One Year Retired

6FPS V6#7: July 8, 2024

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

And suddenly, it’s July. Welcome to summer here in the Pacific Northwest. We’ve had a few hot days, but not a sustained heat wave. Meanwhile, California seems to be broiling. I keep seeing things that make me feel we moved at just about the right time.

June just flew by. For someone who no longer has a full-time job, it sure doesn’t feel like I’ve got nothing to do. The reality is I’ve shifted time to doing more of what I want rather than what my employer wants, but in many ways, it doesn’t feel like things have slowed down much.

Apple Intelligence

I was fascinated by Apple’s keynote on it’s new intelligence features. It’s the very beginning of a multi-year path into this new technology, and the possibilities seem huge. This feels like as big a technology shift for computing as the graphical interface was in the early days of the Mac, but it’s going to take time for this to mature.

There are, of course, big issues to solve as well. I think Apple is doing a good job of avoiding the problems other AI setups have run into, like, oh, mass hallucinations and making stuff up.

This is a technology shift that we have to be patient with as they figure it out and make it really useful, so of course, the usual anti-Apple pundits are declaring it a failure based on a first announcement of what will be a version 1.0 tool. These pundits will be proven wrong again. Many of these pundits also declared Apple TV a stupid idea from the start (it just passed Paramount in subscriber numbers), and, of course that Apple was insane to think it could do retail (there are 530 stores worldwide).

Down below I link to John Gruber’s take on Apple Intelligence, and I think it’s one of the best and most thoughtful perspectives I’ve seen. Well worth a read.

This year will be an iPhone year. I skipped last year, and every other year is likely my cadence from now on. I have noticed my phone isn’t keeping a charge quite as well as it used to (batter health 88%, so starting to fade), so I’m looking forward to seeing what the next round of iPhones look like (and cost). I might also upgrade my watch, since I find I use it a lot in many small ways. I’m happy with my iPad — I considered whether to update it, but considering Apple is fast-tracking from the M2 to the M4 (for many good reasons), I think it makes sense to wait for the M4 equivalent iPad Air to arrive. Ditto with my laptop. Part of me would really like to shift from a Macbook Pro to a lighter MacBook Air for the reduced weight, but that’s going to wait for an M4 version as well. Everything’s doing well functionally, so there’s no real hurry — I don’t exactly feel like things are slow and grumpy using them.

Cancelling the New York Times

Lots of people I know are very publicly cancelling their New York Times subscriptions because of articles they published after the first presidential debate. Evidently people suddenly realized the Times editorial was very pro-Trump and pro-GOP.

I would have cancelled as well, except I figured that out a few years ago, and I haven’t been giving them money for a while now (and when they bought the Athletic and started stupid-izing that, I cancelled that as well). It’s a bit of an eye opening exercise to see people who’ve carefully not wanted to see this blatant bias by the Times until now finally hit their camel-straw point. They are, in many ways, even more overtly biased than the Wall Street Journal is (another place I carefully don’t send money to).

Fun projects

There are a couple of fun projects I’ve been working on recently.

First, with both Laurie and I being long-time Doctor Who fans, I decided it’d be fun to get all of the Doctor Who blu-rays and digitize them into the Plex server, so we’d always have them around. So far, I’ve got three seasons of Pertwee, one of Davison and Baker, and David Tennant’s tenure done, and I’m about to do Eccleston and Matt Smith. This takes a bunch of time: but most of it is waiting for rendering things to finish, so my on-hands is limited.

Another project I’ve been working on is creating an easy way for me to use and share my photography. My “serious” photography is all shot in raw, processed in lightroom and stored in the catalogs there, but if I’m not at my computer in my office, I can’t easily access it.

What I realized is that I really didn’t need to tie the image to Lightroom unless I wanted to re-process them, so I’ve been, year by year, exporting them as jpegs (two copies, one watermarked, one not), and them importing those as albums in Apple Photos.

This gives me the best of both worlds: the kind of processing capability and power I want from Adobe Lightroom, but the ease of carrying them around literally in my pocket if I want to grab one and show it or share it in some way. So far, I’m about 3/4 of the way through my total library, and it’s come in handy a few times. Took me a while to figure out how to do this, but now that I have, it’s solved a bunch of little challenges I’ve fought over the years.

The one downside of this is if I DO go and re-process an image, I need to sync it into photos and delete the older versions, but it’s rare that I do that these days, so not a big deal. The ability to scroll through and use the images without needing to fire up Lightroom, though, is really nice.