As a side twist to yesterday’s Amazon outage, and, perhaps, unrelated, I woke up this morning with an extra 127 unread old emails on my iCloud+ inbox. Emails I had already deleted, or archived. Not a warm fuzzy feeling, at all.
amazon apple techLooking forward to iOS 26.1 with excitement and anxiety. Vietnamese has been added to Apple Intelligence, and thus it becomes possible to use it on Live Translation.
Now, that could be a total disaster if the person you are translating from Vietnamese to English doesn’t use the proper diacritics. 😬
apple techToday was Apple’s Day. They announced a new MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro, all with the new M5 Apple silicon SoC. 🥳
On a different topic, it was not F5—“a global scale and industry-leading converged application delivery and security platform”—Day, as they shared they had been breached by a “highly sophisticated nation-state threat actor”. 💀
apple techI want to go back to start using email more, like I used to. I am looking into participating more on mailing lists, and overall using email more for communication for which I have been using non-asynchronous apps. I prefer to use the apps provided by the OS, as I have mentioned it before. The thing is, macOS mail app has a couple of things that the “email perfectionist” in me dislikes. A lot. I am one of those, yes. Let’s see:
in-reply-to
and message-id
to properly create threads. It seems that the iOS/macOS Mail app will not exclusively use those, often using subjects to group emails.>
Internet “standard”. Apple Mail insists on using their colored |
.So, that’s the pickle, my pickle. Will I dust off mutt
, or Thunderbird? Ugh, I don’t want to, but…
My most favourite Spotlight function (search for a word definition on Dictionary) is broken. It is my second most used feature on Spotlight, with the first being to open applications as my Dock has only Finder and Bin. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. I would not mind if that tiny scrollbar shown above also goes away. Thank you, Tim Apple!
apple techWith the release of iOS 26, it is iOS 7 all over again. It is also Mac OS X, “the re-run”, with the release of macOS 26. Complain we must, it matters not.
“The new iOS 7 is horrible. It looks like something grade schoolers designed. The colors are too bright. It is very distracting when you have to squint looking at different apps due to the harshness […]. There is no point in keeping something that is so horrible to use.”
apple rants“Just “up"graded my iPhone to iOS 26 and I absolutely hate it. It’s visually the ugliest iOS Apple has ever produced […]. It’s so ugly I’m thinking of cancelling my iPhone Air order and looking at Samsung options.”
For as much as I liked Steve Jobs, I didn’t know him personally. I liked (and still do) how he was presented to us. I know now that he had many issues of his own. This user comment on Hacker News made sense to me:
One part of his legacy that will forever be misunderstood is that being brutally honest, being demanding, being abrasive is a trait that only translates to success when you are at the top. Countless mid level managers believe it is the only way to lead.
For Steve Jobs, it’s not that being an asshole was his secret sauce. It’s that his unique position allowed him to survive the downsides of his personality.
Today marks the 14th anniversary of Steve Jobs death, at the age of 56.
apple tubesI am having a not-so-first world problem. Nine out of ten, when I go out for an outdoor walk, I forget to start the workout either on phone, or watch. The watch, on its infinite wisdom sometimes reminds me, or prompts me to start it—notice the emphasis in sometimes. Is there an easy trick to get a workout going, other than starting (and stopping) it manually?
apple meThis mug (made in Japan) is only available for purchase at Apple’s Apple Park Visitor Centre. You can find it on eBay, and other second hand places, at exorbitant prices. Alex, a friend of mine, got me this one by driving 30 minutes from his house to the store—I wish I was as lucky as him, living so close to “The Mothership”! I have wanted this mug for a long time, and I love it! Thank you Alex!
apple friendsHaving the Apple Watch unlock—and login automatically on—the Mac feels like magic. Yet another reason to have this device on my wrist.
apple techI am wearing a watch (Apple Watch) for the first time in, like, 25 years. It isn’t to tell the time. Not at all. It is almost exclusively for health reasons (95%), and fast communication/keeping up-to-date (5%). Just like the iPhone I have, which I use for almost everything but as a phone, the Apple Watch is almost anything, but a watch. I’ll say, it is a wrist-held computer.
apple techSo, about the Apple Event today, I am planing to get an Apple Watch 11, likely for Christmas, or Epiphany. Tempted by the AirPods Pro 3, but not quite sure I will get them. Excellent event, as always!
apple techYep, it is happening again—like each year, LOL. Christmas is (might?) coming early, everyone! Add the Apple event to your calendars, and be there or be square!
apple techA user on Slashdot, referring to Steve Wozniak’s decision of selling his Apple stock, wrote: “Smart man. Great engineer. Bad decision. Happens to all of us.” To which Woz himself replied:
apple tubes“I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.”
Coming across a few MacPaint arts from the mid-1980s brought me a lot of memories, even though I saw them in the early 1990s. I remember vividly when I got my very first Mac around that time (Performa 575) at Sears. Over $2,000.
➝ Via Decryption.
apple viaApple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is coming up once more and, as always, I feel like kid before Christmas. The rumours I allowed myself to read tell something about Tahoe, and version 26, to match with year. Let’s see.
Update: 02 Oct 2025 @ 16:35:32
It is here, now! “Tune” in! Liquid Glass, oh my! Absolutely loving the upcoming updates for all versions 26s. With iPadOS 26, the iPad becomes one step closer (but not quite, since “macOS is superior”, as George pointed out) to becoming a “lite” laptop.
apple wwdcApple’s Lisa 2 computer. I know it is old, I know it is retro. My old eyes will certainly complain at the screen size and resolution, but damn, such a beautiful machine, and keyboard design! Yup, I am certainly on “boomer’s” mood.
apple techJohn Gruber describes fluidly why the dream of making iPhones in the United States is just sheer fantasy.
“United States doesn’t have anyone with the necessary vocational skills, who would want to work tedious factory jobs at factory-job wages, and China does. That’s part of the fever-dream mad-king fantasy of this entire cockamamie endeavor by Trump: these are difficult, low-paying, long-houred jobs that Americans don’t want. That these jobs are all in China and India is proof that America is far ahead, not that we’ve fallen behind.”
Of course I agree! Asking Apple to make the iPhones in the US is rotten non-sense coming out of a necrotic mind.
apple techI know it is a complex relationship—just like any other big company CEO—that of Tim Cook and Trump. Yet, Tim should have never donated money to Trump’s inauguration, nor attended to it. If favours were what he was after, he failed. He should have known better.
“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s [sic] that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” he said. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.”
Since when does a US president have the rights to interfere with free commerce, without congressional oversight?
apple politicsApple has announced their latest Mac mini, and it’s everything I wanted to see. The task ahead is to convince partner that we need one (note that’s a need, not a want), which we do (well, we need a computer, not an Apple computer per se, but I wouldn’t have it any other way). Yet, I need to do the convincing without adding any stress. Let’s see how I can engineer to do so. Certainly with extreme finesse.
apple techI have decided to use Apple’s Journal app more. Towards that aim I have placed it on my mobile device home screen. That will not interfere with any of my public interactions, as Journal will simply be that, a personal journal, and thus not for public comsumption.
My aim is to document the mundane, “what did I eat last night?” kind of thing, to recollect, and preserve, daily happenings and thoughts at day’s end.
apple techWell, “that” deed is done! 🥳 Now the wait starts. Some will deliver on 20th September, other will not arrive until October! 😩😂
appleNow, this is some promise!
apple techWhen we launch Private Cloud Compute, we’ll take the extraordinary step of making software images of every production build of PCC publicly available for security research. This promise, too, is an enforceable guarantee: user devices will be willing to send data only to PCC nodes that can cryptographically attest to running publicly listed software. We want to ensure that security and privacy researchers can inspect Private Cloud Compute software, verify its functionality, and help identify issues — just like they can with Apple devices.
I feel like I am late to the party for not having dropped a note here right after, or during, Apple’s WWDC. Yes, I saw it live. Yes, I am excited about iOS/iPadOS/tvOS 18, and macOS 15. Of course I don’t have a problem with the way Apple is implementing AI (which, from now on, stands for “Apple Intelligence”). I love it all, and can’t wait for it!
apple wwdcI have decided to move from 1Password (for which I pay a yearly subscription) to iOS native Passwords before the year is over. The ability to share passwords with family tilted me over. I will not wait for Passwords to become an app of its own—though I am sure that’s coming—because I don’t think that should hold me back now.
apple cryptographyAbout iOS 17 relase on 18 September, make sure to turn off the betas (thanks George!) if you participated. Simply go to “Settings → General → Software Update → Beta Updates”. and turn it off.
apple techMy take aways from the Apple Event:
It’s that time of the year again, and I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned Apple’s event. It’s coming! Like, day after tomorrow coming. I will watch it, like I do each year, for sure! If you like Apple, and their products, I recommend you watch it too!
apple techFeeling a little bit nostalgic. I am sure it is part of things that happen “before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern”. That kind of thing.
apple