sangsara.net

Tag: Apple

  • Week 43.24

    Week 43.24

    I’m on my last week camping out here in a co-working space while renovations continue in the apartment next door. From what I’ve observed, they’re probably behind schedule and will continue into November. As of this moment, however, I’m not planning to extend my membership another month.

    On the few days I’ve stayed home, I found that AirPods Pro do an okay job of reducing the noise, as long as you’ve got some audio playing. That should allow me to do most of the same things well enough (watching films, reading books, scrolling trash), but the part of being out here that I’ll miss is observing other people at work and guessing what they do. The most entertaining one so far has been a life coach who saw his clients for one-on-one sessions out in the open space, right next to other people typing away on laptops. Weird!

    I am incidentally looking forward to the AirPods Pro update next week that will turn them into hearing aids and concert hearing protectors. We got my dad a new pair in anticipation of the former, and he’s open/excited to try it out. If you know someone who may have impaired hearing but doesn’t want to get fitted for traditional hearing aids, check this new feature out because it may be a helpful alternative. Hearing loss apparently contributes to dementia.

    Come with me to Bluesky

    On le scrolling de la trash: I decided to reduce my participation in totally toxic platforms like Twitter, toxically owned platforms like Threads and Instagram, and make another go at a decentralized alternative. It’s complicated, but I don’t want to fully leave these places because I want to know how people I disagree with think. I’ll spend less time there, though, and I won’t post new content.

    I’ve tried Mastodon but its lack of algorithmic discovery was a bug for me, not a feature. Like Michael who reached the same conclusion, I will not be renewing my omg.lol subscription and that will mean the loss of my social.lol Mastodon account in about a year.

    So that means returning to Bluesky, 14 months after I first got in. In the beginning there was a waitlist, and it was hard to find people I already knew elsewhere, and I couldn’t get anyone to follow me. A year on, it’s beginning to look like a viable place to hang out. There’s a tool called Sky Follower Bridge that helps you find your Twitter people on Bluesky.

    You should look me up at @sangsara.bsky.social if you decide to join! I have just 44 followers now, but with your help I might get to 45.

    I like two things about it right now: that the community I see is welcoming and nerdy in that OG internet way, and that one can customize their experience via ‘feeds’. Technically, if the niche and/or conspiracy theorizing content I see on Twitter ever comes over, I can wall them into a clearly marked section that I’ll only see when I want to, but on the same open platform built to last longer than the ones we’ve had. I’m tired of moving from shipwreck to new-but-already-cursed ship every few years, an odyssey described in this great thread by @pookleblinky.bsky.social that I reposted. It’s disgusting but us millennials probably coined the term ‘digital nomads’ because that’s what we are.

    Later: After writing the above, I came across this post by Adam Singer about why quitting TikTok and Instagram gives you an edge over most other people, who are hopelessly addicted and mentally fractured, a topic I mentioned recently after reading the controversial book Stolen Focus. He makes a distinction (that I agree with) between image/video-based networks, and text-based ones like Bluesky, Reddit, and old-school forums, because the latter type fosters connections and discussions in a way that pure content delivery systems largely do not.

    In the same way it doesn’t matter if Johann Hari got the facts exactly right in his book, it doesn’t matter if you cut down on social media because you hate a tech baron’s irresponsible personal/business/product design choices or if it’s because you just want to reclaim some agency over your own mind. The important thing is that you try it and see what happens.

    ===

    Test photos

    Here are some photos I took this week (ProRAW in the default camera and some with Fig Camera’s beta) while further improving my upcoming positive film LUT. I’ll probably sell it on Gumroad for a few bucks. I have no marketing channels and no hope that anyone will ever find it. Other than that, the main thing holding it back is that I have no name for it.

    ===

    Other activities

    • On Wednesday I saw Ben and Nate for a few drinks and dinner, which became cocktails till midnight and a S$230 expense I consider irresponsible in this economy.
    • On Friday we met my parents for a rare weekday lunch. It was at a restaurant attached to a gourmet grocer, and afterwards I found an entire suckling pig gutted and shrinkwrapped, on the bottom shelf of a freezer, ready to be taken home for S$285 (pic below, you’ve been warned). How many people would know what to do with that?!
    • On Sunday we went out to watch our niece play netball in a youth tournament. It was my first time watching the sport at all, and it struck me as a strange cross between basketball and golf. It’s all running and passing until someone gets close to the basket, then everything stops and they take their sweet time to shoot.
    • Over the weekend I convinced Kim to play some co-op games on the Switch. We started with the indie game Blanc, which mostly has a unique art style going for it: hand-drawn and scanned sketches turned into a 3D world. The gameplay — a baby fox and deer journeying together through a snowy world — was unfortunately boring.
    • Then we tried It Takes Two, a bigger budget affair from EA, which Munz recommended to me awhile back as a non-gamer who enjoyed it with her boyfriend. This was surprisingly a lot more fun despite the higher difficulty level (from several platforming sections while wrangling a 3D camera). It helps that you have unlimited lives, and can learn by dying.
    • IYKYK, but we have been bingeing The Devil’s Hour on Amazon Prime Video, a UK drama series that came out in 2022 and whose second season just premiered. We watched the first episode when it came out then never went back for more. That was a mistake. It looks like a cop show, but with something supernatural going on, and it’s kinda creepy/scary to watch alone in the dark, but towards the second season it starts to show its hand and I was hooked.
    • MUBI has a few films by François Truffaut in my region, and they’re all due to leave today, so I’ve been trying to watch as many as I can. In order, I saw The 400 Blows (1959), Stolen Kisses (1968), Antoine and Colette (1962), The Last Metro (1980), and Jules and Jim (1962). I probably watched The 400 Blows in my late teens but it reads so differently when you’re closer to the parents in age than the child.
    • I’m planning to see his last film, Confidentially Yours (1983), later today after posting this. What can I say? The dude had range. These films reinforce the notion I have of French cinema effortlessly, almost pathologically, blending genres. They go from tragedy and defeat to absurdist comedy in an instant — it all exists together, I guess.
    • I read and enjoyed Psalm for the Wild-Built, a cozy little novella by Becky Chambers that won the Hugo Award. It’s set in a neo-Luddite world where people lead more sustainable, less technology-driven lives after all their robots became sentient one day and decided they would live separately from humans.
  • An image that came to mind while thinking about Submerged

    An image that came to mind while thinking about Submerged

    I probably didn’t manage to close the loop on Submerged in yesterday’s update. The experience of watching a film in a blacked-out space where your own body isn’t visible, and it envelops your senses so completely that it becomes the entire world, and it’s shot like a traditional film with changing camera angles and the buildup of suspense and you’re just forced along for the ride — this powerlessness is movie viewing turned up to 11. You’re inside the director’s vision and can’t really look away.

  • Week 41.24

    Week 41.24

    It’s Monday, and for the time being, my schedule for writing these updates has shifted out by a day as Monday mornings now find me in a co-working space, and writing this gives me an opportunity to blend in better than, say, watching films or playing games whilst surrounded by people grasping their foreheads, stroking their chins, and sighing loudly. Yes, those things just took place around me.

    It’s Monday, after a massive storm, and my feet are soaked from wading through puddles to catch the bus. You’d think this would be a common occurrence in Singapore, where the tropical rain gets heavy, but only a few occasions stick out in memory — those mornings where the office walkways are cluttered with umbrellas opened up to dry, like caltrops or anti-tank barricades; my damp, socked feet perched on top of sneakers I hope will dry before lunch; everyone else’s teeth a-chattering in vicious air-conditioning calibrated for sunny days.

    Earlier this week, I shuffled my feet while sitting here and felt something come loose: the right heel of my (only) three-year-old New Balance 990v4 sneakers. So much for ‘Made in the USA’! I borrowed some black plastic tape to conduct unglamorous field surgery, and they lasted till I got home. I have two newer pairs (v5 and v6), and sure hope they hold up longer.

    iPads are pretty great, actually

    My daily companion over the past four days here has been my 11” M1 iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard, somewhat neglected of late. I’ve found that it does everything I need to pass an entire day, from library books and magazines with the Libby app, to gaming, video, web browsing, chat, and photo editing. My MacBook Air would be better for watching movies, but that’s mainly it. If anything, that only makes me surer that my next iPad will be a 13” model.

    Unfortunately the new iPad Pros with M4 chips are priced on par with MacBooks, making the choice between the two much harder (and in favor of MacBooks if I’m being honest). Recall that the original iPad launched for just $499 USD, and its marketing tagline was “A magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price”. That’s still how the iPad lives in my mind: a powerful alternative device that does way more than its price suggests. So it occurs to me that the iPad Pro is no longer the right choice for me, and the iPad Air is a truer heir to that original proposition. (Put aside the product now simply called ‘iPad’, because at $349 USD it’s actually even cheaper than the first generation and more like a budget “SE” model.)

    We’re seeing Apple push its ‘Pro’ lines further this year, packing them with innovative features that are useful for a small subset of professional users, but which most customers won’t need or appreciate. Things like streaming multiple 4K video feeds from iPhone cameras to a single iPad for production in real time. Or recording LOG-format video to massive ProRes files, including studio-quality audio from four microphones.

    Adding these capabilities and pricing accordingly means some current Pro buyers might want to downgrade to the ‘mid’ models. In order to avoid losing them, Apple would need to elevate those products, and avoid artificially holding back features for the sake of differentiation. We’ve seen that happen with this year’s iPhone 16, which packs an OLED display, Dynamic Island, 48mp camera with a 48mm focal length option for the first time (!), Camera Control thingy, and even things like next-generation Photographic Styles and Audio Mix which they could have reserved for the Pro phones. The only thing it needs is a 120hz ProMotion display. I’m expecting next year’s iPad Air and iPhone updates will finally include that.

    I love that the iPhone 16 is now a great enough product for almost anyone’s needs, but I’ll likely keep buying the Pro models as long as they offer better camera features. I can entertain switching to an iPad Air because I don’t even know what camera hardware it has and won’t ever use it.

    A quick word on cameras and my presets

    I mentioned before that I’ve been beta testing an app called Fig Camera. It has two standout features: great “natural” processing options that dial back Apple’s aggressive defaults, much like Halide’s Process Zero mode; and the ability to process photos on-the-fly with your own custom look. As someone who somehow finds it fun to make photo filters/presets, and has fortunately had some success with them, I love that I can now take photos with my favorite styles directly applied. It’s like how Fujifilm cameras’ “Film Simulations” obviate the need for post-processing. I can now snap photos in Fig that look great to me and don’t need any further editing.

    Shot on iPhone with Fig Camera and my work-in-progress film LUT

    I posted a few recent photos using a film-style sim on IG and Threads and asked something like, ‘should I become one of those preset guys and offer my own as LUT files you can buy?’, to which several kind people said ‘sure’! So I’m thinking about it. This particular look is inspired by the “Positive Film” effect on earlier Ricoh GR cameras (they changed it for the worse with the GRIII), but slightly more “dry” like Fujifilm Classic Chrome. I’ve been using and tweaking it for over a year now, so the trick will be knowing that it’s DONE.

    Immersive Video and Submerged

    I’m still sitting here and my shoes are still wet. I’ve thought about bringing my Vision Pro to this open-plan space—not for the attention, but because it would be nice to have a huge screen that no one else can see. There are many things in my MUBI backlog that would not be cool to watch in public. And what’s even better than a 13” iPad? How about a thousand inches?

    We watched Submerged (2024) over the weekend, Apple’s new Immersive Video release exclusively for Vision Pro. It’s the first film they’ve done that isn’t a documentary or music performance — I guess the right word is fictional? I’m sure I said early on that this new immersive format (a full 180º view) lends itself best to video that puts you somewhere incredible, and wouldn’t be good for movie storytelling, with fast movement (nausea hazard) and quick cuts. I’m here to admit I was wrong.

    Submerged, by Academy Award winner Edward Berger, is only 17-minutes long but about a 12GB file when downloaded offline. You can view it as the first experiment in what filmmaking with this new technology could look like.

    I wrote on Instagram:

    Apple Immersive Video is a new medium. People will be experimenting with how to tell stories with it for years to come.

    Submerged is a great first step, the only movie I’ve ever seen that felt like “being inside” of it. More than seeing Avatar in IMAX 3D even.

    That’s different from the “being there” of POV video — it’s 100% a film with directorial intent. You experience it like a spirit summoned into the world and held down by a seance, without knowledge of your body. Your consciousness is pure camera.

    What I was trying to say was that making films for this format will require inventing a whole new set of techniques. Regular immersive video is easy: plonk a camera down in one static location and let people experience what it feels like to stand there and observe the action. This is the courtside seat at a basketball game, the front row of a performance. It’s amazing to us anyway because the viewpoint is rare, but a film made like this would only be a play.

    In the near term, we’ll see directors converging on a few approaches that work. Like how early 3D movies always had things flying directly at your face. The key question for me is how do you make an audience look at the thing you want them to notice, when they can look almost anywhere around the world you’ve built?

    Berger answers that in three ways. The first is action; big movements. When something explodes and water gushes out of a pipe a second later, you’re bound to notice it. The second is depth of field; like how I remember Cameron pushing and pulling focus at several points in Avatar (2009) to highlight subjects. This goes against natural vision and is more jarring in a wide-angle format like Apple Immersive Video, since you’re choosing for your viewer what they can and cannot look at, but it’s a filmic device everyone is familiar with.

    The third is a combination of Dutch angles and heavy vignetting that produces a novel effect in Immersive Video. When you watch a film like this, you are a disembodied viewer (what I meant above by a summoned spirit), without the ability to see even your own hands. You are severed from the real world. Your viewpoint changes according to the director’s will; sometimes a subject is extremely close and larger than life, other times they are small and distant. Berger often cuts to shots where the edges of your 180º view are shrouded in darkness, and/or where the camera is tilted at an angle, such that you feel yourself almost falling towards the zone of interest. This serves to direct your gaze, as to look in the opposite direction of gravity unconsciously takes more effort.

    I can’t wait to see what else emerges as more filmmakers play with this.

    Other media activity

    • I’m watching Lady in the Lake on Apple TV+, a 7-part series starring Natalie Portman that no one seems to be talking about. It’s rather good, but a slow burn and not one to be binged.
    • Another show that we discovered on a recommendation from Jose, and that no one seems to be talking about, is Ludwig, a 6-part BBC series starring David Mitchell as a reclusive professional puzzle-setter who gets enlisted to help the police solve murders. It’s very good, and sidesteps many of the elements that make other episodic murder-of-the-week procedurals tiresome. Well, it’s short enough that you never reach that point. I’m hoping they renew this.
    • I read Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari. This was inspired by an article in The Atlantic about how American college students today can’t even read an entire book anymore because their attention spans have been destroyed by social media, and book-reading on the whole is in serious decline. Utterly depressing. In order to get better sleep myself, I’m now trying to limit caffeine in the afternoon, alcohol, and phone use before bed. I’ve always detested multitasking—so much so that I avoid using external monitors with my laptop—and I’m now trying to be more mindful of distractions while reading or writing. As I made my way through the book, I was horrified to notice that I was picking up my phone every five minutes to check messages or look up completely unrelated topics.
  • Week 38.24

    Week 38.24

    I didn’t fall ill after all, but Kim’s flu evolved into what looks like a chest infection, leading to coughs all night and poor sleep for both of us. I bought a pair of Loop Quiet 2 earplugs in anticipation of a neighbor’s renovation, and they were somewhat useful under these circumstances too. She finally saw a doctor after several days of nagging, and is now on antibiotics and there’s been some improvement in the last day.

    On Tuesday, I opened the front door to discover a swarm of mosquitoes hovering over my black sneakers — later on I discovered they love hiding on black objects, as a form of camouflage — and took to them with an insecticide spray. In the process, quite a few made it into the apartment. I clapped a dozen to death and confirmed from their squashed bodies that they were Aedes mosquitoes: the species that spreads malaria and dengue fever.

    The red light came on in my head: a new crisis just dropped! Why were there so many? How the heck was I supposed to hunt down all the ones that came in? Fortunately, a neighbor happened by, and when I mentioned them to him, he assured me that they were infertile male mosquitoes (males don’t bite or spread diseases) intentionally released as part of a national anti-dengue campaign called “Project Wolbachia”. They’re meant to breed with females and decrease mosquito numbers by wasting their time, because the eggs don’t ever hatch.

    I’d heard of this program over the years, but didn’t share his confidence that MY mosquitoes could be explained by this. He said “oh yeah, they (the government) release them here all the time”, which led me to check the official website in disbelief. It was true. According to a published schedule, officers of the National Environment Agency release these genetically engineered mosquitoes twice a week, probably by the thousands, around public housing blocks in my district. I waited to see if I would be bitten, and sure enough, I never was. The males only live about a week, but it’s still insane to me that someone is deliberately releasing a ton of insects that look exactly like the ones we know can be dangerous. What am I supposed to do, ask their pronouns before trying to kill them?

    ===

    My new old iPhone arrived, and I ran into some issues during the phone-to-phone transfer process. It failed a couple of times, and I finally gave up and went the ‘restore from iCloud backup’ route. It took several hours, and then I had to check every app to see if I’d gotten logged out. It was the same frustrating dance I do every year I upgrade iPhones, but without the reward of actually upgrading.

    Happily, iOS 18 looks visually fresh and brings a bunch of welcome features. It’s the first OS update in awhile that actually makes your phone feel new. I’m using the new Home Screen mode that lets you have big icons without text labels, and there’s a new dynamic background that shifts colors throughout the day. You can also use a dynamic rainbow gradient on the Lock Screen’s clock, which looks great against black when the always-on display is set to sleep without showing your wallpaper.

    The customization that’s possible with the new Control Center shortcuts and resizable widgets is pretty deep, and something I would not have expected Apple to provide if you’d asked me a couple of years ago. I’ve mapped the Lock Screen camera shortcut to launch Halide, and my Action Button to launch a Google shortcut that does a visual lookup of whatever is showing on your screen. I’ve also put a new button in Control Center that starts my personal radio station on Apple Music.

    Apple Music has also received a significant, if not immediately apparent, change in iOS 18. The “Browse” page has been renamed “New”, and where every user would previously see the same curated selection of new releases, popular songs, and recommended playlists, this content is now personalized based on your listening behavior. The initial impression is positive: I’m no longer being pushed Thai music, or Mandopop, or the local bands I don’t care about. But longer term, I’m worried about the lack of serendipity that might result from this. I discovered some of my favorite music through accidents and unexpected tangents, as I’m sure is the same for anyone reading this.

    <Smooth segue into Media Activity>

    I don’t recall when I first heard the qawwali music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, for example, but boy did it make an impact on me some 30 years ago. I never understood a single word, but you don’t have to in order to feel touched by something divine in his voice. So I was super pleased this week to see in the New York Times that an unreleased album had been discovered in the vaults of Peter Gabriel’s record label. They even produced a making-of video to tell the story of its discovery and restoration.

    The new old album, Chain of Light, is more in the traditional style so each of the four songs runs about 10 minutes. It may not be an ideal starting point for most; so I still recommend beginning with Mustt Mustt or Night Song, two ‘Westernized’ albums he made with Michael Brook to be more globally accessible.

    The Jesse Malin tribute album, Silver Patron Saints, is now out too, with covers by Bruce Springsteen, Counting Crows, The Wallflowers, Elvis Costello, and many more greats. Back when you had to buy CDs on faith in a physical store, I liked getting these tribute albums and would decide based on the artists doing the covers, even if I didn’t know the musician being celebrated. If some of my favorite artists were involved, then the odds were pretty good that I was about to discover someone fantastic. Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation — The Songs of Vic Chesnutt was one such album (unfortunately the album is incomplete on Apple Music for me, maybe a regional licensing thing).

    Will algorithms ever be smart enough to replicate that sort of discovery?

    This week in reading, I hit my Goodreads challenge of 12 books by finishing Kyla Scanlon’s In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work. It was an admittedly low target, so I’m confident I’ll be able to finish a few more before the year ends.

    We watched Sam Mendes’s 1917 (2019) and it was riveting, beautiful cinema. The single-take gimmick was probably unnecessary but made the action immediate and every movement of the camera threatened to reveal a hidden threat suddenly behind our heroes, which I thought effectively mimicked the tension of real conflict. A deliberately edited film shows you danger on its own schedule, but real time action is real time dread. Someone I follow on Letterboxd also observed that this felt like watching cutscenes in games like Call of Duty, a cinematic style that I think emerged because devs were showing off what their game engines could easily do that Hollywood could not. But the battlefield is pretty flat now, and movies are essentially made with the tools of game development, so we can’t stop these two mediums converging.

    [I didn’t take any shots for the Featured Photo this week, so I’m relying on WordPress’s ability to automatically generate some AI slop based on the post’s content.]

  • Week 37.24

    Week 37.24

    Kim got back from her trip with a flu, thankfully it doesn’t seem like Covid and should pass in a couple of days. Jet lag and illness are terrible partners: she spent about two whole days in bed sleeping it off and missing meals. I’m hoping to avoid it, but you shouldn’t place any bets on my famously weak immune system (putting aside the fact that it can fight off chickenpox).

    It was iPhone launch week again — where did the last year go? As usual, many key details had already leaked thanks to Mark Gurman’s sources. The Pro phones are slightly larger, the 5x zoom length is now across both models, and there’s a new “camera control” area along the right side; both a button and a ‘Touch Bar’. The regular iPhones 16 get all the great colors, while the Pro ones only get dull metallics. One of these years, we’ll get to have some fun too.

    The only things on my wishlist that hit were improved battery life and performance, which aren’t surprising — the real question is how significant are they? Apple says the CPU is 15% faster, the GPU is 20% faster, ray-tracing is 2x faster (though I can’t name a single game dying for it), and the 16 Pro Max gets 4 hours more video playback for a total of 33 hours. That’s a 14% increase over the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

    So to summarize, it’s a 15% better iPhone than the one I have, the AI features will release slowly over the next year, and there’s a camera button that I do want (but only serves to do things you can already do on the touchscreen). Given the fact that I already got a Vision Pro and could use some financial prudence during this sabbatical, pre-order Friday came and went without me buying a new iPhone for the first time in 16 consecutive years. Nobody believed I could do it!

    >> For future reference, my battery health is at 88% and 310+ cycles after a year. Coming off the regular Pro size for my iPhones 12 through 14, moving back up to the Pro Max form factor felt perfectly fine, and I think the lightness of titanium was a big factor. I never felt like I’d chosen the wrong size. Caveat: I did change out all my jeans to have roomier pockets.

    I decided to go caseless for this next year, and was quickly reminded that my iPhone came with an annoying defect: a slight misalignment of back cover glass and titanium frame, leaving a rough, kinda sharp edge that you can feel pressing into your palm. I wanted to get a replacement as soon as I took it out of the box because all the marketing talked about ‘comfortable rounded edges’ on the new design, and I was missing out. But replacement units are hard to come by the first few weeks after a launch, so I decided to wait and just popped it into a case and never got back to it.

    This week, nearly a full year later, I called up Apple Support and tried to explain this admittedly minor issue. They suggested I visit an authorized repair partner who could assess it in person, which gave me a good excuse to get Shake Shack for lunch (after Michael’s recent quest for “hot chips” — just French fries for us outside the UK and Australia — I had a craving that wouldn’t go away).

    All in, I had to sheepishly explain my problem to three different support people, two on the phone and one in person, but everyone was very nice about it? I think acknowledging upfront that you are about to sound like a crazy person (in a friendly, non-crazy way) is generally a good strategy for these situations. I’ve now got a replacement phone on the way, and think I’m happily set up for the harrowing year ahead of Not Having The Best iPhone.

    ===

    My friend and ex-colleague Bert was back in town for a visit, and a bunch of us from the old team met up with him in a configuration that hasn’t been together for maybe six years. It was great to see everyone looking no worse for wear, and arguably with more hair, muscles, and iron (from medical implants and drinking too much Guinness) than ever before.

    One thing he mentioned was how warm it is here these days, and how he’s lost all acclimatization. I’ve personally never felt acclimatized to the heat, and am always looking for solutions — see this recent post where I got the Sony Reon Pocket 5. That gadget has been plenty helpful, and I still use it whenever I’m heading outdoors for any meaningful length of time, but it’s not enough on its own. So now I’ve gone and got myself a portable handheld fan after seeing bts videos of K-pop idols holding them all the time. Edit: on second thought, I might have seen them in an episode of Irma Vep.

    This brand, JisuLife, claims to be the world’s number 1 portable fan manufacturer. Who knows if they are? But they had a bunch of products on sale during the recent 9.9 event on Shopee, so I got one of these clever folding designs that collapses into a cylinder much smaller than the umbrella I carry around in my bag. It even doubles as a flashlight.

    A couple of days later, whilst browsing the shelves at a Harvey Norman, I came upon a shelf of JisuLife products and got instant fomo when I tried another model out. The Life9 is even smaller, and eschews big visible blades for an internal turbine design that works like a hairdryer. The result is a much stronger, albeit narrowly focused and noisier stream of air. So now I have er… two fans.

    Both charge via USB-C, but the former model (Life8) uses some non-standard spec and won’t work with my usual cables, only the USB-A to USB-C one it came with. The Life9 charges normally as expected. They’re both cheaper on Shopee than on the official site, and you might catch them for lower on occasional flash or live sales.

    ===

    Media activity

    • Two current streaming movies over the weekend: The Instigators on Apple TV+ and Rebel Ridge on Netflix. The former is o-k with some amusing moments, a heist movie that subverts the usual joys of a heist: the brilliant plan coming together, the thwarting of smug antagonists. No, these guys are morons, but sorta lovable. Matt Damon is often lovable. 3 stars.
    • The latter film is more entertaining fodder, a Reacher-esque tale of small town corruption and sadism meeting a particularly skilled outsider. They messed with the wrong guy, etc. It drags a little long, however, and doesn’t quite strike the comeuppance note as satisfyingly as a Lee Child joint. 3.5 stars.
    • I know, because I read two of them this week. I finished The Midnight Line (Reacher #22) in a day or two. It’s a pretty chill story as the series goes, with a slight mystery that won’t keep you dying of suspense or anything. Almost no danger for our hero. 3 stars.
    • I immediately went onto Past Tense (Reacher #23) and found that much more entertaining because there are actual stakes involved. Part of the problem with Jack Reacher is that he’s Superman, and you never worry that he’ll make it out okay. This book introduces a few vulnerable characters that you can actually worry about. 4 stars.
    • After that, I read Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface, a book that everyone was raving about a little while ago. I preferred Babel, but this is a fine little bit of meta narrative about the publishing industry, being Asian, and being Asian in the publishing industry, or just pretending to be!
    • Listened to a lot of Waxahatchee for the first time since discovering her back in May. Her latest album Tigers Blood, and 2021’s Saint Cloud, in particular. There’s something I just love about the Alabamian accent.
  • Week 36.24

    Week 36.24

    I was able to visit my parents for dinner for the first time in over a month. The long delay was on account of my dad developing a painful case of shingles, which, if you don’t know much about (like me), is a reemergence of a dormant chickenpox virus in one’s body, often after the age of 50. In other words, if you’ve had chickenpox before, you’re at risk of shingles — a nastier, localized version of the same virus.

    Unlike the regular childhood version, it doesn’t usually take over your entire body, just specific areas. In my dad’s case, it affected his back and one side of his torso, leaving the skin painfully sensitive for weeks — nerve pain that, for some, can linger for years. Thankfully, he’s making a quicker recovery.

    I had to stay away because I have never gotten chickenpox, and you can catch it from someone with shingles. I was urged to get the vaccine, because adult cpox is reportedly awful (like shingles, maybe worse), but my doctor suggested doing some blood work first to test for immunity — mostly because he didn’t believe I could make it this far in life without getting chickenpox. But it’s true! My mother swears it, and I have two traits: pretty good memory of my childhood years, and an outsized tendency to complain of ailments. There is no way that I could have gotten chickenpox as a child and everyone just forgot.

    The test results came back, and apparently I’m immune. The only theory I have traces back to this one time in kindergarten, when the boy sitting next to me in class developed cpox and had to leave school early. I recall living in fear that I would be next, and pus-filled bubbles would soon show. I remember checking myself fastidiously for a week or more, but it never came. Perhaps the glancing exposure was just enough to let my immune system prepare itself, but not enough to result in an infection? Or maybe, as my recent run-in with a car suggests, I’m actually Unbreakable like Bruce Willis in that M. Night Shyamalan movie.

    ===

    Kim is away again for work (13,600km away to be precise), and my having to deal with our pest situation alone has been a whole saga too boring to recount in detail. Tl;dr I’ve deployed a fleet of poison/bait traps, struggled with anxious insomnia, taped up a bunch of possible entry points, cleaned up a lot of lizard poop, sprayed insecticide down drains…

    More happily, the morning she left for the airport, I was up early and decided around 7:30 AM that I might go for a walk before it got too warm. This was inspired by Cien’s recent revelation that she’s been taking hour-long morning walks nearly every day. Just to get it out of the way: that’s a bit much for me, but I might go once a week. Spontaneously, this particular morning’s resolution ended in Peishan and me ‘virtually’ joining her for a walk at the same time, in our respective neighborhoods, sending photos along the way. This is actually a pretty fun thing to do!

    It was, however, warm despite the early hour. And it’s been hot and humid all week out here. I had to walk 10 minutes from an MRT station to a restaurant yesterday evening in very still air, and I could feel the sweat on my back not evaporating at all, merely pooling. Even my Sony Reon Pocket 5 brought little relief; I barely perceived that the metal contact point was cooler, or it can’t do much to dispel the mugginess of high humidity.

    ===

    I couldn’t take the wait any longer and upgraded to the visionOS 2 beta. I won’t upgrade any other devices, but I wanted any improvements in eye/hand tracking that I could get. So far, it’s been perfectly stable. I could talk about the new gestures and features, but the single most impressive thing has been the ability to view old 2D photos as 3D spatial scenes.

    What this looks like is simply layers of depth. You obviously can’t look around corners, and it’s not doing anything crazy like building 3D models you can move around in. But it’s like going from looking at a scene with one eye to two eyes. They suddenly have a liveliness to them because your brain can not only see that one object is in front of another, but perceive it too. Sadly, this is not something that can be demonstrated with a photo or video. The only way is to see it for yourself.

    The AI-powered segmentation of objects is somehow flawless, even better than on Portrait Mode (blurred background) photos taken with an iPhone. In one shot I had of a vineyard, every individual plant and leaf stretching to the horizon line was distinctly separated in space from the others. You can also blow them up to life-size with an “immersive” viewing mode, which puts you right in the space.

    Going through photos from the past two decades, of people who’ve passed on, and places I may never see again, has been profoundly moving. Documenting your experiences in photos has always been like building a time capsule, but this approaches time travel. It makes me so glad for every moment I thought to capture at the time, and the fact that the Vision Pro can do this retroactively for normal photos feels like the most unexpected gift I never knew I wanted. That’s what Apple does best, I suppose.

    Before the annual fall event tomorrow night, I’ll go on record again that I don’t think I’ll be upgrading my iPhone or anything else this year (but this time I really mean it!). So far I’ve had 16 iPhones and lost this bet with myself every year, but I can’t justify an incremental tech purchase in the same year as the AVP.

    Things that are unlikely to be announced but might make me reconsider my ‘no upgrade’ vow:

    For iPhone 16 Pro (Max):

    • No camera bump
    • New image processing pipeline that walks back the aggressive AI/HDR look and brings back natural looking photos à la Halide’s Process Zero (but with 24–48mp HEIC/JPEG XL files)
    • Bold, saturated colors like on the old iPod nanos
    • Untextured, grippy back glass
    • Significantly faster or exclusive Apple Intelligence features compared to iPhone 15 Pro
    • Completely new battery chemistry that means I won’t be sub-90% battery health in under a year

    For Apple Watch Series 10:

    • 2x battery life
    • Blood glucose monitoring
    • New body design that shames the old ones so bad you can’t wear them out in public anymore

    For AirPods Max:

    • Redesigned headband that either replaces the mesh or improves its comfort and durability
    • Significant weight reduction and/or new materials (comfort and durability)
    • A great protective case
    • Addition of a power button

    ===

    Media activity

    Recent reading momentum led me to finish reading Neal Stephenson’s Interface after two months. It’s a highly entertaining sci-fi story about contemporary American politics, media culture, and using brain implants to reverse a presidential candidate’s stroke damage. Nearly the entire time I was reading it, I visualized the main character as Robert F. Kennedy, and his VP pick as Kamala Harris.

    For my next book, I’m taking it easy with Jack Reacher #22, The Midnight Line.

    A few years ago, Nintendo remade two classic ‘80s visual novel-style adventure games under the “Famicom Detective Club” banner. This week, they released a wholly new third entry in the series, Emio: The Smiling Man, which got greenlit because of the warm reception that the remakes received. The history of these games is pretty interesting, and I watched this whole video essay on them.

    I bought and played the first remake, The Missing Heir, back around 2022, and found its authentically ancient gameplay archaic and frustrating. For example, in most such games, when questioning someone about a topic, you will reach a point where their answer starts to repeat itself — a sign that you’ve heard all you’re going to hear. In the first two Famicom Detective Club games, this is not the case (pun unintended).

    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: There was a car seen at the time, I heard.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Oh! I just remembered something. It was a black sedan.

    This is such incredibly bad game design, because someone repeating themselves like that is unnatural in the real world, so it appears as a limitation of the game (not having AI to generate different versions of “I dunno”). So of course a player isn’t going to keep pressing, because the suspect’s response isn’t an invitation to keep trying. It’s the equivalent of a brick wall in the game’s interaction model. But no, you’re meant to kick every solid object multiple times in case it comes loose.

    I ended up finishing the game using a walkthrough, and declined to buy the second game, The Girl Who Stands Behind. I’m guessing that Emio, being a new game, will be an improvement in this regard and so I intend to play it someday. But it doesn’t feel right doing that unless I also play the second game (there is no real need, they are not connected).

    Rather than pay $30 USD to frustrate myself, I watched a 7-hour video of someone else playing through the entire game — at 1.5x speed, of course. The first video I found was actually 10 hours long because the player was blundering through some of the aforementioned game design quirks, so I gave up on him and found this better one instead.

    Oh, and there’s another kinda new game that concludes something that started in my childhood, and I finished it this week. That game is of course Return to Monkey Island, which I played on the Switch. If you subscribe to Apple Arcade, you can also play it there. I don’t know how I feel about it; the original two games were the pinnacle of LucasArts’ point-and-click adventures and I probably remember them most fondly of all. The new sequel brings the story to a close, but with a new art style and an acknowledgment that a long time has passed (both in story terms and the authors’ perspectives). There was no way the ending could have satisfied every question and loose end, so they just went for something that felt true enough to its roots, but kinda comes out of nowhere. I was honestly surprised when the credits rolled. But that’s life!

  • Week 32.24

    Week 32.24

    It was Kim’s birthday and to celebrate, we went out for some great yakiniku at a place called Yakiniquest (the name gets points for trying, I guess) where the service was great but the food was incredible. It was probably one of my Top 3 wagyu experiences, along with Matsusaka beef in Kyoto (we walked into an acclaimed, booked-out restaurant and were given a table that had just no-showed), and of course, Kobe beef in the delightful, jazz-adopting city of the same name.

    As an extra surprise, I orchestrated Cameo shoutouts from celebrities on two of the reality shows we unapologetically enjoy bingeing together: Below Deck Down Under, and Gogglebox. I put them on our media server and turned the TV on in the morning, telling her new special episodes had just dropped overnight. She bought it, and it was a fun moment.

    The rest of the week was spent in the tight embrace of the Apple Vision Pro’s dual loop band. One of the things I hoped to get out of being an early adopter of the AVP (both the product and the platform) was a closeness to this new spatial computing form as it germinates, to have a sense of “spatial nativeness” develop in my brain. A sense of its conventions and limits that would help me intuit how to navigate and create new experiences for it, should I ever want to. Which means always being on the lookout for new apps (both programs and applications) and trying them out.

    This week I spent time in a social app called inSpaze, built exclusively for the Vision Pro. As a result of that positioning, and the lack of current competition on the App Store, it’s become the de facto place to hang out and meet other Vision Pro owners to swap stories and recommendations. Try to imagine a cuter, visual Clubhouse, where you spend time in virtual living rooms you can decorate and personalize. In addition to chatting, you can look at photos and 3D models together, listen to music, and play card/board games.

    It’s worth pointing out that you don’t get a normal webcam view of each person, because you’re all wearing Vision Pros. So like all videoconferencing apps on the system, it uses Apple’s Personas: photorealistic avatars based on face scans you do when setting up your Vision Pro, that use its many sensors and cameras to mirror what your real eyes and face are doing.

    If joining a roomful of random strangers from around the world and jumping into whatever conversations they’ve got going on sounds like an introvert’s worst nightmare, that’s because it probably is. I did it anyway, and found it slightly thrilling but also chiller than expected. For one, the use of Personas creates psychological distance; it’s you, but it’s also more a puppet that looks like you. I commented on this and others agreed it made them feel safer.

    What struck me most, though, was how nice and welcoming the community feels, because we’re all early adopter nerds enthused to be sharing this novel experience. It reminds me of the internet when I was a teenager, where the thrill of meeting someone from across the world was pure and untainted by the danger and cynicism that later crept into online spaces. And of course, there’s the fact that a community gated behind a S$5,299 purchase is more likely to be well behaved.

    One nice touch that allows truly cross-border communications is the real-time translation that puts subtitles under each person speaking. In the daytime here, I’ve met a lot of Chinese speakers, and this feature has helped me to follow some conversations I otherwise wouldn’t have.

    It was during one of these afternoon sessions that I met one of the key people behind the app, and we got to talking about their opportunity, business model, and product that got me thinking more about the challenges that smaller developers are facing with this new platform. It’s a well-reported fact by now that AVP sales are low by Apple’s standards. While that’s easily explained by the steep entry price and the challenge of defining a new product category, it still poses a chicken/egg dilemma for creators.

    Solo developers and very small teams doing this on the side can probably justify toying with small apps and selling them for a few dollars, but anyone building something ambitious on the level of a social network or massively multiplayer game, for a total addressable market in the low six-figures — AND having to bankroll it for the next couple of years while Apple works on the cheaper model and second generation Pro — is being asked to take on more risk.

    I have no doubt that Apple will persevere and iterate until this category succeeds, like they always do, so it’s not a question of whether Apple Vision has a future. It just needs to convince developers and their investors to stay faithful, and seed the demand. It’s going to be tricky, and I’d like to see Apple advertising hard for the next 18 months to keep spatial computing visible and galvanize the ecosystem. Even if people can’t find the means to buy the product, they should want to.

    As further proof of the magical, early-internet vibe, I logged into inSpaze early one morning and met a varied group of American users, including a hospital administrator and VR-obsessed truck driver. After many in the room logged off, I found myself speaking with a Canadian man who casually mentioned working with tech podcasting luminary Leo Laporte over a decade ago. As he continued, it dawned on me that he was Ray Maxwell, an 80-year-old polymath whose name I would often hear on Leo’s This Week in Tech (TWiT) network, where he once had his own podcast about aviation and various science topics.

    As a one-time avid listener of TWiT, I can’t overstate how starstruck I felt as Ray told me stories from his expansive career: time spent at McDonnell Aircraft in the 60s, adjacent to where the Gemini space capsules were being built; color science engineering at a company later acquired by Kodak, recommending SF stories by his friend (two-time Hugo award-winning author!?!?) Spider Robinson; and how he’s recently been into capturing spatial video for the Vision Pro.

    I recognize that the early days of any new frontier, team, or relationship are a special thrill that can’t be expected to last, so it’s up to us to maximize and enjoy every moment. Feel free to reach out if you’re getting into spatial computing and want to swap notes!

    ===

    Music

    It must be the peak of the summer release schedule, because so much new music has come out this week.

    The new Glass Animals album is one of those that starts with a banger and keeps the energy going until you’re five songs in and picking up your phone to check the tracklist in disbelief. It’s called I Love You So F*ing Much and it’s soaked through with space beats, vocoders, and addictive melodies.

    I knew they had a cult following before 2020’s Dreamland introduced them to everyone, but I foolishly never got deep into it because the phenomenally successful Heat Waves overshadowed every other song. On hindsight, that tune would have done the same on 99% of albums — it’s the longest charting song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. Now I’m excited to soon experience their two older albums for the first time, ZABA and How to Be a Human Being.

    ROLE MODEL is back and he’s shed his hipster-emo guise for a cowboy hat after breaking up with Emma Chamberlain (I just found out). Kansas Anymore is filled with the same lite and lovable pop earworms that I enjoyed on his last album, just a lil’ bit twangier.

    beabadoobee’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves is finally out, and I’ll admit that while I’ve liked all her past releases, none of them have ever made it into heavy rotation for me. I think this will be the one that does it. Early singles Ever Seen and Take A Bite were strong songs in her usual nostalgic 90s alt-rock style (with charming videos by her boyfriend, Jake Erland), but the newest one Beaches is perfect! In any of the last three decades, Beaches would have been an instant classic. She made it while working with Rick Rubin at his ‘Shangri-La’ studio in Malibu.

    Rick Rubin continues to fascinate me as a kind of guru or shaman of the music industry, somehow wielding enormous influence without any formal musical ability himself. He’s somehow able to hypnotize or imbue artists with the confidence to create their best work, just by sitting with them and giving feedback. He wrote a book about his creative process that some reviews call an essential bible, while others say it’s a collection of trite cliches. I suppose I’ll have to read it for myself soon.

    I also found myself enthusiastically nodding along to Killer Mike’s new album, entitled Songs For Sinners And Saints by “Michael & The Mighty Midnight Revival”. It’s loaded with funky beats, soulful playing, gospel choirs, and some very sharp rapping.

    It’s safe to come out now. The Smashing Pumpkins have finished releasing their three-part concept rock opera, whatever it was called. They’re now back with a proper album that promises the good old guitar-driven songs they were loved for back in the day. It’s called… er, Aghori Mhori Mei, a title that doesn’t inspire any confidence that Billy Corgan is back on his meds. My god, the edgelordism is only accelerating with age! Here are some lyrics chosen at random: “Milk such blood / To fare thee lost from all but way / And awaken the sea I light / Our slumbers save the sleep / Wherefore we climb…” Kerrang has given it 4/5, at least. I kinda enjoyed it on a musical level but wasn’t listening closely. I’ll keep trying.

    Vultures 2 came out and I didn’t even know. I think I tapped through to Kanye’s artist page in Apple Music just on a whim and was surprised to see it at the top. Nobody wants to support him anymore with all the shit he pulls, but he’s probably better off with no one knowing about this album, if my two playthroughs so far are any indication. It’s a shoddy mess, with some songs having the seeds of greatness in them, but just withered and stunted on the vine. North West features on one song again: the awful “Bomb”, which has her repeating level 1 Duolingo Japanese phrases like “ohaiyo gozaimasu, konnichiwa” over a truly busted beat. According to one recent IG post, he’s still ‘updating it daily’ on streaming platforms so maybe check back in a few months to hear the album’s final form. Or don’t.

  • Week 31.24

    Week 31.24

    It’s been about three months since I embarked on a break from full-time employment, but my subconscious seems determined to remind me of what I left behind. I’ve had about a half-dozen dreams about work: either I’m being called back to help fix something “for just a few days” and finding I can’t leave, or I’m being given some “urgent” problem that is really a big overreaction — I must stress none of them were actually based on real situations or people, which is the weirdest part. Each time, I wake up and realize it’s not just that the problems aren’t real, but I haven’t got ANY problems like them at all, and it makes the whole thing worth it despite opportunity costs.

    With Kim’s leg injury improving, my focus shifted from caregiver to caretaker of my own neglected digital life. The first task was reviewing my digital security practices: passwords were reset, new tools deployed, and unlikely edge cases considered and guarded against. Take this as your reminder to please sort this stuff out for yourself! You must get a password manager. Use 2FA and unique passwords for every website, no exceptions. Protect yourself with a Recovery Key for your iCloud account, and add some trusted people as Account Recovery contacts and Legacy Contacts so you/they can access your data in the event of a hack or your demise.

    Next: email migration! Whoo!

    Four years ago, I switched from Gmail to Hey.com, a $99/yr email service that offered an opinionated user experience which meant leaving behind nearly two decades of history for a fresh start. They don’t support you bringing your email archives along. They don’t even let you use your own choice of email app; their web app and hybrid apps are all you get. I wrote two posts about it back then, saying I would probably not continue with my free trial. But I ended up doing it anyway, and for the most part I’ve really enjoyed trying a new approach to such an ancient, core component of online life.

    For one thing, I never got spam in my inbox. Hey unfortunately lets a lot of spam through, but they land in a separate zone called “The Screener”, along with any mail from an unknown address mailing you for the first time. From here, you can either let them in or block them. It’s a small difference, reviewing a bunch of possible spam on a separate page versus seeing them mixed in with all your legit mail, but feels huge because your inbox becomes a serene, protected space. Admittedly, taking care of “The Screener” has become daily work because spam always gets in.

    From what I’ve seen of Gmail in the past four years whenever I log in for a peek, it’s a post-spam apocalyptic wasteland. It looks like Google has just given up on detecting and filtering spam because some data-driven PM decided it won’t hurt their bottom line.

    Since my current Hey subscription ends in September, I looked into whether it might be time to switch again. Three key reasons: Apple Intelligence, performance, and $99/yr is money I don’t need to spend on email right now.

    Apple Intelligence: I’ve never liked the Apple Mail app on iOS. It felt a little underdeveloped for handling the different needs of modern email — without the tagging and search filters of Gmail, or the segregation of personal mail, newsletters, and receipts that Hey.com built their UX around.

    But the new AI-powered Mail app in iOS 18 looks exactly like what I want, and I’ve decided to embrace the power of defaults. I’m bearish on some aspects of generative AI, but this stuff is where it shines. Because Apple Intelligence will be able to understand what emails are about, it can summarize and prioritize messages while sorting them into categories like “Updates” and “Invoices”, so you can tackle them with different mental modes. I’m hoping that AI will also bring spam filtering that really works. Sadly, because Hey.com intentionally won’t support IMAP and SMTP, I can’t use them with Apple’s new app and have no choice but to leave. The Hey manifesto also contains strong wording that suggests they won’t be adding any AI features soon.

    Hey.com’s performance: It was never blazing fast to use their apps because they’re hybrids with seemingly little caching, and it annoyed me to death every time I ‘backed out’ of a link to find that the whole thread of newsletters I was reading had refreshed and I was back at the top again, but lately things have gotten even worse. About a year ago, the Basecamp/Hey founders went on a crusade against cloud hosting services and decided that they could self-host their services and save millions. I have to assume their infrastructure is extremely Western world or US-centric, because speeds have become terrible for me here in Singapore. I’m talking about noticeably slow performance waiting for EMAILS TO LOAD. I got even more confirmation of this when I tried downloading my 1.6GB .mbox archive to move elsewhere: it was capped at 100kb/s and took me over five hours. I can normally download a file of that size in maybe a minute?

    Ninety Nine United States Dollars A Year: Yeah, I can’t justify paying this much to have my email load slowly AND miss out on exciting AI features. I’m already paying for iCloud+ with tons of storage, so it seems logical to just use iCloud Mail as well. Bless Hey though, they let you keep your @hey.com email address for life even if you leave, so I’ll continue using mine and forward everything to my Apple address.

    A note about concentration risk: I’m aware there are risks in letting one company handle your entire digital life. All it takes is one successful hack locking you out of your iCloud account and it’s game over. For that reason, I would recommend NOT using the new Apple Passwords app coming in iOS 18 if you know how to select and use a third-party one. It’s a great default for people who wouldn’t use a password manager otherwise, but if you can have another basket for that egg, do it. Email is particularly important to keep separate, as most of your account passwords can be reset in the event of a hack if you still control your email address.

    But like I said about the Vision Pro and its integration with Apple Services like Arcade and TV+, I’m finding myself getting even deeper into their ecosystem and liking it fine. Where I once subscribed to differentiated, prosumer-serving alternatives to Apple’s ‘good enough’ apps, these days I prefer their simplicity and constraints.

    I switched from Evernote to Apple Notes several years ago and haven’t looked back. Side note: I’ve been on an anti-Notion campaign ever since I saw an unsuccessful rollout in my last team; it’s another overpowered tool for fiddly people who like to overcomplicate their tasks. I’ve used iCloud Calendar since leaving Gmail. I’ve even ported a lot of ancient files from Google Drive and Dropbox to iCloud Drive. And now email, arguably the most crucial service of all.

    “Hang on, Apple Intelligence in the Mail app isn’t out yet and might not be until the end of the year! How will you live until then?”

    Thanks, little imaginary reader, I’m glad you asked! I’m using Spark Mail in the meantime, which I’ve dabbled with in the past using my Gmail account. It’s a mail client with a bunch of smart, AI features (for a price) that are pretty close to what Apple promises. For one, a smart inbox that works quite well at sorting your different mail types, and a feature called “Gatekeeper” that works just like Hey’s “The Screener”. Their asking price is less than Hey’s, but more than Apple’s (free, if you already pay for iCloud+).

    Just a couple of days into using Spark with iCloud Mail, and two things stand out: One, it’s so nice to use a native email app, and two, I’m actually reading my newsletters again. In Hey, newsletters are collected on a a separate, infinite-scroll page called “The Feed” which suffers from an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem. In Spark, received newsletters sit inside the main inbox, just collapsed into a single line. This seems to make a difference. It’s a visible nudge to check them out, and because they load and react instantly, you can actively triage them and unsubscribe/block/delete if you find yourself asking why you ever signed up for one. Where Hey’s endless stream of newsletters can get overwhelming, Spark’s (and I assume Apple’s) approach is more like a physical magazine or newspaper with a finite amount of content, which most people prefer.

    I should have taken my own advice in 2020 — it turns out Spark’s approach was always the better fit for me. I even made visual aids to explain it!

    This diagram above is how HEY is laid out, if you think of each column as a screen. In the Imbox and Paper Trail, each email is a single line item, while they are larger previews in The Feed, which is designed to give a peek into newsletters so you can decide if you want to expand and read them. This doesn’t work for me because I don’t want to keep all of Graniph’s new product announcements, but I do want to see them.

    And this is an illustration of how I’d prefer to handle my email. A single inbox view encompassing important emails and personal letters, newsletters, and updates/receipts/notifications from other services. Spark … is the closest thing I’ve found to this.

    All in, it’s been a week of fiddling with things that seemed to work just fine, but hopefully I’ve simplified and improved them for the future and not introduced more things to maintain.

    ===

    Media Activity

    • Before I could move off Hey Email, I had to finish my backlog of favorite newsletters. One of them was Craig Mod’s “Return to Pachinko Road” series from earlier this year. Over 18 days, he walked 694,942 steps and wrote close to 50,000 words in daily email updates. I read them while waiting those five hours for my mail archives to download. He’s such a good writer, and I can’t recommend enough that you sign up for his newsletters and/or membership if you can spare the money (regretfully, I can’t right now as a member of the unemployed class).
    • MUBI’s collection of films by Abbas Kiarostami is leaving the service over the next couple of weeks, so I prioritized watching them, starting with the Palme d’Or-winning Taste of Cherry (1997). God, I was not prepared for it on a Monday afternoon and fell to pieces during the old man’s monologue in the final third. Fortunately, I watched it on the TV because I don’t think Vision Pros have an IP rating. 5 stars.
    • Next was Through the Olive Trees (1994) which was very charming — the Iranian actors’ performances are fantastic, and perfectly naturalistic in keeping with the cinematography. I initially score this a 4, but it’s now a 4.5-star film for me.
    • The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) shares some landscapes and in-car camera angles with Taste of Cherry, but where the latter is heavy with life’s troubles, this one centers hope and rebellion against the narratives we find ourselves in. One could even read it as an anti-work parable: forced on a business trip of indefinite length, neglecting his family’s pleas to return home for a funeral, summoned to give gravely inconvenient (hur hur) updates to his boss at all hours, a workaholic asshole learns to relax, enjoy the local milk, and finally give his assignment the finger. 4.5 stars.
    • Fresh off Presumed Innocent, we were looking for another legal thriller to watch and discovered neither of us had seen The Firm (1993) starring Tom Cruise. Welp, it turns out there are no courtroom scenes in the film at all, and he’s a tax lawyer. Still, a very enjoyable 3.5 stars.
    • The Paris Olympics are on, and despite not caring much for sports I’ve found myself unable to resist watching competition on a global scale. Mostly tennis, but also archery, shooting, diving, gymnastics, and some athletics.