Thought Bricks

Last week, I had a new battery installed in an old MacBook Pro. The battery was swollen and didn’t hold a charge so I took it over to Mr. Fix and they replaced it for $135. I probably could have done it with a kit, but it was much easier to have someone who does this all the time do it. My new MacBook Air M2 is great, but sometimes it’s nice to have a beater that can be used when you need a computer to use somewhere where it might get damaged (e.

Sometimes, the world seems to hang together with bailing wire and duct tape. Like today when a botched update by a key internet security provider caused Windows systems all over the world to go into a boot loop. Really fun stuff. The direct impacts to me are a cancelled code review meeting because Azure DevOps was unavailable and a flight delayed by a couple of hours. Not too bad in the scheme of things, but annoying nonetheless.

I installed OpenCore Legacy Patcher on my ancient MacBook. Updates to MacOS from Apple for that system had stopped some time ago and they were just doing the occasional security patch. I’d read about OpenCore before and thought it sounded interesting but until I got my new MacBook, I was a little hesitant to use it on something that was a daily driver. The installation process was as documented and went fairly smoothly.

I’m a big fan of Chelsea Troy. I watched a great presentation by her on O’Reilly the other day called Product Thinking for Engineers(need a subscription). The presentation was a bit different than I had anticipated. I was thinking it was going to be fairly tacitcal stuff about how to work within a product team as an sofware engineer, and there was that, but it was so much more. To me, the most interesting part was a wide ranging and insightful discussion about how we got to where we are with the current oligopolistic state of play in Big Internet.

This is a very nice write up about LXD and Multipass by Jon Seager. He’s not exactly neutral as a Canonical employee, but I agree with just about everything he says about LXD. It’s a really nice system for running containers and virtual machines. I haven’t used it much of late, but I found it to be a powerful and flexible. I was concerned that it would lose mometum when one of the principal developers left Canonical and forked the project, but LXD seems to be progressing quite well as does Incus.

This is the earliest solstice since 1796 according to WaPo. I was wondering that as I had assumed the solstice was always 21 June. I guess it drifts in the calendar which makes sense when you think about it. The calendar is just sort of a loose approximation of the actual mechanics of the universe. The article has an indepth discussion of how it all works which is quite interesting.

Ray Kurzweil has been notably prescient with his predictions on how fast AI will come. Genius is a term thrown around often, but he really fits the bill. He’s invented some really cool stuff over a long period of time. His editorial in The Econonomist outlines his nicely bullish predictions about the impact of AI on humanity. The areas he believes will be most impacted are energy, manufacturing and medicine.

The other day, Apple had their WWDC show and tell. Par for the course of any tech company announcement these days, it was focused on AI (but interestingly led off with an overview of all of the content on Apple TV). Apple was a bit late to the AI party, but since they have a device in nearly everyone’s pocket, they will probably be the most impactful on bringing AI to the masses.

I wrote a post last year about wood buildings which are very interesting. Just recently, I read about a wood satellite. That is just way too cool. Especially intriguing is that it “was assembled using a traditional Japanese technique that doesn’t require any screws or glue”. Plus it just looks cool. Maybe we need to give some serious consideration to bringing back the Woodie? To make it more modern it would have be the Lignite or something like that to make it sound more high tech.

I bought a new MacBook Air to replace my very old 2015 MacBook. I didn’t want to break the bank and M2 model was very reasonably priced at Best Buy so I picked one up. I’ve had it for a couple of days and it’s been great. One of the reasons I replaced my old MacBook was that the battery was very weak and would only last an hour or so.