davep

Siri is broken

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:12:05 +0100

I think, in part, I regret upgrading any of my Apple devices to the 27 line of operating systems. While my experience as a whole has been pretty favourable, the one thing I was looking forward to is not just disappointing, but is a huge step backwards.

I don't use Siri for many things, but I do use it a lot for a small number of core things. On any given day I'll lift my watch up and speak to it to set a timer or a reminder. Occasionally I'll ask other things, but they're the main uses. Thanks to the fairly recent addition of on-device voice handling, these requests have been near-instant.

With the new Siri that comes with iOS 27, etc., if I'm really lucky the reply will be super slow (getting on for 20 seconds or so to do the job), but more often than not it just doesn't work at all. Either it tells me that my main device isn't available right now¹ (which I take to mean my iPhone, which is wild given it's always in my pocket at the time), or it just busy spins for ages and then simply times out and does nothing.

If I try to use Siri on the iPhone itself, it either just busy waits for ages without getting anything done, or it finally tells me it isn't working.

I was one of the people who upgraded to the 16 Pro because of the promise of "Apple Intelligence". I was, unsurprisingly, kind of annoyed that they didn't deliver. But it was fine, the phone is a good one and it's still serving me well. Also, if I'm honest, I was comfortable with the idea that they chose to not really implement anything² rather than implement something bad.

Sadly though, based on my experience so far, they've implemented something bad. Since upgrading, on the Watch and iPhone, I've found that it's either horrifically slow or it just doesn't work. On top of that, I've lost all the benefit of the on-device voice handling of my watches.

Or words to that effect; I can't remember the exact wording. ↩
I mean, of course, they did do the image playground and writing tools, but they're hardly the leap forward in assistant intelligence that was originally being hinted at. ↩

GitHub PR reviews broken

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:19:16 +0100

Late on last week I was doing a PR review at work and noticed that, for some odd reason, the author of the PR seemed to have absolutely nuked all of the indentation in the code. While not a problem given the nature of the files I was reviewing, I wasn't happy with their apparent disregard for style and good practice, and was about to leave a remark and a request for changes. But something seemed off. So I did a refresh of the page and... everything fell into place.

Weird.

Since then I've seen the issue on multiple machines. To be fair, each time it's been in Safari, and each time I've been busy with something else so haven't had the chance to really dive into it. But given it's suddenly cropped up, at the same time, on multiple machines, with nothing else changing, it feels like something on the GitHub side of things.

Perhaps I'm letting a bit of bias creep in here, but I feel like this sort of thing is happening more and more on GitHub. It's not that long back since social previews suddenly broke, for example. It's hard to shake the idea that changes are being made without regard to comprehensive testing, and likely without regard to how things connect.

Now, at this point, it would be easy to reach for the "well they're obviously using agents to do most of the work" argument -- and I'm sure plenty of people would -- but that doesn't quite fit with my experience. Having experimented with such tools for a good chunk of this year now, both for personal and, more recently, professional projects, I've generally found that such tooling easily helps with catching such issues.

Plenty of times now, when using something like Antigravity or Claude Code to work on some code, I've found that with reasonable care (you know: the sort of care you'd put into your work anyway) you can quickly and easily uncover connections and knock-on effects you might not have immediately noticed. Moreover, if LLMs are useful for anything when it comes to coding, it's for writing tests¹. With that in mind you should be able to reasonably expect the number of silly bugs to go down.

Unless, of course, there's no human in the loop anywhere, or the human in the loop lacks adequate training and experience, or, I guess, they simply lack the ability to give a shit.

I wonder when this particular issue will get fixed? I should probably go and see if it's reported in the GitHub forums anywhere. I know for sure that there's little point in actually reporting it as a bug; my experiences with that in the past haven't been great, and the GitHub subreddit has seen enough stories of people getting nowhere.

Arguably they're a little too good at it to the point of coming round the other side and doing badly again, if you don't keep an eye on things. ↩

GitHub social preview is fixed

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:43:51 +0100

Five days after I first noticed it, the ability to upload a social preview for a repository has been fixed.

So now I can finally update the preview for Rogallo again.

From what I can see it took a couple or so threads in the community forums to get this issue noticed, and at least one person in those threads said how they'd initially raised a ticket to report it as a bug and had been brushed off and told to go to the community, as if it was something they were doing wrong rather than reporting a genuine issue.

This has been my experience in the past at least once. I forget the actual issue now, but I remember stumbling into a problem, being a good user and reporting the bug, along with details on how to reproduce, etc., and having the ticket closed and being brushed off with some vague and unhelpful reply. My recollection is that I then found a thread or two where others were talking about the problem. Eventually it was acknowledged and fixed.

It's hard not to feel like such an approach is a deliberate policy. It feels like their front-line support is now a shield that deflects problems to a place where community triage takes place.

GitHub social preview is broken

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:53:39 +0100

Earlier today, now that Rogallo has matured a fair bit, I thought I'd update the banner image and, in doing so, refresh the "social preview" for the repository. This is easy enough, and something I've done plenty of times with plenty of projects. You just go into the general settings and upload a new image.

So, I faffed in Pixelmator Pro for a short while, got the new banner going, and then uploaded it. Weirdly, it didn't preview. I was just left with a blank rectangle.

I tried a couple more times... nothing. I then tested the repository itself with an online "social card" checking tool and, unsurprisingly, an image was set but it was a broken image.

Initially, I was entertaining the idea that I'd somehow done something silly, but really it's something hard to get wrong. A little bit of searching shows that it's not just me, with not one but two reports showing up.

It's things like this that bother me most when using GitHub (or any other large service). Sure, the big outages are bad, but with them you know they're being actively worked on, they're something that's going to be getting constant attention until they're resolved. Moreover, those sorts of issues generally suggest a scale problem¹. These little bugs, though, suggest a lack of attention to detail, a lack of proper testing, a lack of care about the product as a whole.

It's not even the first time in the last couple of weeks that I've run into something like this. The other day I wanted to convert an issue into a discussion -- a feature I've used so many times before. This time... nope. Just didn't work. I forget exactly at what point it failed; I think the dialog popped up and then disappeared. Whatever the now-forgotten detail of the failure, the issue was that a long-standing, reliable feature just stopped working.

Again: big outages can be annoying, but in those cases I tend to just go off and do something else, either at my keyboard or, shockingly, away from it. By the time I get back into the office it'll be sorted. These little things... who knows when they'll be fixed?

Perhaps this bit-rot is a result of the panicked fixes to those big-bang problems?

Yes, of their own design. But still... ↩

Some documentation in Geminispace

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 20:50:55 +0100

Given that Rogallo is coming on pretty well, I feel it's about time to get some sort of documentation for it going in Geminispace. With this in mind, I've created an account over on tilde.team so I can make use of their support for the Gemini protocol.

While I don't imagine I'll be writing documentation as comprehensive as the main site for Rogallo, I do aim to provide some basic information.

The other thing I'm going to maintain there is a version of the change log. Rather than edit it by hand each time, I've added a tool to the Rogallo repository that converts the Markdown version of the ChangeLog into Gemtext.

It looks pretty good in Rogallo.

Initially, I set all of this up so that I was editing the files via Tramp. This worked fine and got me going, but pretty quickly I decided that it would make more sense to create a repository, edit stuff locally, and then just rsync it when I'm good to go.

Not editing in production... I know... How boring.

Terminal bean soup

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:54:32 +0100

I'm sure most people reading this will be familiar with the concept of "bean soup theory". In case anyone isn't, here's how Wikipedia describes it:

A specific phenomenon described as a 'What about me' effect. An individual watches a video that doesn't pertain to them, but finds a way to make it about them anyway. Stems from a 2023 TikTok recipe for bean soup, with commenters saying "What if I don't like beans?"

I feel there's a very specific set of folk who love to "bean soup" anything relating to terminals, and it's common to have them turn up in your mentions if you happen to do anything in the terminal, or for the terminal, that isn't about their purist opinions and how everything must be a Vim clone, or worse.

I first encountered this when I started working at Textualize. Unsurprisingly, given the point, purpose and focus of Textual, some folk would turn up in the Discord server, in the issues, in the discussions, in the mentions of posts in various places, and post their very important opinions about how TUI software must work. Not... discuss their preferences, or offer suggestions (there were plenty of people who were pleasant like that, they were lovely to converse with), no: their engagement was written as if every word that was mashed into their keyboard was a well-crafted, handed-from-on-high RFC-like holy document that MUST and SHOULD be followed¹.

If I was being very charitable I could cut them some slack. If you're building a framework for building applications for the terminal, there's a good reason to make it at least possible for the application authors to follow recognised best practice and to stick with hard-won conventions. Indeed, Textual has some design choices that I think are deeply questionable and misguided and I objected to them on more than one occasion. So, yeah, if I was being charitable, I could cut them some slack.

I could... if they weren't such arseholes about it.

This gets worse though if you're building an application for the terminal, especially if it's built as Free Software and the motivation is to build something for yourself and be kind enough to share. It irks the hell out of me when I build some application for myself, as a TUI, and then someone turns up and starts complaining about my choice of default key bindings, that work in my choice of terminal emulator and my configuration for that emulator.

It's even worse when they do it in a way where they have to show their very deep knowledge of terminals, and how they're very proud of just how lacking in features and progress their own choice of terminal emulator is.

Dude...² I know. I've used physical terminals. I've written COBOL on a minicomputer using a line editor on some honking great dumb all-green all-in-one box. I've even written code on a terminal using fan-fold paper. I've used all sorts of terminal emulators. I spent well over a decade doing shit inside rxvt which was running on my GNU/Linux server while displaying on my Windows desktop machine.

I've installed and tested plenty of terminal emulators.

I'm well aware of the conventions and expectations. If Ctrl+C doesn't quit... that is my choice. It's not ignorance, it's not a lack of history with this stuff, it's a choice. For my software.

So when you turn up and feel the need to tell me that some function keys might not work in some terminal on some GNU/Linux box... I get it, you don't like beans. If that's the case, how about you either don't make my hobby all about your tastes and how I should build my application to suit you, or how about you RTFM and configure my application so it works in your choice of terminal?

I mean... we know you won't. We know you don't even care about the application I'm having tons of fun building, that I'm spending time in a joyous flow-state creating and tinkering with. You just care about making the post all about you and your purity. We know you just care about showing how smart you are.

We know you just can't resist the urge to reply-guy³.

We get it: you don't like bean soup. Nobody cares. Nobody asked.

That reminds me: one day I should write a rant about the folk who obsess about the "Zen of Python". ↩
Let's be honest: it's always a dude. ↩
Let's be honest: it's always a guy. ↩

Recreating my blog stats

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:01:42 +0100

Introduction

Having recently added the dump command to BlogMore I've been thinking I should try and learn a little more about jq. It's one of those tools that's been on my radar for ages, which I've used on very rare occasions to get something done quickly, but which I've never really used in anger.

So I thought it might be fun to see about recreating some of the stats from the stats page using jq alone. Well, I say "alone", I mean "from the JSON data that is produced by the BlogMore dump command", and of course that makes it easier given it dumps some of the key calculated values. In other words I won't be using jq to calculate the word count, or reading time, or GFI, etc.

Post count

To start with, working out the number of posts in my blog is simple enough:

jq '. | length'

Category count

Getting the list of categories would be:

jq '[.[] .safe_category] | unique'

[
  "ai",
  "coding",
  "creative",
  "emacs",
  "gaming",
  "life",
  "meta",
  "music",
  "python",
  "tech",
  "til"
]

and so getting the count of them is simple enough:

jq '[.[] .safe_category] | unique | length'

Tags count

Getting the count of tags takes a little more work, as safe_tags is a list too, so I start out with a list of lists, which I need to flatten first.

jq '[.[] .safe_tags] | flatten | unique | length'

This, right away, is an interesting finding. In my stats page, as of the time of writing, the number of tags is reported as 243, but here I'm getting 224. Given I'm using the safe_tags property, which ensures all similar tags end up with the same value (so Hello World, hello world, and all variations, become hello-world), that would suggest the stats page isn't taking that into account. That's an issue to address.

A date/time interlude

Here's where things get a little interesting for a moment. In the output of the dump command from BlogMore, the dates of the posts are given in ISO 8601 format; specifically the date and time with offset format. From what I can tell, while jq does have some date/time parsing support, it can't handle that format specifically.

This means that if I try:

jq '.[0] .date | fromdate'

I just get:

jq: error (at <stdin>:27293): date "2015-06-18T14:53:00+01:00" does not match format "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"

After some searching around it seems the only approach I can really take is to drop the timezone offset and pretend every time is a Z time:

jq '.[0] .date[:19] + "Z" | fromdate'

1434639180

From here I can then get a fully-parsed list of date/time values using gmtime:

jq '.[0] .date[:19] + "Z" | fromdate | gmtime'

This isn't ideal for what I'd like to do, it's going to skew some of the values related to time, but it's close enough for experimenting.

Posts per year

Now that I have a way of breaking the posting time into a workable array of values, getting the number of posts per year becomes:

jq -r '[.[] .date[:19] + "Z" | fromdate | gmtime[0]] | group_by(.) | .[] | "\(.[0]): \(length)"'

Although, to be fair to jq, that's kind of long-winded when I could just pull the year itself out of the posting time:

jq -r '[.[] .date[:4]] | group_by(.) | .[] | "\(.[0]): \(length)"'

Posts by month

At this point getting the posts by month of year seems obvious too:

jq -r '[.[] .date[5:7]] | group_by(.) | .[] | "\(.[0]): \(length)"'

Posts by weekday

For this, I need to go back to the more involved version of the posting date handling query, where I use gmtime to break down the time. It turns out that the penultimate value is the day of the week as a number. So, while it's not quite as readable in that I don't have day names, I can get the values:

jq -r '[.[] .date[:19] + "Z" | fromdate | gmtime[-2]] | group_by(.) | .[] | "\(.[0]): \(length)"'

In this case Sunday is the first day (the 0 day here).

Posts by hour

Getting the posts by the hour is really just a variation on the date-chopping query used for the posts by year and the posts by month; it's all there in the string version of the date.

jq -r '[.[] .date[11:13]] | group_by(.) | .[] | "\(.[0]): \(length)"'

First and last posting dates

Getting the date of the first and latest post seems nice and easy:

jq -r '[.[] .date[0:10]] | {first: min, last: max}'

{
  "first": "2015-06-18",
  "last": "2026-06-01"
}

Although, from what I can tell, jq doesn't have anything that makes date arithmetic easy so working out the elapsed time between the two isn't so straightforward. It can be done, but it's not as easy as it might be with a bit of Python code, for example. The best I could come up with was:

jq '[ .[] | .date[:19] + "Z" | fromdate ] | ((max - min) / (365.25 * 24 * 60 * 60))'

10.95438841990519

For an approximate value of "year", of course.

Word counts

From here on in many of the stats that can be pulled out from the JSON, with jq, become easier to handle. Each post has a word_count property, so I only need to do this:

jq -r '[.[] .word_count] | {least: min, most: max, average: (add / length)}'

{
  "least": 24,
  "most": 2792,
  "average": 475.0700808625337
}

Reading times

A post's reading time can be accessed by reading_time, so it's as easy to handle as the word counts:

jq '[.[] .reading_time] | {least: min, most: max, average: (add / length)}'

{
  "least": 1,
  "most": 11,
  "average": 1.8921832884097034
}

Gunning fog index

The Gunning fog index is available as the gfi property so there's no work to do to figure it out. It is, however, a floating point value and I want counts in each integer "bucket". That can be done with round.

jq -r '[.[] .gfi | round] | group_by(.) | .[] | "\(.[0]): \(length)"'

As for working out the mean, median and mode... while I worked out the above queries by reading the docs, experimenting, and using Gemini on occasion to either help me understand an error message or to explain why an approach works the way it did, I'm going to have to leave this one 100% to Gemini. Here's its approach to using jq to work out those averages:

jq '
  [ .[] | .gfi | select(. != null) ] as $raw_gfi
  | [ $raw_gfi[] | round ] as $rounded_gfi
  | ($raw_gfi | length) as $count

  # 1. Mean Calculation
  | (($raw_gfi | add) / $count) as $mean

  # 2. Median Calculation
  | ($raw_gfi | sort) as $sorted_gfi
  | (if $count % 2 == 1 then
       $sorted_gfi[($count - 1) / 2]
     else
       ($sorted_gfi[($count / 2) - 1] + $sorted_gfi[$count / 2]) / 2
     end) as $median

  # 3. Mode Calculation (using the rounded values)
  | [ $rounded_gfi
      | group_by(.)
      | map({gfi: .[0], frequency: length})
      | sort_by(.frequency)
      | reverse
      | .[]
    ] as $frequencies
  | [ $frequencies[] | select(.frequency == $frequencies[0].frequency) | .gfi ] as $modes

  # Final Object Assembly
  | {
      count: $count,
      mean: $mean,
      median: $median,
      mode: $modes
    }
'

{
  "count": 371,
  "mean": 9.908842231503396,
  "median": 9.979198312236287,
  "mode": [
    11
  ]
}

As of the time of writing: that's bang on what I get in the stats. Honestly though, by this point, I think I'd be reaching for Python or something similar to do this sort of work. For sure, I can't say if this is a good jq query, if it's in any way idiomatic, or even if it's error-free. The numbers match what BlogMore says though.

Conclusion

This has been a useful exercise in getting to know a little more about jq, and I can see myself reaching for it to do quick little jobs now that I've finally taken some time to dive into it. As it turns out, it's also been a useful little audit of the content of the stats page because I've even found a bug that needs addressing; so that's a bonus.

Wipr

Sat, 23 May 2026 20:29:17 +0100

While I know the subject really fires some people, ad blockers are something I've never really paid too much attention to. Back in the early days of the web, the really early days, I used to run with full-on JavaScript blocking¹. The web changed and I accepted it.

More recently, as I've become a full-time Safari user in the last couple of years, I've been running with Ka-Block! installed. It's been fine. I've never really noticed it. I think it blocked some stuff, but not other stuff. I've never really noticed if it was getting updated or not; I just wasn't paying attention.

Then, this morning, I saw this post in the Fediverse and for some reason it caught my eye. I followed the link, did a bit of searching, asked Misko about his experiences with the app, and saved a bookmark.

Now, this evening, I've thrown down my fiver and I'm running with Wipr 2 installed, both on my Air and my iPhone. When I'm next on either of my Minis, or on my iPad, I'll throw it on there too.

The installation process was straightforward, albeit one where you need to enable four extensions rather than just the one.

As well as that, you then need to enable it in the app itself and you're good to go. I've since tried visiting a couple of locations that I know still showed adverts or consent pop-ups and... clean. So clean!

My expectation for tools like this is that they end up breaking some site in a way you least expect, so I'll be very aware of that for a while. That said, if I do run into a problem, not only is it easy enough to turn blocking off just for that one site, there's a very clear route to reporting problems too.

Mostly, though, I hope I can go back to paying this app no attention whatsoever. If I can, I imagine that's high praise and a job well done for this sort of tool.

I just know someone is reading that and thinking "pfft, JavaScript came along late into the web you noob". ↩

Ghosted by Ghostty

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:19:31 +0100

I just grabbed and opened up the MacBook Air and met this:

First time I've ever seen this and I've been using Ghostty for quite a while now.

To be fair, the MacBook did update to 26.4.1 overnight and has tried to get back to the state it was in before the restart, so I imagine that's the cause. But I've never seen this before.

I'm all good now; I ⌘-q the app and started it again and there's no sign of a problem.

Goodness knows how I get to see that log...

Discovering powRSS

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:50:34 +0100

This was a nice find yesterday: I think I came across it when someone I follow on Mastodon boosted a post from the account related to the site; it's a site called powRSS. The concept is pretty simple: collect links to all sorts of small blogs on all sorts of topics, and then provide a honking great discovery feed/pool. You can read more about the idea on their about page.

For sure, this sort of thing isn't exactly novel: those of us of a certain age will fondly remember the fun of webrings and other similar initiatives, not to mention feed aggregation sites where you could discover trending blogs or see what your friends were reading, and all that. But, to some degree, that fell out of favour and/or the limelight when social media got really popular.

So with this in mind it's good to see people still providing such sites. I've added this blog to it and I'll be diving in there now and again to see if there's anything new I should be following.

It'll be fun to populate OldNews with more things to read.

Hello MacBook Air (again)

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:30:09 +0000

As I mentioned yesterday I decided it was time to update my portable/sofa hacking setup and treat myself to a nice new MacBook Air. It's here (well, I picked it up yesterday evening after dinner).

So far I'm very pleased with the choice. It's light but feels sturdy. The screen is very pleasing to read. The keyboard is really nice to type on (albeit I do prefer the old MacBook Pro, but on the other hand this is a bit more quiet, which matters if you're sharing a living room with someone else). It's fast. So fast! It's also so quiet! So very quiet! And cool too. The Intel-based MacBook Pro would get very warm as I worked; this just stays cold.

The really great part though is the battery life. Depending on what I was doing, with the Intel Pro, I'd get a couple of hours off the cable. On the other hand, last night, I spent a few hours setting things up on the Air and I barely noticed the battery drop at all. This, more than anything, is what I wanted.

Well, okay, I wanted the speed, the quiet, the lack of heat, and the long battery life.

Oh, and the rather lovely "Midnight" colour. It's not black, but it's close enough.

The setup itself went pretty well, although for some odd reason I ran into problems when setting up Emacs. These days I always use Emacs Plus via Homebrew and have never had issues. Weirdly though, this time, if I did the installation method that builds locally all sorts of things went wrong. I don't know if I missed a step or something but I did what I normally do when dropping Emacs on a Mac. So I started again with the pre-built approach and that worked better.

Even then though, I ran into problems with my setup downloading everything. Things mostly worked but I kept seeing all sorts of issues relating to git-gutter and git-gutter-fringe not being able to load (despite the fact they'd downloaded fine, from what I could see).

In the end I gave up trying to get it to all work from scratch and hand-removed and then hand-installed via package-list-packages instead. Not the most scientific of approaches, and one I'm sure I'll regret at some point in the future, but at least I got to a point where I could get other stuff done on the machine.

All of which is to say: if you're reading this blog post I got my Emacs and git environment to the point I can write things and push them out to the world. At which point that's the really important stuff up and going and I can call this "set up".

Once I'm happy that's working, I think it's time to revisit my Emacs setup. While I don't think it needs another complete restart, I think it might be time to at least look through what I have loading in and perhaps remove some things I don't use any more (for example, I always carry around vterm from the days when I was testing every possible terminal I could get my hands on -- that's less important to me these days.)

MacBook Air M5

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:12:21 +0000

It's just over a month shy of being 10 years since I bought my first MacBook. As I mentioned at the time: I'd bought my first Mac about 10 months earlier than that, had got used to it, had grown to like the OS, and had need of a small and light hacking machine to use while doing a lot of train travel (and I really did do a lot of train travel after that).

Fast forward a touch over 3 years and, by accident of a windfall due to work things, I ended up treating myself to a MacBook Pro. This was one of the last Intel models. It worked well and served as my main hack-at-home machine for quite a long time. I used it to code and edit videos and a bunch of other things. It sat there, on my desk, plugged into a couple of screens, and never really served as a portable machine.

Fast forward around 4 years and, having been using a MacBook Pro M1 for a while through where I worked then, I had a desire to get a M-chip Mac for personal use and settled on an M2 Pro Mac Mini. That thing was, and remains, a beast of a machine. It's set up here in my office right now and I'm sure will last me for some time to come.

The thing is, in the last 6 months, my home life has changed. I moved. I now share a place again. It's nice to sofa hack and hang out and all that "share a space with other people" stuff. To that end I've been using the Intel MacBook Pro again but I'm noticing that it's getting old now. It's not that it isn't coping with what I need it for -- far from it -- but having the fans kick in lots, and just the heat, and also the fact that the OS is stuck in the past because it's now a "legacy" machine... I sensed it was time for an upgrade.

A new MacBook Pro was an option, of course, but that feels like overkill for some sofa hacking. If I want to do any heavy video editing or any heavy coding the M2 Pro Mini is still the machine for the job. The new Neo looked really good too, but the entry-level storage seemed a bit stingy these days and once you bump up to the next level, while still stuck with the same memory, well the price starts to get dangerously close to...

So, yeah, as of today, I've kind of come full circle; a decade on from that MacBook Air purchase I have a new sofa hacking machine coming in the shape of the new M5 MacBook Air¹.

So this weekend will involve me digging out my "new macOS environment" checklist and working through it, getting a hacking environment up and going again. One thing I do want to do is follow that list but also write out a fresh copy, because this time around I want to see if I can get a good Python environment up and going minus the use of pyenv. Not that pyenv is a problem, at all, but I feel like I should be able to achieve everything I need using just uv.

I'm not a hardware nerd, so don't dive deep into this stuff. Despite what I said about the M2 Pro Mini still being there for heavy coding and video editing, it wouldn't surprise me to find out the Air is more than capable too. ↩

Astral and OpenAI

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:11:53 +0000

It's a couple of days now since the news hit that OpenAI are in the process of purchasing Astral. When I first saw this my initial reaction was pretty much "woah", followed by getting on with what I was doing.

Until, that is, I opened up the socials. On Mastodon, Reddit, Bluesky, Threads, etc... anywhere I followed any Python-based content, I was seeing very firm opinions posted. Plenty of folk either talking like it was the end of their tooling as they know it, or proudly boasting that they'd avoided uv and ruff (and lately ty too I guess -- not that I've really tried that yet myself) because they'd predicted this evil outcome from the start and they were untainted by this but look at all you idiots who fell for this long play!

Okay, I exaggerate slightly, but there were some pretty strong opinions kicking around, especially in the (often fairly smug) "I stayed pure and never used uv" camp.

Personally, I don't get it. The last I looked the tools I use that Astral are behind are FOSS. Also, the last I looked, plenty of FOSS tooling is written by folk who are either paid to do so (I had my moment), given some time in the day job to work on those tools, or just plain have a day job and also work on those tools. If, as plenty are speculating, the Astral purchase is an acqui-hire, the likely result is going to be one of those three scenarios.

If it isn't one of those scenarios, if work on uv and friends just ceases, well, at best some smart folk can fork the tools that are useful and keep them going (this is a major benefit of FOSS after all) and, at worst, well... we can fork them and agent the shit out of them. Right?

macOS desktop widget switching

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 09:26:00 +0100

When desktop widgets first turned up in macOS I was pretty quick to embrace them. On my personal Mac Mini I use a pair of screens, the right one mostly given over to Emacs, and there was generally room to space there. These days that screen generally looks something like this:

Recently I've got into streaming while I do some coding and it's the right-hand screen that I work on and capture using OBS. When I was setting this up I realised that the widgets being there could be a problem; not because they could distract or anything, more that they could, at times, contain sensitive information (there's my reminder list and my calendar there after all).

What I needed was a quick method of hiding all the widgets, and showing them again later, without it being a lot of faff.

With a little bit of digging around on the net I finally came up with a pair of fish abbreviations that do just the job!

abbr -g widoff "defaults write com.apple.WindowManager StandardHideWidgets -int 1"
abbr -g widon "defaults write com.apple.WindowManager StandardHideWidgets -int 0"

Now, when I'm going to stream, part of my "getting stuff ready to go live" checklist is to run widoff in the terminal; once I'm finished I can then just run widon again to have them come back.

Fast, clean, handy.

I've also got a pair for when I'm using Stage Manager:

abbr -g smwidoff "defaults write com.apple.WindowManager StageManagerHideWidgets -int 1"
abbr -g smwidon "defaults write com.apple.WindowManager StageManagerHideWidgets -int 0"

Although, really, I can't remember the last time I used Stage Manager. I dabbled with it for a wee while, found it vaguely handy in a couple of situations, but it doesn't seem to have stuck as part of my workflow or work environment.

When it doesn't just work

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 10:32:00 +0100

My journey into the Apple ecosystem has been gradual but all-consuming. I've gone from, around 8 years ago, being unconvinced about how good the whole Apple world is, to pretty much having all the hardware they make available, in some form, that I have an actual use for¹.

One of the devices I was late to, but won over by, after moving away from Android to iPhone, was the Apple Watch. These days I have two: the original SE, and also a Series 8. Generally I've marvelled at just how seamless the experience is. I swap watches: the connection to my phone "just works" and it figures all that out. Stuff syncs. Stuff stays in sync.

I lean heavily on the watch. The Series 8 is my daily driver, and the SE acts as my nighttime tracking device while the 8 charges and I sleep.

I record walks. I record runs. I record lots of heart rate data. I pay for things, pretty much everything, with it. I... take it for granted really.

Yesterday though, something odd started to happen. I noticed that some things didn't seem to be syncing from my watch to the phone. Health-related things weren't turning up. A recorded workout didn't show. The control of all things audio seemed to decouple and the watch kept taking over use of my AirPods from the phone in an annoying way I'd never experienced before. Things like that.

I tried a reboot of the watch. Stuff turned up.

It happened again. I tried a reboot of the phone. Stuff turned up.

It happened again.

I then rebooted watch and phone, stuff seemed fine, and I didn't think much more about it.

Then this morning I swapped from the SE back to the Series 8 as I sat down for breakfast, my usual routine, and the syncing was failing again.

This, for me, this is when Apple stuff gets really frustrating. There's no easy or obvious way to diagnose what's going on. Like: I could not sync some health data from the watch to the phone, but I could use "Find My" to ping the watch (presumably a difference in communication route, BT vs Wi-Fi perhaps). There's no obvious error dialog. There's no obvious log to look at. There's no "your BT is borked" alert or something.

Searching online the advice seemed to be the nuclear option: unpair the watch, reset it, start again. So I've done that this morning and it's been quite the pain. Getting it set up again was straightforward enough, but having to go through the whole thing of dismissing all the "here's some tips on how to use this watch you've had for a year and used every day" cards was annoying, also having to set up my payment cards again was annoying. Also, and this is on me for not backing them up recently, trying to recreate my watch faces from memory and remembering which ones they were based on was also annoying.

Apple are actually so good at a lot of this seamless shit; but damn do I wish they'd also be good at making a tool that lets you easily and smoothly diagnose some issues. I would imagine sync issues between watch and phone are common enough that a wee tool where you run through diagnostics, and where there's a Q&A to help narrow down the issue, would be a great experience.

Anyway... it seems to be up and running again, so hopefully that's that issue solved. I tried a couple of things that would need to sync from the watch to the phone and they showed up instantly; actually faster than I've been used to for quite a while.

Fingers crossed...

During a conversation about this at work the other week, I think I figured out that the only Apple product category in which I don't own an example of the hardware is displays². :-/ ↩
When the VisionPro comes out I'll be able to say there's two. ↩

Constant Siri voice loss

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 13:04:00 +0100

This seems to have started with iOS 17, and I can't narrow down the how and the when of it happening, but over the last week or so I've found that every couple of days Siri seems to lose their voice. By this I mean the high quality voice that's used when they speak seems to disappear. I notice this when I ask my phone or headphones a question or to do something, and I get a really low-quality voice that speaks back to me.

The voice itself seems to be a version of the voice I normally use, but like it's using an on-device much-cut-down version. If I go into the settings to check what voice is selected, it's the one I normally use, but it wants to download it again.

Sure enough, once the download is complete all is good again. I've not kept track of when it happens -- and I think I should from now on -- but it feels like it happens every couple of days; I almost always notice it first thing in the morning, the first time I ask the phone or the headphones something.

I hope it is some sort of iOS 17 weirdness and is gone when 17.1 turns up.

LinkedIn is useless

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 14:16:00 +0100

I have a LinkedIn profile more by accident than on purpose. For most of that site's early days I just ignored it, even needing to go to the trouble of aggressively marking emails from it as spam as it seemed to want to turn itself into some sort of online networking cult, encouraging folk to send invites to their contacts, or worse. But after job-seeking in late 2017 the recruiter who found me the position I took up asked if I might join up and endorse him or some such nonsense and, at the time, I thought what the hell.

Since then though I've mostly found it useless, and at times straight up horrific. Don't even get me started on how a previous employer's push to make everyone use their profiles as more company branding created a perfect pool for people to go phishing in, while at the same time IT were on a phishing-awareness push; a perfect illustration of how some people lose their minds when it comes to that site.

The last year though, while working in a more FOSSy world, I've started to dip my toe back in when it comes to linking to what we're building with Textual. As such, I drop into the app once or twice a week and look to see what other folk might be talking about too.

During a recent dip in I saw this:

Huh! Okay! That... that's actually kind of sensible! While I'm nowhere near looking for anything else to do, showing off the public projects you care about seems like a good idea. GitHub repos can be a good CV, I believe.

So I click through...

And that's where it all falls apart. Pretty typical for LinkedIn I'd say. Name, description, obsession with skills, obsession with building up a social graph. But...

No link to the repo.

No.

Link.

To.

The.

Repo. O_o

o_O

I can't even.

Going full Apple search

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 08:39:00 +0100

For as long as I've had a smartphone -- so ever since the HTC Magic was released -- I've used whatever search tool Google have had available as my way of searching for stuff from my phone. Even when I made the switch to the iPhone, back when the iPhone 11 was around, I still installed and used the Google Search app.

Since jumping ship from Android to iPhone, I've followed the usual track that some do of "embracing the ecosystem", and it generally has paid off. The more I lean into "the Apple way", the more stuff actually does work together and work together well (I won't say "it just works", because that can sometimes so very not be true, but really I do find that Apple's ecosystem is more coherent and more stable than the one Google provided). But searching for stuff... that stuck with the Google search app.

So, more as an experiment than anything else, starting this morning I've removed the Google search app from the home screens of my iPhone and my iPad and I'm going to force myself to use Spotlight to do all my searching, and see how I get on with it.

Of course, when it comes to searching for stuff on the web, it's not going to make a whole heap of difference; it's still going to end up searching with Google, but I do like the idea of search leaning into what Spotlight knows about my stuff too.

Also, on my phone at least, it has the added benefit of freeing up a slot in the dock at the bottom of the home screen.

Apple Design

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 08:10:00 +0100

As someone who started out in the Android ecosystem when it came to smart phones -- starting out with a HTC Magic and going through a few different phones before settling on Pixels (until I finally jumped ship to iOS in 2020) -- I have to admit that there's always been something nice about the design of iPhones. iOS, less so... My first exposure to iOS was back in 2015 when I got an iPod, and I wasn't terribly impressed. It looked okay, but it felt so far behind Android in terms of functionality.

Much has changed and improved since then. These days, 3 years into being totally consumed by the Apple ecosystem (one day I should write a post about how comprehensively I've moved over), I'm won over and I like how iOS works now.

Except this...

That thing where, when you're in one app, it will show the most useless link "back" to another app, and in doing so bump the time up and out of the way a little. Like, seriously, compare it to when the app link thing isn't there:

Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

After all this time you'd think they would have found a less janky way of doing this; perhaps even simply removed it (I can't remember the last time I needed or wanted the ability to go "back" an app like this, especially not with the bottom-of-screen swipe gesture being a thing). If nothing else you'd think that, by now, they'd have found a way of doing it that doesn't look so terrible.

The "eh, let's just shove it here" approach that seems to be on display here almost reminds me of the "time wiggle" that used to mildly annoy me back on my iMac.

The HomePod fixed itself

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 07:46:00 +0100

A couple of weeks back I mentioned home my main HomePod had got stuck installing 16.6 of the software that runs it. This situation persisted for days after writing that post and I kept promising myself that I was going to see if I could unstick it by removing it from the Home, doing a factory reset and adding it back again.

Of course, during the week that followed, I never got round to that. You can imagine what it's like: no time in the morning, and by the time I get home in the evening I want to watch TV and use the HomePod as the speaker for the Apple TV, I don't want to be doing tech support shit.

The following weekend... yeah, I kinda forgot.

So, here I am, a couple of Saturdays on, it's early morning, I've had breakfast and I'm having coffee and I think it's the perfect time to do this. I hope the Home app my on iPad and... it's sorted!

So, yeah, it looks like it somehow managed to unstick itself in the end. A quick test of some of the issues I was seeing suggested there was still an issue, for example asking for the temperature in the bedroom would still result in a "working on it" reply followed by it telling me it wasn't responding. A quick reset seems to have fixed that.

I guess it's good to know: if it happens again, it'll keep on working as the speaker for my Apple TV, and it'll eventually sort itself out even if I don't muck about with a hard reset.