There’s no shortage of The Lord of the Rings reviews and analyses on the internet, so in this post I’m not going to go that much into my thoughts on the story. What I want to focus on instead is the actual physical copy I read this on.

Some Quick Thoughts on the Story

Even though I already knew all the main story beats so well from the films, it did not at all take away from my enjoyment of the book. I was enthralled from start to finish and there was rarely any dull or slow moment. For years I had been avoiding reading the book as I had this preconceived notion that it was going to be difficult to read and the plot would proceed at a glacial pace, and that it would take me months to get through it. I was happy to not find that to be the case.

These days I don’t read much fiction, and almost never something that is this long. This is one of those rare books that made me feel this huge sense of loss after finishing it. I sat down to read this book every single day for over a month, and I was truly immersed. It felt like I was on this adventure with these characters and went through thick and thin with them. Reaching the end of their story and having to leave them behind just left me feeling sad and empty. As dramatic as it might sound, it was almost as if I had lost some purpose in life now that I won’t get to sit down and continue on the journey with them. I know this phenomenon is not uncommon among fiction readers, but I honestly don’t remember the last time I felt this way; I read the entire Harry Potter series a few years back—which is more than doubled in word count—and I don’t recall feeling this way after completing that.

The 2021 Illustrated Edition

Going into this, I knew that I wanted to read it with a physical copy. I also specifically wanted a single-volume edition with all three parts contained in one binding. The one I ended up getting is the illustrated edition released late last year. This is a hardcover and includes illustrations in full color done by Tolkien himself.

With a $60 price tag, this is not a cheap book, probably the most expensive book in our humble home library (excluding college textbooks of course). It is quite a fancy book, and I know that “you’re not supposed to read fancy books” as John Green said. But this is the only good copy I have and I just wanted to read with it.

On the outside, this book is just gorgeous. The dust jacket comes in gray and features the original illustration from the first edition of the book with Tolkien's signature. The page edges are colored red which gives out a nice contrast. The best part about the exterior design is the Ring Verse on the fore-edge. It almost made me want to shelve this book backwards so this would be visible.

With the dust jacket off (as I always do when reading hardcover books), you will find that the Eye of Sauron illustration is actually printed on the cloth hardcover itself and not on the dust jacket which I think is a nice touch. The same illustrations on the dust jacket spine can also be found on the hardcover.

With 1,178 pages, this book is not light: it weighs 1,585 grams (yes, I did put it on a scale). So it’s not one of those books that you would want to bring with you to read in a park or on a flight.

Inside there are 32 illustrations (excluding the maps) inserted throughout the book, between relevant pages. It also comes with a nice little bookmark.

I actually purchased a box set of The Lord of the Rings a while back, but it comes in three separate paperback books. The main reason I didn’t want to read those was the low print quality of the text. I don’t know what the correct term for this in publishing world, but it looks almost like these pages were photocopied from older, lower-quality edition of the book. On the other hand, this single-volume illustrated edition has high print quality and sharper text which made for a much more pleasant reading experience.

There are two 10.5”×14.5“ fold-out maps drawn by Christopher Tolkien. One of the west of Middle-earth and the other of a more close-up area near Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor. I found these maps tremendously helpful with establishing spatial awareness when it comes to the plot and character movements throughout the story.

This 2021 illustrated edition of The Lord of the Rings is indeed a fancy book. To me it is well worth the premium price for the entertainment value I got out of it. Given the quality of this printing, I’m sure it will remain in good condition in my book collection for many years to come.

Again, here is all I'm asking: take out that 5K 27-inch panel in the discontinued iMac Pro (or the one you're putting in the new 27-inch Apple Silicon iMac), put it in an external display chassis, maybe add some bells and whistles like a webcam, USB-C ports, fancy speakers, etc., slap a $1,300-1,500 price tag on it (knowing Apple), and take my money.

And look at what they announced:

[Studio Display] features an expansive 27-inch 5K Retina display, a 12MP Ultra Wide camera with Center Stage, and a high-fidelity six-speaker sound system with spatial audio.

[…]

With 600 nits of brightness, P3 wide color, and support for over one billion colors, images come to life with spectacular detail. True Tone technology automatically adjusts the display’s color temperature as the environment changes for a more natural viewing experience. An industry-leading anti-reflective coating enables incredibly low reflectivity for better comfort and readability.

[…]

Studio Display also includes a studio-quality, three-microphone array with an especially low noise floor for crystal-clear calls and voice recordings.

[…]

Studio Display has three USB-C ports that deliver speeds up to 10Gb/s to connect high-speed peripherals, storage, and networking right into the display. A Thunderbolt port enables users to connect Studio Display and any connected peripherals to their Mac with a single cable. The same cable also delivers 96W of power to a Mac notebook, allowing Studio Display to even fast-charge a 14-inch MacBook Pro.

Never before in my time of following Apple had my wish been granted almost so spot-on. The Studio Display has everything I asked for, and then some. Not only that it has a webcam, it also supports Center Stage. Not only that it has speakers, it also supports spatial audio.

The announcement itself was such a roller coaster of emotion. They showed the Studio Display and went into all of its features, talking about the camera, speakers, built-in A13 Bionic chip, etc. And that’s when I (and my bank account) got really worried: this thing is packed full of features and I thought that it for sure was going to be at least $2,200-2,500. So when it was revealed to be $1,599, I never celebrated so hard for something that is still so expensive. But given the precedent with the $5,000 Pro Display XDR with a $1,000 stand, this Studio Display price tag is quite reasonable in my opinion.

Annoyingly the base configuration comes with a non-height adjustable stand which is such a cheap move from Apple given how much it already costs. To upgrade to a height-adjustable stand without the nano-texture coating is extra $400, making it a nice rounded $2,000. Way too much for a computer monitor, but that configuration is what I ordered.

Not to make excuses for how ridiculously expensive this monitor is, but for comparison the Thunderbolt Display that came out in 2011 had a $1000 price tag which, adjusted for inflation, would cost around $1,250 today. That monitor came with a non-retina 1440p panel and 720p camera. So the new Studio Display costing $350 more with all of these extra features is not out of character for Apple.

Mac Studio

This was another surprise for this event. This Mac and the M1 Ultra look like a beast of performance. I definitely don’t have that kind of need and I am very happy with my 14-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro. The tease at the end about the Mac Pro is so very cheeky and I can’t wait to see what they’re going to do with it.

Obviously, a list of even the most rudimentary features can’t help but also be opinionated. Though my tastes have surely influenced this list, I really do think that any streaming app that fails to implement nearly all of these features is failing its users. Again, these are not frills. These are the bare-bones basics.

He also pointed out this little feature with Siri on Apple TV which blew my mind:

I can ask “What did he say?” and the Apple TV will skip backwards, enable subtitles, play for a short duration, and then disable subtitles again, all on its own. Surprise and delight!

Surprise and delight, indeed! My ears are not as well-tuned to English dialogues as compared to native speakers so I often miss lines when watching movies. But I also don’t want subtitles on all the time either. This trick is going to be life-changing.

There is one Apple TV-specific thing I would like to add to this list. When a video is paused with a UI overlay with some informational text and/or scrubber, and I hit play to resume playback, I would like to be able to then hit the back button on my remote to dismiss that overlay. Having to continue watching with that overlay still obstructing or dimming the video, even for a few seconds, is a terrible experience. Or better yet, the app should just dismiss the overlay the instant the playback resumes.

The worst part is that this behaves differently on different apps which drives me up the wall. In YouTube and TV app, you can hit back and it will dismiss the overlay while still playing the video. In apps that use the native player you have to tap (not click) on the touchpad on the remote to do so. In apps like Netflix and Disney+ when you hit back it just exits out of the video player entirely! They’re all so inconsistent and it’s just pure maddening!

I don’t know what the solution should be here. It would be great if all these apps use the same native video player so the experience would be consistent across the board, but that’s never going to happen.

Fast forward one and a half years later to January 2022, my wait was finally over!

The configuration: 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 24-core GPU, 64GB of RAM, and 2TB SSD. I upgraded to the M1 Max for the 64GB RAM option as I don't have the need for that much GPU performance which is also why I didn't max out to the 32-core GPU option. The extra memory bandwidth is a nice perk, but I doubt it would be that useful to me.

I was originally going to get the 16-inch model, having only ever owned the 15-inch models in the past. But at 2.2 kg (4.8 lbs) compared to 1.8 kg (4 lbs) of my 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro, it would be too heavy for me on the rare occasions that I need to bring it somewhere. And since most of the time I run it docked at my desk connected to external monitors, I figured I could get by with the smaller 14-inch model. On paper, the screen is only an inch smaller than the one it's replacing anyway.

Don't get me wrong, this 14-inch MacBook Pro is still plenty heavy for a small laptop at 1.6 kg (3.5 lbs), almost as heavy as my old 15-inch.

The Migration

Transferring everything over from the old machine instead of setting this one up brand-new is definitely the way to go. I didn't want to have to spend time reconfiguring it from scratch with all the files, applications, and countless settings.

Everybody else seems to have no issue whatsoever with the Migration Assistant these days, but it ended up not being as painless as I was hoping for.

With these two connected to each other using the Thunderbolt 3 cable that came with my CalDigit TS3 Plus dock, at first the Migration Assistant refused to use the wired connection and instead insisted on using the wireless "Peer-to-Peer" connection. I definitely was not going to let it transfer the data wirelessly as I knew that was going to be flaky. Here's what I ended up doing in trying to get them to use the wired connection:

• Turned off Firewall on both machines
• Made sure both Macs were on the same latest macOS Monterey 12.1 (at the time)
• Turned off Wi-Fi on both machines (I don't think this this mattered)
• Made sure in the Network preference pane that they could detect each other via Thunderbolt
• As a desperate attempt, erased all contents and settings on the new Mac and reinstalled macOS (also don't think this mattered)

The final thing I tried—and what I should have done from the beginning—was to put the old Mac in Target Disk Mode. Right away, the Thunderbolt connection showed up so I began the transfer.

My old 2017 Mac used up about 440GB so there wasn't that much stuff to move over. I was hoping that I would see around 200MB/s transfer speed and that this process wouldn't take more than 45 minutes to complete. But to my bewilderment, it wouldn't transfer more than on average 50MB/s with a lot of time spent with less than 10MB/s. It also peaked at only 70MB/s. I quadruple-checked that the cable I used was in fact a Thunderbolt 3 cable. Having already spent too much time and energy going in circles trying to get the wired connection to work, I cut my losses and just let it do its thing, hoping that maybe it would speed up (it never did). I had already waited 18 months for this, surely I could wait a couple of hours more.

In the end, it took almost three hours to complete the transfer of over four million individual files.

General Observations

I do love the hardware design of this model; it has somewhat of a retro look to it, reminding me of the titanium PowerBook G4. The "MacBook Pro" etching on the back is a really nice touch. I also don't mind that it's thicker.

Since the 14-inch one can be configured all the way up just like the 16-inch, I figured I could save some money just getting the smaller size without having to compromise on the specs I want. And as I alluded to earlier, the screen doesn't feel that much smaller than my 15-inch one.

In a little over a month that I've been using it, I didn't run into any compatibility issue (that I could tell) with this being on a completely new architecture; Rosetta 2 is doing a fantastic job translating x86 to ARM. What an amazing feat of engineering that is.

I never had an Apple desktop computer and only ever used MacBook Pros. In all those years, I've gotten used to hearing the fans spinning up when doing anything remotely computational intensive (or even randomly). But now I've discovered the pleasure of working at my desk without that incredibly obnoxious fan noise. It is an absolutely blissful experience.

The notch was no doubt an unexpected feature with this redesign. I'm choosing to look at it not as a protrusion into my screen, but as extra screen real estate extending up to the very edge. Plus I think macOS is the perfect operating system to have to support this quirk since the menu bar, which is the fundamental part of the Mac, is already always at the top. I can't imagine how they would even support this on Windows (not that Apple's support for this was anywhere near perfect).

This also gave us a couple of fun apps like Notchmeister and NotchCam.

I wish this notch included the Face ID sensor. There's no reason why macOS wouldn't be able to support it since it's using pretty much the same chip as the iPad Pro which comes with Face ID. My guess is that they probably don't have the room to fit it as the screen lid is unbelievably thin whereas the iPhone and iPad Pro do have quite a bit more thickness to accommodate it.

This generation of MacBook Pros also sees the triumphant return of the beloved MagSafe connector. I can look past the mismatched color, but it would have been nice if they matched. I really do love the braided cable that comes with it though.

The interesting part about this is that the magnet is significantly stronger than the MagSafe connector I remembered from my 2010 MacBook Pro. Yanking it straight out is pretty much impossible as it's really on there. But pushing it at an angle up or down pops it right out. It definitely still functions as intended, as somebody tripping on the wire would almost certainly not going to be pulling it straight out. Nevertheless, I still feel like this is a slight regression from the old MagSafe we had.

Also props to Apple for still allowing charging via the three Thunderbolt ports because being able to charge on either side is definitely a big win.

Good riddance to the butterfly keyboard. These new keys do feel mushier but in a good way. They definitely provide a much better experience to type on, and more reliable too.

I never found the Touch Bar all that useful since I rarely used the built-in keyboard. As much potential as it may have had, Apple clearly did not want to invest in it, seeing that since its introduction in 2016 they did not make a single improvement to it. Unexpectedly, I did find myself missing it when I was filling out forms and not being able to quickly tap to autofill the fields. But other than that, I don't miss the Touch Bar.

With the Touch Bar gone, this means we now have back the physical escape key! No longer do I need to remap my escape key to the caps lock key to make it touch-typable. The inverted-T arrow keys are another greatly-missed affordance for touch typing and I do very much welcome their glorious return.

Performance Tests

I ran some tests to find out for myself how much faster this thing is. For comparison, my 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro came with the 2.9GHz quad-core i7, 16GB of RAM, and AMD Radeon Pro 560. The numbers are averages of multiple runs I did for each of these tools.

Xcode

I am rewriting Liftoff in SwiftUI so these tests were run using this fairly small project. Each after cleaning the build folder, of course. The build times came from Xcode directly, thanks to this neat trick (via ATP):

defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode ShowBuildOperationDuration YES

M1 Max: 10s
Core i7: 25s
Delta: 2.5x faster

Node.js (via Gatsby)

This was conducted using this very site with the gatsby build command with Node version 16.13.1.

M1 Max: 1m 5s
Core i7: 1m 34s
Delta: 1.4x faster

Flutter

Flutter still doesn't support Apple Silicon natively so the performance improvement seen here is not the most we could have gotten out of it. With this I'm running flutter build ios with flutter clean before each run.

M1 Max: 2m 18s
Core i7: 7m 25s
Delta: 3.2x faster

This test was the first time that I heard the fans on this machine, which kind of disappointed me a little to be honest.

Lightroom Classic

This was conducted on the Apple Silicon version of Lightroom Classic (v11.1). From my understanding, Lightroom doesn't really take advantage of the GPU when importing or exporting photos. But it appears to mostly be using it for displaying and processing the images. So the advantage of the M1 Max here would be around previewing and applying edits to photos, unfortunately not something that I could quantitatively measure and compare.

For import, I used 100 raw 20-megapixel photos taken on the Canon EOS 6D. There were three options enabled:

• Copy as DNG
• Build 1:1 previews
• Apply lens correction

This also resulted in the fans going at full speed from what it sounded like.

M1 Max: 2m 53s
Core i7: 6m 42s
Delta: 2.3x faster

For export, I have a recent project with 44 raw 20-megapixel photos, all with various edits and color corrections. The export files were 80% JPEGs and no image resizing was done. The fans did not spin up for this.

M1 Max: 46s
Core i7: 2m 37s
Delta: 3.4x faster

Some Annoyances

My setup is through the CalDigit TS3 Plus dock connected to two 1080p monitors: one via Thunderbolt → HDMI and the other via DisplayPort → HDMI. While the connection and windows rearranging are almost instantaneous, the majority of the times only one of the monitors would display anything. The one connected via DisplayPort is the troublesome one as it rarely ever works. Every time I connect the laptop to the dock, I also have to reach back and reconnect the DisplayPort on the dock. And even that doesn't always work on the first try either, I frequently have to try multiple times for both monitors to be displaying properly.

This is clearly something specific to the M1 as this was rarely ever an issue with the Intel laptops with the exact same setup. Perhaps it's some sort of driver issue. The recent macOS 12.2 update did not improve the situation either. I think I'm going to have to try swapping out these cables to see if that helps.

What makes this all the more annoying is that it wouldn't be a problem if I had an Apple-made monitor connected to my Mac. I keep these stupidly bad monitors around because there are no good retina external monitors in the market to replace them with. This is a huge gap in the lineup that should have been addressed years ago.

This is not unique to the M1 model but there's one tiny UI issue that has been bugging me since I updated to Monterey. In the menu bar, I want hide the stock clock menu item as I prefer to use the one from iStats Menus. Unfortunately, there's no way for me to completely remove the clock so the next best thing I could do was to change the digital time to be an analog clock so that it would take the least amount of space at the very right edge of the menu bar.

Do you see what I'm seeing? The clock icon is clipped on the top and right side by just a pixel! Every time I look at the time and glance up to that top right corner of the screen, I'm greeted with this badly-rendered clock icon. It's worth noting that this is only visible on external monitors and not the built-in screen. I'm actually not sure how long this has been there. Maybe it's been around since the big redesign they did with Big Sur in 2020. Either way, I filed a bug report (FB9886279) so hopefully this will get fix in a future release.

Final Thoughts

Despite those complaints, I do love this machine. After long dark years of disappointing MacBook Pro lineup, what we now have is truly great and truly pro. It's not lost on me that I'm celebrating getting back what they took away from us in 2016. But it is more than just that: the M1 Max is a powerhouse, the Liquid Retina display is stunning, and the overall industrial design is just gorgeous.

With the modular 2019 Mac Pro, the redesigned Siri remote, and now the 2021 MacBook Pro, Apple showed that they do listen and are willing to give us what we want. The trend has been very encouraging in recent years. My only hope now is that they heard us begging for an external monitor that doesn't cost six grand. I'm cautiously optimistic that this year might be the year.

A couple of years back, I rediscovered the joy of reading physical books after having exclusively been buying ebooks for years prior. Since then I had bought more and more books, which filled up my bookcase faster than I could read them. So in an effort to not have shelves full of books I haven't read, I made a decision to suspend all my book buying activities until I clear out those I had piled up. Therefore a lot of books I read in 2021 were from this backlog, and this will remain the case going into 2022.

By pure coincidence, I read 23 books in 2021 with 17 of them being hard copies, the exact same numbers as in 2020. But I read 5% fewer pages than in 2020 with 8,078 pages, dropping the average book length to 351 pages and pages per day to 21.

Below are five books that made my 2021 top list, ranked by how long it took me to read from shortest to longest.

Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami (2020)

In this book Laila Lalami covers her experiences of being a neutralized US citizen and points out the various contradictions and ways immigrants are treated unfairly in the US. She shows how non-white citizens still face challenges and prejudices in this country despite the fact that they should have the same rights and privileges as any other citizen. As a person of color and noncitizen living in the US, it wasn't hard for me at all to relate to her stories and essays.

One starkly revelatory point she made was how the US labels its non-white citizens. Even after years or decades of assimilation and generations later, they are still labeled as hyphenated Americans such as Mexican-Americans or Chinese-Americans. But descendants of white immigrants are simply referred to as Americans and not English-Americans, French-Americans, etc.

This is a poignant book everybody should read to get a better view into the immigrant experience and what it means to be a conditional citizen in the US.

a white woman told McCain that “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, he’s not, he’s a—an Arab.” “No, ma’am,” McCain replied, taking away her microphone. “He’s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

[...]

The woman said Obama couldn’t be trusted because he was an Arab, and the rebuttal wasn’t about the lack of causality between the two; it was a reassurance that he wasn’t Arab, he was a family man. The second contradiction was between being “an Arab” and being “a citizen.” Clearly, Obama could only be the latter if he was not the former. (p. 17-18)

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack (2020)

Cosmology and astrophysics have always been subjects that captured my imagination since I was a kid. But as just a layperson, I find the subjects exceedingly difficult to get into with all of the advanced mathematics and equations. I've read quite a few popsci astrophysics books like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds, which truthfully were not light and easy reads for me. But The End of Everything by Katie Mack provided a refreshing perspective on the genre.

This book addresses the topic of how the universe could end, where most popular science media and discussions on astrophysics I've come across usually focus on the beginning. We all know that the Earth and all of its inhabitants will die a fiery death when the sun eventually engulfs us in five billion years. But Mack isn't interested in our insignificant rock's end and instead presents us with five ways the universe as we know it could meet its demise. With enthusiasm and humor, she takes you on a journey through each of them with all the astrophysics and quantum mechanics nitty-gritty details (some of which were not easy to grasp, I must admit). My personal favorite of the bunch has to be the incredibly anxiety-inducing vacuum decay with the expanding "quantum bubble of death" traveling at the speed of light destroying everything in its path by taking apart all of the elementary particles that are held together.

Being quite a short book with just over two hundred pages, it is by no means lacking in substance. She just doesn't go off on tangents and remains straight-to-the-point which was one of the reasons that made this book an enjoyable read to me. I highly recommend it for any space nerd out there.

Something coming at you at the speed of light is invisible — any little glint warning you of its approach arrives at the same time as the thing itself. There is no possible way to see it coming, or even to know that anything has gone wrong. If it approaches you from below, there will be a couple of nanoseconds during which your feet no longer exist while your brain still thinks it is looking at them. Fortunately, the process is also entirely painless: at no point will your nerve impulses be able to catch up with your disintegration by the bubble. It's a mercy, really. (p. 145)

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green (2021)

I am no stranger to John Green as I've been a dedicated vlogbrothers viewer for years. But I've only read two other of his books: Looking for Alaska and Turtles All the Way Down. Though young adult genre isn't really my cup of tea these days, I nevertheless still find myself drawn to his writing, not for the plot or romance aspects, but for his nuggets of wisdom and ways of looking at the world. That's why I was so excited for The Anthropocene Reviewed, his first nonfiction book¹.

This book is a collection of essays, adapted from his podcast of the same name. In each essay he reviews a facet of our human-centered planet on a five-star scale, kind of like Yelp reviews. But unlike Yelp reviews, the subject is used as a jumping off point for him to tell a more personal story and offer his perspectives on being human. Some essays are autobiographical and can be quite heavy in subject matter, some lighthearted, but all endlessly thoughtful. While I quite enjoyed the humor, of which this book does not lack, I couldn't help but also get emotional reading some of his more reflective and touching essays. Some of my favorites are: Harvey, Auld Lang Syne, googling strangers, and Super Mario Kart.

This is a personal love letter to planet Earth, to celebrate humanity and the wonders of being alive on this rock.

What does it mean to live in a world where you have the power to end species by the thousands, but you can also be brought to your knees, or to your end, by a single strand of RNA? I have tried here to map some of the places where my little life brushes up against the big forces shaping contemporary human experience, but the only conclusion I can draw is a simple one: We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary. (p. 273)

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021)

The Martian was such a fun read for me with all of the space and science nerdiness. I knew then that I had to keep an eye on Andy Weir. With Artemis, I opted to skip it due to lackluster reception. But after seeing so many rave reviews about Project Hail Mary, I figured I would give it a go.

Without spoiling too much, the premise of this book is that our protagonist woke up all by himself with amnesia on an interstellar mission to save humanity. What followed was a thrilling ride not unlike The Martian with incredible wit, humor, and such care into details any science and space nerd will surely appreciate. This novel puts the "science" of "science fiction" in the forefront and where there's fiction involved with the science, it's not too wacky or ridiculous that it took me out of the immersion of the story. My brain was willing to play along and remained engaged through to the end. This one is definitely a must-read if you enjoy a good sci-fi adventure.

Broadly speaking, the human brain is a collection of software hacks compiled into a single, somehow-functional unit. Each “feature” was added as a random mutation that solved some specific problem to increase our odds of survival.

In short, the human brain is a mess. Everything about evolution is messy. (p. 202-203)

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore (2020)

I've heard quite a bit about Jill Lepore, especially from her widely-acclaimed These Truths (which I still plan to pick up one of these days), but it wasn't until when I acquired a signed copy of her most recent book If Then that I finally got a taste of her writing. This book tells a story about the now-defunct Simulmatics Corporation and its mission to target and manipulate US voters and consumers using behavioral data and prediction algorithms. Sounds pretty familiar right? It wasn't Facebook or Google who pioneered these techniques we've all become so familiar with in recent years. Over half a century before Donald Trump with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, there was John F. Kennedy with Simulmatics Corp., both men succeeding at the same audacious goal with the help of machines exploiting the same kinds of voter data.

This book wasn't originally going make my top list as I felt that large parts of it were quite dry and dragged on a bit too long with all the political details of the day and lives of men who I didn't particularly care about. I also wished that she had touched more on the technical details of the algorithms they used to do these predictions. But in the weeks since I finished this book, it has been stuck with me and I kept catching myself thinking back to it, especially the epilogue which I think was the strongest chapter. She draws parallels to what's happening now in the 21st century, and shows us that these hubristic ad men in the 60s were not all that dissimilar from tech execs in Silicon Valley today. This story also serves as a cautionary tale, reminding us that we've been through this before and that we shouldn't only just look forward to the future but to also look back at our history and not repeat the same mistakes again.

But the study of the human condition is not the same as the study of the spread of viruses and the density of clouds and the movement of the stars. Human nature does not follow laws like the law of gravity, and to believe that it does is to take an oath to a new religion. Predestination can be a dangerous gospel. The profit-motivated collection and use of data about human behavior, unregulated by any governmental body, has wreaked havoc on human societies, especially on the spheres in which Simulmatics engaged: politics, advertising, journalism, counterinsurgency, and race relations. Its rise also marked the near abandonment of humanistic knowledge. [...] The future was everything, the past nothing: a void, the humanities obsolete. Apollo reached the moon. Icarus reached the sun, and his wings did not melt. Instead, the light blinded him. (p. 324)

What I'm Looking Forward to in 2022

• The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. I have been putting off reading these for too many years. So now I am publicly committing to reading them this year.
• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. I can always read more about the Asian American experience in the US. But I've also heard a lot about this book as it showed up in so many lists, and won the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Memoir.
• Klara and the Sun by Sir Kazuo Ishiguro. Another book that I've seen a lot of people recommending, including by my friend Indira. It sounds like it's going to be a really thought-provoking read.
• Rationality by Steven Pinker. I read both The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, and personally found his writing style right up my alley. This is a follow-up book to that series with a topic that I'm already quite interested in.

However these immune cells are heavily anthropomorphized which I don’t like seeing too much with scientific subjects, but I understand that to not do so would make the book much less approachable.

I still highly recommend this for those looking to get a solid understanding of this system that keeps you alive.

Some interesting things I learned from this book:

• It’s difficult for us to create medication against viruses because the way a virus works is that it needs to connect to our cell to infect it. And to do that, it needs to mimic the shape of the receptors. A drug that attacks the receptors on the virus has a high likelihood that it will also attack our own cells.
• Developing an allergy is a two-step process. First the body needs to encounter the new allergen first, which our immune system will activate and create antibodies against the new allergen. But nothing happens this first time. The next time it encounters that allergen again is when our immune system starts attacking and that's the allergic reaction.
• There are no scientifically-proven ways to boost your immune system. People that say so are just trying to sell you stuff.

This post chronicles the journey I took to get an internationalized domain registered and configured for this website.

Goals

I am by no means an expert in this domain (excuse the pun), so this is more of a documentation of my learning and the problems I ran into when trying to set this up for myself.

Here are the things that I'll go over:

• The basics of internationalized domain names and how they work
• Domain registration and configurations
• Challenges and pitfalls I encountered
• Support for them on the web

The Internet's Great Oversight

The creators of the web were mostly English-speaking Americans and this resulted in most of the standards and practices only being thought out from that standpoint. This has a lasting effect until today where the vast majority of domain names we see on the web use the limited ASCII character set, which consists of only Latin letters. This is due to the fact that the Domain Name System (DNS) was designed to only support ASCII which leaves out many languages and their native alphabets and scripts. While the Latin alphabet is the most used character set in the world, it certainly should not be the only character set supported for domain names. In order to correct this oversight, the standard for internationalized domain names was introduced.

Internationalized Domain Name

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is a domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. This means it can contain Unicode characters which allows for domain names in various non-Latin alphabets and scripts. Since only ASCII characters are supported by the DNS due to its design, supporting IDNs is just a mechanism to work around this limitation without having to overhaul the deep-rooted infrastructure for the internet. The important goal the designers behind this standard had was to ensure that IDNs are interoperable with the existing infrastructure so its introduction would not break existing user-facing applications, such as web browsers or email clients. This standard was approved by ICANN and deployed in 2003.

The solution is just a matter of converting the Unicode domain name into its ASCII representation before submitting the DNS query. Doing so involves using an algorithm called Punycode which, as described in RFC 3492, "uniquely and reversibly transforms a Unicode string into an ASCII string". Everything from that point on remains the same. This means that browsers don't necessarily have to support this standard and they should still be able to locate resources specified at the ASCII version of the IDNs.

Internationalized Country Code Top-level Domain

Country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) have been around since the early days of the internet. You have probably come across them as domain hacks with the likes of .io (British Indian Ocean Territory), .fm (Federated States of Micronesia), and .ly (Libya) among many others. These are subjected to each country's requirements which means they can limit who can register them and for what purpose. A number of these ccTLDs also have non-Latin counterparts in their country's native script such as .cn + .中國 (China), .eg + مصر. (Egypt), and of course .th + .ไทย (Thailand). These are referred to as internationalized country code top-level domain (IDN ccTLD). Surprisingly they are quite recent additions to the internet, having only been available starting in 2010.

Converting Unicode to ASCII in a Domain Name

Converting an IDN into its ASCII counterpart involves a few steps:

1. Split up the domain name into individual labels.
2. Encode each label using the Punycode algorithm.
3. Add a special prefix xn-- to each label.
4. Put the full domain name back together using . to separate the labels.

As an example: for an IDN คน.ไทย, the individual labels are คน and ไทย. Encoding those labels yields 42c6b and o3cw4h, respectively. Adding the prefix and putting them together into a full domain name we get xn--42c6b.xn--o3cw4h.

You can visit http://xn--42c6b.xn--o3cw4h in your browser now and you should see that it gets decoded back to the Unicode form of คน.ไทย. Even though your browser displays the domain name in Unicode to you, in the background it first converts it to ASCII before submitting the DNS query, and everything from that point works the same way as any ASCII domain.

Registering วัทธิกร.ไทย

Having an uncommon name in English-speaking world, the domain name of this site is just my romanized first name: Vatthikorn. I would say that in itself is already pretty cool. But I think what's even cooler is to also have the domain name of my actual first name in Thai script with a Thai IDN ccTLD: วัทธิกร.ไทย. Not many people can say that they have not only one, but two domain names for their site that are literally just their first name.

To find the registrar for a ccTLD, you can of course just do a quick internet search, there's this list for every single one of them, each with its own Wikipedia page. You can also visit IANA's Root Zone Database page that lists all of the available TLDs with more details for them than you'll ever need. But a fun trick I discovered is to simply go to your terminal and use the whois command for your TLD:

So to thnic.co.th I went, and sure enough, my Thai name was not yet taken. To register it, I had to provide both the Thai name as well as its Latin counterpart. So I'm basically getting two domain names at once. They offer a few TLD options such as .co.th + .ธุรกิจ.ไทย (business entities) and .ac.th + .ศึกษา.ไทย (academic institutions). But the one I'm eligible for is .in.th + .ไทย which is designed to be used by Thai citizens.

Due to the fact that they have to verify my identity and eligibility, the registration was technically just a request which needed human review and approval before they handed the domain name over to me. After submitting the request, I then had to email them a proof of payment which I had to make via PayPal. The price was 856 baht/year (around 27 USD). And just mere five hours later — on a Sunday morning in Thailand too — I received an email back from one of their representatives saying that my request was approved!

Setting up DNS Provider

My intention with this newly-acquired Thai domain name was to set up a basic 301 redirect to the main site. The forwarding service is not included with the purchase of the domain and they charge extra 428 baht/year (14 USD) for it which is ridiculous if you ask me. Having already spent a bit more than I wanted to on the domain name, I had to take matters into my own hands.

The DNS provider for this site is currently AWS Route 53. But in trying to set up วัทธิกร.ไทย on it, I learned that it doesn't accept domain names with Unicode characters and you have to convert them to ASCII first. That was a bit disappointing as I expected AWS to be more global and inclusive than this. On top of that, using Route 53 was going to cost me additional 50 cents a month. After some searching, I found that Cloudflare supports IDNs directly in their UI without requiring you to convert them to ASCII. Setting up an account and adding the domain name was such a smooth sailing process compared to AWS. Best of all, it's completely free for what I'm using it for.

Setting up Forwarding

Setting up forwarding using only the DNS can be done with a CNAME record but there are a couple of caveats. First, you can't do this on the apex of a domain. So while you can do:

You can't do:

This on its own was already a no-go for me since I didn't want to have to use www in my site's URL.

Second, this method cannot perform a proper redirect where the path and/or query components from the original domain are appended to the target domain. Say you want to have example.com/about forward to another-domain.com/about, this is not possible with a CNAME record. Doing that is a web server’s responsibility.

While you could absolutely go with a DIY route and set up a web server (like Apache or Nginx) to just do HTTP redirects with all the customizations you want, to me that seems overkill for what boils down to just a vanity domain redirect for my own amusement. There are also several free URL redirection services out there but I didn't want to add another link in the chain that could potentially break my setup.

As it turned out, Netlify, where this site is hosted, provides a domain alias feature that I can leverage to make this work the way I wanted to. Unfortunately, they also don't natively support IDNs in their UI so it has to be in its ASCII form.

The next step is to add an A record for this domain to point to Netlify's load balancer IP address. Since I only want Cloudflare to act as a DNS provider, I made sure that this record is marked as "DNS only" instead of "Proxied". This keeps it strictly a DNS record and bypasses Cloudflare's other functionalities.

After the A record was propagated, trying to load https://วัทธิกร.ไทย resulted in an error as the subject name in the TLS certificate returned didn't match the requested Thai domain name:

The problem here was that after adding an alias domain name on your Netlify site, the TLS certificate needed to be renewed so that the alias domain would be included.

After that was regenerated, วัทธิกร.ไทย finally loaded the content of this site. However, it didn't perform a redirect to vatthikorn.com (วัทธิกร.ไทย remains in the URL field in the browser). For this you can certainly set up redirect rules with Cloudflare but since I already have an existing _redirects file to have Netlify handle them for me, I wanted to keep all the configurations in one place. Doing this is just a matter of adding an entry for the domain name (of course it needs to be in ASCII as Unicode characters also aren't allowed here either):

So now sending a curl to วัทธิกร.ไทย correctly returns a 301 response code with the location header pointing to the main domain name with the same path:

Some Finishing Touches

To finish this off, I figured why not add a little more fun to this by also creating a special URL for my About page all in Thai: วัทธิกร.ไทย/เกี่ยวกับ. The goal is to have this redirect to vatthikorn.com/about. This was easy enough to do using the same _redirects file, though it requires those Unicode characters in the path to be URL-encoded first.

Now the final configurations for these redirects look like the following:

And that's all there is to it! You can now visit วัทธิกร.ไทย and it should take you to vatthikorn.com, and วัทธิกร.ไทย/เกี่ยวกับ to the About page.

Adoption and Support in the Wild

As I mentioned earlier, IDNs were first deployed back in 2003 so it's been around long enough to vote now. Thankfully, web browsers have had support for this since very early on. But what I wanted to know is if some of the popular social sites allow my newly-configured Thai domain to be added on my profile.

Instagram isn't having any of it. (But hey, you can put Unicode characters in the bio. So yay for emoji, right?)

While Twitter isn't even trying and just throws up this badly-formatted error message.

LinkedIn accepts it but converts it to the ASCII form for you, which is just lovely to look at.

But GitHub and Letterboxd work very nicely on the web (though both of their mobile apps won't display it).

All in all, if there's one thing I took away from this exercise is that when developing software, we should really consider diversity and inclusion aspects from the beginning and not just take the path of least resistance and only support what we're familiar with. At the very least, making sure our apps are localized and have proper accessibility support should be on top of that list. For IDNs, the fact that it was an afterthought made adding support for it just a hack that is neither ideal nor elegant. The internet — with its great promise of allowing everyone equal access to information — should have been designed to work for everyone, not just those who speak English.

Thanks to Indira for proofreading and helping improve this post.

Further Reading

• Hello World: Enabling Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)
• Internationalised Domain Name World Report
• How I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

Which is a shame because there are a lot of great ideas here.

It's becoming such a cliché now during this pandemic when we say that time is a weird concept. But the other day I was in for a rude awakening when I found out that it's almost June. I say this every year but this year really did fly by. On the bright side, we all know what this means: it's WWDC time! To keep on the tradition, here is my wish list for this year:

16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon

We all know it's unlike Apple to announce new hardware during their big event for new software, but I think this is the right crowd to announce this for. As previously mentioned, my current 2017 MacBook Pro is starting to make me feel like I could use an upgrade. And with how well-received the M1 chip has been, I have never been more eager to see the larger MacBook Pro get a refresh. The rumors this time around have started to really pick up with a couple of recent reports saying that there is a new 16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon coming very soon with "a redesigned chassis, magnetic MagSafe charger and more ports for connecting external drives and devices" as well as the HDMI port and the SD card slot. If these all turned out to be true, this would be the best MacBook Pro update in recent memory. It also would be an unprecedented backtracking from Apple. We just saw a similar thing happened with the new Siri Remote dubbed "The Apology Remote". So I think we stand a good chance of getting "The Apology MacBook Pro" at WWDC which would make a lot of people very, very happy.

Affordable External Display

I already said this last year, and I'm going to say it again: Apple needs a less expensive external display in their product line-up. The five-thousand-dollar Pro Display XDR is an amazing feat of engineering, but at that price nobody can justify that unless you are a media production company. We sorely need an Apple-branded display that is aimed more for the mass market. Think the 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display. They cannot honestly expect us to use the M1 iPad Pro (with Thunderbolt 3, no less) or these new Apple Silicon Macs with this insanely expensive monitor. Apple knows that the MacBook Pro is very popular among developers — no doubt among those in attendance at WWDC — and they connect their laptops to one or more external displays, myself included. I have been holding off on replacing my monitors in hope for a new Apple monitor for years. I am still using these two ugly mismatched 24-inch 1080p ASUS monitors (one of them being a hand-me-down) from my college days as my setup.

Again, here is all I'm asking: take out that 5K 27-inch panel in the discontinued iMac Pro (or the one you're putting in the new 27-inch Apple Silicon iMac), put it in an external display chassis, maybe add some bells and whistles like a webcam, USB-C ports, fancy speakers, etc., slap a $1,300-1,500 price tag on it (knowing Apple), and take my money.

Catch Up iPadOS with the Hardware

The iPad Pros are such powerful devices, and now with the M1 chip in them, they're as powerful as the brand-new iMac. iPadOS, on the other hand, needs a lot of work to catch up with the incredible hardware it's running on. I am really hoping that this year will be the year we see some significant improvements to iPadOS to unlock the device's potential. As a developer, I would absolutely love to be able to do some sort of software development on it. The multitasking model on it also needs some rethinking/refinements to make it easier to use and manage. I have been eyeing these new M1 iPad Pros ever since they were announced in April but am still holding out on them to see what they do with iPadOS 15.

Home Screen Widgets

The popularity of iOS 14's widgets surprised a lot of people, even Apple themselves. Knowing this, I'm fairly certain that Apple will iterate more on this feature in the upcoming iOS 15. My wish for that is for them to be more interactive as right now the only possible action is launching the app (or launch the app to perform actions in it). These widgets would be vastly more useful if we were able to use them to do things like checking to-do items off or controlling media playback right from the home screen. They could also go a step further and do away with the left-to-right top-to-bottom grid for the home screen and let us place items wherever we want on there.

HomeKit

I've recently added more smart devices to the Home app and found some of the controls and automations lacking. For example, the camera automation includes options to turn the camera on or off based on the location of the members of the household. But there is currently no way to do that based on time of day. This would be really useful as I would like my indoor cameras to record when I'm at home but only during the time when I would be asleep to keep an eye on the house at night. Also the HomeKit Secure Video only saves recorded clips at 1080p and I think there should be an option for us to store them at full resolution. Sharing the Home with household members could also use improvements as I found things like notifications and access to settings to be real flaky.

Shortcuts

While Apple made some good additions to Shortcuts in iOS 14, there is still a lot to be desired. Location-based automations need to run automatically without requiring user input. Right now by requiring confirmation, they fail at the very thing they're supposed to do. These automations need to also stop popping up as notifications every time they run, cluttering up Notification Center. Please just make it an option to turn these off.

Memories Management in Photos

I love the Memories feature that resurfaces old photos grouped based on people, places, or events into nicely curated collections. And putting this as widgets on my home screen makes it all even more delightful. However, I wish there were more controls built into this such as changing cover photo for each Memory or hiding Memories based on people, time periods, or places. I also wish they would add more inclusive holiday Memories to the mix like Chinese New Year or Diwali as the ones I've ever seen are only for days like Christmas or Independence Day.

Screen Time for tvOS

We already have Screen Time for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, so adding this to tvOS is a no-brainer. I spend a lot of time on my Apple TV so I would really like to see some data here. I'm not sure what's taking them so long, it seems like it shouldn't be that hard to implement. I've been waiting for this since 2019 so I really hope this year is the year.

Unbeknownst to me, Apple in fact publishes their event videos with its own public RSS feed just like any other podcast. Now with the exciting realization that I won't have to manually comb through the archive of Apple media event videos, I whipped up a quick and dirty script to pull the duration data from the respective feeds and do the calculation for every ATP episode that covers an Apple event.¹

So let's get the big question out of the way: which Apple event did they spend the most disproportionate amount of time discussing? That honor goes to the Mac event in November 2020.

The event itself clocked in at just under 49 minutes² and the ATP episode discussing this came in at 2h 43m 45s making the ratio 3.34. This means that for every minute of that event, the guys spent 3 minutes and 20 seconds discussing it. That really should not come as a huge surprise as this was the shortest event they have covered so far. Plus what's more exciting to talk about than the very first Macs for the ARM transition that all of us Apple nerds have been anticipating for years?

And funny enough, in second place is the most recent episode from this past week's event, with the ratio of 2.57 (2m 34s per minute). If you're curious and too lazy to look it up, they spent 43 minutes and 34 seconds talking about that minute-and-a-quarter podcast announcement alone.

Now let's look at some stats for all of the events they have discussed on the show. From the very first Apple event they covered (the WWDC 2013 "can't innovate anymore my ass" keynote) to the most recent one this past week, there were 27 events in total. Those events average at 1h 41m 9s while ATP episodes come in at 2h 12m 5s. This results in the average ratio of 1.47 (1m 28s for every minute of the event).

Since the pandemic, Apple transitioned to doing their events entirely online with shorter-yet-still-packed pre-produced events. The pre-COVID number is 1.24 (1m 14s) and the pandemic-era number, starting with WWDC 2020, is 2.38 (2m 28s). These recent short events really did come loaded with tons of stuff to talk about.

So in summary:

• The longest ATP episode for an event: WWDC 2020 keynote at 3h 15m 1s.
• The shortest ATP episode for an event: WWDC 2013 keynote at 1h 12m 27s.
• The most time spent per minute of the event: November 2020 event at 3m 20s per minute.
• The least time spent per minute of the event: WWDC 2013 keynote at 37s per minute.

If there was one good thing that came out of the horror of 2020 for me, it's that my reading habit got more solidified. Given that we can no longer go out to restaurants, sitting down to read a book after dinner has become a must-do daily routine. Even though I did not read as many books as I'd like with all the time available, this year I tried to read more widely by selecting novels and non-fiction topics I hadn't usually chosen. Trying to be a more critical reader, I also started taking better notes and highlights, and spending more time thinking about the ideas presented to me.

This year I read 23 books with 16 nonfiction and 7 fiction. While the number of books matches my 2019 number, the number of pages increased by 45% to 8,519 pages in total. This averages to 23 pages per day and 370 pages per book. In years past I almost always bought ebooks, but in an effort to build up a home library, I started buying mostly physical copies this year, so 17 of these I bought as hard copies.

The following are the five books that made my 2020 top list. Note that these are not necessarily books that came out this year, but just the ones that I read and found to be the most affecting and interesting to me personally.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (2019)

Like a lot of people this year, I was prompted to inquire more into racism in the US and to be better informed when it comes to these racial issues. Dr. Kendi argues that we cannot just simply be "not racist" as inaction against racism equates to helping perpetuate racism itself, and therefore we must actively be anti-racist to dismantle it. As a foreigner who spent a better part of my adolescent years in the US, his take on assimilation and "Americanization" as being inherently racist ideas hit me on a personal level and made me question my past actions in trying to fit in.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff (2019)

The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma pushed me to check this one out. Before reading this, I had already been ardently against the shady practices tech giants like Google and Facebook put in place to make billions with our behavioral data, but this book opened my eyes to so much more. It is a deeply troubling but incredibly important book for our time and goes way beyond the issue of privacy. There is no doubt that these companies — especially Facebook — are in no small part responsible for the spread of anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, the rise of extremism, and the overall political discourse in recent years. We are living in a dystopian world where these companies know so much more about us than we realize and effectively have the means to control us. This was the longest book I read this year, coming in at 691 pages. It is not a light read but it covers a lot of ground, exploring virtually every facet of what these surveillance capitalists are doing to our society, how they're undermining democracy, and what it could mean for the future.

Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)

This one has been on my list for a long while, and earlier in the year I finally picked it up in preparation for the film adaptation that has since been delayed. I have not read that many sci-fi novels, so I figured if I were to change that I definitely have to read Dune. It became clear to me not long into the book that Star Wars was heavily inspired by Dune: The desert planet, dew gatherers on Arrakis vs moisture farmers on Tatooine, Bene Gesserit's Voice vs the Jedi mind tricks, to name just a few. I don't think I need to say much more about this book as we all know how original and highly-regarded it is.

Letters from an Astrophysicist by Neil deGrasse Tyson (2019)

This is a collection of his responses to people who wrote to him. His perspectives, ways of thinking, and outlook on the importance of science and reason deeply resonate with me. I have a long list of quotes from this book so I'll let his words speak for themselves:

Once you confess to not knowing what you are looking at¹, no logical line of reasoning allows you to then declare that you know what you are looking at. [...] To go from “We don’t know” to “It must be God” is another example of an argument from ignorance.

True science literacy is less about what you know and more about how your brain is wired for asking questions.

But one must always recognize the difference between knowing that something is true, knowing that something is not true, and not knowing one way or another. It’s the not knowing part that leaves singular events susceptible to inventive accounts (especially from conspiracy theorists) of what may have happened.

The world is no stranger to religious warfare—with abject slaughter of countless innocents in the name of one god or another. So [the] supposition that one needs God to behave or to give meaning to life—while it may be true for many people—is certainly not a pre-requisite to a fulfilling, law-abiding life.

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon (2018)

This book chronicles the decades-long fight to get the New Horizons mission off the ground against all odds, and I must say that I did not expect it to be such a thrilling read. Truly almost a missed opportunity for generations to come, the mission was a race against time as Pluto traveled further away from the sun and, had they waited too long, would cause the atmosphere to dissipate, preventing any kind of atmospheric study from being conducted. It is also an amazing underdog story as the team at the Applied Physics Laboratory competed against the more experienced Jet Propulsion Laboratory to get their mission selected with such tight budgetary constraints and all the red tapes. The second half of the book went over fascinating insights and science behind the eventual fly-by in all of its glorious details. The story gave me such admiration for these people doing the remarkable work of advancing humanity's scientific knowledge.

What I'm Looking Forward to in 2021

• A Promised Land by Barack Obama. This is what I am currently reading and will be into 2021. I was too young (and too far away) to pay much attention to US politics during the 2008 election or his first presidential term, so it's been such an insightful read so far.
• How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. I have been waiting for Bill to write a book for a long time now so I am eagerly looking forward to this one.
• The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. As a Green brothers fan and Nerdfighter, this is a must-read for me.
• To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini. I loved the Inheritance Cycle and have been looking forward to this for years. Despite that, I had no idea this came out earlier this year! Definitely will be the next novel I read.

Thanks to Jess for proofreading and helping improve this post.

Apple in iOS 14 is planning to introduce a new App Tracking Transparency feature that will let users know when companies want to track them across apps and website. Following outcry from developers like Facebook and ad networks unprepared for the change, Apple delayed the implementation of the anti-tracking functionality until early 2021.

Craig Federighi, in an interview with The Independent (via MacRumors):

“If we sell cars with airbags, and we decided to put airbags in our cars before someone else did, and customers want to buy those, I think it's great that we've provided that that choice,” he said. “We're not waiting for someone to require we do it, we're we're making that part of what it means to use our platform.”

I think Apple should have shipped this feature already. They are not outright banning this practice but only giving users the awareness and option to opt out. These companies have been operating these data mining and surveillance operations for way too long without much oversight. They are now complaining because they know that they are collecting users' data without their consent. And they know that most users, if given the option to opt out, would do so.

This is not about small businesses or whatever bullshit they come up with, it's about them needing as much raw materials as possible to extract behavioral data from. And those data are then turned into "personalized experiences" which in reality just means figuring out what we want, think, and feel and then selling that information to advertisers or worse.

The M1 chip, which belongs to a ‌MacBook Air‌ with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. According to the benchmark, the M1 has a 3.2GHz base frequency.

[...]

In comparison to Macs, the single-core performance is better than any other available Mac, and the multi-core performance beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model. That high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1096 and a multi-core score of 6870.

That is crazy talk. The entry-level laptop without a fan beating out top-of-the-line 16-inch MacBook Pro! Imagine what the higher-powered variant of this chip could do in a desktop Mac with more thermal envelope and wattage.

My current 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro has been feeling slightly long in the tooth and I was considering upgrading to the then new 16-inch model until Apple announced back in June that they are transitioning to ARM. Now I am certain that my next Mac will be an Apple Silicon Mac. My hope is that before or during WWDC next year, they will announce a 16-inch model of this.

An idea with a simple premise popped into my head: I wish I can have customizable Home Screen widgets that can open any URL. Since I had already been looking for an excuse to properly learn SwiftUI, I figured why not just try to make this myself as a learning exercise.

WidgetLink

WidgetLink is a very basic app that lets you create widgets on your Home Screen that can launch any URLs. This is not limited to just web URLs but also any app’s URL scheme. This means that not only can it open web links but any app or action can also be performed with their provided URL schemes.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that this is not a very useful or unique app with its functionality. There’s probably only one other person who might even find this remotely useful. The way it works is also not very elegant due to a technical limitation that's not within my control: when the link is tapped, instead of opening the URL, it first launches the app before opening the URL in a browser.

You might also be thinking “but Zack, you can already do all this with a Shortcuts widget” and you would be absolutely right. But with that you can only fit at most 4 actions on a medium widget with little customization on how they look.

Customization is a big deal with iOS 14 and WidgetLink allows you to pick text and background color, number of rows and columns, link image and its shape to suit your Home Screen aesthetics.

This currently supports small and medium widgets. The small one, again, due to limitation of the OS, can only be used to launch a single URL. You can long press on the widget to edit and choose which URL to display.

On the medium widget, up to 15 URLs can be shown (albeit looking pretty crowded). You can reorder the links inside the app by tapping the Edit button in the list view. This ordering will arrange the links on the widget in a left-to-right top-to-bottom manner.

Special Thanks

This wouldn't be possible without the incredible 100 Days of SwiftUI tutorials which helped me tremendously at learning the basics of SwiftUI enough to get me started on developing this app. Also I'd like to thank my girlfriend Jess for a small but important contribution she made by picking the main color for this app (#FF613D) because I could not decide for the life of me what color to use.

These past few weeks have proved to be a great learning experience for me with SwiftUI. The declarative syntax was little difficult to wrap my head around at first and Core Data was not the most fun to work with. But my brain is now in SwiftUI mode and it’s going to feel strange to context switch it back to work on UIKit again.

Anyway, if you happen to be that one other person who thinks this might be something you could make use of, I would be delighted and honored if you give it a try. And please don’t hesitate to send any feedback my way.

Date: 26 September 2020
Tee Time: 2pm
Condition: Mostly sunny
Heat index: 40ºC (105ºF)

It’s been a long while since I played any golf, with the last full round of 18 holes being back in March. But at last, in recent weeks, I started picking it back up and going back to the range as well as walking the short par-33 back 9 at a local club after work. This past weekend was my first full round of 18 holes back after a 6-month hiatus.

I hadn’t hit my driver in months and that club had always given me much anxiety: mostly due to my own lack of confidence. And with the course being a par-72 at a little bit over 6,400 yards, using my driver was all but inevitable. Before the round, I just warmed up quickly with my 56-degree, 7 iron, and the driver, which actually felt pretty good.

Hole #1 - Par 4 - 384 yards

The round was off to a good start with a drive perfectly down the middle of the fairway, maybe around 250 yards from the tee. I got on the green in 2 but three-putted for a bogey 5.

Current Score: +1

Hole #2 - Par 4 - 341 yards

Second hole saw another great drive down to about 70 yards, which I then overshot the hole by 20+ yards. Luckily, I was able to save par with an up-and-down.

Current Score: +1

Hole #3 - Par 5 - 500 yards

This was when things started to go downhill. The tee shot hooked into a bush and after an embarrassing lay-up flub, I was chipping my 5th shot from front-left of the green then two-putted for a double bogey 7.

Current Score: +3

Hole #4 - Par 3 - 169 yards

This par-3 saw me pulled way left of the green with a 6 iron. A noncommittal chip trying to avoid a tree branch put myself in a bunker which followed by a pretty decent shot out to about 5 feet. I then missed the putt and walked off with a double bogey 5.

Current Score: +5

Hole #5 - Par 4 - 369 yards

Now I got the pull bug in my head and ended up pushing the drive way out of bounds into a nearby neighborhood. I eventually got on the green in 4 but proceeded to three-putt for a triple bogey 7.

I just played the last 3 holes 7 over par. But I didn’t really have any expectation anyway and didn’t really care all that much.

Current Score: +8

Hole #6 - Par 3 - 142 yards

An easy GIR with a 9 iron followed by a two-putt par.

Current Score: +8

Hole #7 - Par 4 - 367 yards

A fairway hit, another GIR, and a two-putt par.

Current Score: +8

Hole #8 - Par 4 - 410 yards

Another fairway hit. I missed my approach shot just short of the green but managed another up-and-down for par.

Current Score: +8

Hole #9 - Par 5 - 480 yards

A fairway hit, green in 3, and a two-putt par.

Current Score: +8

Hole #10 - Par 5 - 529 yards

I pulled my driver left of the fairway again but a good lay-up got me on the green in 3 and two-putted for par.

Current Score: +8

Hole #11 - Par 4 - 409 yards

This hole saw a great drive to around the 150-yard marker with the pin tucked behind a front-left bunker. A soft 8-iron shot nicely drew from right edge of the green down to about 6 feet above the hole. That approach was the shot of the day for me. I sank that putt for the first birdie of the day.

Current Score: +7

Hole #12 - Par 3 - 178 yards

Coming up on this hole, I was feeling pretty good with my game, realizing that I just played the last 6 holes at 1 under par. This quickly resulted in a thinned 5-iron hooking 30-yard left of the pin. I managed to chip over a bunker on to the green but three-putted for a double bogey 5.

Note-to-self (for the hundredth time): Stop thinking about the score, especially when you’re doing well and feeling in the zone, because you almost always ended up messing it up right after.

Current Score: +9

Hole #13 - Par 4 - 374 yards

Hit another solid drive to about 100 yards, my favorite approach distance. A well-practiced 56-degree shot put myself about 15 feet short of the hole. I missed the birdie putt and walked away with a par.

Current Score: +9

Hole #14 - Par 4 - 432 yards

I again pulled my driver into the rough and had to hit the second shot around a tree with my 4 iron. Chipped on to the green and missed an 8-foot par putt for a bogey.

Current Score: +10

Hole #15 - Par 5 - 488 yards

Attempting to avoid the chronic hooking, I pushed my tee shot to the right edge of the fairway. It was a par-5 so I was able to lay up, got on the green in 3, and two-putted for par.

Current Score: +10

Hole #16 - Par 4 - 320 yards

My tee shot yet again pushed right into the rough but luckily I had a shot at the green with about 100 yards left. Put that on the fringe and walked away with a two-putt par.

Current Score: +10

Hole #17 - Par 3 - 145 yards

This was a par-3 over water with a deep bunker front of the green. Put my 9-iron tee shot left of the green and chipped on with a two-putt for bogey 4.

Current Score: +11

Hole #18 - Par 4 - 390 yards

On this last hole, I piped it straight down the fairway with about 130 yards left. A PW shot put that on the green about 20 feet short of the hole. I then unexpectedly drained that uphill putt for a birdie to end a solid back 9 at +2.

Round Summary

In total I hit 44 out and 38 in for a ten-over 82. For the first round of 18 after a long break and almost no practice sessions, I am quite pleased with the result.

Fairways hit: 8 of 14 (57%)
Greens in regulation: 10 of 18 (56%)
Up-and-downs: 2 of 6 (33%)
Putts: 35
Three-putts: 3

Some Takeaways

• My irons and approaches felt pretty good without any catastrophic miss-hits, except on the two par-3s which costed me 4 strokes.
• My putting did save me quite a few stokes. On those holes that I parred, there were several 4-5 feet knee-shakers as well as a couple of 6-8 feet ones.
• The driver definitely needs work to straighten out these push/pull inconsistency.
• Mentally, I need to stop worrying about the score and just relax and focus on one hole at a time.

Apple Central World’s distinctive architecture is brought to life with the first-ever all-glass design, housed under a cantilevered Tree Canopy roof. Once inside, customers can travel between two levels via a spiral staircase that wraps around a timber core, or riding a unique cylindrical elevator clad in mirror-polished stainless steel

Really great looking store. The all-glass exterior with the canopy is pretty much identical to that of the Steve Jobs theater at Apple Park.

The Apple logo on the Video Wall also has a cool design, spelling out “Krung Thep” in Thai.

In the Thai-language news site MangoZero, Patta.pond got a chance to do a quick tour of the store and has some more photos from the inside, including the Boardroom in the basement. And if you look closely, I think one of the framed photos is the Steve Jobs theater.

This year's WWDC keynote felt much denser than in years past. I think this is partly due to the fact that the entire keynote was prerecorded ahead of time, and compared to regular live stage keynote, this allows for a more fast-paced presentation. I surely felt quite overwhelmed afterwards with all the information that was bombarded at me for almost 2 hours. But despite everything that's going on in the world, Apple managed to put together such an amazing set of new features and functionalities to their software lineup.

iOS

The Home Screen update is probably the most striking by far for this release. And it is, no question, sorely needed. During iOS's 10+ years lifespan, the Home Screen remained virtually untouched and looked outrageously archaic in recent years. Until now. As a person who dislikes having the iPhone filled with pages and pages of apps, but prefers a clean single-page Home Screen, I am elated to finally hide all the folders away and replace that space with the new Widgets. I never need all those apps to always be visible anyway since using the search functionality is way more efficient.

Another feature that also made me really happy was the inline replies in Messages. The official word on the iOS 14 preview page says that this can be done "to a specific message in a group conversation". But now that I am running the beta on my devices, I am happy to report that this also works in one-to-one conversations too! I've been waiting for this day since WWDC 2017 and my wish has finally been granted!

The new Translate app is pretty neat but Thai is not even an option. Can't say I'm surprised though. Hopefully that will come soon in the future.

iPadOS

I don't use my iPad nearly enough but there are quite a few exciting changes coming to iPadOS this year. First off, the new search ability, which is taken right from macOS's Spotlight, looks amazing. This will further elevate iPadOS closer to the productivity machine that Apple has been striving for.

But the most exciting feature by far for iPadOS for me is Scribble. This is such a simple and obvious feature but it's going to make using the iPad a much more pleasant and natural experience. You can even scratch to delete and circle to select! In hindsight, this feature feels like it's a long time coming given the fact that Apple has had this handwriting recognition technology since the Newton in early 1990s.

AirPods

The two updates to the AirPods are the two best features they could have picked for them. The spatial audio sounds awesome and no doubt contains some amazing technology behind it. I definitely look forward to trying it out.

The one feature that took the trophy for the AirPods is the automatic switching between devices. This has definitely been one of the biggest pain points when using the AirPods since I tend to use them with a few different devices. Whatever Apple magic they're doing behind the scene to detect the device being used, I really hope it works seamlessly.

watchOS

I finally get my watchOS sleep tracker! I can't believe it took them this long to include sleep tracking capabilities to the Apple Watch. The Face Sharing is also pretty neat. Sadly still no custom watch faces.

Also the handwashing detection is probably the most 2020 feature there is. I don't think I'll personally find it that useful since I tend to just take off my watch whenever I'm washing my hands.

macOS

The star of the event by far is the macOS. As we all expected, Apple announced that they're transitioning to use their own SoCs for their Mac lineup. They seem to have a pretty aggressive timeline with the first ARM Mac debuting later this year and that this transition will complete in just two years. Not sure what Tim's definition of "complete" is. Does this mean in two years they will stop making new Intel-based Macs? Or stop supporting them?

This release also comes with probably the biggest redesign of the macOS UI that I can remember. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this design language yet. It almost feels like they're doing this UI refresh in anticipation of a touchscreen Mac. It clearly has a lot of iOS elements in it, just look at the new Control Center. A lot of the buttons and controls look bigger and have more space between them. But all in all, I think I kinda like it? We'll see.

And apparently macOS Big Sur is officially macOS 11.0! Or is it...?

See my other posts in this series: 2016, 2017, 2019, 2021.

My favorite Apple event of the year is finally upon us! This year's WWDC is all virtual due to COVID-19 but that doesn't mean the main event is not going to be full of exciting announcements. Here are the things I wish to see tomorrow, in no particular order:

ARM Mac Transition Plan

This is not anything new to those who have been following Apple news. But with this recent report from Bloomberg that Apple is planning to release a Mac with their own processor soon, WWDC is a perfect event for them to discuss the transition plan with the developers in (virtual) attendance.

There are a lot of talks about a completely re-imagined macOS, or possibly a brand-new iMac to go alongside this transition. But I think Brendan Shanks puts it best on what is probably going to happen when this eventually happens:

My core prediction: The Mac is getting a re-engining, not a re-imagining.

Much like the Mac’s switch to Intel, this transition will be fundamentally simple and, ideally, invisible to end users.

This means:

• No massive hardware changes, like adding touchscreens.
• No massive software changes, like requiring apps to be sandboxed, or come from the App Store, or be written with UIKit and Catalyst.
• No complex schemes, like hybrid ARM/Intel Macs that run apps on both processors.

Screen Time for macOS and tvOS

This was on my 2019 wish list and unfortunately nothing was mentioned. So please Apple, this feature would be so useful to so many of us.

New Affordable External Display

Last year I was hoping for a new Apple external display and that became a reality. But we all know how absolutely ridiculous the price is for the Pro Display XDR, and nobody needs this thing unless you're John Siracusa or a movie studio.

So to clarify from last year, I would like an affordable Apple external display. All I want is for them to grab that 5K panel they use for the iMac Pro, put that in an external display package, and sell it.

More Stable iOS 14

Saying iOS 13 was a buggy release is to say the least. I believe they should do something similar to what they did with iOS 12 and just make iOS 14 less feature-rich but more stable and optimized overall.

SwiftUI Improvements

The biggest surprise for me from last year's WWDC was SwiftUI. So this year I'm hoping to see some more improvements with the framework.

Updated Apple TV and Remote

It's been nearly 3 years since the latest Apple TV was released. I do think it is now time for some updated hardware, especially the remote. But I think this is a longshot. It's more likely to be announced during the fall event.

Updated HomePod

The HomePod was announced 3 years ago at 2017's WWDC and since its release in 2018, there has been no update to the hardware. I'd like to see some new hardware, ideally a new smaller and cheaper model and perhaps a price cut to the main one.

macOS 10.16 Avalon

I quite like this name that Myke picked during the Upgrade's WWDC Keynote Draft episode.

Images from these protests — including protesters dousing their faces with milk in order to temper the sting of the tear gas — underscore not only the intensity of the response, but a major contrast with the lack of force that’s been used in anti-lockdown protests at state capitols around the country, when the protesters were armed white men.

[...]

“Unarmed people, many of whom are people of color, protest police brutality and are met with police brutality — flash grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets,” says Georgetown Law professor Paul Butler, the author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men. “But when armed, mainly white protesters storm the Michigan state capitol, the police just let them be.”

Truly pisses me off. Scary to imagine what could happen if these protesters were armed like those white anti-lockdown protesters.

After nearly two decades of effort, Elon Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, successfully launched its first two people into orbit, ushering in a new age of human spaceflight in the United States. The flight marked the first time astronauts have launched into orbit from American soil in nearly a decade, and SpaceX is now the first company to send passengers to orbit on a privately made vehicle.

What a momentous accomplishment for SpaceX and American human spaceflight.

On a personal note, I am deeply disappointed that I did not get see this launch in person despite living not more than 50 miles away from Cape Canaveral. But I was actually able to hear and feel the rumbling all the way from here, albeit after quite a few minutes of delay. Under usual circumstance, I definitely would have been there since the crack of dawn today to catch a good view of the launch.

Chris Gebhardt on Twitter:

Endeavour! They named it Endeavour! Endeavour was my personal favourite Shuttle Orbiter because it is actually her maiden voyage that is my first memory. This day just keeps getting better and better. #SpaceX #CrewDragon #Endeavour

From the live stream during the tour of the capsule, Doug Hurley said that they picked this name because both his and Bob Behnken's first flight was on the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Interestingly, Endeavour was also the name given to the command module on Apollo 15 and the lunar module on that mission was named Falcon.

As of December 2017, women made up an average of 23.5% of the world's parliamentarians, although this figure hides significant regional variation: Nordic parliaments are on average 41.4% female while Arab parliaments are on average 18.3% female.¹ Women account for 10% or less of parliamentarians in thirty-one countries, including four countries that have no female parliamentarians at all. And in most countries precious little is being done to remedy this. (p. 272)

Naturally, this made me wonder what the figures are like in Thailand parliament.

From my research on the Thai National Assembly website, there are 78 women out of 489 MPs in the House of Representatives, making it 15.95% female. Note that this figure does include the first transgender MP elected to the Thai parliament, Tanwarin Sukkhapisit, but they actually identify as non-binary. I'm counting them in as the stat I'm looking for is about how male-dominated the parliament is.

On the Senate side — where senators are not elected but appointed by the military government — there are 26 women out of 250 senators, making it 10.4% female.

In total, there are 104 women out of 739 MPs. This makes the Thai parliament as a whole only 14.1% female.

Now let's see how Thailand fares against other countries². Keep in mind the world average as of 2019 is 24.5% and in Asia it's at 19.7%.

Thailand's House of Representatives is ranked 132nd (out of 188 countries) in terms of percentage of women in the lower chamber or unicameral parliaments. Within South East Asia, it comes in at 8th out of 11 countries, beating out just Malaysia, Myanmar, and Brunei. The irony is that a lot of Thais often look down on their neighboring countries such as Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Cambodia as being less developed.

Now for the Senate (again, not elected but appointed by the junta), out of 78 countries with an upper chamber, Thailand's is ranked 71st, only beating out countries such as Nigeria, Yemen, and Haiti. And amongst the 5 South East Asian countries with an upper chamber, it comes in dead last.

Needless to say, this is embarrassing for Thailand. But then what isn't embarrassing about this country's current political situation?

The RAW image, which comes from reading the Bayer Filter Mosaic, can not be visualized without a transformation to create an RGB image that can be displayed on a screen or printed on paper.

The interpretation of the raw file to reconstruct colors from the Bayer Filter Mosaic (what is often referred to as “Color Science”) and produce the final image applies a number of subjective transformations and selectively throws away information. The subjective interpretation must happen somewhere between capturing an image and displaying it. Someone has to take the subjective decisions about what information to throw away, what information to keep and how to transform the information to be able to visualize it.

[...]

When you read “no filter” or “straight out of camera”, what you are really reading is “I’m leaving the post-processing choices to the engineers who designed the camera”.

Very well-put here by Carucci. I am a firm believer that a large portion, if not in some cases the majority, of the time it takes into creating a photograph is in the post-processing¹. But in this day and age of digital photography, where any image can be conjured up in Photoshop, the words "post-processing" and "editing" have gotten the connotation that the producer of the work is not being truthful. It sometimes feels almost as if those who are so in-your-face about their "no filter" photos think they have some sort of moral high ground for not touching up their photos.

Now with great cameras being so ubiquitous thanks to smartphones, these "no filter" images are in fact so incredibly post-processed that there are probably way more adjustments done to these smartphone photos than how much an average photographer does to process their RAW images.

From Apple's press release for iPhone 11 back in 2019:

Next-generation Smart HDR uses advanced machine learning to capture more natural-looking images with beautiful highlight and shadow detail on the subject and in the background. Deep Fusion, coming later this fall, is a new image processing system enabled by the Neural Engine of A13 Bionic. Deep Fusion uses advanced machine learning to do pixel-by-pixel processing of photos, optimizing for texture, details and noise in every part of the photo.

So yeah, every image everyone takes nowadays is very much so post-processed.

Build and display this spectacular LEGO Ideas 21321 ISS (International Space Station). Packed with authentic ISS details, including a posable Canadarm2 and 2 rotating joints that coincide with 8 adjustable ‘solar panels’, this 864-piece set is a wonderful gift idea for space enthusiasts, adult LEGO fans or any experienced builder.

And:

This ISS (International Space Station) toy building kit for adults, measuring over 7” (20cm) high, 12” (31cm) long and 19” (49cm) wide, makes a beautiful display model that will catch the eye of every passer-by.

Announcement tweet from the official LEGO account:

An out-of-this-world building experience is coming! 🌙⭐️ The LEGO International Space Station is available February 1st!

Listed for $70 on the product page on LEGO website.

Just take my money already.

SpaceX completed a crucial test of a key safety system of its Crew Dragon spacecraft today. The test involved launching its Crew Dragon using a Falcon 9, though without any actual crew on board. The launch was then intentionally cut short, with the In-Flight Abort (IFA) system triggered to separate the Crew Dragon from the rocket about about a minute and a half into the launch process.

And:

The Falcon 9 rocket used her [sic] had flown on three previous missions, and was in fact the first booster produced as part of SpaceX’s run of human-rated variants of the Falcon 9 design. As intended, the Falcon 9 broke up once the Crew Dragon ejected, with the on-board fuel generating a pretty impressive explosion.

The best clip of the separation from SpaceX:

Crew Dragon separating from Falcon 9 during today’s test, which verified the spacecraft’s ability to carry astronauts to safety in the unlikely event of an emergency on ascent

Then the subsequent explosion of the booster, from Spaceflight Now:

This spectacular series of photos shows the Crew Dragon abort and the expected explosion of the Falcon 9 rocket during today’s launch escape test over Florida’s Space Coast (📷: Katie Darby).

Loren Grush:

RIP Falcon 9. We saw it clearly fall from the sky

Side note: I saw this film in the theater when it came out and really enjoyed it. Regrettably, I actually had never heard of Tate–LaBianca murders or Charles Manson before seeing the film. Only after I came out of the theater did I finally learn from my girlfriend what that whole subplot was actually about.

Now I'm going to have to rewatch this film with this newfound perspective and context...

Enter the AirPods Pro. After months of speculations, Apple announced in a press release and made available the long-awaited upgrade to their wildly popular and loved product, all within a two-day period. This pushed me over the fence, and I am now an owner of these headphones.

It just so happened that I was going to be on some long-haul flights not long after I got the AirPods Pro, so they were the perfect testing grounds for comfort and noise cancellation. Prior to the flights, my initial guess was that my Bose QuietComfort 35 (Series I, ver. 3.0.3) would be more comfortable for such an extended usage, but it turned out the AirPods Pro were way more comfortable. It must be something to do with my ears because after a couple of hours with the Bose headphones on, my earlobes would always start to hurt as the earpads were pressing on them. With the AirPods Pro, that is not an issue. I'm not as sensitive as some people might be with this type of in-ear earbuds — I actually prefer them over regular earbuds that just sit on the edge of the ear canals — so I was able to wear them hours after hours on those flights. I even went to sleep and woke up with them still in my ears feeling no discomfort around or in them.

As you might know, there are usually quite a few announcements during long flights like these. With the Bose, I would have to either take them off completely, or move an earcup up off one of my ears onto the temple to be ble to hear the announcements. With the AirPods Pro, a click to pause followed by a 1-second hold to activate the Transparency mode was all it took to be able to hear the surroundings. Alternatively, I could just take one out of my ear and it would pause whatever media playing as well as turning on Transparency mode for the other ear. I personally found it to be a much more seamless and less of an annoyance than traditional headphones are in this situation.

The noise cancellation is way better than I expected. In the aircraft cabin at cruising altitude, the ambience noise was, according to my Apple Watch's Noise app, around 70-75dB, which was a perfect environment to test this. I compared them with the Bose headphones with no music and, to my surprise, the AirPods Pro did better at canceling out the noise than the Bose headphones. I did not at all expect this to be the case. And to get a similar level of isolation, I had to turn up the volume a bit more on the Bose. I believe this is due to the nature of the in-ear earbuds creating a seal in your ears blocking much of the noise, combined with the superb Active Noise Cancellation system.

Though when the music is playing, I find that the Bose headphones perform better when it comes to sound quality. This isn't really a fair comparison to begin with and I am no audiophile or have that acute a sense of hearing, but I can tell that the AirPods Pro do sound a bit flatter than the Bose. However, the AirPods Pro do produce quite a lot of bass in such a tiny package.

During one of those flights, I was pleasantly surprised that there was a baby crying a few rows ahead of me which I was completely oblivious of until I turned off the noise cancellation. I happily turned it back on again. The transition from Transparency mode to Active Noise Cancellation is super satisfying. It feels almost literally like the world disappearing right in front of you and you're now in your own world. By the time I flew back in another stint of flights totalling over 24 hours, I ended up just using the AirPods Pro the majority of the time. The only time I had to use my Bose headphones was when the AirPods Pro needed recharging.

The Transparency mode is interesting. With my Bose headphones, I'm used to this "headset" mode that happens sometimes during conference calls in which it relays the sounds the microphones pick up back into the headphones. It is a very off-putting experience since the headphones are canceling out the ambience noise but at the same time that very same ambience noise they're cancelling out, plus your own voice as you talk, is being played back. It kind of makes you feel like you have hyper-hearing or something. And with the AirPods Pro, I was half-expecting Transparency mode to be something like that. Again, to my surprise, it's better than I had anticipated. I can definitely tell that they're playing back what the microphones pick up but the effect is definitely not as startling an experience. To me it's very close to sounding perfectly natural, except it sort of has this quiet background static noise added to it. I can definitely hear the surrounding way more compared to when the Transparency mode is off. This is a very useful feature if you want to have a conversation while wearing them or be mindful of your environment when you're out and about.

The AirPods Pro also work with the Find My app (I actually have no idea if the regular AirPods do). What's really cool about this is that in the app there's a "Play Sound" option to help with locating them, just like with the iPhone and iPad. It starts with a quiet beeping that gets progressively louder. I thought this would only work if there's a device currently connected to them because clearly the AirPods Pro themselves are not connected to the internet to be able to receive the command to play the sound wherever they are in the world. But I did some testing by disconnecting them from my phone and going outside so they are out of range. I hit the "Play Sound" and after a few seconds the app said the sound was being played on them. A little puzzled, I came back inside and indeed the beeping sound was playing, and yet they were still disconnected from my phone. A notification then popped up on my phone saying that they were found by my iPad which was sitting in range of them.

So I think what happens when you hit "Play Sound" on the Find My app is that the phone would first try to connect to the AirPods and play the sound on them. If it cannot find them, it would cycle through other devices you have signed in to your iCloud account and try to connect to them to play the sound. I tested this theory by bringing both my phone and my iPad out of range of the AirPods Pro and doing the same thing in the app. And sure enough, no sound was played. This is such a little thing but I find it so thoughtful and delightful. For all I know, this might already be the case with the regular AirPods and I'm just finding out about it now.

When you go into the Bluetooth setting and tap on the little "i" icon on the AirPods Pro, it brings up a custom settings page that allows for quite a bit of customization. This includes changing the name, select the noise control, and pick if you want the press-and-hold on the stem to trigger Siri or switch between noise modes, which can be set differently between the left and right ones.

Towards the bottom of the page, there is this interesting little option labeled Ear Tip Fit Test with caption "Check the fit of your AirPods¹ ear tips to determine which size provides the best seal and acoustic performance". The test itself just plays this 6-second sound and uses the microphones to determine if the seal is optimal for best noise cancellation. It would tell you if the seal isn't perfect in one or both of the ears. Amusingly for me, I ran this test with all three ear tip sizes and they all reported perfect fits. So I'm just using the medium ones and saving the others as spare parts.

Some other nuggets:

• The tip takes much more force to pull off than I thought. It felt like I was definitely going to break it.
• The force buttons on the stems work great and require no getting used to. I thought the act of pressing on the stem would have pulled out or loosen the seal in my ears but they remain unaffected even after repeated pressing.
• Despite the case being a bit larger than the regular AirPods, they fit perfectly in the tiny change pocket on my Levi's 511 jeans.
• The case and the AirPods themselves do get dirty quite easily. And now with the in-ear earbuds, it's gonna be earwax town all up in there.
• When you're charging the case on a wireless charging pad, you can tap on the case near the indicator light and it would lit up showing the charging status. Green for charged and amber for charging. Interestingly, this doesn't work if you're charging it via Lightning cable.
• There were no Apple stickers in the box.

So now that the new Mac Pro is available for sale, I figured I would go take a look at how much it costs with everything upgraded to the highest possible configuration. And as you can see in the screenshot above, it will cost you $52,748.

Apparently there is an 8TB SSD option coming soon so it will definitely be well over $53,000. For context, the MSRP for a brand-new BMW 5 Series is $53,900.

Then we can also add the Pro Display XDR with nano-texture glass with a Pro Stand which will add $6,998 to it. And why not make it a dual-monitor setup while we're at it.

So now this whole setup will set you back $66,744, excluding taxes.

Well, at least the shipping is free.

I’m on cloud nine. Look at this glorious keyboard! An Esc key! Inverted-T arrow keys! A millimeter of key travel! Enough spacing between the keys for our fingers to accurately orient themselves! And keystrokes will probably work, 100% of the time, for years!

[...]

The biggest change is that I finally don’t feel like it’s constantly fighting me. Its design doesn’t feel spiteful. It’s a computer that doesn’t seem to hate being a computer. I’m not afraid to use it in the world, and I’m not avoiding using it because it’s unpleasant. The butterfly keyboard was the opposite, it never got better, I never got used to it, and good riddance to it.

Following in the footsteps of the fantastic iMac Pro, updated Mac Mini, and upcoming Mac Pro, the release of the 16-inch MacBook Pro ends a painful chapter of neglect and hubristic design of the Mac. Apple has finally turned the ship around.

John Gruber:

Really, I don’t think there’s anything I can write here that will convince you how good these speakers sound. However good you think I’m saying they sound, they sound way better than that.

[...]

We shouldn’t be celebrating the return of longstanding features we never should have lost in the first place. But Apple’s willingness to revisit these decisions — their explicit acknowledgment that, yes, keyboards are meant to by typed upon, not gazed upon — is, if not cause for a party, at the very least cause for a jubilant toast.

This is a MacBook you can once again argue is the best laptop hardware money can buy.

A lot of high praises for this new 16-inch MacBook Pro. The 15-inch MacBook Pro has been my main personal computing device since the 2010 model and now the 2019 model for work. So I spend a lot of time on them. This upgrade sure does look like it has almost everything I wish for.

Jason Snell (via Michael Tsai):

[D]espite the reduction in bezel size, this is a larger laptop than the 15-inch MacBook Pro—14.09 inches wide (up .34 inches or about 9 millimeters) and 9.48 inches deep (up .2 inches or about 5.2 millimeters). The 16-inch MacBook Pro is also thicker, by less than a millimeter, at 0.64 inches (1.62cm) thick.

[...]

Clearly Apple’s design philosophy here was to optimize for performance and battery life and allow the laptop to get a little larger if needed. After many years of Apple seemingly prioritizing thinness and lightness even in its products targeted at professional users, this is a refreshing shift.

[...]

The new studio-quality mic array has a signal-to-noise ratio that is so high, it rivals that of popular professional-grade standalone digital microphones. With 40 percent less hiss than before, recordings sound superclean and capture much more of the quieter detail

[...]

If you’re someone who was waiting to throw out the industrial design of the MacBook Pro for something that looks different, or to add back MagSafe and a card slot, this laptop will disappoint you. Apple apparently didn’t have those features high on its priority list, if they were even there at all.

And a little bit of insight from Phil Schiller in an interview with Roger Cheng:

To make this new scissor mechanism work appropriately in a notebook, we had to adapt it to the angle, which is different in a notebook than in a slanted desktop design for ergonomics. And it had to work in a design that had a backlight, which the notebook has that desktops do not.

Lewis Hamilton has stepped out of the great Juan Manuel Fangio’s shadow to join Michael Schumacher as one of only two drivers in history to have won as many as six F1 world championship titles.

What an incredible achievement. One more to go to match Schumacher with the most world titles of seven. I hope Hamilton will surpass him though I don't think it will be easy with the regulation changes coming up in the next couple of years.

Side note: I'm a complete newcomer to F1 but I highly recommend Netflix's documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive. It's what got me started with this sport.

[T]here’s no question how AirPods Pro compare to regular AirPods. The difference is like night and day. Amtrak trains are pretty noisy — especially at what we in the U.S. so adorably consider “high speeds” — but with AirPods Pro the clackety-clack rumble was effectively blocked out.

[...]

My corner store has a noisy refrigeration unit. With AirPods Pro on — playing nothing — I couldn’t hear it at all. I couldn’t tell that my dishwasher was running even though I was sitting right across from it in my kitchen.

The AirPods Pro's noise cancellation seems to be better than expected. Even MKBHD thought so too. I'm pretty sure it's no better than those in Bose and Sony over-ear headphones. But I'm going on some long haul flights soon and they are perfect testing grounds for this. I'll report back in a couple of weeks.

Also, an interesting tidbit:

The force sensor — the flat section on the earbuds stem that faces forward when in your ear — is effectively a button. But it’s not a button. It doesn’t actually move, and it doesn’t provide haptic feedback. But it acts like a button and — most importantly — sounds like a button. When you press it, the AirPod Pro plays a click. I use the singular AirPod there because the click only plays in the bud whose force sensor you pressed. The effect is uncannily like clicking a real button. In a similar way to how force touch trackpads on modern MacBooks and Touch ID iPhone home buttons feel like they truly click, the AirPods Pro force sensors feel like actual clicking buttons. They actually have more of a premium clicky feel than the truly clicking buttons on Apple’s wired EarPods, even though they don’t actually click. It’s uncanny, and Apple at its best.

Check it out on Goodreads.

Highlights

• Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it’s improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results. Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.
• First, deep learning provides a sense of purpose in life. Developing skills is meaningful. It feels good to get good at something. Ultralearning is a path to prove to yourself that you have the ability to improve and to make the most of your life. It gives you the confidence that you can accomplish ambitious things.
• The opposite of this is learning optimized for fun or convenience: choosing a language-learning app because it’s entertaining, passively watching trivia show reruns on television so you don’t feel stupid, or dabbling instead of serious practice.
• Your deepest moments of happiness don’t come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself.
• Professional success, however, was rarely the thing that motivated the ultralearners I met—including those who ended up making the most money from their new skills. Instead it was a compelling vision of what they wanted to do, a deep curiosity, or even the challenge itself that drove them forward.
• The best ultralearners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.
• The first problem that many people have is starting to focus. The most obvious way this manifests itself is when you procrastinate: instead of doing the thing you’re supposed to, you work on something else or slack off.
• Make a mental habit of every time you procrastinate; try to recognize that you are feeling some desire not to do that task or a stronger desire to do something else. You might even want to ask yourself which feeling is more powerful in that moment—is the problem more that you have a strong urge to do a different activity (e.g., eat something, check your phone, take a nap) or that you have a strong urge to avoid the thing you should be doing because you imagine it will be uncomfortable, painful, or frustrating?
• If you actually start working or ignore a potent distractor, it usually only takes a couple minutes until the worry starts to dissolve, even for fairly unpleasant tasks. Therefore, a good first crutch is to convince yourself to get over just the few minutes of maximal unpleasantness before you take a break.
• Flow is the enjoyable state that slides right between boredom and frustration, when a task is neither too hard nor too easy.
• Researchers generally find that people retain more of what they learn when practice is broken into different studying periods than when it is crammed together.
• Multitasking may feel like fun, but it’s unsuitable for ultralearning, which requires concentrating your full mind on the task at hand. It’s better to rid yourself of this vice than to strengthen bad habits of ineffective learning.
• When we learn new things, therefore, we should always strive to tie them directly to the contexts we want to use them in. Building knowledge outward from the kernel of a real situation is much better than the traditional strategy of learning something and hoping that we’ll be able to shift it into a real context at some undetermined future time.
• Many ultralearners opt for projects rather than classes to learn the skills they need. The rationale is simple: if you organize your learning around producing something, you’re guaranteed to at least learn how to produce that thing.
• One strategy I’ve seen repeatedly from ultralearners is to start with a skill that they don’t have all the prerequisites for. Then, when they inevitably do poorly, they go back a step, learn one of the foundational topics, and repeat the exercise.
• [S]omething mentally strenuous provides a greater benefit to learning than something easy.
• Whether you are ready or not, retrieval practice works better. Especially if you combine retrieval with the ability to look up the answers, retrieval practice is a much better form of studying than the ones most students apply.
• Fear of feedback often feels more uncomfortable than experiencing the feedback itself. As a result, it is not so much negative feedback on its own that can impede progress but the fear of hearing criticism that causes us to shut down.
• Ultralearners carefully adjust their environment so that they’re not able to predict whether they’ll succeed or fail. If they fail too often, they simplify the problem so they can start noticing when they’re doing things right. If they fail too little, they’ll make the task harder or their standards stricter so that they can distinguish the success of different approaches. Basically, you should try to avoid situations that always make you feel good (or bad) about your performance.
• One of the pieces of studying advice that is best supported by research is that if you care about long-term retention, don’t cram. Spreading learning sessions over more intervals over longer periods of time tends to cause somewhat lower performance in the short run (because there is a chance for forgetting between
• Psychologists theorize that the difference between grand masters and novices is not that grand masters can compute many more moves ahead but that they have built up huge libraries of mental representations that come from playing actual games.
• Simply spending a lot of time studying something isn’t enough to create a deep intuition.
• One way you can introduce this into your own efforts is to give yourself a “struggle timer” as you work on problems. When you feel like giving up and that you can’t possibly figure out the solution to a difficult problem, try setting a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further.
• Explaining things clearly and asking “dumb” questions can keep you from fooling yourself into thinking you know something you don’t.
• In a fixed mindset, learners believe that their traits are fixed or innate and thus there’s no point in trying to improve them. In a growth mindset, in contrast, learners see their own capacity for learning as something that can be actively improved.
• Experimenting is based on the belief that improvements are possible in how you approach your work.
• Experimentation is the principle that ties all the others together. Not only does it make you try new things and think hard about how to solve specific learning challenges, it also encourages you to be ruthless in discarding methods that don’t work. Careful experimentation not only brings out your best potential, it also eliminates bad habits and superstitions by putting them to the test of real-world results.
• The biggest obstacle to ultralearning is simply that most people don’t care enough about their own self-education to get started.
• I recommend setting a consistent schedule that is the same every week, rather than trying to fit in learning when you can. Consistency breeds good habits, reducing the effort required to study.
• Finally, take all this information and put it into your calendar. Scheduling all the hours of work on the project in advance has important logistical and psychological benefits.
• [I]n my own experience, I’ve noticed that enjoyment tends to come from being good at things. Once you feel competent in a skill, it starts to get a lot more fun. Therefore, although a tension between the two can exist in the short term, I think pursuing aggressive ultralearning projects is often the surer way to enjoy learning more, as you’re more likely to reach a level where learning automatically becomes fun.
• A hungry person can eat only so much food. A lonely person can have only so much companionship. Curiosity doesn’t work this way. The more one learns, the greater the craving to learn more. The better one gets, the more one recognizes how much better one could become.

Picking the Photo

In the collection of landscape photos I took over the years (you can see some of them at the gallery), I was looking to pick out one that's unique and has that, dare I say, fine art quality, worthy of being hung prominently on a wall.¹ There were a couple of candidates, but I landed on this one (still a camera-processed JPEG):

This photo was taken back in summer of 2015 in Krabi, Thailand. To get this shot, I had to get up early enough to be at the trailhead by 4 in the morning, then hike in the dark for 2.5 hours on a mostly unmarked trail for about 4 km (2.5 mi) with around 500 m (1,600 ft) elevation gain up to this relatively unknown viewpoint to catch the sunrise. The effort it took to capture this made it so gratifying, and that's part of the reason why I chose this photo.

Re-processing the Photo

Back when I first took this photo, I already did the post-processing and uploaded it online. Though looking at that photo now 4 years later, I don't really like how I had done it; it felt a bit too cool for my liking. So I took another shot at it, and this time with proper preparation for prints.

Printing

After some research, I settled on ordering the print from Mpix. I wanted the highest quality they had to offer so I went with a 10"x20" Giclée print on their matte "Fine Art Photographic" paper. I considered doing 12"x24" but with a mat board and a frame, I figured it would be too large.

Framing

I had absolutely no idea how to even start with this. My initial plan was to just have it framed by Mpix with the print order, but unfortunately it's not very customizable and they can get quite pricey. Researching for some local frame shops revealed that they can also get expensive quick and the turnaround time could be a few weeks. In the end, a couple of guides online convinced me to go with the semi-DIY route. So I ordered the frame kit from Frame Destination.

The kit is a custom-sized 14"x24" Black Wood Frame with a 2 1/8" mat board. For the glazing, I picked the acrylic over glass as I wanted to keep this relatively light. It's also more optically pure than glass and shatter resistant.

At the risk of looking super pompous, I signed the print before framing it. I went back and forth on this for a while because, for starters, I don't really have an actual signature and I thought maybe this print isn't of fine art quality enough that it warrants a signature. Plus this project was for my own enjoyment, it's not like I was planning to sell it at an art show or anything. But in the end, after some reading around and stumbling upon this video, I went ahead and signed it. This acid-free Decocolor gold paint marker worked out nicely.

Of course, even after pages of practice, not only did I not sign it as nicely as I'd like, I also didn't even space it properly from the corner. Oh well...

When it came time to actually put it all together, I would soon learn that I should have taken that B&H guide more seriously — especially around how acrylic can become statically charged — and gotten myself some anti-static gloves or cloths. Being in a small-ish apartment with two cats, I could not believe how much cat hair and dust particles are floating around in the apartment which, to my dismay, all chose to hang out on the acrylic. After frustratingly fiddling around for an hour, feeling utterly defeated trying to get all the cat hair off of the acrylic, the frame was ready to be assembled.

Using this linen hinging tape, I did the T-hinge to mount the print to the foam board, and the foam board to the mat board. Everything had to be in the right order: first the empty frame, then the acrylic, the mat board, the print, and the foam core. Securing all the frame points, then attaching the wire to the frame, and it was completed. Lastly with a basic picture hanging kit, it is now proudly displayed on the wall.

It finally feels finished that this photograph takes up physical space in the world and is no longer just 1s and 0s on a hard drive or in the cloud somewhere to only be double-tapped on and forgotten about after a couple of seconds of being looked at. If you haven't printed out your favorite photos, I highly recommend it.

Check it out on Goodreads.

Highlights

• Every pack in Yellowstone had at least one wolf that had been darted from a helicopter, collared, and assigned a number by the park’s small team of wolf biologists.
• Territorial conflict was the most common cause of death for the park’s wolves, most of whom didn’t live beyond four or five years. Life for wolves was an adventure, but it was usually not a long one.
• O-Six’s great-grandmother had been one of the first wolves reintroduced to the park, captured on the plains of western Canada, eight hundred miles to the north, and ferried south by plane and truck in the winter of 1995. By that time, Yellowstone had been essentially devoid of wolves for almost seven decades.
• Once found in virtually every habitat between the Arctic Circle and present-day Mexico City, gray wolves had been the target of a centuries-long campaign of trapping and poisoning—a war waged both for their valuable pelts and to protect livestock. They were all but eliminated by the 1920s across the vast majority of the Lower 48.
• Rangers patrolling on horseback finished the job the trappers had started: finding active dens, destroying the pups, and then trapping or tracking the returning adults so they could be killed as well.
• As a science, wildlife management was still in its infancy, and park officials genuinely believed that predators would eventually decimate the park’s prey population if left to their own devices. They didn’t realize that wolves and elk had coexisted in Yellowstone for thousands of years, that the two species had in fact evolved in tandem with each other—which explained why the elk could run just as fast as the wolf but no faster.
• Hunting was big business in the Northern Rockies—not just for the professional hunting guides who relied on a steady stream of clients to earn a living, but also for the restaurants and motels that hosted the influx of out-of-town hunters who arrived every fall.
• Now, just fourteen years after the first pens were opened in the Lamar Valley, the wolf population in the Northern Rockies had grown to over seventeen hundred animals.
• Ensconced in the sparsely wooded Lamar Valley since the early days of reintroduction, the Druids were the easiest pack to spot for researchers and park visitors alike, making them the face of the reintroduction program for over a decade.
• As the years went by and Yellowstone wolf-watching became a full-blown phenomenon, Rick became something of a celebrated figure himself, with all the perks—and headaches—that appertained. Visitors interested in seeing wolves learned by word of mouth that their best course of action was to look for Rick’s yellow Nissan Xterra.
• Rick never quite got used to being followed, but he grew resigned to the routine: if he so much as paused in a pullout or parking lot, it was just a matter of time before one car would stop, then another. Soon a dozen cars would be squeezing in. Like a grizzly or a bald eagle or any of the park’s traffic-jam-inspiring attractions, he had been sighted.
• Wolves had an evolutionary imperative to become attuned to the emotions of others because they lived in packs, where cooperation—for hunting, for protection from rivals—was paramount. Sociability enhanced the chances for survival.
• Over years of watching wolves, Rick had become convinced that empathy was the single most important trait that an alpha could have, and 21’s capacity for it continued to amaze him.
• Alpha wolves with Druid lineage were now spread throughout the Northern Range, including the female who would eventually lead the Agate Creek Pack and give birth to O-Six. To Rick, the Druids were like the Kennedys, American royalty.
• Rick mourned 21’s death for a long time. In the years he’d watched the wolf, he felt he’d learned everything there was to know about him—his quirks, his moods, his strengths and weaknesses. He could guess what 21 would do before he did it. Rick liked to tell visitors that “21 never lost a fight, and he never killed a vanquished rival.” In fact, Rick sometimes called him “Superman,” because he’d always felt that 21, of all the wolves he’d known, had the perfect blend of valor and nobility. He hung a poster-size print of the enormous silver male on the wall above his writing desk in his cabin. Captured at full sprint, he appeared to be flying.
• But O-Six, since leaving her natal pack, had become surprisingly adept at single-handedly bringing down prey.
• Experiencing Yellowstone through a spotting scope was an entirely different experience from seeing the park from a car or even from a hiking trail. Only when you tried scanning the entire length of Specimen Ridge or Druid Peak one two-hundred-yard diameter circle at a time did you get a sense of how big the Lamar Valley really was.
• The Lamar Valley boasted the highest prey density of anyplace on earth outside the African Serengeti.

• From a high of 174 wolves just seven years before, the number of wolves had plummeted to roughly 100.

  Project biologists had long suspected that such a drop would occur as a kind of equilibrium was reached between predators and available prey, but it was still hard for veteran watchers to accept. Wolves were now harder to spot than they had been in years, and Rick resigned himself to the inevitability of an occasional day without a sighting.

• Every year since reintroduction, they’d seen more wolves and fewer elk, as Louie had known they would. In the last count taken before wolves were reintroduced in 1995, over nineteen thousand elk were roaming Yellowstone’s Northern Range. By 2010, that number had plummeted to six thousand, roughly what it had been back in the 1960s, before rangers stopped culling the park’s herds.
• In the rest of America, hunting was dying. Rates of participation had been declining for decades—only 6 percent of Americans still hunted. But in the Northern Rockies, it remained integral to the culture—Montana had the highest number of hunters per capita, and Wyoming wasn’t far behind.
• For some, it was less a sport than a means of supplementing the family food budget. Butchering a five-hundred-pound elk yielded upward of 250 pounds of meat for the freezer, enough to last an average family nearly a year, all for the price of a fifty-dollar hunting permit.
• Wolves were once the most widely distributed land mammal on earth, and every early pastoral civilization in the northern hemisphere outside of Africa competed with them for land on which to run livestock—and for the livestock themselves. Wolves very rarely attacked people, but a single wolf could ruin a shepherd’s livelihood if he developed a taste for cattle, sheep, or goats.
• Humanity’s most beloved animal and its most despised were essentially the same creature, but the wolf’s threat to the shepherd’s livelihood poisoned relations between men and wolves, and the wolf’s reputation never recovered.
• One brother would sometimes show up at the den carrying a large piece of elk, such as a leg assembly, but this process was clumsy, involving frequent stops to renew his grip. More commonly the males used their stomachs as grocery bags, swallowing up to twenty pounds of meat and making the long journey back to the den. When they arrived, their sides bulging noticeably, they regurgitated the meat for the pups, like birds feeding chicks in a nest.
• The most common practice was to ride for several days in an enormous circle, leaving poisoned buffalo meat all along the route. By the time the wolfer came back around to the beginning of his circuit, dead wolves—along with countless other predators and scavengers, including eagles and other raptors—littered the ground. The wolves were skinned on the spot; the rest of the carcasses were left to rot.
• His commitment to reintroduction was about science, not sentiment. Wolves belonged in the Northern Rockies because they played a vital role in the ecosystem, not because they were beautiful or fun to watch.
• Wolves had become one of those polarizing issues, like abortion or gun control or war in the Middle East, about which the country could not seem to reach a consensus.
• The real struggle was over public land—what it should be used for and who should have the right to decide. The federal government owned almost half of all the land in the West, in large part because nineteenth-century homesteaders found much of it too arid or too rugged to settle, unlike the more hospitable Midwest, which settlers had made into the nation’s breadbasket.
• Rick knew that in the field of wildlife biology, imputing human characteristics to a creature that it doesn’t really have—anthropomorphizing, as the habit is known—is considered a cardinal sin and a hallmark of amateurism.
• But wolves, Rick felt, were more like humans than they were given credit for, in their tribal ways and territoriality; in their tendency to mate for life; and in the way male wolves provided food and care for their offspring, so unusual in the animal world.
• More than anything, what wolf advocates fought against was the long-held notion that wolves were nothing more than killing machines.
• O-Six, as Laurie frequently pointed out to her readers, was rarely “cuddly.” But that wasn’t why she and so many other watchers had come to admire her. It was her stunning blend of confidence and competence that inspired them, her indomitable will, her ability to bend a harsh landscape to her own ends, to do what needed to be done to provide for herself and her family every day, without fail. Seeing her in action was like watching a gifted athlete,
• More wolves, it seemed, meant more beavers, but that wasn’t all: the return of Yellowstone’s top predator was having repercussions up and down the park’s food chain.
• In short order, Yellowstone’s newly dominant canines reduced the Northern Range’s coyote population by half.
• hunters could shoot a hundred wolves on the other side of Alaska without engendering a peep of protest. But shoot one park wolf that people had come to know and love, and suddenly everyone in the state was talking about the evils of wolf-hunting.
• When an alpha died, especially a female, packs tended to splinter.
• By the time the hunting and trapping seasons around the park concluded, twelve Yellowstone wolves had been lost, including six collared animals.
• In the five years since legal hunting began, trophy hunters had taken over 2,500 wolves in the Northern Rockies, 1,500 of them in Idaho alone. Wolf populations are notoriously difficult to estimate, but official counts showed that the total in Montana at the end of 2014 was 554, down about 100 from pre-hunting levels. In Idaho, game officials had managed to reduce the population from a high of 893, in 2009, to 770.
• Hunting was an intellectual pursuit for him. You had to know your prey, and you had to take them ethically. He spoke often about the principle of fair chase and what it meant to him. He wanted me to know he’d followed the Lamar wolves’ movements for weeks before he found them, driving around Crandall looking for tracks and listening for their howls. “I put in my time to get that wolf,” he said.
• Humans might not have become humans, in other words, without wolves.
• Wolves have larger brains, and studies of captive wolves have found them to be demonstrably smarter than dogs; they are better able to distinguish quantities, for example.
• After the death of O-Six, the mantle of world’s most famous wolf fell to a gray female who had been collared by Wyoming game officials near Cody. In October 2014, she showed up at the north rim of the Grand Canyon, the first wolf sighted in the area since the 1940s.

Check it out on Goodreads.

Highlights

• How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings—and especially for women? Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. And how can we create a moment of lift in human hearts so that we all want to lift up women? Because sometimes all that’s needed to lift women up is to stop pulling them down.
• Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back.
• The reasons are simple: When the women were able to time and space their pregnancies, they were more likely to advance their education, earn an income, raise healthy children, and have the time and money to give each child the food, care, and education needed to thrive.
• When children reach their potential, they don’t end up poor. This is how families and countries get out of poverty. In fact, no country in the last fifty years has emerged from poverty without expanding access to contraceptives.
• Whenever you include a group that’s been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you’re working globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you’re working to benefit all members of every community.
• Women’s rights and society’s health and wealth rise together. Countries that are dominated by men suffer not only because they don’t use the talent of their women but because they are run by men who have a need to exclude. Until they change their leadership or the views of their leaders, those countries will not flourish.
• “What do you know now in a deeper way than you knew it before?” I love this question because it honors how we learn and grow. Wisdom isn’t about accumulating more facts; it’s about understanding big truths in a deeper way.
• Vishwajeet told me, “Their cup is not empty; you can’t just pour your ideas into it. Their cup is already full, so you have to understand what is in their cup.” If you don’t understand the meaning and beliefs behind a community’s practices, you won’t present your idea in the context of their values and concerns, and people won’t hear you.
• We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves.
• But condoms are often unhelpful for women trying to avoid pregnancy. Women have told me over and over again, “If I ask my husband to wear a condom, he will beat me up. It’s like I’m accusing him of being unfaithful and getting HIV, or I’m saying that I was unfaithful and got HIV.”
• When women can time and space their births, maternal mortality drops, newborn and child mortality drops, the mother and baby are healthier, the parents have more time and energy to care for each child, and families can put more resources toward the nutrition and education of each one. There was no intervention more powerful—and no intervention that had become more neglected.
• That judge, who sentenced Sanger to thirty days in a workhouse, was expressing the widespread view that a woman’s sexual activity was immoral if it was separated from her function of bearing children. If a woman acquired contraceptives to avoid bearing children, that was illegal in the United States, thanks to the work of Anthony Comstock.
• In Comstock’s eyes, and the eyes of his allies, women were entitled to very few roles in life: to marry and serve a man, and bear and take care of his children. Any detour from these duties brought disrepute—because a woman was not a human being entitled to act in the world for her own sake, not for educational advancement or professional accomplishment, and certainly not for her own pleasure.
• A woman’s pleasure, especially her sexual pleasure, was terrifying to the keepers of the social order. If women were free to pursue their own pleasure, it would strike at the core of the unspoken male code, “You exist for my pleasure!” And men felt they needed to control the source of their pleasure. So Comstock and others did their best to weaponize stigma and use it to keep women stuck where they were, their value derived only from their service to men and children.
• I’ve come to learn that stigma is always an effort to suppress someone’s voice. It forces people to hide in shame. The best way to fight back is to speak up—to say openly the very thing that others stigmatize. It’s a direct attack on the self-censorship that stigma needs to survive.
• The United States has also been successful in bringing down teen pregnancy rates. The country is at a historic low for teen pregnancy and a thirty-year low for unintended pregnancy.
• The people who push these policies often try to use the Church’s teaching on family planning for moral cover, but they have none of the Church’s compassion or commitment to the poor. Instead, many push to block access to contraceptives and cut funds for the poor.
• It’s the mark of a backward society—or a society moving backward—when decisions are made for women by men. That’s what’s happening right now in the US. These are not policies that would be in place if women were making decisions for themselves. That’s why it’s heartening to see the surge of women activists across the country who are spending their time knocking on doors, supporting family planning, and changing their lives by running for office.
• Just twenty years after the program began, Mexico has achieved gender parity in education—not only at the primary school level but also in high school and college. And Mexico has the world’s highest percentage of computer science degrees awarded to women.
• A girl who is given love and support can start to break the self-image that keeps her down. As she gains self-confidence, she sees she can learn. As she learns, she sees her own gifts. As she develops her gifts, she sees her own power; she can defend her own rights. That is what happens when you offer girls love, not hate. You lift their gaze. They gain their voice.
• In India, women spend 6 hours a day doing unpaid work, while men spend less than 1. In the US, women average more than 4 hours of unpaid work every day; men average just 2.5.
• That is hugely significant because it is paid work that elevates women toward equality with men and gives them power and independence. That’s why the gender imbalance in unpaid work is so significant: The unpaid work a woman does in the home is a barrier to the activities that can advance her—getting more education, earning outside income, meeting with other women, becoming politically active.
• If there is any meaning in life greater than connecting with other human beings, I haven’t found it.
• Bill said, “I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events.”
• You can’t dedicate your life to the principle that all lives have equal value if you think you’re better than others. Bill, at his core, doesn’t think that way at all, and that is one of the qualities I love most in him.
• I’ve never held the view that women are better than men, or that the best way to improve the world is for women to gain more power than men. I think male dominance is harmful to society because any dominance is harmful: It means society is governed by a false hierarchy where power and opportunity are awarded according to gender, age, wealth, and privilege—not according to skill, effort, talent, or accomplishments.
• Child brides are often under intense pressure to prove their fertility, which means that their use of contraceptives is very low. In fact, the percentage of women using contraceptives is lowest where the prevalence of child marriage is highest. And low use of contraceptives by girls is deadly: For girls age 15 to 19 around the world, the leading cause of death is childbirth.
• Tradition without discussion kills moral progress. If you’re handed a tradition and decide not to talk about it—just do it—then you’re letting people from the past tell you what to do. It kills the chance to see the blind spots in the tradition—and moral blind spots always take the form of excluding others and ignoring their pain.
• One sign of an abusive culture is the view that members of the excluded group “don’t have what it takes.” In other words, “If we don’t have many women engineers here, it’s because women are not good engineers.” It is unimaginable to me both how flawed the logic is and how widely it’s believed. Opportunities have to be equal before you can know if abilities are equal. And opportunities for women have never been equal.
• Tech is the most powerful industry in the world. It’s creating the ways we will live our lives. If women are not in tech, women will not have power.
• The percentage of computing graduates who are women has plunged since I was in college. When I graduated from Duke in 1987, 35 percent of computing graduates in the United States were women. Today, it’s 19 percent.
• There are likely a lot of reasons for the drop. One is that when personal computers made their way into American households, they were often marketed as gaming devices for boys, so boys spent more time on them and it gave boys exposure to computers that girls didn’t get. When the computer gaming industry emerged, many developers started creating violent war games featuring automatic weapons and explosives that many women didn’t want to play, creating a closed cycle of men creating games for men.
• The United States is one of only seven countries in the world that do not provide paid maternity leave—joining the company of Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and a handful of other island nations. This is startling evidence that the United States is far behind the rest of the world in honoring the needs of families.
• The lack of paid leave in the US is symptomatic of a workplace culture that also struggles with sexual harassment, gender bias, and a general indifference to family life. All these issues are aggravated by one reality: fewer women in positions of power.
• Every society says its outsiders are the problem. But the outsiders are not the problem; the urge to create outsiders is the problem. Overcoming that urge is our greatest challenge and our greatest promise. It will take courage and insight, because the people we push to the margins are the ones who trigger in us the feelings we’re afraid of.
• Women must leave the margins and take our place—not above men or below them, but beside them—at the center of society, adding our voices and making the decisions we are qualified and entitled to make.

See my other posts in this series: 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021.

We're less than a week away from Apple's most exciting event of the year, WWDC. And these are the things I hope to see announced on Monday, in the order of how much I want them:

Dark Mode for iOS

This one has been in the list the longest for me. And it looks like my wish will finally come true this year.

Mac Pro

Just please, Apple. It's been a long time since we heard anything about this. I was really hoping they would show it off during WWDC 2017, and then still nothing in 2018. Now is the time we see it.

Screen Time for macOS and tvOS

I love Screen Time for iOS and monitor mine often. But I also spend a lot of time on these two other platforms and I would really like to know how I spend them, especially on the Apple TV.

New External Display

They also promised that a new Apple display is in the works. Showing this alongside the new Mac Pro during an event aimed at developers doesn't sound like a bad idea. So far looks like I might be in for a treat.

Apple Card

Apple Card was announced back in March of this year. It was probably the one I was most surprised and impressed by during the event. So I hope to get a date for this so I can apply for one.

Sleep Tracking on Apple Watch

I wear my watch to sleep sometimes, and having a first-party sleep tracker on it would be really nice.

macOS 10.15 "Sequoia"

Okay, it's obvious we're getting macOS 10.15. I'm just putting it here because I think Sequoia is a pretty dang good name for it.

Seeing that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and that I live only a mere hour-and-a-half drive away from Cape Canaveral, I went to see it in person. And all I can say is that it was hands down the most breathtaking thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

Here are some of the photos I took from about 4.3 miles north of the launch pad at Playalinda Beach.

I also mounted my phone on top of the camera to capture the video of the launch. Please excuse the shakes from the shutter clicks and the lack of aim since I was trying to stop taking photos and instead taking it all in as this big beautiful rocket flew into space.

The crowd, myself included, just couldn’t hold it together when it finally took flight. It was impossible not to get excited. Most of us had looked forward to this for years and waited in the Florida sun for over 7 hours that day.

One thing that almost all of launch videos lack is the sound and rumbles. They were remarkably loud and powerful that I could feel it in my body. This video by Destin from the YouTube channel Smarter Every Day conveys it almost perfectly of what the experience was like.

The launch itself is not the only thing that blew my mind. As I have said above, the two side boosters were, in fact, reused and they managed to land them both simultaneously.

And to top it all off, SpaceX live-streamed the fairing deployment directly from space to David Bowie's Life On Mars with the Earth in the background.

Just look at how absolutely preposterous and amazing that is. It gives me a giant smile across my face every time.

I am incredibly excited for what this could bring, not only in SpaceX’s future, but in the future of space exploration as a whole. Like Elon said, “We want a new space race. Space races are exciting.” So I still hope that one day I will get to see humans walk on Mars.

But a laptop upgrade was long overdue and I couldn't be more excited.

In setting up my new MacBook Pro, I made a checklist of all the applications and settings I need to be able to use it normally:

• Remove everything from the Dock

• Open Sytem Preferences

  • General → ✓ Use dark menu bar and Dock

  • Desktop & Screen Saver → Screen Saver

    • Select Aerial

      • ✓ Play Different Aerial On Each Display
    • Start after: 10 Minutes

    • Hot Corners…

      • ↗ = Start Screen Saver
      • ↘ = Put Display to Sleep

  • Dock

    • Size: around 25%
    • ✘ Magnification
    • Position on screen: Right
    • ✘ Animate opening applications
    • ✓ Automatically hide and show the Dock

  • Mission Control

    • ✘ Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use
    • Dashboard: Off

  • Language & Region

    • Add ภาษาไทย

  • Security & Privacy

    • ✓ Require password immediately after sleep or screen saver begins
    • ✓ Allow your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac
    • Allow apps downloaded from: App store and identified developers
    • FireVault → On

  • Keyboard → Shortcuts → Spotlight

    • Show Spotlight search: ⌥Space

  • Mouse/Trackpad → Point & Click → ✘ Scroll direction: Natural

    • Down means down
  • Trackpad → Point & Click → ✓ Tap to click
  • Set up Time Machine backup

  • Accessibility

    • Display → ✘ Shake mouse pointer to locate

    • Mouse & Trackpad

      • Trackpad Options… → ✓ dragging without drag lock

• Install Alfred

  • General → Alfred Hotkey: ⌘Space

  • Features → System

    • ✓ Eject
    • ✓ Eject All

  • Workflows

    • Install Alfred Spotify Mini Player
    • Install Units
    • Install Dash
    • Install alfred-weather
    • Install alfred-toggl

  • Appearance

    • Install Dark Mode

• Install iStat Menus

  • Set to only show date, time, battery status, and CPU usage

• Install Bartender

  • Hide everything so it looks like this:

  

• Install iTerm 2

  • Install Solarized Color Presets
  • Preferences → Profiles → Colors → Color Presets → Solarized Dark
  • Install Homebrew

  • Install fish shell

    • brew install fish
    • chsh -s (which fish)
  • Install oh-my-fish

  • Install Powerline fonts

    • Change font to 12pt Meslo LG S DZ Regular for Powerline

  • Change theme to agnoster

    • omf theme agnoster

• Install Chrome

  • Just for Flash
• Install Firefox

• Install Sublime Text

  • Install Material theme

    • Color Scheme: Material-Theme-Darker

• Install Karabiner

  • Remap caps lock to escape only for built-in keyboard because escape key on the Touch Bar is unusable
• Install 1Password
• Install RescueTime
• Install Evernote
• Install Pastebot
• Install Tweetbot
• Install Moom
• Install Day One
• Install TextExpander
• Install Telegram
• Install Airmail
• Install Xcode
• Install Eclipse
• Install GitKraken
• Install Dash
• Install VLC
• Install Plex Media Server
• Install Backblaze
• Install f.lux
• Install Dropbox
• Install Google Backup and Sync
• Install Microsoft OneNote
• Install Slack
• Install Byword
• Install Hazel
• Install Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
• Install Steam
• Install Cyberduck
• Install Sketch
• Install Skype
• Install Todoist
• Install Toggl Desktop
• Install Ghostery
• Install FruitJuice

The time-lapse was taken with my DSLR camera at 5-second intervals. The entire video is made up of over 3,400 images totaling over 30GB of data. Check it out below:

See my other posts in this series: 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021.

It's that time of the year again! Among all of Apple annual events, WWDC is probably my favorite. This year is already looking to be quite different since they are moving back to where they began in San Jose, instead of Moscone West in San Francisco which had been there go-to location since 2003.

This week is all about developers, and as a developer myself, I cannot wait to find out what Apple has in store for us in new software capabilities, APIs as well as potential exciting new hardware. So without further ado, here is my wish list for the WWDC 2017 keynote:

iOS 11

Last year, the Photos app was made smarter by machine learning, letting it search for specific objects, detecting faces, and automatically creating photo albums and slideshows with the Memories tab, all without sacrificing user privacy. This year with iOS 11, I expect the app to gain new features to better compete with Google Photos which is getting even better with recent announcements during Google I/O.

There's no doubt that iOS 10's headlining feature was the Messages app, thus I don't think there's going to be much on this for iOS 11. Though, the ability to reply to specific messages and rich text formatting are the top two features I wish Apple would add to iMessage. Telegram has a really good example on the former.

iOS 11 should also bring about more productivity and automation features to allow for more professional tasks on the iPad Pro, as shown in their ads. Since a popular iOS app Workflow was just acquired by Apple in March, I hope this means that they are indeed improving productivity and automation abilities on iOS. If I could only pick one feature in this category, the ability to manage clipboard history would be it. I suggest you check out Federico Viticci's recently published concept video of the direction he thinks Apple should take its iOS platform on the iPad.

Just this past week, there was a report that Apple is working on an AI-specific chip and might unveil it during WWDC. I think it's quite likely given the timeliness of this report. Knowing their philosophy, they would definitely highlight the security and privacy aspects they've achieved that Google or Amazon haven't with their AIs, and hopefully announce an API alongside it. This would also tie in very well with their existing AI efforts for the Photos app and their smart assistant Siri.

SiriKit, in my opinion, is still very limited and missing some really obvious features. An integration with audio library that would enable third-party apps such as Spotify and Overcast to be voice-controlled is on the top of that list. I'm pretty sure that they would add some new domains to allow more developers to integrate their apps with Siri.

Conveniently, this is a perfect segue to the next item on my list…

Siri In A Can

In my WWDC 2016 Predictions, I expected them to announce the Siri Speaker. Let's just call it Apple Home as Mr. Jason Snell cleverly suggested. It has been well over a year since this rumor first surfaced, and so far we still have nothing. I believe they will really do it this year. With Amazon announcing two new Echo devices within two weeks of each other, Google Home gaining some new capabilities, and even Microsoft getting in on this with the Cortana-powered Harman Kardon speaker, Apple really has to be working on something to bring itself into this market. It is definitely not too late.

Though, Siri still needs a lot of improvements if it were to compete with what's currently out there, and I'm sure that Apple certainly has the technical and marketing prowess to blow those out of the water with this Apple Home. Their vision on HomeKit as shown in this video indicates that they are invested in the smart home space, and a device that brings it all together makes a perfect sense. Though knowing Apple, I wouldn't be one bit surprised if this device starts at $299.

Refreshed MacBook Pro

Another recent report says that Apple will refresh the MacBook Pro as well as MacBook Air at WWDC to compete with the recently-announced Microsoft Surface Laptop, and to "win back disappointed loyalists". I doubt that will happen. And even if it does, the reason is definitely not because Apple needs to compete with Microsoft in the laptop market. MacBook Pro's sales number dwarfs that of Microsoft Surface's (or any other company's for that matter). I really don't think Apple cares very much at all about them.

However, this doesn't mean that they should just forget about their MacBook Pro for the next foreseeable future (like the Mac Pro). Quite the contrary, in my opinion. An updated MacBook Pro would certainly make a lot of people very happy, especially myself since I'm writing this very sentence on my mid-2010 15-inch MacBook Pro (that is plagued with occasional GPU panics). I have been holding off on getting a new MacBook Pro due to the current generation having received a mixed response, and I hope that this hypothetical refreshed MacBook Pro would address some of the main criticisms such as the outdated Intel Skylake chip, lack of 32GB RAM option, inconsistent battery life, and the flawed keyboard. All they need to do is to have Phil Schiller say something along the line of "While the new MacBook Pro with the revolutionary Touch Bar was a great hit among our users, we also listen to those of you who say that there are still rooms for improvements. Today we are making our best laptop even better."

New Mac Pro Sneak Peak

In a stunning turn of events, Apple invited a selected group of journalists over to its campus to discuss the future of the Mac Pro back in April. They admitted that their current "trash can" Mac Pro has critical design flaws that have been preventing them from sufficiently updating it, and revealed that they are hard at work on designing the new Mac Pro which will not be ready this year. There is a lot of speculation as to when Apple came to this decision, but all signs seem to point to that this decision was made no longer than 3-6 months prior to the announcement (and quite possibly mere weeks). This means that it's likely that we won't see the new and "completely rethought" Mac Pro until the end of 2018, or even 2019.

This doesn't mean that they have nothing to show during WWDC. I really hope that they have at least the design of this new Mac Pro to show off to developers. It would definitely soften the "Apple doesn't care about professional Mac users anymore" narrative it's been getting lately.

They also revealed that an updated iMac aimed at professionals is coming this year, so I guess this is when they would show off the hardware and announce the release date.

New iPad Pro

This rumor has been around for quite a while, but it seems like they might announce a 10.5-inch iPad Pro at WWDC, which would then ship later in the fall. I'm indifferent to it but like I have said above regarding iPad productivity, and iOS in general, this product would be a perfect device to showcase iOS 11 as well as an indication to what the updated 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro might look like.

macOS 10.13

I honestly cannot think of features that are really needed in the next version of macOS. The current generation of Mac operating system has been around since the turn of the millennium and it is already a feature-complete, fully matured platform. Of course there are small things they can improve here and there such as a system-wide dark mode (please?), but gone are the days of frequent major updates to the OS.

One thing I definitely would count on them to talk about — if not during the keynote then one of the sessions — is the new Apple File System (APFS). It was only last year when they announced that they were developing an entire new file system to replace its now ancient HFS+, and promised to roll this out for all of their platforms in 2017. With the recent iOS 10.3 update, hundreds of millions of iOS users worldwide are already using APFS. macOS Sierra, however, has only gotten a beta version of that. I think the release of macOS 10.13 later this fall is a perfect opportunity for this.

Oh and can we get rid of that antiquated iTunes and come up with something better?

Apple Park

I know this is not an Apple product per se. But, in a way, this is a product by Apple. Its most expensive one in fact. I highly encourage you, dear reader, to check out this excellent article by Steven Levy on Apple Park and what an incredibly ambitious project it is. This will either be at the very beginning or the end of the keynote where Tim Cook tells us more about the campus and how beautiful, innovative, and environmentally-friendly this building is. There's no doubt that this has been distracting a lot of important design talents within the company, including its design chief Jony Ive himself. It makes you wonder if this is what has been causing Apple to release some arguably lackluster products in recent years, doesn't it? Still, this is one hell of a building and I cannot wait to pay a visit one day.

So would all these really fit within the two-hour window? Probably not. I suspect they would spend most of their time going through new features in iOS, watchOS, and macOS and leave little time to announce new products. But all this is just a speculation, we will find out for sure comes June 5th.

In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari attempts to tell the entire history of humans in a length of a book. He started off around the time when modern humans first appeared, two million or so years ago when we were not that different from apes. In the first chapter, he writes, "The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish."

Of course Homo sapiens, or "The Wise Man", was not the only human species roaming the earth at the time. There were Homo neanderthalensis in Europe and western Asia, Homo erectus in Asia, Homo soloensis in Java, a dwarf species Homo floresiensis on another Indonesian island, Homo deniosova in Siberia, Homo rudolfensis, and Homo ergaster in East Africa. They were all human beings. Imagine if one or a few of those species survived until today, what would religions, human rights, nations, or laws be like?

Interestingly, all other human species vanished and Sapiens is the only one left. Harari proposed several theories as to why that is the case with one being the competition of resources which turned into violence and genocide. "Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark", Harari writes, "In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group." So it is safe to assume that our ancient ancestors would not be so friendly towards an entirely different human species. The meeting between Sapiens and Neanderthals and the resulting extinction of the latter could very well be the first and most significant genocide in human history.

Just how then did Sapiens manage to push a stronger species with bigger brains like Neanderthals to extinction? It was just another human species with nothing more special than others. Harari believes that this has to do with its unique language. Around 70,000 years ago, Sapiens experienced a Cognitive Revolution which scientists commonly believe happened due to some accidental genetic mutations that changed certain wirings in the brains. This caused Sapiens to be able to think in an unprecedented level and develop its unique type of language found in no other human species. This did not only enable them to gossip about tribe members or warn them about predators in the area with details beyond a mere ape can, it also allows them to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. Things such as gods, heavens, or nations.

These fictions maybe seem useless for surviving in the wild, but they enabled Sapiens to collaborate and work towards common goals unlike any other species. Sure, wolves, bees or killer whales do cooperate and have their own languages, but they only do so with a small number of closely related members. Believing in the 'common myths' such as the biblical creation story, the divine rights of kings or popular sovereignty gave Sapiens the ability to cooperate with a large number of people which led to our affluent society today.

Modern Sapiens walking the earth now may see certain rituals such as dancing around a campfire during a full moon or praying to a lion god as 'primitive', but our society today functions on the exact same basis. These ideas such as business corporations, financial institutions, nations, democracy, human rights, freedom, gods, and laws only exist in our collective imagination and yet we act as if those things really exist. Lawyers today are just modern sorcerers who tell far more complex and stranger tales.

Without imagined realities or social constructs, the society as we know it would certainly cease to function. If everyone stopped believing in financial institutions, limited liability companies, laws, or governments, the economy would collapse and nations across the globe would fall into chaos. The world we live in today is the result of a successful storytelling effort to convince millions of people across millennia to believe in these common myths. It would be impossible to build great mosques or empires spanning half a continent if we could only talk about things that really exist in the world such as trees, mountains or tigers.

We are all living in dual reality. One is the objective reality of things that we can see, touch, and smell and the other is an imagined one of things that only exist in our minds. As Harari puts it, "As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google."

But upon setting up the backup, I was faced with a very hard decision: whether to upload the images in high quality or original quality. With high quality, it offers an unlimited free storage with a reduced file size as long as the photos have the resolution of 16 megapixels or less. This should be enough for everyday images taken with smartphones. With the original option, the photos will be uploaded in full size with no compression. However, it will be limited to how much storage space is available on the Google Drive.

UPDATE: On 11 November 2020, Google announced that they will no longer offer the free unlimited High quality storage starting 1 June 2021. So the benefit of doing that over original quality only comes down to storage savings for your Google Account (which comes with 15GB of free storage).

The “reduced file size” part is what I wanted to know more about since I was definitely going to take advantage of that free unlimited storage. However, I was worried that the compression algorithm would be too aggressive at reducing the file size, and thus lowering the image quality below the acceptable level. In order to figure this out, I decided to do a little investigation on how much quality, if at all, was lost by the compression, and if we can see any visual differences between the original and the compressed one.

Before we go any further, I must put forth a disclaimer here that I am by no means an expert when it comes to image compression algorithms. What I'm about to show here is a non-scientific experiment conducted on a cheap, uncalibrated, 1080p monitor using a couple of random photos I took. So please do further research and tests before making your decision on this.

To run this experiment, I selected two images: one with the resolution of 20MP taken with my DSLR and the other at 8MP with my iPhone 6.

First, let’s look at the image taken by the DSLR. Since this image has the resolution of 20MP, Google Photos downsized the image to 16MP, so it definitely lost the actual pixel count in the process.

Original at 20MP

Compressed to 16MP

Now let's take a look at them with a 100% crop and compare them side-by-side.

Original (left) and compressed (right) side-by-side

Apart from the obvious difference in the resolution, the image quality seems to not have been affected at all.

If we take a look at the information of the two images, we see that the resolution has been reduced to 16MP and the file takes up only 3.6 megabytes. That's over 75% reduction in file size! I'm really impressed at how high-quality the image still looks after having gone through this aggressive compression.

Now let’s compare the images taken by the iPhone 6’s back camera. Unlike earlier, the image here did not get downsized because the resolution is way below the 16MP limit.

Original at 8MP

Compressed at 8MP

They look virtually the same to me. Now let's look at them side-by-side at 100% crop:

Original (left) and compressed (right) at 100% crop

Can you notice any differences in the details at all? Because I can’t.

Here is a look at the properties of the two images:

Notice that the resolutions are exactly the same and all the metadata is still intact after being compressed by Google Photos. So the only difference here seems to be the 30% reduction in file size.

This visual inspection reveals that there seems to be no loss in image quality at all. So we have to go a bit deeper to find out what's going on.

Given that the original and compressed image have the same resolution, the reduction in file size has to result in some quality loss or else it would be impossible to make it smaller. So to look for that, I brought the images into Photoshop in order to drill down to the very smallest of details that our mere monkey eyes can’t see.

What I did was to open them in Photoshop on two different layers, one on top of the other.

Now the trick here is to change the blending mode to “Difference” which will show any differences between the two images. If they are exactly the same, this will result in a completely black image. Here is the resulting image after applying the blending mode:

If you don't look closely (or if your screen is not at the brightest setting), you won’t see anything other than the complete blackness. But if you really look for it, you will start to see faint outlines of the image. But here is when the histogram becomes handy.

Let’s take a quick detour and talk about histogram. A histogram is a graph representing pixels of different color range/tones in an image. Now the histogram we see here is a simplified version that only shows the greyscale range from black (left) to white (right). The higher the graph at a given point along the x-axis, the more pixels there are at that specific color/tone.

If the two images are exactly the same, we would only see a single vertical line at the very left of the histogram. That would mean the image is entirely composed of black pixels. Here we can clearly see that there are pixels of other colors as well. This reveals that the two images are in fact different.

To make this clearer to see. I adjusted the histogram level to show only those pixels that are present in the image. Here is the result:

And there it is! The evidence of quality loss I’ve been looking for. What we see here is called compression artifacts, and to simply put, they are junk that got added to the image from the lossy nature of the JPEG compression. The brighter the pixel, the more different they are.

If we zoom in closer, we can see how nasty these compression artifacts are.

So with all these in mind, I decided that the high quality option will suffice with photos taken by my iPhone camera. Even though we found out that there are quite a lot of compression done to the image, in reality those quality loss just cannot be seen with naked eyes. I figured that I don’t need the highest of quality for these day-to-day photos since I won't be post-processing them anyway, unlike those taken with a DSLR. The 16MP limit won't be a problem either since it's more than large enough for photo album printing or even framing. I would, however, keep images with a resolution higher than 16MP away from it if you want to take the advantage of free unlimited storage. Even if the image quality is visually the same, I don't think it's worth getting your images downsized to only 16MP.

See my other posts in this series: 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021.

With WWDC 2016 just right around the corner, here are products I think (and hope) we will see during the keynote on Monday:

Change from "OS X" to "macOS"

There have been a lot of rumors (and evidence) regarding the name change of OS X since all of Apple operating systems use the uncapitalized-name-followed-by-‘OS’ convention (i.e. iOS, tvOS, watchOS). So it only makes sense that they would change OS X to macOS (or MacOS) to make their OS lineup's branding style more consistent. We hear people mispronounce OS X as "oh-es-EX" all the times when it is supposed to be "oh-es-TEN.” But we really can’t blame them because who uses Roman numerals on a regular basis anymore?

Now there is a debate going on between macOS and MacOS. Personally, I prefer macOS because it’s just more consistent and MacOS looks like it’s a typo of Mac OS, because that is what they called it before rebranding it to OS X. I understand that they might want to capitalize the word “Mac" for trademark reasons and what not but I’m hoping that they would just go with macOS. It just looks better, in my opinion.

As far as the name for the next version goes, I believe they will continue with the same naming convention after California natural landmarks. So… macOS Half Dome? macOS Red Wood? Or maybe just drop it and go with macOS 11?

New iTunes

iTunes is in a dire need for an overhaul. It has become so dreadful for me to have to use it from time to time. It is too clunky. It tries to do too much in one app. And it doesn’t even work that well. Perhaps, breaking it down into different apps for Apple Music, iOS devices syncing and backing up, and iTunes Store could solve this problem.

Dark Mode

A more universal dark mode that is not only for the menu bar and the dock, but also for apps like Finder or Safari, would be nice. I really wouldn't complain if that's all they add for 10.12.

Siri for Mac

Siri is heavily rumored to be coming to the next version of OS X, which I personally would never use. I really can’t see myself talking to my Mac asking for stuff or launching apps when using Spotlight already lets me launch apps, search for files, do maths or unit conversions very quickly. But who knows, maybe they came up with a really interesting implementation that will make me want to use it.

Siri API

I do hope that Apple would release the Siri API to developers as a part of iOS 10 SDK. I think this would really drive the usage of the feature. For me, the reason why I rarely use Siri is because its lack of support for third-party apps. If they choose to give developers to tools to integrate Siri into their apps, this year’s WWDC would be a perfect stage to do so. It’s been a long time coming. Apple usually loves releasing APIs to developers such as CloudKit, HomeKit or HealthKit, I don’t know what is stopping them from doing the same thing with Siri.

Siri Speaker

By this I mean a speaker with a microphone that sits in your living room and always listens to you. This would be a direct competitor to Amazon Echo and the upcoming Google Home. Honestly, I am a bit skeptical on how well they can improve Siri given the competition. Apple is not a company that is known for their expertise in machine learning unlike Google. I mean, look at how bad the search feature on the App Store is (but then there are also rumors that improvements are coming). Also, their firm stance on customers' privacy and data collection only makes it more difficult for them to improve on such feature that heavily relies on user data. With all that said, I trust that they will find a way to do so without compromising their views on privacy, and hopefully surprise us all.

watchOS 3

I think the watchOS will see quite a significant update since they did not announce a new Apple Watch during their spring event. One single most important thing they need to address with the new watchOS is the load time for the watch apps. These apps take forever to fetch the data, even those not required network connection. With watchOS 3 (or perhaps, Apple Watch 2), I hope that they somehow find a way to let the watch directly fetch data without having to rely on the iPhone to download it first and pass it along to the watch.

Another thing I think they should add is to allow developers to create custom watch faces. We have this smart watch technology, I don’t want to be stuck with the mimicking of a circular mechanical watch face or simple digital time-telling. Since it was shown off to the public almost two years ago, the Apple Watch has not received a new watch face and now it really needs some fresh ones. Of course, these third-party watch faces will have to be approved by Apple just like any other thing but the possibility of some developers coming up with new and clever ways of telling time is a very intriguing prospect.

And one more thing: Maybe it’s time to get rid of that clunky, honeycomb home screen design that makes it an impossible task to look for apps. I just hope that they are not too proud of it to change that.

A New MacBook Pro Retina

The last time the MacBook Pro lineup received a significant upgrade was more than two years ago. So it is safe to say that a big upgrade is definitely coming. Though I hope that they would announce it during WWDC, I am not holding my breath for it since WWDC tends to be more about software. On the other hand, I wouldn’t say it’s impossible since they have announced a lot of hardware during WWDC in the past including the retina MacBook Pro itself as well as the Mac Pro. Considering that all of Apple’s third-party developers have to use Macs, it would make perfect sense if they plan to announce one during the keynote.

The new retina MacBook Pro is rumored to feature Intel’s new microarchitecture, Skylake, which improves the performance and reduces power consumption. Now this might be the reason why we will see a change in the form factor with this new model since they can make it thinner while not sacrificing battery life. And we all know how much Apple loves making their products even thinner and lighter. Personally, I would not mind them keeping the same form factor and just increase the battery life instead.

AMD’s upcoming Polaris GPU is also expected to be featured in the high-end 15” retina MacBook Pro. However, the company said the GPU would not be ready until Q4 of this year, so that might be a reason why we won’t see a new MacBook Pro next week.

Another big rumor floating around is the OLED display panel that will be replacing the row of function keys. At first, I was not so sure how this will work since we rarely look down to our keyboards anyway when we type, and to have a touch surface instead of physical keys might not work as well either. However, this recent concept rendering by Martin Hajek made me think that this might actually be a really cool feature. But we'll just have to wait and see.

Credit: Martin Hajek

Swift 3.0

According to Swift.org, Swift 3.0 is expected to be released “sometime in late 2016” so I believe it’s possible that we would see some sort of a preview for that. This is a developer conference after all. But since Swift become open-source last year, the announcement would not be that exciting given that we already know what new features of the language are. However, if they choose to have maybe a slide or two for Swift, they would probably only highlight a few important features and changes such as the Swift Package Manager that will also be available for Linux and Darwin, Swift Core Libraries, more imported Objective-C APIs, and some refinements to the language including the removal of ++ and -- operators, and C-style for-loops.

การพัฒนาเทคโนโลยีอวกาศเป็นสิ่งที่สำคัญสำหรับเผ่าพันธุ์มนุษย์เรามาก ถึงแม้ว่าดูระยะสั้นมันไม่เห็นจะมีประโยชน์อะไรเลย จริงที่ว่าในโลกนี้ยังมีเรื่องปัญหาปากท้อง ก่อการร้าย หรือโรคภัยไข้เจ็บอีกเยอะที่คนควรจะสนใจและแก้ปัญหามัน (ตอนนี้ก็มีคนใส่ใจไปทำพวกนี้เยอะแยะอย่าง Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation หรือ World Food Programme) แต่นี่มันเป็นเรื่องของระยะยาวและต้องมองมันในภาพใหญ่จริงๆ รู้สึกเสียดายที่คนไม่ค่อยให้ความสำคัญกับมัน

ถ้าย้อนกลับไปดูในประวัติของโลกนี้ ตั้งแต่เริ่มมีสิ่งมีชีวิตมา มันมีเหตุการสูญพันธุ์ครั้งใหญ่ (mass extinction) มาประมาณ 5 ครั้ง ตอนล่าสุดคืออุกกาบาตพุ่งเข้าชนโลกในยุคไดโนเสาร์ (จริงๆเป็นอุกาบาตขนาดเล็กมาก ถ้าเปรียบขนาดโลกเท่ากับตึก 3 ชั้น อุกกาบาตที่ทำให้ไดโนเสาร์สูญพันธ์ุทั่วโลกมันมีขนาดเท่าลูกถั่วเม็ดนึง) ถ้าเราดูเหตุการสูญพันธ์ุตั้งแต่เริ่มแรกเราจะเห็นเป็นแนวโน้มว่าอีกไม่นานคงจะเกิดขึ้นอีก¹

Credit: waitbutwhy.com

ที่จริงมีสิ่งอันตรายมากมายที่สามารถทำให้สัตว์โลกสูญพันธ์ุแบบทันทีทันใดได้ ไม่ว่าจะเป็นอุกาบาต, supernova, solar super flare, หลุมดำที่หลุดมา, โรคระบาด (epidemic) แบบที่ไม่ได้มีแฮปปี้เอ็นดิ้งเหมือนในหนัง Hollywood, หรือ superintelligence ซึ่งสิ่งพวกนี้มันเป็นภัยที่เกินเอื้อมมือมนุษย์เราแน่นอน เราเข้าไปแทรกแซงอะไรมากไม่ได้ โดยเฉพาะภัยจากอวกาศ

ถ้ารู้อย่างนี้เราก็ควรจะเตรียมตัวไว้หรือเปล่า?

ลองดูวิธีคิดที่ทำให้นึกภาพง่ายๆนะ...

เปรียบว่าโลกนี้เป็นคอมพิวเตอร์และสัตว์โลกรวมถึงมนุษย์เราเป็นข้อมูลต่างๆในฮาร์ดไดรฟ์ (เทียบว่าเวลาหนึ่งเดือนในเรื่องนี้เท่ากับเวลาจริง 50 ล้านปี) ตั้งแต่ที่เราซื้อคอมพ์เรามาตอนเดือนพฤษภาคมปีที่แล้วฮาร์ดไดรฟ์มันพัง (crash) ไปแล้ว 5 รอบ ในเดือน สิงหาคม, กันยายน, ธันวาคม, มกราคม, และเมษายน พอรีบูตกลับมาข้อมูลหายไปประมาณ 70% ทุกครั้ง ยกเว้นตอนเดือนมกราคม ที่ข้อมูลหายไป 95%

แล้วตอนนี้คือปลายเดือนพฤษภาคมปีปัจจุบัน เอกสารชื่อ HomoSapiens.docx เพิ่งถูกสร้างเมื่อประมาณ 2 ชั่วโมงที่แล้ว คิดดู เรามีฮาร์ดไดรฟ์ที่เต็มไปด้วยข้อมูลสำคัญมากๆพวกนี้ แล้วจากการที่เราเคยใช้งานคอมพิวเตอร์เรา เรารู้ว่าทุกๆ 2-3 เดือน ข้อมูล (i.e. สัตว์โลกทั้งหมด) จะหายไปประมาณ 70% โดยครั้งสุดท้ายที่มันพัง (i.e. การสูญพันธุ์ครั้งใหญ่) คือตอนเมื่อเดือนกว่าๆที่แล้ว

เราควรจะทำอะไรหละ?

เราควรจะทำสำรองข้อมูล (back up) ไว้ใน external hard drive โดยเฉพาะไฟล์ HomoSapiens.docx

โครงการอวกาศต่างๆอย่าง NASA, ESA หรือโดยเฉพาะบริษัทเอกชน SpaceX นี่แหละที่จะเป็นตัวช่วย back up สายพันธุ์เราโดยการที่วางแผนจะเอามนุษย์ไปตั้งหลักปักฐาน สร้างอาณานิคมที่ดาวอังคาร (แล้วดาวอื่นๆอีกต่อไปในอนาคต) จริงอยู่ว่าดาวอังคารไม่ได้ปลอดภัยหรืออยู่อาศัยง่ายกว่าเลย (เรื่องความเป็นไปได้นี้ยังต้องทำวิจัยและคิดเทคโนโลยีใหม่ๆอีกเยอะ)

เค้ามีคิดที่จะส่งไปรอบละ 100-200 คน พอผ่านไปซัก 4-5 ทศวรรษ เทคโนโลยีเดินทางอวกาศจะดีขึ้นทำให้ส่งไปได้รอบละมากคนขึ้น และทำให้ตั๋วค่าไปถูกลง และหวังว่าอาณานิคมเล็กๆ จะกลายเป็นเมืองใหญ่ที่มีคนอยู่ซักล้านคน เต็มไปด้วยสิ่งอำนวยความสะดวกและสถานบันเทิงต่างๆเหมือนโลกเรา

เท่านั้นเราก็ได้ทำ backup ของสายพันธุ์มนุษย์เราอย่างเสร็จสมบูรณ์ กลายเป็นสายพันธุ์ต่างดาวเคราะห์ (interplanetary species). นั่นแหละคือ “ก้าวกระโดดที่ยิ่งใหญ่ของมนุษยชาติ” (giant leap for mankind) ที่นีลอาร์มสตรองเคยพูดถึงอย่าแท้จริง ถ้าโลกโดนอะไรขึ้นมา มนุษย์เรายังคงมีดำรงอยู่ต่อไป

ในอนาคตเราอาจจะอยู่อาศัยบนดาวอังคารแบบนี้ก็เป็นได้

ถ้าจะถามว่าจะมีเหรอคนที่บ้าจะยอมทิ้งโลก ทิ้งบ้าน ทิ้งครอบครัวเพื่อที่จะไปอยู่ดาวอังคาร มีอยู่แล้ว ดูตอนปี ค.ศ. 1605 คนยุโยปที่เริ่มย้ายไปก่อตั้งอาณานิคมที่ทวิปอเมริกา (New World) มีน้อยคนมาก มีแต่พวกบ้าๆ ที่กล้าทิ้งบ้านเกิดตัวเอง ขายบ้านขายของเพื่อที่จะไปเริ่มต้นชีวิตใหม่ที่ Jamestown หรือ Plymouth คนกลุ่มแรกที่จะไปดาวอังคารก็จะเป็นเหมือนกันนี่แหละ

ตอนแรกอาจจะไปอยู่ซัก 2 ปีก่อน² แล้วคนเหล่านั้นก็จะกลับมาทำให้คนบนโลกรู้ว่าจริงๆแล้วการไปดาวอังคารไม่ใช่เป็นตั๋วขาไปอย่างเดียว เราก็เดินทางกลับได้

คนบนโลกจะเห็นบางคนกลับมากลายเป็นคนดังเพราะความกล้าหาญของเค้า บางคนอาจจะเขียนหนังสือยอดขายอันดับหนึ่ง บางคนอาจจะทำเป็น YouTube, รายการทีวี หรือภาพยนตร์ — คนก็เริ่มอยากจะไปมากขึ้น

คนบนโลกจะเห็นรูปถ่ายสวยๆจากการไปเดินขึ้นภูเขาที่สูงที่สุดในระบบสุริยะ (Olympus Mons) ที่ทำให้ Mount Everest เป็นเหมือนกับเขาขนาบน้ำ หรือแคนย่อน Valles Marinaris ที่ทำให้ Grand Cayon กลายเป็นเหมือนคลองแห้ง — คนก็อยากจะไปมากขึ้น

คนบนโลกก็จะรู้ว่ากระโดดลงจากเหวสูง 6-7 เมตรลงมาได้โดยที่ไม่บาดเจ็บอะไรเลย และเห็นคลิป YouTube ของพวกกีฬาผาดโผนใหม่ๆที่เล่นได้โดยเฉพาะบนดาวอังคาร เพราะมีแรงโน้มถ่วงแค่เท่ากับ 38% ของโลก — คนก็อยากจะไปมากขึ้น

อีกอย่าง อาจจะมีระบอบการปกครองแบบใหม่ที่ทันสมัยมากขึ้น ที่ไม่มีรัฐบาลปกครองเลยก็เป็นได้ ทุกคนสามารถโหวตเรื่องต่างๆได้โดยตรง ทำให้บรรลุฉันทามติ (achieve consensus) ได้ง่ายขึ้น

แต่ก็แน่นอนอยู่แล้วว่าไม่ใช่ทุกคนจะมีปัญญาไปกลับได้ง่ายๆ ยังไงก็อาจจะต้องขายบ้านขายของเพื่อที่จะได้ไป เหมือนตอนที่คนเริ่มไปอยู่ที่อเมริกา แต่เรื่องพวกนี้จะทำให้คนตื่นตัวมากขึ้น เพราะมันมีความแปลกใหม่อยู่เยอะ แล้วคนก็อยากจะไปเป็นคนแรกที่ทำอะไรบนดาวอังคาร เช่น เปิดร้านส้มตำร้านแรก สนามฟุตบอลแห่งแรก เป็นคนแรกที่พิชิตยอดเขา Olympus Mons หรือเป็นคนแรกที่นำยางพาราไปขายตามที่ท่านนายกฯเคยกล่าวไว้

ส่วนเรื่องค่าตั๋วไปดาวอังคารมันแพงแน่นอน ก็เลยมีบริษัทที่พยายามทำให้การบินอวกาศถูกลง ตอนนี้แพงมากเพราะจรวจใช้ได้แค่ครั้งเดียวแล้วถูกโยนทิ้งหมด เขาเลยพยายามหาวิธีนำจรวจที่ใช้แล้วกลับมาใช้ใหม่เพื่อที่จะช่วยลดต้นทุน (cost-per-launch) นึกดูว่าตอนเราบินจากกระบี่ไปกรุงเทพฯ เรานั่งเครื่องบินลำใหม่เอี่ยม พอถึงแล้วสายการบินโยนมันทิ้งทุกไฟล์ท แล้วมาสร้างลำใหม่สำหรับแต่ละไฟล์ท ค่าตั๋วมันคงจะแพงมากๆ

ภาพจำลองจรวด Falcon Heavy ที่จะนำออกมาใช้ปลายปี 2016 และสำหรับส่งยานอวกาศไปดาวอังคารในอีกไม่กี่ปีข้างหน้า Credit: SpaceX

แน่นอนอยู่แล้วว่าสำหรับคนทั่วไปฟัง(อ่าน)ดูคงจะหัวเราะเยาะว่ามันเป็นเรื่องแค่ในนิยาย sci-fi, เพ้อฝัน, ไร้สาระ, ไม่มีทางเป็นไปได้, "บ้าหรือเปล่า มันไม่เกี่ยวกับเรา" แต่ลองนึกภาพดูว่าถ้าเราบอกคนสมัย 30-40 ปีก่อน ว่าในอนาคต เราจะสามารถคุยเห็นหน้ากับคนอีกฝั่งนึงของโลกได้โดยใช้แผ่นสี่เหลี่ยมในฝ่ามือแผ่นนึง เค้าก็คงจะหัวเราะเยาะเราเหมือนกัน เข้าใจว่ามองดูตอนนี้อาจจะเป็นเรื่องที่เป็นไปไม่ได้ แต่ถ้าเราไม่กล้าคิดจะทำสิ่งที่เป็นไปไม่ได้ Christopher Columbus คงจะไม่ได้ล่องเรือข้ามมหาสมุทรมาพบโลกใหม่ (New World), พี่น้องไรต์ (the Wright brothers) คงจะไม่ได้สร้างเครื่องบินลำแรก หรือสหรัฐอเมริกาคงจะไม่ได้ส่งคนไปเดินบนดวงจันทร์ คืออย่างที่กล่าวไว้ เรื่องนี้มันเป็นปัญหาระยะยาว มันอาจไม่ได้กระทบกับเราหรือลูกๆหลานๆหรือเหลนๆเราด้วยซ้ำ จะให้คนทุกคนมาสนใจก็คงจะเป็นไปไม่ได้ แต่ยังไงเราก็ควรที่จะมองเรื่องนี้ในมุมของเผ่าพันธุ์มนุษย์ทั้งหมด รวมถึงรุ่นต่อๆมาในอนาคต ไม่ใช่แค่ภายในช่วงชีวิตเราทุกๆครั้งที่เห็นรัฐบาลประเทศต่างๆหรือนักวิชาการออกมาบอกว่า...

เห้ย อย่าไปสนใจเรื่องโครงการอวกาศหรือไปสร้างอาณานิคมอยู่ดาวอังคารเลย เรามีปัญหาอีกตั้งเยอะแยะบนโลกเราที่เราต้องจัดการกับมัน

มันเหมือนกับพวกเขาบอกว่า...

เดี๋ยวเราค่อยดูแลสุขภาพทีหลัง ตอนนี้เราต้องทำงานผ่อนบ้านผ่อนรถให้หมดก่อน

คือยังไงมันก็ต้องมีเรื่องสำคัญที่ต้องเข้าไปดูแลก่อนอยู่แล้ว แต่ถ้ามัวแต่ไปใส่ใจเรื่องด่วนๆพวกนี้จนลืมคำนึงถึงเรื่องที่สำคัญในภาพใหญ่ ก็จะทำให้ความเสี่ยงต่อการอยู่รอดของมนุษย์ (existential risk) ยิ่งสูงขึ้นไปอีก

เท่าๆที่เรารู้ โลกอาจจะเป็นดาวเคราะห์ดวงเดียวที่มีสิ่งมีชีวิตอยู่ในจักรวาลนี้ก็เป็นได้ คิดดูมันน่าเศร้านะที่ว่าดาวเคราะห์สีฟ้าลูกเล็กๆลูกนึงกลางอวกาศที่กว้างขวาง ไม่มีทางเลยที่ใครจะมาเจอได้โดยบังเอิญ ที่อุตส่าห์ได้โอกาศมีสิ่งมีชีวิตอยู่อาศัย โดยเฉพาะสิ่งมีชีวิตที่มีสติสัมปชัญญะ (consciousness) จะหายไปได้แค่ในพริบตา เหมือนชะตากรรมไดโนเสาร์และสัตว์พันธุ์อื่นๆสมัยก่อน

แล้วเราคิดว่ามนุษย์เรามันต่างกับสัตว์อื่นๆยังไงที่จะเป็นข้อยกเว้นจากการสูญพันธุ์ครั้งใหญ่กระทันหันที่หนีไม่พ้นนี้ได้...

อ้างอิงบางส่วนจาก waitbutwhy.com

Here is what I had before:

Cringing at the badge on the Mail app

And here is what I have now: A much better sight to see

Of course I did not suddenly go from that original one to this within a day. This is the result of a few iterations spanning across several weeks involving tough decisions whether or not to keep an app on the home screen.

The process went something like this: First, I wanted to reduce the number of pages to only one page so it is easier to find apps I want. Second, I got rid of all the apps I never used but somehow just left it there because I could not bother to do anything about them. The first ones to go were Clock, Camera and Calculator apps, because I can quickly access them in the control center. Then I realized that I never (or rarely) touched iTunes Store, Game Center, Contacts, Phone, Wallet and iBooks. So they are gone too. After awhile, all the built-in apps were put into one folder. And long story short, it became what I have now.

The Dock

I put three most important ones in the dock. Now the reason why it has only three has to do with the Launch Center Pro app. Since it is an app that contains all the actions I frequently perform on my phone (such as starting a timer, Google search, FaceTime or launching apps), similar to a folder, putting it in the middle of the dock right above the home button gives an impression of it expanding up into a secondary home screen. And it just looks nicer. The 2Do app is quite new to me, I have been searching for a decent to-do apps for a while. I tried the built-in Reminders, Things, Trello, Todoist and many others, but 2Do did it for me. Though I have been wanting to try OmniFocus, the price tag kind of scared me away. Then I have Telegram which is a free messaging app I found to be much faster and overall a more pleasant experience than WhatsApp.

The Folders

This top row is purely influenced by CGPGrey’s. What he did is genius and I really love the aesthetic of it; everything is just looks nice and clean. It is pleasure to look at. Only having one app in the first page of each folder indicating what the folder is about made the title irrelevant, so they became just periods for simplicity (though I wish I can leave them blank). From left to right they are social, games, development and others.

The Rest

Here are a few notable ones:

• Quartz has just became my favorite news reading app recently, the iMessage-like interface really streamlined the news reading experience. I never found myself going back and check a news app like this one before.
• Instapaper is where I store all the articles I found from various places to read later. It is really nice to have a hub for everything you find online here to sit through and read them. And you get a dark mode too.
• Spark is an email client which has just demoted my previous email app, Email. I like this over the others due to its New, Pins and Newsletters sections and its support for all the email providers.
• Sleep Cycle tracks my sleep at night. It display really cool and insightful data and trends, which I love to see. It also integrates with Life Cycle, an app that shows my daily activities, places I visit and how much time I spent there.
• Overcast is my podcast listening app of choice. It blew the built-in podcast app out of the water. The killer feature has to be Smart Speed which so far has saved me an extra 18 hours on top of my speed adjustments alone.
• Level Money helps me track my spending and shows how much spendable money I have left for each month. My favorite feature of this app is ability to add trackers to each merchant based its category. It will then aggregate all the purchases and show me how much I spend on each category each month. Again, I love seeing data and trends.

This has been a really nice change for the better. I can do frequent tasks faster especially with the help of Launch Center Pro. For those of you who are thinking of cleaning up your home screen but could not find time or the motivation to, I encourage you to take no more than an hour to do this. Trust me, it is worth it.

Yesterday, I finally got myself a Solid State Drive (SSD) for my 2010 MacBook Pro. It has been using traditional hard drives for more than 3 years and now it is really slow. The price of an SSD now is relatively cheap compared to how much it would cost 2 years ago.

I was surprised to find out that a 120GB SSD now only cost $90 on Amazon. That was also one of the reasons why I decided to upgrade from a traditional hard drive to a much faster and less energy-consuming SSD.

I got a 250GB SSD from Samsung, which is the best-selling SSD on Amazon.com, for only $145. At the beginning, I was contemplating between the Crucial m500 and Samsung 840 EVO. Despite the fact the Crucial is one of the first companies that entered the SSD market since around four years ago, I still prefer the Samsung over it because it received more positive reviews and has much faster transfer speed.

I already had some experiences changing the RAM and hard drives on my MacBook, so upgrading it to an SSD was rather an easy task for me to do.

There are 10 screws on the back of a unibody MacBook which need a 0 size screwdriver to unscrew them.

The back cover can get really dusty. So this was a good chance for me to clean it up.

The drive is located on the bottom left corner. There are 4 more screws to be screwed off before I could lift the hard drive up and disconnect the SATA cable. The SATA cable is really fragile so I had to be extra careful disconnecting it from the hard drive because if I ripped it I would need to look up the tutorial on how to replace one. Once the hard drive came off, there are 4 more mounting screws on each corner of the drive which I must use them on my SSD for it to be able to be installed. These are not normal screws, I needed a Torx screwdriver to work with them.

After the mounting screws are in place, I just carefully connected the SATA cable to the SSD, put it down and secured it in place. Then I put the back cover back on and ta-da! That was it! Pretty easy right?

Next part was the nerve-wrecking part. I booted up the computer and hoped that it would recognize a new SSD in its system because if not I would need to open the back cover up again and re-install the drive or worse, return the drive and get a different one. But luckily, it recognized the new drive! So now the very last part was to install the operating system. I already created a bootable USB drive to use as an installer for OS X Mavericks.

The USB flash drive with OS X Mavericks on it.

The installation took a reasonable amount of time but still really fast compared to installing one on a hard drive.

After about half an hour of installation process, my MacBook booted up the a new SSD and freshly installed OS X Mavericks! Its boot-up time was less than 15 seconds! I tested the read/write speed it clocked in around 250MB/s for writing and 270MB/s for reading.

Not the fastest but still impressive nonetheless.

And that was it! My journey through upgrading my laptop to a SSD. If any of you guys are thinking of upgrading your computers to a SSD, I strongly recommend it.  Though I haven’t gotten a lot of experiences with it but so far it has been great (I’ll post some updates later). My applications launch in matter of seconds rather than minutes. The boot-up and shutdown time are also insanely fast. I can easily say that this is one single best upgrade for my laptop so far.

As some of you might already know from my previous post that I went to Michigan to visit my host family and friends for the winter break. It was a 10-day trip, we mostly just hanging around the area, didn't do anything much. (Except a lot of driving and skiing/snowboarding) So I flew in to Grand Rapids on the 17th of December, about one and a half year since I flew out here back to Thailand after I finished my exchange program during 2010-2011. The trip was about 6 hours long, I had to make a connecting flight in Cincinnati. It was about 9pm when I arrived. To be honest, it was a strange feeling coming back here again. Now I'll just assume that most of you probably don't know my story when I was here as a exchange student. So just to clear things out, I had an awesome time here. It was one of the best years of my life.

As I walked out of the gates down to the waiting area. I already knew that my host family was gonna be here to pick me up. So I was kinda looking for them, and I honestly didn’t even know how to react, it’s been too long but still, I was really excited. In the summer of 2011, when I was here the last time, they dropped me off at this exact place. And one thing I think you should know, and I’ve never written about this before, is that I bursted into tears saying goodbye to my host parents here. It was tough to say goodbye. We all know that feeling. On that day I knew that we will meet again, it’s just the matter of where and when. So here I was, back at the place where I said goodbye, where I saw them for the last time. Then I saw them waiting for me on the bench. I let out a huge smile, walked right to them and gave them both a big hug. After a little greetings, we walked down to the baggage claim area and off to their place, which is about an hour north of Grand Rapids.

After a long ride with a lot of chit-chatting, we finally arrived at the same house that I was staying at for almost a year. It all looked pretty much the same, I felt lucky that I had a chance to come back here again at last.

Next day, my host dad, Brad, took me out deer hunting. But before I could be inside the woods to look for deer, I needed to wash off all my human scent with special soap and sprayed every pieces of clothing I was going to wear with this hunting spray.

There was this place we called ‘the cabin,’ it was the place where he usually hunts and it was in the middle of the wood. Perfect place for deer hunting. We then went inside the woods and out to the open field where he told me that he always sits and wait for deer to show up here.

The cabin

Since I was there with him that day, we need to sit and wait inside that little cabin (seen in the photo above). Brad had his muzzleloader loaded and ready to shoot at any second the deer show up. It was about 3pm when we went inside and started waiting for deer, and that was all we did; sit and wait. We needed to be extra quiet and still. We couldn’t make any noises because that might scare the deer away. We would never know when they will show up, they are too quiet. We just had to sit there, looking out the window and hope that deer would show up soon. But we can play with our phones though, as long as they didn’t make any sound. Surprisingly, AT&T had 4G coverage in the middle of the woods...

It was about 5:30 pm when it got dark and we couldn’t see anything anymore, so we packed our things and went back home. I was a little bit disappointed though. I even brought my DSLR with me, hoping that I would get a chance to take a picture of a living deer in the woods. But we didn’t have any luck. Continue to part 2...

The view from backyard

There is gonna be a lot more to come!

Check out the whole set here.

So last week I went to a Thai festival called, Loy Krathong at a Thai temple here in Auburn. It's a festival that we celebrate every year. According to Wikipedia, the name's meaning could be translated to "Floating Crown" or "Floating Decoration."

Image: Wikipedia

In Thailand, we celebrate this festival by floating these "Krathong" (Crown/Float/Decoration) on the evening of the full moon of the 12th month in Thai lunar calendar. So it's someday in November. This year it is on the 28th of November.

Since I'm going to college here in USA, I didn't get a chance to celebrate this in Thailand (for 4 years in a row). So the Thai Student Association created an event for not only Thai student but for anyone who was interested to celebrate this tradition at a Thai temple.

Inside the temple

We went to this Thai temple called, Wat Washington Buddhawaram on Sunday last week. The temple hold a Loy Krathong event for anyone to join and learn our tradition, so there are a lot of Thai people as well as some Americans at the temple on that day. A lot of them brought food, some of brought their homemade Krathongs. For those who didn't make one, the temple was also selling their handmade Krathongs.

Delicious Thai Food

The food are just really good. Maybe that's also because I haven't had any Thai food in a while and I really miss how delicious Thai food is. So, yeah, I enjoy the food a lot.

Oh and we prayed too. It's been a long time since I attended the praying at the temple.

Then in the afternoon, it's the time for us to float our Krathongs, at the swamp nearby. Actually in Thailand, we float our Krathongs in the river at night. But since there's no river near the temple and the night in December would be so cold, we just did it at the swamp in the afternoon.

Out at the pond

My Krathong!!

We came back to the campus in the late afternoon. It was a really fun event. I got to meet some other Thai people/students in the area, floated my Krathong, and most importantly, savored the deliciousness of homemade Thai food. Let's do it again next year!

Check out my full gallery on Flickr here.

Until next time.