A new computer

On a new computer now—an M1 MacBook Air. Did I get all of the capitalisation right? Did I call it the right thing? It's very small, and very light, and very fast. It doesn't get hot; it doesn't have fans so it's very quiet. I'm like 4 years late to the party but everyone was right about the M-series silicon. My favourite part is that the computer is gold (it's more of a Rose Gold), which is a colour that they don't really make computers in nowadays.

I like it very much, and that's all I have to say about that.

Like Chris, I’m back on Apple Podcasts after a few years on Pocket Casts (to which I migrated from a few years on Overcast). Apple Podcasts is fine: it’s reliable, it works well, it integrates with the rest of the Ecosystem. It doesn’t play fast and loose with my data; it doesn’t put a bunch of podcasts behind a subscription; it doesn’t inject microtargeted advertisements. And importantly: it’s the default.

I’ve been trying to keep up with the latest & greatest & most-awarded in software for what feels like forever now. Watching reviews on YouTube and keeping track of data management methodologies. Creating accounts and signing up for betas and letting free trials lapse. But something's changed in my online verve over the past six months or so: I just don’t have the energy for it anymore.

Don’t get me wrong—there is some software that’s so thoughtful and well-designed that I can’t abandon it: applications like iA Writer or mpv or Things or Figma that I’ve used for years and which have never let me down. These applications have become defaults for me as well. But for every thoughtful piece of software like this, there are a dozen podcast apps, note-taking apps, reminder apps, mail apps, calendar apps, terminals, browsers that all do basically the same thing as the one that came with your computer or phone.

I’m tired of weighing up pros and cons. Plain ol’ Safari works (pretty well, actually, nowadays) for me. Plain ol’ Mail.app. Plain ol’ Apple Podcasts.

Counterargument to yesterday's post about PWAs vs. native apps: Instagram and Facebook are injecting tracking scripts to their in-app browsers! It looks like they're doing this by using a webview, rather than the embedded Safari view, to show the web within the Instagram/Facebook app.

This is eminently not a problem if you're using Instagram or Facebook in the browser, rather than using the mobile app. Similarly, if you use the "Open in Browser" option for links in Instagram/Facebook, they won't be able to track you there, either. The tracking code is only embedded in webviews launched by the Instagram/Facebook app.

Obviously blame lies at least a little bit with Apple for making this sort of thing possible—which sort of works at cross-purposes to their argument that Safari is the only viably secure browser on iPhones.

(Interestingly, this tracking behaviour isn't found on the in-app browser on WhatsApp—another Meta property.)

On the rare occasions that I plug my iPhone into my computer (a 2015 MacBook Pro), the phone will usually connect and disconnect rapidly, buzzing every couple of seconds as the phone is discovered and undiscovered, not charging. Most SEO-optimised posts online ask you to reset your System Management Controller or completely format your phone, which is not practicable. Instead, I've found that restarting the usbd service fixes the issue. You can do it on the command line but I've found it easier just to open Activity Monitor, search for "usbd", and kill it from there.