This may have been the first time that an Apple event week coincided with my birthday week. Expectations of having a present to buy myself were high, but when it turned out that only the iPad Pro in 12.9” size would be getting the mini-LED display technology I’d been waiting for, and that the damned thing would cost me about S$3,000 in all (with AppleCare+, Pencil, and Magic Keyboard), I began to have second thoughts. After a little deliberation and rationalizing, I ordered myself last year’s iPad Air as a good enough substitute. Normally, you’d expect to receive it in a day or two, but perhaps because of Covid, its ETA was next week instead.
And then on the weekend, I started to doubt the wisdom of not buying the latest and greatest, because I knew it would grow to become a nagging dissatisfaction. It would only cost an additional S$360 to go from a 256GB WiFi iPad Air to a 256GB WiFi iPad Pro 11”. That money pays for (roughly in descending order of importance to me): a smoother and brighter ProMotion display; the M1 chip for more future-proof performance; Face ID; four speakers instead of two; LIDAR and additional cameras, including the new front-facing one with Center Stage; supposedly “studio-quality” microphones; and Thunderbolt/USB4 compatibility. Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it? A pity about not having mini-LED on the 11”, but it’s clearly a better device regardless. So I’ve canceled the iPad Air and will have to wait at least another month for the Pro to go on sale.
The other nagging thought I had was that maybe some new features in iPadOS 15 this year will be exclusive to M1-bearing iPads. These iPads have 8/16GB of RAM for the first time (actually listed on Apple’s site!), which makes them the hardware equal of the M1 MacBooks. What if… developers of Mac apps could elect to publish quick iPad versions? I don’t have a Mac of my own anymore, and a way to occasionally manage and transfer files to hardware devices like my Kobo would be welcome, so any app interoperability would be amazing. What if you could run an iPad over two displays for double the multitasking? If any of this comes to pass but leaves the iPad Air out, I wouldn’t even be able to look at it, let alone use it for the next three years.
TL;DR: the iPad Air is great and more than enough to get stuff done, but if you want slightly nicer bits, you might want to pay more for the 11” Pro. And I’ve decided that I am the type of idiot who would wallow in eternal regret if he didn’t spring for the nice bits.
Because it’s a birthday month, the wanton overeating continued. Cake, pizza, cocktails, wagyu beef bourguignon, a lavish slab of kueh salat from a Michelin-starred restaurant, and a lovely bit of smoked pork collar at a wedding lunch I had the privilege to attend. Tonight, we’re going out for more Italian. There’s yakiniku scheduled in a few days. It’s irresponsible but no one has stepped in to stop me.
I’ve slowed down on Star Trek: Legends, mostly because it’s so bug ridden I think I’m better off waiting for another update before continuing.
I enjoyed some of Marvel’s Runaways comic series a few years back, but didn’t know it was turned into a TV show for Hulu. Three seasons of it are now available on our local Disney+ and it’s very bingeable, as we found out this weekend. The less you know going in, the better. Most synopses give away too much in the first sentence alone.
A few weeks ago, HEY.com started selling t-shirts with their logo on them. Knowing that they’re really ads for their service, they priced them low; apparently at cost. As an enthusiastic early adopter and current user, I had to get one. It finally arrived in Singapore on my birthday, which was a nice coincidence.
It’s like the ants around here have gone crazy. I noticed them swarming in the kitchen one morning, carting off bits of a granola bar whose wrapper had a corner mysteriously torn off. Did they do it with their teeth? One colony cleansing later, I saw them reappear in another cupboard trying to get into a packet of dates. Wondering if there was something seasonal or lunar about this behavior, I asked some friends if they’d noticed anything similar lately and got “YES!” for an answer.
I joked that it was as if the ant leaders had announced that they weren’t going to make their food targets for the quarter, so everyone needed to get out there and collect goddammit!
Stonks. This week was noteworthy just because everyone now knows what a GameStop is, even though we don’t have any. I saw the headlines but didn’t poke into it until it was too late to get rich. Buut I bought a single overpriced share anyway, in solidarity with the people out to make predatory short-sellers suffer. I can’t even begin to guess if this is as big a deal as some make it out to be, or just a blip the system will painlessly absorb. I can’t intuit if it’s the beginning of a sea change in money, or just a January news story. My longstanding ignorance of market matters doesn’t help. But it is exciting to watch.
If it turns out to be a big deal though, many smart people seem to think it will accelerate adoption of decentralized finance platforms. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about getting my feet wet with PoolTogether, which was just buying lottery tickets with play money. This week I actually used Uniswap, and bought into an index fund governed by smart contracts. So… progress. Maybe next week I’ll quit my job and yield farm for a living.
It wouldn’t be an update without some Apple-related anecdote. My wife got one of the new iPad Airs for work purposes, and it’s nice enough that I actually questioned needing the next iPad Pro. Better screen technology and an A14X would be great, but if they raise the price for miniLED then I might just settle for an Air. My current iPad Pro, the one-off 10.5” model (2017), is such a weirdo. It’s like they had to cut a bunch of corners on it while waiting for the redesigned third-generation (2018). It doesn’t support spatial audio with AirPods, even though older devices like the iPhone 7 do. It’s got a white spot on the screen that I’ve seen others complain about. And graphically it’s so weak that most games seem to run in 480p.
Before bed each night, we started watching random YouTube videos of food being prepared, with no narration or music. Just street food kitchens and stalls in Korea and Taiwan frying up stuff at scale, with tons of oil. It’s beautiful, horrifying, and sleep inducing all at once.
As a result, I didn’t use my Netflix account until Sunday, when I started to watch Alice in Borderland, which is a truly not-bad Japanese live action series based on a manga. I recommend giving the first episode a go, just to see an impressive shot of Shibuya that will make you go “wait, what?!”. I’m up to Episode 3, which unfortunately goes into one of those time-wasting sequences where people scream/shout each other’s names for about three minutes. That’s still my number one pet peeve about Japanese shows. Nevertheless, I can recommend it on production values alone.
What a week for music, though. New albums from Rhye and Weezer, and the long-awaited debut albums from Arlo Parks and Celeste.
Through the serendipity of my personalized Apple Music radio station, I also discovered Instant Karma, an Amnesty International project from back in 2007 to “Save Dafur”. It’s 61(!) John Lennon covers by various artists, including R.E.M., Willie Nelson, The Cure, a-ha, Lenny Kravitz, and The Postal Service. Avril Lavigne even covers Imagine! I haven’t had the time for it all, but Regina Spektor’s version of Real Love might be my pick already.
This is the 14th consecutive week of doing this “new” regular blog update rhythm. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to keep going, although it’s getting harder to think of things worth mentioning since so much of what happens is now a thematic repeat. But I’ve decided to give myself a break. So what if I do the same things? So what if I’m negative? So what if this bores you/me/anyone? At least I’m still here.
I tend to mention Apple Music a lot in these posts, and this week I noticed that my “New Music For You” playlist hasn’t updated in several weeks. It’s supposed to refresh every Friday, based on your listening habits. All the other algorithmic personalized playlists are fine. I guess as long as they find new ways to break things, I’ll mention them. Do I want to get on another hour-long support call to complain about this? Not really. I might spend more time with the music I’ve already discovered instead.
One of my favorite songs of last year was Charli XCX’s White Mercedes, and it popped back in my head this week and stayed for days. I was even motivated to go on YouTube and look for interesting covers — there was just one: a rough take by Alec Primavera that shows what a strong ballad it is. I kinda want Ryan Adams to come out of exile and cover it.
While we’re on YouTube, the Auralnauts team is still obsessed with making Star Wars videos, and this new one is pretty clever: it uses footage from the prequels and their spot-on overdubs to realize a story about Anakin and Obi-Wan on a weekend-long clubbing bender. Turning a giant Jedi battle scene into a glowstick rave is just inspired. Weekend at Obi’s.
I watched the US presidential debates like everyone else, and all that noisy talking over each other just gave me anxiety like Uncut Gems. I then went on Twitter and saw other people making the same reference. Did Uncut Gems come out in 2020? I’m lost in time.
I’ll come back to Apple for a second: it’s weird that no Western media seems to have gotten the new iPad Air for a hands-on demo; at least, I can’t find anything on YouTube. But a quick search shows that quite a few Chinese media/bloggers were invited to handle and shoot footage with the new devices, in what looks like an Apple Store. My guess is that the out-of-hand COVID situation in the US is preventing similar events, and they can’t mail the iPads to journalists until the products are ready to come out (lest the A14 chip be officially benchmarked before the iPhone 12 event). China being relatively safe at the moment has given them the First Look video advantage.
I’ve been playing the new mobile game from the Chinese developer miHoYo (their tagline: Tech otakus save the world), previously known for the impressive looking but not-my-cup-of-tea anime action game, Honkai Impact. This new one is an open-world RPG called Genshin Impact, and it liberally borrows all the good bits of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, while leaving out all the annoying parts like weapons that break after you use them too much. It’s a breakthrough in free-to-play game design, art direction, and mobile game engineering. Most F2P RPGs are absolutely awful and quite transparent about the fact that they’re not about fun or gameplay mechanics, just completionist character collecting gacha loops that whales get hooked onto. You can actually play Genshin Impact without thinking much about paying for anything, and there are no ads — those inclined to pay for rare items and characters can do that, but it’s not pushed in your face, nor does it seem necessary (at least several hours in, where I am).
A late discovery: Okinawan brown sugar, or kokuto. I’m drinking an old fashioned right now that I threw together with vanilla bitters, Gentleman Jack, and a dash of dark syrup made with this complex, earthy, salty sweet stuff. I found a good article on the “Art of Eating” site, if sugar as a fancy healthy food sounds like your kinda thing.
After watching S2E6 of Midnight Diner (the original series), I had the sudden urge to make a pot of Japanese cream stew, so that’s what we did for Sunday’s dinner. If you could go into a restaurant here and find that, I probably wouldn’t have; it’s one of those things you just have to do for yourself.
Genshin Impact’s highest quality settings (iPhone 11 Pro Max)
I finally finished reading This Is How You Lose the Time War after grazing on it for over a month, and immediately wanted to start over and read it again. The writing is otherworldly and poetic; the playful subversion of the old back-and-forth-correspondence framing device ingenious. I am ecstatic that it exists, and floored by the achievement of its creation. Closer to the end, it does a few things that I’d say should be familiar to anyone who’s read a few stories about time travel, but this does not detract from the overall experience. It’s handled deftly and with no unnecessary emphasis.
Back in Week 30 I read two other books on time travel and I can safely say that TIHYLTTW is the best of them of all. Two of the three (I won’t say which) feature the idea of going very far back to the early days of the earth to hide out from other travelers, which is cool. I’m hungry for more innovation in the time travel story department, so let me know if you have any anime, films, or books to recommend.
Apple made a new iPad Air in the shape of the iPad Pro, as has been rumored for months. If they’d offered it at the old iPad Air price point of USD$499, I’d be choosing colors right now. But at $100 more, it’s close enough to the price of the iPad Pro that I’m considering just waiting till next year’s spring refresh to get one with an A14X and hopefully a mini-LED display.
No one’s going on vacation this year, but some hotels here have carefully reopened for staycations, and so I’m writing this week’s update from a lovely sea-facing spot on the island of Sentosa. We had a few rum cocktails last night, and there’s an arts and heritage tour later before dinner. It is sort of nice to have a change of scenery after all. I should get going now and make a serious try of taking a break.
Oh, and we decided to try making chess a regular pastime of ours. Does anyone play chess anymore? I remember seeing expensive chess computers in the glass showcases of department store toy sections as a kid. I coveted them… imagine an AI living inside the chess board that would play with you, any time and anywhere! Since they don’t have chess sets on loan here (maybe COVID-19 related), I found a free 3D version and we’ve played two games so far on my iPad. Those dedicated chess systems were so special once, and now they’re just an app.
(Later) I’ve come back to say that I learnt something on the hotel tour I’m sure I learnt back in school but forgot: Sentosa was previously known as Pulau Blakang Mati, which loosely translates from Malay to the “rear island of death”. It was so named because of how the Japanese took lots of people there to be executed during WWII, or malaria, or how pirates would use it as an ambush spot. Maybe all three. In the 1970s, the Singapore government decided to officially call it Sentosa, which supposedly means peace and tranquility. Today, it’s a holiday resort cluster with a Universal Studios and people getting drunk on beaches, which just goes to show… anything can be given a second chance with a strong rebrand.
I bought into the rumors that Apple would launch the new Watches and iPads via press release on Tuesday. I don’t know why, in retrospect, because that makes no sense at all. Those product lines are way too important and making an event of streaming some video isn’t a high barrier for them. So now I await the September 15 “Times Flies” event with interest. I hope the new headphones get unveiled, because I’m ready for them.
I applied that unresolved retail intent to the so-called 9.9 (as in Sept 9) sales that happened on all the local platforms, buying way too much alcohol on Lazada. For future reference: Roku gin, Amaretto Adriatico, Bulleit bourbon, Don Julio Añejo tequila, plus vanilla and mole bitters.
Bitters are super useful, and I’d said the same before about flavored syrups in a previous post. However, I’ve since discovered the Monin brand products sold locally (and made in Malaysia) are utter crap compared to ones made in France. They’re so thin, weak, and synthetic as to be unusable, and I’d like to pour the bottle I have down the drain.
We binge-watched all 9 episodes of Little Voice, although that’s not a strong recommendation. It’s fairly uneven, and maybe a B or B- overall. For a show about a singer-songwriter’s journey, the songs did not work hard enough. I can’t recall a single one now. Which just reminded me of how sad it is that we’ve lost Adam Schlesinger to COVID. His work on films like That Thing You Do! and Music and Lyrics stand on their own.
One scene in the final episode featured The Way You Look Tonight, which suddenly reminded me of Kenneth Branagh’s 2000 adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which of course, I then immediately had to re-watch. I think I saw it in theaters here in Singapore when it came out, loved it, bought the soundtrack on CD on my way home, and then got the DVD a couple of years later when I was in the UK. It was a bit of a commercial failure and no one else seems to have seen it, but I just loved it. If Shakespearean comedy mashed up with the Cole Porter songbook sounds like your thing, please see it.
And that led to wanting to see another musically oriented romantic comedy, so we decided to give Yesterday a chance despite the uneven ratings and my consistent distaste for Danny Boyle’s work. UGH! I tried really hard to give the central premise a pass, and was rooting for the film to square it with a gold-hearted core, and there were moments in the first half that I really liked, because of what they tried to say about the Beatles, but it really had nowhere to go and deflated into an unlikeable mess.
v1.01 (Jan 30, 2020) — iOS 13.3.1 fixes a bug that affected the way Share Sheet imports had to take you out of the Photos app and into Shortcuts. So this is now simplified. Also added emoji graphics to make the main menu fancier.
v1.02 (Sep 5, 2020) — Updated to fix the shortcut stalling at deletion of original photos after processing. Apple changed some behavior in the Shortcuts.app.
Summary
HEIFer is a shortcut for iPhones and iPads (you can import and run it in the Shortcuts app that is part of iOS 13) that automates the batch conversion of photo to HEIF/HEIC formats. This has the benefit of making their files dramatically smaller without any visible loss of image quality.
HEIF stands for High Efficiency Image Format, and Apple introduced support for it in 2017. You can find out more about the format here.
HEIFer has three modes:
Converting a manual selection of photos
Scanning the newest 100 photos in your library, and converting any JPEG/PNG/TIFF images it finds
Converting the last imported batch of photos (from a camera or SD card, using an adapter)
This is my first proper iOS Shortcut and I made it to learn the ropes.
I’m kinda all-in on the HEIF format, and if your iPhone is set to save at “High Efficiency” in the Camera section of Settings.app, then you’re already using it for every photo you take. The quality is great, and you can store twice as many photos in the same amount of storage space.
But… I also shoot photos with other cameras, and every manufacturer, from Canon and Nikon to Sony and Leica, seems to be years behind in the software game, and the only options they offer are usually JPEG and RAW. What’s more, the CPUs in these cameras are usually very underpowered compared to what’s in your iPhone, so they don’t try very hard to compress the images efficiently. You can typically turn a 10MB JPEG from your camera into a 3–4MB HEIF file in less than a second. It’s a tremendous waste of space, both on device and in your cloud backups, to keep the JPEGs.
When you save an edited photo out of VSCO, you’re turning a HEIF file into a JPEG
I also edit my photos with iOS apps like VSCO and Lightroom, and almost all of them save the finished photos in JPEG. So if you’re regularly editing your iPhone photos, those small .heic files are still ending up as fat .jpg files at the end of the day. It’s nuts!
So HEIFer is a way to quickly take those old-ass files, bring them into the present, and then dump the originals. For instance, if I’m shooting directly to JPEG on my cameras (why not RAW? That’s a topic for another day), all I have to do is plug in the SD card, select “Import All”, run HEIFer, and I’m done in three taps.
If your photos have proper timestamps, then you will still see them in chronological order in the “Photos” tab. However, if you go into the “Recents” photo album, it will reflect the process of converting and deleting them, i.e. it’ll be as out of order as your recollection of a big night out.
sangsara.net 