< Notes...

Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) is coming 8-12 June, 2026. It is the very first Christmas of the year. Second comes around September, and third, will, you know. As always, will watch it live! Can’t wait!

Emails sent from iCloud+ (custom domain) to various Microsoft domains (outlook.com, hotmail.com, msn.com) keep bouncing with “please contact your internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list”. Of course, the “internet service provider” is a red-herring. It’s email service provider; it’s Apple.

You would think the giants have their relationships figured out, eh? Apparently not. This only happens with Microsoft, though, no one else.

Available for: iPhone 6s (all models), iPhone 7 (all models), iPhone SE (1st generation), iPad Air 2, iPad mini (4th generation), and iPod touch (7th generation).

An 11 years old device still receives security updates from Apple. Meanwhile Google:

Nexus devices get security updates for at least 3 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store, or at least 18 months from when the Google Store last sold the device, whichever is longer. After that, we can’t guarantee more updates.

How do you like them apples?

These release notes are painstakingly and lovingly hand-crafted by human Ghostty maintainers, including the full changelog. They take a combined 16+ hours to write, so please enjoy. 🥰

Just upgraded to the very shiny Ghostty version 1.3.0. In a world where almost any application update boringly reads “bugs fixes and improvements”, Ghostty 1.3.0 release notes are something to appreciate, and admire.

I left my Mac’s volume too loud last night, so today while working the hourly time announcement was bothering me. It turns out you can control the volume from the CLI. It was as easy as connecting to the Mac via SSH, then:

osascript -e "set volume output volume 10"

Where 10 is the volume you want to set. Setting it to 0, well, very similar to mutting it (which can also be done, but I didn’t bother).

My Ghostty configuration under macOS, in case it is handy as a starter point for anyone. As you can see, it has one macOS specific line, and my font of choice, Hermit.

# Theme
theme = iTerm2 Pastel Dark Background

# Mouse and cursor
cursor-style-blink = true
cursor-color = #33FF33
mouse-hide-while-typing = true
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

# Key bindings (tmux pane ALT arrow left/right)
# Unbind the default word-navigation behaviour
keybind = alt+left=unbind
keybind = alt+right=unbind

# Font
font-family = Hermit
font-size = 17

# Window and colours
background-opacity = 0.85
background-blur = 10
foreground = #33FF33
maximize = true
macos-titlebar-style = tabs
split-divider-color = #505050
unfocused-split-opacity = 0.5
window-padding-x = 20
window-padding-y = 20

Fitness, with its time to stand up nagging truly needs to back off. I mean, I am sitting on the toilet, trying to do what we all do, you know, and not even there it gives up. Next I know, “Time to stand up” comes up, like, really?! Bugger off!

While I still prefer using the OS default applications, I have decided, for the time being, to use Ghostty as my default terminal application on macOS (maybe on Linux too, we’ll see). I find it fast, highly configurable—but not as cumbersome to configure as iTerm2—, and simple. Having used iTerm2 in the past, it was relatively easy for me to break my vanillist vow on this one.

Maybe it is just me—though I hyperbolise, as I can’t be alone—but I have zero issues using Safari (Apple’s web browser). I exclusively use it on mobile, and desktop, not a single problem. It is fast, lean, renders perfectly. Truly, “it just works”. I can’t fathom installing Chrome, or Edge, or any other web browser, on any of my Apple devices.

If that MacBook Neo advertisement isn’t incredibly well done, I don’t know what is! Horsie needs a laptop of her own, maybe one of these awaits her?

Another MacBook tomorrow? That wouldn’t make much sense, would it? Unless Apple is going for the unexpected. I am still hoping to see a new Apple TV. Let’s go!

Update: 04 Mar 2026 @ 10:33:02

Well, what do you know? The rumours were true. Allow me to present you the new MacBook Neo. Wow!

Hacker News user std_move succinctly lists a few points that they believe make the MacBook Air “the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k”. They mention that “it has no fan, thus completely silent, high resolution display without flickering, and with reasonable response times, best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU, no Microsoft Windows annoyances […] amazing battery life”, and they go on.

I am an Apple fan and, thus, perhaps my opinion bears no weight, but I happen to fully agree.

Apple is on a roll this week! Six new/upgraded products, so far: iPad, iPhone, Studio Display, M5, Pro, and Max processors, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air. Woah! And still there is one more thing, or more!

Made with soft, nonabrasive material, the Polishing Cloth cleans any Apple display, including nano-texture, safely and effectively.

I am an Apple fanatic, but their polishing cloth has to be the closest to a quasi-perennial April Fools’ Day I have ever seeing. I mean, look at its compatibility list and all—yes, compatible with today’s iPhone 17e. Only second to the Pocket; or maybe the Pocket is second to the Polishing Cloth? 😅

With work, life, and other news taking precedence, I completely missed that Apple plans to unveil, allegedly, up to five different products next week, starting tomorrow. I will take this small distraction, for sure!

Today, Apple announced iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with the information assurance requirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be used with classified information up to the NATO restricted level without requiring special software or settings — a level of government certification no other consumer mobile device has met.

This is quite nice, and as an Apple fanatic it makes me happy (proud?). Long live NATO—for as long as it is needed, that is.

Even though I moved away from using 1Password in 2023, Horsie wasn’t able to do so. With their upcoming price increase she now promises, for sure, “cross my heart and hope to die”, to she will stop using it before our next renewal date comes up (November 2026).

The line below from this website drew a chuckle out of me. I instantly thought, “If you used vim, ‘of course’, then why did you use nano on the instructions?”

sudo nano /etc/nsmb.conf # I used vim, of course

Update: 10 Mar 2026 @ 16:54:25

Ooooh, I get it now. The author copied the contents of the gist, verbatim. Yup, makes sense. I also need to read things more carefully. 😅

➝ Via Hacker News.

Apple’s Fitness needs to chill, really. Not even five minutes after waking up, and not even one sitting on the loo, its “Time to stand up” command is getting a little bit out of control.

I forgot to note that this issue with the Spotlight was fixed on macOS 26.1. I know we tend to complain, and blame Apple for the obvious gaffes they make, but they will eventually get their act together, and come through.

Even though I was able to move away from using 1Password back then, Horsie wasn’t, or didn’t. So, here we are, two years after, and a $59.85 subscription renewal coming up on 23 November. Of course she promises this year will be the last. 🙄

After so much wait for iOS 26.1, and the inclusion of Vietnamese for use in Live Translation, I feel nothing short of dissappointed. Mum says the translation is an abomination, and begged me to, please, not to use it. Sometimes she gets confused with the service being used, but the end result is what matters. She messaged me, using her classical english:

“Stop writing in Vietnamese. Translate from google, totally different from what you think or what you want to say.”

Apple’s new iPhone Pocket feels like something one would read on April Fools’ Day, which is how I felt when they first came out with their Polishing Cloth. Alas, it is not! 😅

Update: 11 Nov 2025 @ 12:22:15

Holy fuck! Please pardon my Icelandic, but what in the world?! Somewhere on my April Fools’ thought I missed the most important piece of information.

“iPhone Pocket in the short strap design retails at $149.95 (U.S.), and the long strap design at $229.95 (U.S.).”

If this comes true, that is, front facing camera and Face ID components becoming invisible on a 20th Anniversary iPhone, then it will be my time to upgrade.

“Notarize your macOS software to give users more confidence that the Developer ID-signed software you distribute has been checked by Apple for malicious components. Notarization of macOS software is not App Review. The Apple notary service is an automated system that scans your software for malicious content, checks for code-signing issues, and returns the results to you quickly.”

Apple’s notarisation service is good for the user, and developers—the last need to pay $99 a year for it. Yet, there are some that believe the Apple’s notarisation blocks software “freedom”.

➝ Via Hacker News.

The corner radius alignment—or lack thereof—on macOS 26 has been bothering me from day one. Specifically for the two applications I run maximised at all times, Safari and Terminal. Will Apple fix it (my hope)? Is it behaving as intended (my biggest fear)?

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.

Looking 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. 😬

Today 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”. 💀

I 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:

• No strict threading, that is, using 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.
• No way to set quoted text to start with the venerable > 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!

With 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.”

“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.

I 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?

This 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!

Having the Apple Watch unlock—and login automatically on—the Mac feels like magic. Yet another reason to have this device on my wrist.

I 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.

On this one, upgraded to Tahoe last night. This time I didn’t do a wipe-install, but a regular upgrade. Simply restarted the mini—which has been running without reboot for a couple of months, or so—and went through the upgrade. Smooth, no issues.

I have macOS 26 to install and play with, and today, out of all days, I am stuck working past 3.5 hours my quitting time.

So, 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!