A blog about programming, Apple, Unix, gadgets, and other nerdy stuff.
It’s been widely reported that OpenAI is working on a consumer
electronics product. Most of the recent commentary has been about a
portable smart speaker, sort of like an Amazon Echo but with a
battery. It makes sense, if you think about what the service called
ChatGPT is today. It’s an AI model that you can talk to. I don’t know
how many people like talking…
If you take the time to put your vibe-coded web apps into systemd services, don’t forget to enable them. Otherwise they won’t start on a reboot! 
 % systemctl enable coolname.service
 

I totally redid my blog tech stack with a live Go server. We’ll see how it goes. 
 Seems pretty performant so far. 

I will not be taking any questions at this time. 
 S: 
 
 Andor Season 1 
 Andor Season 2 (provisional) 
 Rogue 1 
 The Empire Strikes Back 
 
 A: 
 
 Star Wars 
 The Last Jedi 
 
 B: 
 
 The Force Awakens 
 Return of the Jedi 
 Solo 
 Mandalorian Season 1 
 Mandalorian Season 2 
 
 C: 
 
 Ahsoka 
…
I’m marking the occasion by ditching my
old green screen look, and making the layout a bit more
responsive. Maybe I’ll do some more style cleanups later. 
 I’m working on a really long post that might be more interesting than
the other old and hilariously wrong writing compiled here. We’ll see,
maybe I’ll post it before it is provably wrong. 

OK, just type /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto 
 That will do it. 

gohugo.io looks like my dumb go blog go system, but actually good. 

As of iOS 11, setting up a new iPhone is easier than ever. You can
take the old phone and hold it near the new one to transfer wifi
config and Apple ID basics. From there, a restore from iCloud takes
care of most everything. 
 There are some things that do not come along with iCloud
restore. Here’s a checklist, which are things that got me when I set
up my new phone…
PDFWriter is a virtual printer you can install on Mac OS to create
PDFs. This might seem dumb because creating PDFs is built in to Mac
OS. However there are a number of weird cases where this is useful,
usually related to dumb enterprise software. 
 There are instructions that I always have trouble finding: 
 
 Install PDFWriter package by double clicking 
 Go to system…
The blog was completely offline for a while because my Macminicolo
machine died a slow death. Well, it’s not really dead, but it is in a
sort of coma. Probably a bad disk, everything is insanely slow that
touches the disk. 
 I thought maybe it was time to set up a VPS instead of a “real”
machine. I had the usual struggle trying to remember where to put…
Marco Arment (twitter @marcoarment) is a programmer. You’ve probably
never heard of him, unless you are a programmer or journalist who is
interested in the Apple ecosystem. But if you are a programmer who has
any interest in entrepreneurship, you should know about Marco. He is
truly a jack of many trades, master of several, a one-man wrecking
ball of an entrepreneur. And…
I like log my running with a smartphone app. I’ve tried a lot of them,
but I like Nike Running for the clean UI and terse, friendly voice. 
 However, I like the reporting console available in RunKeeper, and my
friends all use that. So if I want to compare notes or just geek out
on the data a little, I want to have stuff in RunKeeper. 
 (RunKeeper has a super slow-talking,…
I’m playing with the new language Go . I got
interested in it after playing with Swift. I really like the idea of a
compiled language that has modern syntax and capabilities. I was
messing around with scripts and server apps on my Mac. But these
experiments had a hard limit: if I ever wanted to do something “real”
with a server/web application, Swift is not a…
I was pretty excited to get an Apple Watch. I ordered two, one for me
and one for my wife. The most interesting thing aspect of the watch to
me was the personal communications features. I love the concept of
sending a few taps on the wrist to my close family with no more effort
than raising my wrist. And they could get that message without it
interrupting whatever they are…
This is very useful for moving very large amounts of data from one Mac
to another. For example, if you are setting up a new mac and want to
transfer all your files over. From Dan Moren at Six
Colors 

(The way I like it, at least.) 
 
 
 Deploy minimal linode server size. 
 
 
 Create image with Ubuntu LTS. Boot it. 
 
 
 rsync .ssh keys to root account. Then on the linode: 
 
 chown -R root .ssh
 chgrp -R root .ssh
 
 
 
 Update apt for some reason: 
 
 apt-get update
 
 
 
 install the packages you need:…
This site is published as a simple hierarchy of .txt files converted
into mostly static HTML by
 Markdown . The only
dynamic aspect is that header and footer elements are served using
Apache server side includes. 
 I had written a terrible Python
script to do this, but I
rewrote the whole thing in Go as an exercise in
learning that language. 
 It’s a…
Soon (March 9 2015), Apple will have an event to disclose more details
about Apple Watch. Most people expect they will announce detailed
configurations, availabilty and pricing. 
 Of particular interest are the Apple Watch Edition models, which will
feature solid 18k gold cases. The Apple Watch is big, as watches go,
as big as a luxury Swiss watch like a Rolex. Such watches are…
There are more rumors around now that Apple is working on an electric
(possibly self-driving) car. Any discussion of this quickly leads to a
“why wouldn’t Apple buy Tesla Motors?” follow-up. 
 Gruber posted his
 view ,
which is that they would have done it long ago if they were going to. 
 A friend of mine has a Model S; actually he is on his second, since…
I read this in a nice post about typographic
mistakes . 
 Tap the space bar while holding ctrl and ⌘, and a character menu will
appear. Then you can type something like “degree” or “fraction” to get
quick access to what you want. 
 Others to search for: 
 
 multiply 
 prime 
 dash 
 minus 
 ellipsis