sangsara.net

Tag: iPad

  • Week 44.25

    Week 44.25

    I saw a doctor about last week’s vertigo episode, and they concurred with my internet research that it was most likely a case of BPPV. Apparently, it really does “just happen” to anyone and they see quite a few cases of it. I was told to watch my salt intake and blood pressure, and see if the vertigo occurs “too often”, which might indicate a need for further scans.

    The doctor was surprised when I explained that we’d performed the Epley maneuver at home with a YouTube video, and said that it was probably what they’d be doing for me now if I’d still had symptoms. I didn’t explain that it had essentially been an AI consultation, because I didn’t want to get lectured about how they can be wrong. Not saying it’s a good idea, but it helped until I could get an appointment with a real doctor.

    After the doctor’s visit, I decided to have breakfast at Starbucks, a thing I used to do too often when I went in to the office. But in light of the advice I’d just been given about eating less sodium and watching my blood pressure, I opted for an egg white wrap instead of the rosemary chicken croissant that I really wanted, and it was unsatisfying. Is that what I have to look forward to now in old age? Just healthy compromises and remembering the good old days of eating crap?

    As if eating in revenge, we had a huge dinner with Alex at a place called “La Vache!” the following night. They run a simple concept: S$68/person for a salad, ribeye steak, and unlimited French fries. Cocktails are S$26 and pretty substantial. There are also desserts if you have room, including gelato from Messina down the road. Reader, I had a lot of fries and thereby a lot of sodium. So much so I’ve spent the rest of the week trying to up my water intake to make up for it.

    ===

    The MOFT brand iPhone case I got a few weeks ago has been impressing me so much with its soft material and quality construction that I blinked and found that I’ve now bought more products in their MagSafe-compatible lineup.

    The Snap Phone Tripod Wallet folds out into an adjustable stand that could be useful for anyone needing to shoot photos, make video calls, or watch media handsfree. Like I said, I’m barely conscious of why/how I bought these things, because that doesn’t describe me. I suppose I’ll just have to become a content creator then! It also holds up to 2 cards, although in hindsight I should have gone with the thinner version that doesn’t.

    That’s because a few days later, I also ordered their Snap Field Wallet which holds 8 cards and even some folded bills, coins, and a SIM card tool. There’s a version of this that includes a built-in stand, but I decided against it since I already have the “tripod” for stand-related needs.

    Happily, this shopping spree concludes my search for a new minimal wallet to replace my worn and aging Bellroy. Every bearable option I’ve found has been over S$120, and because carrying a wallet is such an antiquated concept for me these days with everything on the phone, I wasn’t thrilled to spend the money. But the MOFT Field Wallet’s low price and novel origami design made for an easier and less risky decision. It’ll mainly stay in my bag, but the option of attaching via MagSafe is a nice bonus.

    ===

    I haven’t seen many films lately, so this week was a corrective period. I saw a Korean arthouse film on MUBI that I don’t regret but can’t recommend, called Woman Is the Future of Man (2004), and a more mainstream Korean thriller called The Old Woman With the Knife (2025). The titular trifecta was pure coincidence, but I also saw the new Keira Knightley vehicle, The Woman in Cabin 10 (2025). None of the above are really worth your limited time on Earth, if we’re being honest.

    Usually, whenever a three-hour film pops up in the queue, I push it down to the bottom. But this time when I saw Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) was leaving Netflix, it seemed like a sign to just sit down and do it. I can’t believe I waited so long though, because it’s something of a masterpiece despite the gangland tropes, and I don’t normally even like these kind of stories.

    I subscribed to Disney+ Premium to watch Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) in 3D on the Vision Pro, another three-hour movie. While the story isn’t worth the time, the immersive experience and quirky filmmaking tech was absolutely worth my money. My Letterboxd review: “The story of a Saturday morning cartoon with the technical complexity and execution of a space mission. Big failure on the part of our entire species that we can’t produce a director who can do both parts equally well. Not a film I want to see again.”

    As an example of how this is a film that you can’t really watch traditionally, it constantly switches between 24fps and 48fps shots, often within a single scene. It feels like a videogame, where you’re watching a cinematic cutscene and then it suddenly transitions into ultra-smooth gameplay. The 3D also pops in HDR clarity on the Vision Pro, where it would be dimmer on an IMAX screen. Sitting at home with Disney+ in a headset is oddly the definitive way to experience James Cameron’s shallow deep sea epic, which probably wasn’t what he envisioned.

    I swore I wouldn’t read or watch any of the Dan Brown/Robert Langdon stories, but it’s been almost 20 years so I put The Da Vinci Code (2006, only 149 mins) on one night and it wasn’t terrible. It helps that it’s a Ron Howard film, and I think I might actually see the next two films, Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016), before they leave Netflix. There was also some positive press for the new Dan Brown book in this series, The Secret of Secrets, so I’ve added it to my reading list. Younger me would be so disappointed.

    ===

    It wasn’t just me that visited the doctor this week — I brought my 2021 iPad Pro (M1) down to the Apple Store over the weekend. When the Apple Genius came up to me and asked, “So what’s wrong with your iPad?”, I answered “It‘s just old.” For a while now, I’ve suspected it of falling short of Apple’s promised “all-day battery life”, but sending it in for a replacement felt like such a hassle that I kept putting it off.

    Because this iPad model doesn’t report battery health in Settings, I figured it was easily below 80% capacity, and was prepared to pay maybe $120–150 for a new battery. So they ran their diagnostics app on it, and told me it’s actually at 86%. Huh. That’s pretty good for 4.5 years! I asked how much it would cost to replace anyway, and was told just shy of S$200, but it would be a full unit swap rather than just a new battery.

    If the battery health had been 70%, I would probably have paid the money and then had to use this for at least another two years. But at 86%, I can probably make this work for another year and then see what the new models look like. So by building a product that actually ages well, Apple has… increased the likelihood of me upgrading even sooner. That’s the 4D chess game that Tim Cook plays, folks.

  • Week 43.25

    Week 43.25

    Vertigo (1958) is a great film, because Hitchcock was a master. It’s also the title of a mediocre stadium rock song, because I love hating on U2.

    Unfortunately, vertigo is also something I experienced for the first time this week — I’m fairly sure I jinxed myself at some point earlier this year by saying out loud “I don’t have any problems”. It hit me on Friday night in the form of extreme dizziness and nausea, and even the walk to bed to sleep it off was difficult without support. It got better the next morning with the help of something called the Epley Maneuver, which I found online.

    Asking around, I discovered that this is a more common human experience than you’d think, with several people I know having suffered episodes. Some of them had dizziness lasting days, and yet it’s strangely not discussed like, all the time? From what I can tell, it’s probably something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), where calcium deposits in your inner ear become dislodged and move around, screwing with your balance. I’ll be seeing a doctor next week to confirm it, but in any case there’s no known cure and it might keep happening for the rest of my life. It’s crazy that so many are just quietly living with this.

    Have I been self-diagnosing with the help of AI? Maybe? I did just sign up for Claude Pro after all, which I’ve mentioned finding more agreeable than ChatGPT. I made vibe-coded two little apps before being laid low: a primitive prototype of my long-gestating stealth game, Cat Creeper, and a tool for my book club to figure out how many chapters of any given book we should read in the coming week. That one is called Book Splitter, and I offer it here for any book clubs out there with a similar need to figure out stopping points conveniently near chapter breaks.

    It’s been a unique experience using Claude’s impressive capabilities alongside reading Asimov’s I, Robot, which foresaw many of our modern discourse around AI safety, and The Optimist at the same time, which has finally begun to chronicle some of Sam Altman’s questionable and unethical moves both at OpenAI and in his private life. The sections detailing his gaslighty, ungenerous, and cruel interactions with his sister Annie ironically reminded me of reading about Steve Jobs’s treatment of his daughter Lisa, in her memoir Small Fry.

    I just passed the part where Dario Amodei and other employees left to start Anthropic. Just as I try to avoid Meta and Google products because of their comparatively weaker stance on privacy versus Apple, it makes sense that some prefer Anthropic over OpenAI for a more cautious approach to AI.

    ===

    My mother-in-law stayed with us this week, which meant getting the newspaper in for her because that’s how some people still get their news. I was shocked to see how thin the physical Straits Times is these days — almost completely devoid of advertising, and on the whole maybe having 20% of the heft I remember from the 90s. It’s also S$1.10 now, up from the 50 to 80 cents I thought it was. Still, it was kinda nice (nostalgic) to sit at the dining table and read the paper in the morning.

    It was also the week where my favorite retro-game-hunting IRL streamer, 4amlaundry, went on a 5-day trip to Kansai, checking out thrift stores and exploring Osaka and Nara. I didn’t want to miss watching it live, so I tried explaining the whole concept of streamers to said mother-in-law, and got her to watch him with me for awhile on the TV, the whole time silently praying that he wouldn’t go look at the display cases of half-naked anime figurines that he sometimes checks out in those stores.

    Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and instead we watched him walk down countryside roads, eat at chain restaurants, and get knocked down by the aggressive deer in Nara. All of that made for some good conversation, so if you get the chance to introduce an elder to Twitch, it’s not the worst idea if you can avoid the NSFW aspects.

    Speaking of shows that you would hope won’t be awkward to watch with your parents or in-laws BUT ACTUALLY ARE, add the latest season of The Diplomat to the list. There’s a lot of cursing (I kinda expected that), and some sex scenes that maybe the producers thought were hot and their audience wanted, but are so unnecessary and desperate that they come across as unintentional comedy. Apart from that, it’s still a fun series that leans into unrealistic political drama, with some unexpectedly good writing (for a Netflix show). Just watch it on your own.

    ===

    I somehow forgot to mention the slate of new Apple products announced last week: M5-powered iPad Pros, a 14” basic MacBook Pro, and a spec-bumped Apple Vision Pro. The product lineup is designed to lead you to the conclusion that you should buy everything, because how do you choose between an 11” and 13” iPad Pro, and a 14” MacBook Pro?

    The 11” iPad size is portable for couch use, but the 13” becomes an advanced desk computer for creative work when paired with the Magic Keyboard and Pencil Pro. But if you’re going to be using it while deskbound, why not get a MacBook Pro with 24 hours of battery life (versus just 10 on the iPad), and the possibility of running local AI models and all kinds of other software that isn’t allowed on iPad?

    Making things harder is the fact that a 13” iPad Pro with accessories costs more than an “equivalent” 14” MacBook Pro, and they’re too costly for an average user like me to justify buying both. So the final decision was to hold out a little longer with my current M1-generation gear, and see what upgrades the 13” iPad Air gets next year — hopefully an M4 or M5 processor, ProMotion, and the aluminum Magic Keyboard currently exclusive to iPad Pro models.

    But bringing the M5 to the Apple Vision Pro makes it a better system to use and own for the next two years, while we wait for the next big leap forward in miniaturization. However as a casual user who only clocks a few hours a week, I couldn’t see myself upgrading for a faster chip alone. The more compelling improvement is a new “Dual Knit Band” that comes as standard, which sorta combines the previous Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band into one much-improved design.

    The best part is that this new band is also available as a standalone accessory, so I ordered one immediately for my first-gen AVP. It’s simply a marvel of engineering and feels incredibly premium. The build quality is off the charts, and the Fit Dial they’ve created to independently adjust both the back and top straps might be the most Apple-y thing they’ve shipped on an accessory since the Stainless Link Bracelet for the original Apple Watch.

    Thanks to this more comfortable and ergonomic band, I’d planned to spend more time with the AVP this week, until the vertigo and unusual weekly routine got in the way. Not gonna lie, my first thought during the vertigo attack, after “What if this never goes away and I’m disabled for life?” was “Does this mean I can’t use the Vision Pro anymore?”

  • Week 33.25

    Week 33.25

    • I had some ice cream at last, but no beers yet. Maybe I’ll stretch this sobriety a little longer. Alcohol is, after all, just a poison worth doing socially but not so much alone.
    • But man, this illness. Being sick for three consecutive weeks was not on my bingo card for the year. I should say illnesses, because we saw a doctor early in the week and she said (and these are the words every INTJ raised on WebMD loves to hear), “I think you’ve correctly diagnosed yourself — this seems like two separate illnesses one after the other, rather than a viral infection that became a bacterial one.” So, just bad luck and weak immunity on my part.
    • Fortunately, it’s just about over. Only a mild cough remains for both of us, but still bad enough that we slept in separate rooms for most of the week. It wasn’t a perfect solution; we still woke ourselves up coughing in the middle of each night.
    • I’m reminded at such times to stop whining and be grateful for minor health issues. Our part-time cleaner just returned from a rather invasive surgery to remove two large fibroids growing on her uterus. It’s been a multi-month ordeal navigating hospitals and insurance companies. I tried to help with some internet research and reassurance, and was glad to see her back to (light) work this week.
    • To get me nutritionally through the sick days, I bought quite a few bananas and unlocked a new breakfast item: peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The PB acts like a glue that keeps the slices from falling out. Gastro engineering! It’s basically a fat handheld dessert in the morning, and maybe I could kick it up a notch with whipped cream?
    • On the video gaming front, I managed to start Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation on the Switch. I’ve been wanting to get into this for several years — recreating the small countryside childhood I never had. It reminds me of Attack of the Friday Monsters! on the 3DS, not surprising since they were both designed by Kaz Ayabe. He must really miss his summer holidays because he’s also the director of Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid, which is pretty much the same concept: catching bugs, fishing, exploring nature, making friends. I’ve err… also bought that game, but might not get to it this year.
    • Guiltily, I’m actually kinda dying to play another game that just came out, despite just starting on this one. Damn my infernal backlog! That game is Tiny Bookshop, an indie title that’s shot to the top of the eShop charts, beating Nintendo’s own Super Mario Party Jamboree! It is what it sounds like, a cozy game where you manage a tiny mobile bookshop. You decorate it, stock titles, and recommend books to passing townsfolk. I can’t believe no one made this game sooner because the premise is obviously gold. Moreover, it appears to have some beautiful locations for you to set up shop in, in the vein of ‘lo-fi beats YouTube video scenery’, so I assume you can just kind of chill in the game and listen to the waves while admiring your little caravan.
    • Ballard on Amazon Prime Video turned out to be a perfectly fine series on its own, with a different tone and a kookier cast than the mainline Bosch show that it’s spun off from. I can’t complain, especially because Titus Welliver shows up now and then to reinforce ties. I don’t know how old Renee Ballard is supposed to be though. She’s living with her grandmother, who looks 70 at most, but Maggie Q is 46.
    • We started on season 2 of Poker Face and I’m loving it. I would have been fine if they’d kept the same episodic format of Charlie on the run and solving crimes from 30 minutes in for the entire show, but they’ve decided to switch things up a bit. Still works. Still a brilliant platform for insane and creative stories with a rotating list of guest stars: John Mulaney, Giancarlo Esposito, Rhea Perlman, Katie Holmes?!
    • I installed the new beta OSes on my iPad Pro and Apple TV 4K and can report they are solid enough at this point. Not enough to risk my iPhone or Mac, though. The Liquid Glass effect is still a little confused. Sometimes a button will be darkened to stand out against what’s behind it, but upon being clicked, it flashes and changes to the brighter style to match some new frosted glass items that appear. It just seems to have to morph and adapt a little too much to be used for UI items that ought to be stable. But maybe that way of thinking is just old fashioned now.
    • Next to be updated will be my Vision Pro. I’m really curious how the glass elements will react to light and real world environments as you move them around in space. My Persona is also horribly outdated and I’m feeling the peer pressure to upgrade to the new, detailed ones — nearly everyone in my book club already has a proper face on and mine still looks like the Lawnmower Man.

    ChatGPT’s closing words for the week: Funny how even illness turns into iteration — new foods, new games, new software skins. Maybe we’re all just beta versions trying to get stable.

  • Week 28.25

    Week 28.25

    • Despite a brief setback, we ended up going to Bangkok for a few days as planned.
    • After spending hours in traffic the last time, I stayed within a smaller radius this time and walked a bit more. There wasn’t any agenda, really; Kim had some things to do and I wanted a change of scenery.
    • There was a jam coming in from the airport, of course, but we were thankfully in a very comfortable ride provided by the hotel. Ours was one of many cars squeezing down the narrow side lanes on the freeway — those buffer zones you don’t normally think cars should (or could) be using. Other cars in the ‘proper lanes’ skooch over to make way for this to happen, and it struck me as a neat metaphor for designing permissive, flexible systems with a normal mode but hiding ample bandwidth to accommodate emergencies.
    • Amidst more news of layoffs and economic rockiness, I think using AI in design (or most things, maybe) should be the side lane to ‘proper lanes’ of humans doing work, but we’re trying to do the opposite. Someone showed me a new customer research platform called GetWhy, where AI personalities conduct interviews over video calls with people, and synthesize some manner of insights automatically. They call it “human depth at survey speed”, which I knew AI would eventually enable: a merging of qualitative methods with quantitative scale. I saw it coming a couple of years ago but didn’t have the strength to look at it directly and figure out the pros and cons. At a gut level, I think it’s a shame that companies will now be able to insert another artificial layer between the people working on services and the people they’re supposed to be serving (or, more cynically, extracting profit from).
    • Anyway back to Bangkok. I saw three films to pass free time in the afternoons. Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning for a second time; Jurassic World Rebirth, which was so terrible and completely lacking in the magic of the original film, the lasting fumes of which this franchise is still somehow able to sustain itself on; and James Gunn’s Superman, which I accidentally saw in Thai, without subtitles. I decided to sit through the whole thing and get by on just the visual language of it, and I think the experiment went okay! I probably couldn’t watch Tenet (2020) this way, though. 3/5 stars with the above qualification.
    • On Brian’s suggestion, I visited the Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) which is a government office in a historic postal service building, mostly notable for its extensive resource library. You have to be a member to enter, although day passes are available for about S$4. It was a good way to pass a couple of hours, and I flipped through some interesting books that are now on my Amazon wishlist.
    • One of them was For the Love of Peanuts, by Elizabeth Anne Hartman, which covers the Peanuts Global Artist Collective — a project where seven artists reimagined Schulz’s characters through public art and exhibitions. There’s more information and photos through the link above. I was coincidentally thinking about learning to draw Snoopy recently, the “correct” way, and seeing this book was such a jolt to my narrow way of thinking — it had simply never occurred to me that I was free to recreate Snoopy however I wanted. Lots of new synapses to build here.
    • At the last minute, I decided not to bring my Switch 2 and it was fine. I always imagine hours of downtime on vacation where I might actually want to play a game, but it never happens. I did use my iPad Pro and am going through a sort of second wave of love for it. I recently got a third-party Smart Folio-type case, for just $12 off Amazon, which makes it much thinner and lighter than Apple’s Magic Keyboard case. The original Smart Cover (launched with iPad 2) is/was such a brilliant and minimal design, giving the device a perfect midpoint between versatility and portability, and having it again with this case is great for traveling.
    • It’s worth mentioning that each night back at the hotel I’d get into a trashy reality tv cable channel dedicated to “courtroom cases”. The quote marks are because I don’t know if you’d call these actual legal courts (but with the US, who knows?), but the two series I saw were awful and entertaining. Paternity Court sees couples come in and argue about their children, usually born on the side with another man or woman, culminating in the results of a DNA test revealing whether the man really is their father. Divorce Court is better, because you get other sorts of relationship issues being worked out, and the judges are sassier and give out strong advice. The name is a misnomer; some of these couples aren’t even married or looking for a divorce, they’re just airing their shit on TV. You can watch full episodes on their YouTube channel.
    • On the flight home, I caught Doctor-X: The Movie Final (2024), the supposed concluding chapter to the long-running Japanese medical drama that’s so bad I fell in love with it. Back in February, I spent an absurdly cost-inefficient chunk of my Tokyo trip watching Seasons 4 and 5 on local Netflix. Seasons 6 and 7 don’t have English subs, so I don’t know when I’ll get to see them — unlike Superman, this is too important to risk rawdogging in a foreign language.
      The movie… well, they went for higher stakes: explosions, AI, helicopters, the works. But that also meant less of the dumb fun and weird humor that makes the regular show a cult favorite. Or maybe not so cult at all — maybe it’s unironically loved in Japan. I kinda hope so.
  • Week 24.25

    Week 24.25

    • My Switch 2 finally arrived on Monday, praise be. It turned out to be an imported European unit, so it has the right kind of power plugs, but the included download code for Mario Kart World would only work with an EU eShop account. It didn’t take long to make one, but it’s yet another needless fragmentation of my digital footprint.
    • It’s a fantastic improvement on the original Switch. It feels more solidly built, and the magnetic Joy-Cons don’t creak and give as much when supporting the console’s weight. The screen is enormous but since the original wasn’t exactly pocketable anyway, who cares? It seems powerful enough to keep up with game requirements for easily another five years. The only regression is battery life, which they’ll surely fix with a new model two years from now.
    • I have yet to play anything on it that graphically pushes into PS5 territory with ray tracing and photorealism; although running Mario Kart World at 60fps in 4K is definitely not something the old Switch could do. That same smoothness extends to Splatoon 3, which got a Switch 2 upgrade patch on Thursday for the franchise’s 10th anniversary, and it feels amazingly fast and fluid on the new hardware. The once painful load times have been reduced to almost nothing, which is nearly worth the price of admission all by itself. At the very least, reviewers agree it’s more powerful than a Steam Deck.
    • Bert was back in town on a last-minute trip, so we met up with some of the old gang for beers and the kind of talk that middle-aged people will get up to if you let them: aging parents, how everything was much better before, and how we’d like to retire voluntarily before AI forces us to. Jussi was once again unable to make it, but he had the acceptable reason of being out of the country.
    • It was WWDC week, and with the comprehensive OS updates that were announced, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that every Apple product experience will be changing this fall. I’ve had several conversations about the new cross-platform design language system they unveiled, which doesn’t have a name but is anchored by a new digital material called Liquid Glass, so people have just been calling it that. I wrote last week that I hoped the new look wouldn’t come with regressions in usability, specifically thinking about legibility and interaction clarity, but those are exactly the issues that everyone has been pointing out in the first developer beta. I’m hopeful that they’ll be able to moderate some of the more extreme decisions before the launch, but there’s no turning back. Like it or not, this is just how things are going to be for us users. What are you going to do, move to Android?
    • While talking to Michael again, one of us offered that Liquid Glass is simply a flex. It’s Apple building a visible moat with their superior silicon. Every iPhone, iPad, and Mac made in the last five years possesses power-efficient cycles to spare, which can’t be said of Android devices, save for a minority of the highest-end flagship phones. So when you look over someone’s shoulder in public and see morphing glass buttons accurately refracting the light coming off other elements on their screen at 60 to 120 fps, you’re looking at the digital equivalent of fine stitched leather. Luxury pixels. Veblen UI. Android manufacturers can’t follow Apple down this road without bifurcating the experience into cheap and premium versions, or forcing tradeoffs like reduced battery life and jankier animation.
    • The iPad got the most extreme makeover of all the platforms, and I’m a mixture of relieved, disappointed, and excited. Relieved that they’ve given up on trying to define some new paradigm for managing multiple apps on a screen; turns out the answer is just the same overlapping windows we’ve had since the first Mac. Mildly disappointed that if they couldn’t crack it after some 15 years, then maybe there just isn’t a better way. The universe might be more constrained than we’d hoped. And excited that the iPad will now be a truer laptop replacement for the majority of people, and with that increase in adoption perhaps we’ll get developers excited to build new kinds of experiences for it.
    Screenshot from Apple.com
    • As a Vision Pro owner, I can’t wait for the improved Personas, sharing virtual spaces with people nearby, and the new “spatial scene” rendering from 2D photos. I’ve already spoken to some people in inSpaze who are rocking the new Personas, and they look 10x better and more realistic than the old ones. In fact, it’s given rise to a weird social dilemma that can only exist in this age. I’ve known these people for a while and we’ve talked with each other quite a bit, but suddenly overnight, their faces have changed and it feels like I’m meeting them for the first time — or realizing I never really had. One person in the group chat looked younger now that his Persona got more accurate. Another person looked older and more intense than his previous Pixar-esque Persona suggested he was. They mentioned feeling slightly uncomfortable with how realistically they’re now presenting — the opposite of the safety that I described back in August last year: “the use of Personas creates psychological distance; it’s you, but it’s also more a puppet that looks like you.” Well, now it’s just your real face for everyone to see. I apologize in advance.

    I’ll leave you with two videos from Pulp, whose comeback album More continues to surprise me by being actually good, as if the band hadn’t gone anywhere for the last two decades. The first single has a great video (above) that uses generative AI in the best way possible. The second video below is a live performance of an old favorite, one of many appearances they’ve been making in support of the new stuff.

  • Fixing an iOS/iPhone issue where apps don’t save photos with the original date and time metadata

    How to solve an iOS/iPhone bug that prevents third-party editing apps (e.g. Lightroom, VSCO, AgBr) from retaining the date/time metadata from the original photos when saving new edited files

    I’ve tried to pack the right terms in the title and heading above in the hopes that you’ll find this page if you have the same problem that I did.

    For several years, edited photos saved from apps like VSCO wound up with the “current” date and time as the “capture time” on my iPhone, meaning that they don’t sort chronologically alongside the original photos when viewing the Photo Library. I noticed with one app that when I made edits on my iPad, it worked as expected, i.e. the original capture time was retained, but mistakenly believed it was a bug in that specific app that only surfaced in their iPhone version.

    Last week I discovered this behavior in the new AgBr app, and got to emailing with the developers. In that process, I realized it was a problem with my iPhone, and most likely down to a bug in iOS rather than the photo editing apps.

    Without further ado, the solution is to “Reset All Settings” in your iPhone’s Settings app (under General → Transfer or Reset iPhone). This will undo many of your longstanding settings, such as known WiFi networks and cards in your Apple Wallet. It’s a pain in the ass, but much better than wiping the entire phone and starting over from scratch, which is what I thought I would have to do.

    I have no idea when I picked up this problem, but it’s a deep-seated one that has followed me across several iPhones, resurfacing with each migration and “restore from iCloud backup”.

    Funnily enough, I chanced upon the solution while whining about this problem to Michael, and while I was celebrating with way too much joy than fixing a computer problem should give someone, he pointed out that just a few weeks earlier he had also solved a longstanding problem with Safari on his Mac while telling me about it. I think we’ve figured out a winning formula.

    Summary

    Issue Description: Edited photos saved from third-party editing apps on iOS/iPhone lose the original date/time metadata, resulting in incorrect chronological order in the Photo Library.

    Cause: Likely a bug in iOS.

    Solution: Reset All Settings in the iPhone’s Settings app (under General → Transfer or Reset iPhone), though it will reset some settings.

  • Week 8.25

    Week 8.25

    • I made myself a spot in the apartment to sit and rot the hours away. This was achieved by moving the comfiest chair over to the dining table and plugging in my iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard into power. From here, I can also watch the TV. The plan was to spend all of Monday sitting here and finally getting some rest from going out every day and walking over 10,000 steps, which has driven my Apple Health metrics up by 2x for the past two weeks.
    • I think my body has been surprised/broken by this sudden surge in activity. It doesn’t help that the bed here isn’t the best, so the morning backaches haven’t been fun.
    • But I ended up going out on Monday after all, because a day spent home is a day I’m not eating curry. I noticed a line for Alba Curry while in Akihabara last week, and made my way to a nearby branch of theirs for my third plate of curry rice in as many days. They’re a Kanazawa-style curry joint, but as far as I know, that doesn’t necessitate the use of baseball references? They have a one-with-everything menu item like Go Go Curry’s “Grand Slam”, except theirs is called the “Home Run”. It comes with a single pork katsu, a fried egg, two sausages, and a fried prawn. The fried egg with a runny yolk was a nice touch, but sadly, the rest of it was average. The curry was a little stodgy and lacked the punch of flavor I was looking for.
    • I had better luck with Hinoya Curry, a favorite of recent years that I’ve never had the chance to eat more than once a trip. Unlike the others, it actually has a little heat while managing a fair amount of fruit-like sweetness. I ordered a plate with only a raw egg, vegetables, and two sausages because I didn’t understand the ordering system and thought it would include a pork cutlet. No matter, it was very good as it was, and now I have an excuse for one more visit before I leave.
    • On Tuesday, I made my way out to MOMAT: the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, a place whose existence I was only alerted to when Michael blogged about his visit last year. It was a particularly bright and sunny morning, which made for a nice visit given its proximity to the Imperial Palace’s moat and picturesque grounds. The museum has a massive collection of over 13,000 works, but only displays about 200 at a time with bi-annual rotations. I like this approach much better than the one taken by Singapore’s National Gallery.
    • In any case, this moment in time seems to be a sort of dead zone for the big museums. Many are preparing for new exhibitions that only begin in March, which is a shame but not a blow because what’s on now is still just barely manageable with the time I have.
    • On the way back, I stopped by Kitte Marunouchi and spotted the Qoobo for sale at the “Good Design Store Tokyo by Nohara”. I first saw this adorable, tail-wagging robot/cushion online many years ago and immediately wanted one, but was resigned to it being an only-in-Japan product. It’s now available internationally if you look hard enough, albeit with a significant markup. After doing the girl math, buying it here was too good a deal to pass up (about S$150), so I guess I’ve found the souvenir gadget I’ve been looking for.
    • Last week, I complained about us tourists overcrowding the city, but it’s everyone; Tokyo is simply up to its observation decks with people. At several points while out and about, I’ve wanted to stop in somewhere for a coffee break but had to hit up multiple cafes to find a free table. Even after 2 p.m., when you’d expect the office crowd to be back at their desks, many seem parked in cafes to work remotely. I saw people doing video calls and some looked set up there for the long haul with stationery, chargers, and other accessories strewn about to make personal workspaces.
    • In the vicinity of MOMAT, I discovered the JCII (Japan Camera Industry Institute) Camera Museum, a small basement space packed with photographic history: hundreds of vintage cameras including the iconic Leica I Model A, which turns 100 this year. Ironically, the museum prohibits any photography of the space or its exhibits. For a mere ¥300 entry fee, I got an hour’s entertainment poring over weird and rare designs — on the whole, the majority of industry players are copycats and follow innovative leaders, quite like how smartphone hardware and software today have converged on similar designs. Virtually every camera I’ve ever owned, or at least some cousin of it, was in this priceless collection.
    • My body has really had enough after all. Three weeks of walking and stair-climbing amidst the coughing masses, drastic temperature changes, and drier air than it’s used to has led to me being mildly ill now. That has regrettably meant calling off some plans, but my new goal for the rest of my time here is to recuperate at home while eating 7-Eleven food and bingeing Doctor-X: Surgeon Michiko Daimon on Netflix. I mentioned this admittedly cheesy but comforting TV show back in 2023, and at that time, a few seasons were still available for watching in Singapore. Today, the show isn’t on any local service, but being geographically in Japan means I can pick up where I left off on Netflix, in the middle of Season 3 (of 7).
    • Rereading that old post, it seems that I experience the same renewed excitement for gaming, that I mentioned last week, every time I come here. I still think this atmosphere hinges on the large presence and floor space given to physical game retail, but this may not last much longer with digital sales on the rise everywhere. Of course, one can also attribute this cultural presence to the relative outsize of the game economy here (including mobile games).
    • One of the games I saw in a box in a store was Shinjuku Soumei, a visual novel I’d seen on the Nintendo eShop before but wasn’t enticed by. I decided to buy and at least start on it while here, and I’ve just finished “playing” it through while resting at home (it’s not very interactive at all, just a click-and-read VN).
    • I mentioned PARANORMASIGHT last week, and while I won’t start playing it until I’m safely home, I did go out to visit one of the Sumida landmarks featured in this creepy supernatural game: Kinshibori Park. It’s not much to look at but there’s a statue of a famous kappa in one corner, one of the “Seven Wonders of Honjo” which the game seems to be based on.
    • By the way, I’m half certain we saw the actress who plays Doctor-X on the streets of Ryogoku a couple of weeks ago. There wasn’t anyone else around, so I couldn’t see from others’ reactions if it really was her. It sure looked like her to me, though, so I’m sticking with that story.
  • 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.