Chaos Server

Every year, for quite a few years now, Jason Snell over at Six Colors does the Apple Report card where he sends out a survey to a collection of developers, journalists, and enthusiasts of Apple and compiles a “how are they doing?” view of things. I am not one of the panelists of the report card,but as an Apple fanboy, I find it find to review on the questions he is asking. Mac - A The Mac is doing great. I can ride on the coattails of last years M1 release and just see that the Mac hardware is crushing it and the software continues to move forward well. I don’t need crazy innovation in the Mac world, just year-over-year improvements and a continual push of the platform forward. I’m proud to be a Mac user in work and in my personal life. I cannot imagine being a Windows user, a Linux user, or a Chromebook user. iPhone - A For the last couple of years, slightly by surprise, I have been using an iPhone SE. Here is what I realized - all iPhone are great! I will probably return to a Pro...

People have all kinds of sides to them, Mei, and some of them are messy. - Jin (Turning Red) Holy cow, the year is over. It’s been a rough couple of years. Do your best to live one day at a time, and enjoy one moment at a time. What are three things in 2022 that were fun for me? Netflix Sandman - At the end of high school my older cousin gave me a bunch of the trade paperbacks for my birthday (or Christmas?) and as a moody intellectual high schooler who dabbled with the idea of being goth, this I was 100% up my alley. It was SO deep. I have a lot of appreciation for quite a few things that Neil Gaiman has written and I do love Sandman. I revisited and read the entire comic book collection again around 2018 with the 30th anniversary collection and enjoyed it just as much. They did a good job with the Netflix TV series. I think it’s captured the comic really well and truly enjoyed watching it. It’s dark, creepy, moody, etc. It NAILED my favorite issue introducing Dream’s sister Death....

You can unlock any door, if you only have the key. - Amulet (Secret of NIMH) What are four movies from your childhood that you like more than anyone else? Or changed you? Or moved you? I'm not sure how old I was when we rented The Secret of NIMH , but I remember being utterly entranced and scared by the movie. Like, "this is a grownup cartoon that somehow my parents are letting me watch!" I would tell all my friends about this amazing movie and none of them had seen it! I greatly look forward to showing this movie my munchkins. I saw both Dragonslayer and Legend around the same time. I was already playing fantasy role playing games and highly entrenched in the fantasy drama and both of these led me to believe that made real movies for people like me. They were creepy, intense, scary, and even had some gory scenes. I loved them both. I was a little older, maybe 7th grade, when I had friends recommending Monty Python's Holy Grail and somehow my parents rented th...

The online-only virtual developer conference is just around the corner and I don’t feel like we’ve seen too many rumors. Here is my very simple very short wishlist for iPadOS. 1. Separate Apps On External Display - The foundation is all ready for this! I want to plug my iPadPro into an external 5K USB 3.1 display and then be able to have two apps on the iPad and two different apps on the external display for a total of four apps. The external display isn’t a touch screen, but that’s okay, because I can connect a keyboard and mouse to the iPad and use the new iOS pointer to manipulate the apps on the external display. We’re so close to this! 2. Web Meeting Camera in Background - If you’re in a web meeting (Zoom, WebEx, GTM) the iPad camera only works if the app is running foreground in full screen. If you switch your web meeting to split screen or put it in the slide over, your web meeting no longer has access to the camera. BOO! When I’m in a web meeting, I want the app to be in the s...

Six months after I created eBay, I started receiving a spate of complaints. Everyone was complaining about each other. - Pierre Omidyar I'm getting more and more used to "renting" technology where I continually upgrade to the latest gadget and then sell the previous one. I do all of this through eBay, where I have yet to be taken advantage of, but it has been a big hassle. I wish this could be easier for me. I just recently sold off my 2018 iPad Pro, 2011 MacBook Air, and iPad mini 2. I thought I'd share the process. The first thing I do is get the trade in value from somewhere reputable like Apple or Gazelle. What will Apple give me if I give my product back to them? Once I have that, I know what the minimum price is that I want from eBay (with some math). eBay is going to take a 10% fee for the item and then when I use PayPal, PayPal is going to take 2.9% fee (+ $0.30). So I'll take whatever price I was going to get from Apple, do the reverse math, and that ...

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. - CS Lewis (talking about J.R.R. Tolkien) I found the time to read a lot growing up. Reading was my before-dinner ritual. Get home, finish homework, watch the Disney afternoon, read 1-2 hours until dinner. I read a lot of trash SciFi and Fantasy from the library, but I also ran across some series that stuck with me. The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings - It took me a very long time to make my way through this whole series. I read the hobbit in 6th grade and Fellowship in 7th, and then I kept getting distracted by other school books and then restarting Fellowship each summer. I finally finished Return of the King in my freshman year of college. Throughout middle school, high school, college, and a little beyond I played Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) and have read more than a hundred supplemental books from ICE. ICE was always good at referencing and using so...

Innocence is a catalyst for magic. - Mary and the Witches Flower I bought a Drobo way back in 2011 to move my content off my internal drive and move it onto beautiful attached storage. For the longest time my Drobo 2G was connected to my AirPort Extreme as an "AirDisk", a cool feature where the AirPort turned any drive into a NAS. Of course, Apple retired the AirPort Extreme so when I switched to Eero the Drobo moved to be attached storage to my server (a MacBook Air 2011). Then two things happened at the end of 2019. The first was I realized that my Drobo was connected via USB 1.1 (12 Mbps) and that it was the slowest link in the chain of streaming content off my Drobo to the various devices around the house (and over the internet!). The second was a red light of death! One of my 1TB drives failed, but truth be told, going 8 years before my first drive failure was pretty good. So I replaced the failed drive with a new Seagate, and after a 200 hour rebuild, everything was ...