Cellphone dependency
This video about cutting down on phone dependency has been making the rounds:
I have some thoughts about it.
A clean energy future
I just watched this video about energy dependence and it got me thinking about some stuff.
In particular, it struck me how one of the quoted figures is that even LED lighting is only about 30% efficient in its conversion from final energy to usable light. My experience with LED lighting has been that 120V AC lamps do indeed generate a lot of heat, and I guess 30% sounds about right, but so much of that heat is just from the power circuitry: namely from having to convert AC to DC and step the voltage down.
But does it have to be that way?
Are you having COMPUTER PROBLEMS?
Tech upgrades
I got an M4 Pro mini for my office, so that I could put my M1 Studio in my studio. I’ve also changed web browsers. Let’s talk about both of those things, and one other thing!
M4 mini
So, today Apple unveiled the new M4 Mac mini, which seems like a perfect upgrade for me! Except… they did something really asinine:
They put the power button underneath.
This means that you have to physically pick up the machine to turn it on, or to force-reboot it. Those are rare occurrences, but they’re enough of one that this becomes a problem.
Why’s this a problem? Well, part of it is that the mini’s maximum storage configuration is pretty small, and upgrading the storage is stupid expensive, so pretty much everyone who’s using these for doing, say, audio and video work is going to need an external drive enclosure. And external drive enclosures tend to have very short, fixed Thunderbolt cables, and managing those cables can become very tricky even when you don’t need to move your device around.
This will also be a big problem for people who want to rackmount or monitor-mount their devices; as far as I can tell from various photos, there isn’t really much of a gap/lip under which you can place a finger. Maybe people will start making custom button-pressing tools or something, I dunno. I guess that wouldn’t be too hard.
But still, it’s annoying that Apple would make this change.
(Hopefully they at least put it under the front corner, which would at least be livable! None of the photos I’m finding show which corner it’s under though.)
Another annoying thing is that while there are now five USB-C ports (three of which are Thunderbolt), there are no longer USB-A ports, so at least for my setup I’d need to run everything through a Thunderbolt dock, and finding one of those that’s both reliable and provides the ports I need is troublesome at best. Also, in my experience, you really want a dedicated port (rather than a docking station) for an external monitor, a storage enclosure, and an audio interface… and that’s all three Thunderbolt ports right there. So then my keyboard and mouse would have to plug into one of the USB-C ports in front, and that gets really messy really fast.
So anyway, power-wise the M4 mini would be a huge upgrade for me, but for the physical and connectivity requirements of my recording studio, it doesn’t seem like a good fit.
Maybe I’ll get an M4 mini for my home office and then move my M1 Max Mac studio into the recording studio. Or maybe I’m fine with the hardware I have already.
February updates
Miscellaneous updates
I haven’t felt like blogging lately, but here’s some updates.
Miscellaneous goings-on
I’ve been on guanfacine for a few days and so far I’m not noticing that my focus has changed any, but on the plus side my blood pressure is great now. So, that’s good.
I don’t know if it’s from the naltrexone or the guanfacine but my dreams have been pretty vivid and weird, but usually in a good way. Unlike when I was on the Wellbutrin and my dreams were vivid and stressful.
⭐️ React is a subsidy
Incremental progress
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of criticism about the IndieWeb movement based on the notion that everything that comes out of it is biased towards people with technology privilege; that it’s all well and good for people who know how to run a website to build their own thing, but that the vast majority of the Internet is made up of people who’d have nowhere to begin. And that it follows that the IndieWeb movement is inherently flawed.
I agree with the issues of tech privilege and access, but I disagree with the conclusions.