’s annual reports to investors show that 99.9% of people have no problems. But I had a brand spanking new MacBook Pro fail, and my iPhone 6s had a slow battery death, and now this. This is timely with the departure of Jony Ive, who was apparently the one responsibility for this thinness race. I honestly wouldn’t mind a phone or laptop a few millimeters thicker, if it meant it would not bend in half under minor use.

(And yeah, “BUY A REAL COMPUTER SHEEPLE.” Whatever, grow up, etc.)

* * *

It’s Sunday, which is always depressing. I’m not sure why half of my weekend is always spent in a dour mood over why I’ve wasted half of my weekend. I also get into this bad cycle of thinking I need to majorly course-correct everything, usually on Sunday night. I need to get off my ass and devote my life to learning (guitar | some programming thing | a writer’s works | obscure history of film | electronics | how to fly a jumbo jet | whatever). I wish instead of Sunday, I could have two Saturdays. There must be some mindfulness technique to fix this. Maybe lobotomy. (Do they still do those? Great, I’m going to fall down a k-hole researching this.)

I was thinking about this, because my Sunday routine used to be much different when I was in college, or just after. I used to make a lot of phone calls on Sunday nights after dinner, usually because that was when people were around the most. And I used to love the phone, to a fault. My long distance bill, back in the pre-cell days when that was still a thing, would end up being a colossal amount, catching up with people across the country.

I also have this strange little gap between maybe three and five, when I’ve already written in the morning and finished my errands in the early afternoon, and I feel some overwhelming need to do something in that time period, but I’m never motivated to do anything. The answer is that I should write more then, but I never can. And doing anything else — taking a nap, playing video games — makes me feel completely unproductive and horrible. I’m not sure if it’s my anxiety of the upcoming work week, or the fact that I never use the phone any more and my only human interaction is clicking a screen that causes my current dread routine. Or maybe I need to eat probiotics. Whatever.

* * *

Not much else here. I fell down a Chuck Klosterman rabbit hole in anticipation of his next book, and ended up re-reading almost all of his output. It sort of amazes me how it feels like Grandland was around forever, but it only lived between 2011 and 2015. Much shorter than The Awl‘s almost-ten year run, but same thing — they came out of nowhere, got huge, and died. Meanwhile, I’ve been plugging away here for decades, with no ideas, no traction, etc. Anyway, I read like four or five of the Klosterman books, which led me to reading music critic Robert Christgau’s memoir, which is… interesting. I guess he sums it up himself at the start of the book by saying most biographies are about astounding people or people who have some trick to sell or some story of overcoming adversity, and he doesn’t, but here you go, let’s get into 200 pages of his unremarkable childhood. It’s still interesting to me, but holy shit, people on Amazon hated it. Anyway, we’ll see if I can finish this one up without coming up with the stupid idea that I need to start writing record reviews again.

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general

Ode to a 2014 Retina MacBook Pro

Well, it was time. The Retina MacBook Pro I bought in 2014 reached its retirement, and I got a new one. This one did not have a spectacular death or great failure, but it was getting up there, so I decided to swap it out now, while I could afford it.

Two computers ago, the mid-2010 model I had lasted four and a half years, but had some major problems along the way. It was from the first batch of the dual-GPU machines, and had the NVIDIA curse, which meant two mainboard replacements (within warranty.) There were also two battery replacements, one in warranty, and a later one on my own. A fan crapped out at one point, and I lost one of the rubber feet, and molded a functional but ugly replacement from Sugru. To be fair, I thrashed the hell out of that machine, put some serious miles on it. I still have it, and it still runs, but it’s at the point where the OS doesn’t get updates anymore, and there’s no good browser for it.

The 2014 was a step down in some ways: it was a 13-inch, as opposed to the 15-inch one. It had an i5 as opposed to an i7, and integrated graphics only. But, it was light as hell, very easy for travel. The retina screen was great. And I had no maintenance issues, no repairs, no service, nothing. My only complaints were that the battery is slowly going, maybe 85% of engineered capacity, but losing maybe a percent a week. Its half-terabyte drive was getting pretty crammed. And I was scared to update to High Sierra and break everything, so it stayed at El Capitan. So, no real complaints, but time to move forward.

The bad timing here: my work computer went sideways about a week ago, requiring two trips to Palo Alto to get it wiped, and re-wiped, and re-re-wiped. It got hung up on a Windows 10 update bug, where it would download six gigs of data, spend half a day updating, fail, restore itself, then immediately start the process again. I ended up getting a newer machine, which also had to be wiped/updated, but the whole thing was a giant reminder that I do not like dealing with Windows 10 machines, not that I have any option to migrate all my crap to a machine that doesn’t run any of the programs I use.

I fretted about which machine to get as a replacement. I really wanted a 13-inch machine again, but I really wanted a 1TB drive. By the time you option up a 13-inch machine to get the big drive, it’s almost the same price as the 15-inch. So, that’s what I did. I ended up with a 2017 15-inch, with the 3.1 GHz i7, 16 GB of memory (double what I had), a 1 TB drive (also double), and the Radeon 560 4GB GPU, along with the down-switching to the integrated graphics. Space Gray, which I was 50/50 on, but looks nice.

Probably the biggest pain in the ass is the port issue. The machine now has two Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports on each side, and a headphone jack on the right (wrong) side. My home setup involves Ethernet, DVI video, and a USB hub with two USB connectors for keyboard/mouse, another for an IR receiver, and then whatever phone or external drive I need to periodically plug in. So, the dongle situation: a TB3 to ethernet; the “AV connector” which has USB/power in/HDMI; an HDMI to DVI; and the existing USB3 hub. I also got a USB-C-to-USB connector for whatever odd thing I need to plug in. And I’m using a USB audio DAC into my monitors. So, two plugs. I thought about a Thunderbolt dock, but they all seem a bit half-baked.

I think the usual screed here is how horrible it is that all ports are going away, Apple is a bunch of fucking evil communists, I can buy a $500 plastic Asus machine at Best Buy that has tons of ports, etc. My general thought is that TB3 is the way to go – much higher throughput, daisy-chainable, and one universal connector. The problem is all the shit that doesn’t use it. But I’ve got that figured out, so, done.

The machine feels a bit heavier, but bigger. We’ll see how it travels, since I am gone next week. Also not sure on battery life, but they tend to get better with each iteration. The keyboard is different. It has Touch ID, which is a little weird, and not that consistent between apps and stuff, but it does work well. Siri is fairly useless on the Mac. I run the machine clamshelled most of the time, so the new touch bar thing is not even on my radar.

I started setting up the machine by hand, copying over files and reinstalling everything, then realized I was going to screw everything up, break my mail or iTunes or whatever. So I gave up, blanked out the machine, and fired up Migration Assistant. I wired the two machines directly with Ethernet, and about two hours later, it finished, and was about 95% set up. Lost a day of writing, but I lost almost two weeks on that Windows 10 machine, so, yeah.

And once again, important PSA: BACK UP YOUR MACHINE. Get an external drive, clone your entire machine on it, and keep doing it regularly. Or use CrashPlan or BackBlaze. Or do both. I didn’t run into any backup issues this time, but seriously, if you have a computer, you need to back it up.

Anyway, happy firestorm or whatever you celebrate.

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general

WordPerfect for Mac

A stupid memory… I was thinking about how I used to love WordPerfect on the Classic Mac OS. It wasn’t a port of DOS WP 5.1; a different dev team wrote their own program, and the company called it WordPerfect, so it worked much faster. I always found it better than Word on the old Sys6/7 Mac.

Anyway, found this page: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/mac-intel.html – Someone has set up the SheepSaver PowerPC emulator to run MacOS 8.6, along with a few versions of WordPerfect. So you can download one image file, and with almost no fuss (aside from the big download) you can then run WordPerfect on a modern Intel Mac.

I was messing with this and realized I have a Stuffit archive of the Mac machine I had at my first job, 22 years ago. I’ve never been able to un-stuff it, because of the weirdness of Mac resource forks or whatever. I brought it into this emulated machine, and it instantly opened it. So I had the same set of files I had back on my Centris 660 AV in Seattle in 1996.

There wasn’t much there: the 1984 commercial in QuickTime; a bunch of QuickHelp source for the Spry Mosaic browser; some other assorted utilities, like DropPS and GraphicConverter. The fun find was I had a Sounds folder, which had a few hundred short clips of audio from Beavis and Butthead and Pulp Fiction. They were all sampled at like 10kHz; the whole folder is like 38 MB.

It reminds me of a time when Windows audio was almost nonexistent, unless you paid hundreds of bucks for a SoundBlaster, but every Mac had pretty decent audio, standard. There was a big culture of hoarding these little ten-second samples of Star Wars and RoboCop movie quotes. Like I remember hanging out with my Calculus teacher at IUSB – this must have been in late 1990. There were almost no Macs at the South Bend campus, but for some reason, he had a brand new SE/30. I went to check it out one time, and he spent half an hour playing me every sound file he had downloaded from the internet, these little clips from science fiction films, all hooked in so it would play Darth Vader when he started up or shut down his machine.

I don’t even know how to play these audio files outside of the emulator, but it works in the program. I guess now I can just go to YouTube and play the entire TV show if I want, but it’s interesting to see a snapshot of how it used to work back then. Also, the old Mac interface looks so blocky and weird now, which is hilarious.

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general

New iPad

Thanks to a generous gift card from Sarah for my birthday, I ended up at the Apple Store, upgrading my iPad again. I was really on the fence about upgrading at all, because there’s a rumor they will be updating in March, but there’s another rumor that there’s a massive 10nm chip shortage that’s going to push back the release significantly. And I’m far enough behind the curve with my circa-2012 iPad 4 that anything would be a big upgrade.

My big dilemma was whether to get the 9.7-inch iPad Pro or the 12.9-inch. I ended up choosing the smaller one, partly because of price, and partly because the 12.9 is a bit ungainly for me, slightly heavy and hard to type on. Also, it really feels like I’d bend it in half at some point, like the first time I put it in a computer bag. So I went with the 9.7, but I did option up to 128GB of storage.

I don’t use an iPad that much to need a Pro version, but this is an oddball side effect of the horrible market segmentation going on at Apple right now. There are essentially four different iPads in three different sizes right now, and none of that makes any sense. What is the difference between an iPad Air 2 and an iPad Pro 9.7? Better processor, better screen, better cameras, the smart connector, the use of the pencil, and better speakers. But why make those two different lines? It’s confusing, and it reminds me of the mid-90s, when there were three dozen different Centris and Quadro and Duo and Fucko models of the Mac, back when Apple really sucked.

As far as the not using part, I really have/had high hopes for the smart connector thing, because bluetooth keyboards are always a pain in the ass, especially charging them. But the $170 keyboard that Apple sells is hot garbage. It feels like typing on an Atari 400, and you have to use it on a table. I want something I can use in my lap, but I don’t know what one that is yet.

I don’t write on the iPad, but I do think about it. For a while a few years ago, I would only take the iPad and a keyboard on trips, and try writing that way. But now, it’s just as easy to bring my MacBook Pro with me, and have access to all my writing at once. I wouldn’t mind using the iPad more for notes, or for a distraction-free writing device.

I also ordered an Apple Pencil online, after deciding not to in the store. Maybe I can use the Paper app to sketch out ideas. A million years ago, I had a Toshiba Windows tablet with a pen, and had huge plans to use OneNote and plot out books and take notes, and I never did shit with it. Maybe this will be the same, but who knows.

Overall, the upgrade, which is about four or five times faster, seems nice and snappy. The new screen is much better looking. And it’s odd that it is physically smaller overall, but has the same screen size. I expect that in a week, I won’t notice the speed jump at all, which is what happened when I upgraded from the gen-one to the four. Still, very nice birthday gift to myself.

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general

The iCloud Music Library Different Version of a Song Thing

I’ve been having some odd problems with iCloud Music LIbrary and Apple Music. Here’s a description and walkthrough of the issue, partly so I won’t forget it in six months when something completely different doesn’t go sideways, and partly so there’s a record of it somewhere on google, because googling on stuff like “iTunes different version of song” only results in insane hyperbole having nothing to do with the issue.

(Also, take all of this with a grain of salt. This is my experience, and what I tested. Maybe I have the terms or usage screwed up. If so, please comment. Also a big warning: there are a bunch of edge cases that you can hit by screwing around with your settings, potentially destroying your entire music library. This isn’t a list of those. PLEASE do more reading and back up all your shit before you do anything.)

First – I subscribed to Apple Music. It’s like Apple’s version of Spotify; ten bucks a month, and you can stream a bunch of music without buying it, ad-free. It’s not the entire iTunes store’s contents; I don’t know if it’s a subset, or a different list, but it’s fairly comprehensive. There are also various curated playlists, which are neat, and I’ve found a lot of great new experimental music there. It’s all confusingly integrated into iTunes, and I have some complaints there (as does everyone else).

So at home, on the Mac, I’ve got 17,000-odd songs that I’ve either ripped from CD, bought from iTunes, or otherwise downloaded (cough). When I’m at home, I listen to those fine, and also have added some Apple Music playlists to “My Music” as it’s called in iTunes. I listen to the mix of those two when I have internet access, or just the ones on my physical machine when I don’t.

Second – the iPhone Situation. Back in the day, I kept no music on it at all, and carried around an 80GB iPod with a mirror of my collection on it. When the 64GB iPhone came out about five years ago, I started mirroring my entire collection to my phone. When that stopped fitting, I created a bunch of playlists and only synced those, to only sync stuff that was higher rated, recently played, recently added, etc. I also used to sync everything I purchased, but that got to be too much after a certain point. Right now, I sync about 2000 songs, 20GB of stuff. The partial collection sync works okay, although every once in a while, I’d get stuck without something I wanted to hear, but I’d live.

Now, about iCloud Music Library. The text next to this option is “Store your Apple Music songs and playlists in iCloud so you can access them from all of your devices.” The general idea is that you are pushing a master list of all tracks and playlists to the cloud. Then when you use the Music app on another device with that iCloud account login, you get a copy of those lists, and can then stream the songs from the cloud without having them on the device. In theory, I could sync no music to my phone, have zero bytes of music stored or synced, and just get everything from the sky.

There are really two things going on here, and it’s a very subtle difference that is not clearly explained. First case, let’s say I don’t have an album on my Mac. I never bought or ripped the Krokus album Headhunter. (Of course, this is a lie. I think I own 17 copies of this album.) But I found it in Apple Music, I liked it (who doesn’t) and I added it to My Music. What I’ve done is added a link to the album in Apple Music within the big list of songs and playlists in my library. I didn’t download it, though. But if iCloud Music Library is turned on in my Mac iTunes and on my iPhone, that link is added to my iCloud Music Library, and it’s synced to my phone. I can then stream the song “Eat the Rich” from my phone, and all is well (until I drive into a tunnel, or like 80% of Indiana.)

Second case: what also happens is that I am syncing the master list of all of my tracks and playlists to the cloud. So let’s say I ripped that copy of Headhunter from a CD back in 2002, and it’s been knocking around various music libraries on my computers since then. (Probably true.) And maybe I one-starred the song “White Din” because it’s a 90-second intro track of sound effects, and it’s stupid when it comes up when I’m driving around with my windows open stuck in traffic. So the file never gets synced to my iPhone, but it’s in my master list in iCloud. The song “Screaming In the Night” is synced and is physically on my iPhone, so that plays fine, even when I’m in a plane at 40,000 feet and don’t pay extortion prices for WiFi. But if I’m listening to the entire album (which is itself a list of the tracks, stored in this synced master list my phone got from iCloud) and it hits “White Din” it will stream that song for me.

(To also slightly complicate things: if you don’t have the physical song on your device, there is a way to download the Apple Music copy and have a cached version of a song you didn’t even buy on your phone, so you can play it without internet access. This is nifty, but it never ever works, because you will always forget to download that version, and the feature is half-buried and impossible to find or use, and you have to do it on a per-playlist basis.)

The second case is a nice-to-have. The first case, you have to turn the iCloud Music Library to see your Apple Music playlists. It appears to me that there’s some difference between Apple Music playlists and an iTunes playlist I’ve created by hand, because you can’t sync Apple Music playlists unless iCloud Music Library is turned on. I’d been adding all these neat playlists to my library, but couldn’t see them on my phone. So, I turned on iCloud Music Library, and that’s when my problems started.

(Yes, I’m a thousand words into this post, and just now getting to the problem.)

I noticed my playlists were getting weird. Like with this theoretical Krokus situation: I’d be syncing the entire album to my phone, from my own non-Apple Music playlist. Then I’d be out and about, and when the song “Headhunter” came up, instead of playing the studio version that’d I’d ripped from the 1983 album back in 2002, it would instead stream some shitty live version with only one original member recorded at a county fair in 2012.  Or it would stream a horrific EDM dance remix by a DJ from Ireland who also happens to use the name Krokus and has a 38-minute trance number he also called “Headhunter.”

(This is a theoretical example; I don’t know if Krokus was having an issue. Here’s one that really happened though: I had the entire Queensryche album Empire synced to my phone, in a playlist of songs rated above a 3. The album was originally ripped by me from a CD. When the last song “Anybody Listening?” played on my phone, instead of using the synced studio version, it would instead stream a live version of the same song.)

My first attempt at trying to fix this: I renamed the track on my Mac, adding an “(r)” to the filename, thinking that would break the match. It did not. I don’t know why, but it still played the same fucking live song.

My second attempt: I turned off iCloud Music Library. I then told it to delete everything from the phone (which is fine, it’s all copies there) and re-sync. It went back to the way it was. I can’t play Apple Music playlists anymore, but all of my music is fine.

I don’t know why this happens, and I don’t fully understand it, but I’ve got a trip later this week with limited internet, so I’m not screwing with it any more.

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general

The Latest S

Another two years have passed. My iPhone wouldn’t hold a charge more than half a day anymore, and I got annoyed at carrying an external battery charger everywhere. So this week, it was off to the Apple Store to trade in the old 5s for the new 6s.

First things first: I do not understand what the hell is going on with upgrading phones. I’m on AT&T, and it used to be you had a contract, you did your two years of time, then you came in and got a $700 phone for $200 or $300 and the promise to re-up for another two years. I realize phones are not “free” and you pay for that $500 subsidy over time. I recently moved to a different plan and gave up my unlimited data plan so I could use tethering, which was probably a mistake, especially since everything is streaming or in the cloud now. But anyway, I was under the assumption this upgrade deal would continue, and the AT&T web site made it look like it would.

But once I got to the store, they said no. I was given three options: pay $750 for an unlocked phone, join AT&T Next and pay an extra $25 a month for the phone and be locked in for 30 months with an option to swap phones at 24 months, or use Apple’s financing to pay some amount (maybe like $25, I don’t know and I’m too lazy to look it up) and then trade up every year. There is allegedly some discount on the AT&T Next thing if you have a newer plan, probably with a lower data amount — I don’t even fucking know. All I know is my cell phone bill went up like 25% for no real reason, but I did end up not paying for the entire phone up front. So they have made it so you pay the same price for not getting the phone subsidy, or you can pay extra to get the subsidy, which is total bullshit. I have a feeling if I would have said “Yeah, I’m not upgrading at all today and keeping my old shit phone” they would have charged me another $25 a month to do that.

Anyway. I jumped from 5s to 6s. The biggest thing about the 6s is the phone itself – it moved from the 4” to the 4.7” size. I looked at the 6s+, and it seemed far too big for a phone. The 6s is honestly too big for me. It’s also very slippery and I’m almost sure I would drop it within the first day if I didn’t get a rubbery case for it. I haven’t dropped an iPhone ever, but I’m certain I won’t make it six months with this one without face-planting it, hopefully not on concrete. The move of the lock button to the right side is also awkward to me, and touching anything at the top of the screen is a chore when holding the phone in one hand. Maybe I should have gone to the larger size and just completely given up on ever using it with one hand. I like the small amount of extra screen real estate, but honestly, there are rumors of a 4” next-gen phone, and I’d almost consider that when the next upgrade cycle happens (and who knows when the hell that is now, with this stupid contract I signed.)

The 6s is faster. It’s much faster, but I’m sure I won’t notice it in a week or so, and it will be the new normal. But the touch ID is remarkably fast. Battery life is about the same. There is the new 3D Touch feature, which detects finger pressure and opens little pop-up windows for frequently-used functions. This feature is largely useless to me, and is the equivalent to when right-clicking was introduced in Windows 95. It meant that some but not all things had a weird right-click menu on it, and you never knew what you could do unless you experimented forever to find these “bonus” menus in odd places, and who has time for this shit.

The camera is a big upgrade, going from 8 to 12 MP on the rear, and 1 to 5 on the front, with better sensors (really the important part, not megapixels) and the video moving to 4K. I haven’t had a chance to do much with the camera yet, but I used my iPhone as camera for most of my vacation pictures over Thanksgiving, so I see myself doing that going forward.

Upgrade was smooth, going from a backup. I had a phone with no music and no stuff on it for the drive home, which was the same as last time. But this time, I also had a watch that was similarly dead (although it could still tell time and everything) because my watch was now paired to an old phone that had been wiped and traded in. The one snag I had moving forward was that Apple Music and the iTunes Cloud crap meant that no music was syncing on the device anymore, and I was streaming everything. I had to fuck around forever with making playlists available offline, and I’m still not sure they are. Apple really needs to figure that shit out.

There’s always been an odd emotional reaction when the old phone gets wiped, shut off, and shoved in an envelope to go off to the recycling plant. My phone never leaves me, has everything on it, and there’s always a close emotional bond to it, as stupid as that sounds. My phones end up going to many states and countries, held to my face for many long phone calls, and tapped away for literally years of online interaction.

This strange nostalgia seems to happen less and less now with each upgrade cycle; I remember it being horrible the first time I traded in my broken iPhone 3G for a new one, after only nine months of use. Now, it’s not as big of a thing. With the cloud stuff and upgrade process, it’s more like a digital soul is being pulled from one host and dumped into another, because the new phone had the same old layout and data and preferences, but in a shiny new case.

Makes me wish I could do that with my own body at some point. Isn’t Kurzweil done with that shit yet?