Michael Camilleri

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 07:26:00 +0900

So if you’re using an iPad with an external keyboard and you tab away from Mail, Mail will reset the focus to the message list when you tab back. I don’t know if this is Mail’s fault or iPadOS’s but I’m tempted to blame iPadOS.

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 17:02:00 +0900

Allow me to be the 5,467th person to point out how silly it is that Apple Music’s Replay feature kicks you over to Safari.

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 09:11:00 +0900

I’ve been using computers for a little over 30 years and I don’t think I’m ever going to remember that Excel hijacks the scroll wheel as long as it’s the active window.

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 11:05:00 +0900

And then I was back to one Linode.

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 10:31:00 +0900

Chris Eidhof and Nicholas Christowitz’s SwiftUI Field Guide is excellent. I wish SwiftUI were open source so work like this didn’t have to be reverse-engineered from scratch.

Weeknotes #214

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 10:20:00 +0900

We went to Disneyland on Sunday! It wasn’t really apropos anything—I suppose if you wanted to squint you could say it was for Emma’s birthday. Really I saw on the Friday news that the weather was meant to be unseasonably warm on Sunday, was surprised to discover there were tickets readily available for Sunday, quickly discussed it with Eri and then booked. I was also fortunate to find a car available for all of Sunday and we were all set. The weather was indeed good and the overall experience was fun. I say overall, though, because John had a lot more difficulty handling some of the rides than I anticipated (Star Tours, the Western River Railway, the Castle Carousel) and Rowan wanted to go everywhere I did. All of that meant that while I had imagined being able to go on some of the rides together with Emma and John (like Star Tours), instead, I ended up mostly babysitting John and Rowan while Eri and Emma went on things. Still, it’s Disneyland. I do think this might be the last time we go as a family; at least until John and Rowan are a bit older.
It was an action-packed weekend all round because on Saturday, we took the kids to Tokyo Station after Emma’s Yoyogi Chapters class (John’s class wasn’t on). Rowan’s still deeply fascinated by trains so this meant that all up we rode on the Seibu Ikebukuro Line, the Yamanote Line, the Sobu Line and the Chuo Line. On top of that, we went up to the garden on the roof of the Kitte Building and saw a number of shinkansen pulling in and out.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’d bought an iPad (8th Generation) for Emma and John so that the iPad Mini they use could be handed down to Rowan. I particularly called out being concerned about the 32GB capacity. I was right to be. It felt like every day I needed to offload an app so that Emma could install something, or John had more space or I could upgrade the system. And then on top of that, the iPad didn’t run as smoothly as the iPad Mini does (maybe a result of needing to push around a larger number of pixels on the screen?). Despite being just outside the two-week return period, a very kind person on the English Apple support line allowed me to initiate a refund. With that done, I then bought a new (!) iPad (9th Generation), this time with 64GB of storage. This model cost ¥49,800, a significant increase over the ¥38,800 price of the refurbished model I returned. You win again, Apple, I guess.
Jon Stewart returned to the Daily Show. The New York Times has a good write-up.
I’ve mostly kept up the 45 minutes of Japanese study a day but I’m not doing much more than catching up on my flashcard vocabulary. Hopefully as the cards move through the SRS algorithm, I’ll have less to review and more time to spend doing study that feels more productive.
Generally speaking, I find music analysis YouTuber Charles Cornell’s high energy personality a little too high energy for my liking. But as someone who has always been curious about why the producers of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies went away from Klaus Badelt when he (apparently) wrote the iconic score for the first soundtrack, I forgave the all-caps ‘INSANE’ in this video’s title exploring that story.
The ‘He’s a Pirate’ piece is what’s being analysed in the above video but I’ve always preferred ‘One Last Shot’ (Apple Music).

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 16:54:00 +0900

Has anyone worked out when iMessage will show previews of Bluesky posts and when it won’t? There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason.

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 18:43:00 +0900

Why doesn’t Safari have a shortcut that allows you to open a URL in a Tab Group?

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 16:46:00 +0900

The YouTube app on iOS just asked what problems I’d encountered on the front page. I eagerly selected ‘Other’, hoping it would ask for details and I could say ‘Never show me YouTube Shorts!’ Alas, as soon as I clicked ‘Submit’, the questionnaire closed itself. Cowards!

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 09:58:00 +0900

Saw people sharing the news from early January that Twilio is shutting down the desktop version of Authy. Minimalist is a fantastic password manager for Apple platforms that can on login put the relevant 2FA token on your clipboard via its Safari extension.