Posts from Zack Apiratitham
The Canon EOS 6D had been my main camera since 2013, and aside from occasional fun cameras and a new lens, my photography gear pretty much remained unchanged. My 6D is now definitely showing its age and it's way past time for me to upgrade. For some years now, I knew that whenever I get around to replacing the 6D, the new camera would not just be a mirrorless but specifically a Sony mirrorless.…
Exactly a year ago, I went on a scuba diving trip with my friend Indira on the east coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. I did mention in a previous post sharing my old film photos that I would be bringing my film camera with me on this trip. I also brought along a disposable Kodak camera in addition to the Minolta X-370s. Here are some shots from those two rolls 1 . First, from the Minolta with the…
I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia and oftentimes get lost in the most random rabbit holes. Here are some topics from the past week of my browsing journey: Flag of Monaco , Monaco , Albert II, Prince of Monaco Canon EOS 6D , Sony a7 , Sony a7R V , Sony a7 IV , Exmor Roger Federer , Roger Federer career statistics , Novak Djokovic Campden tablet Nottoway Plantation Josh Freese , Foo Fighters…
Back in the fall of 2023, we went on a week-long road trip around Hokkaido . We were there during peak foliage season, so I took a ton of photos. As has been the trend with my recent photography, it took me almost 18 months to finish processing these. Here are the ten I'm quite happy with. Fall foliage near Lake Tōya Rock formations at Noboribetsu Jigokudani or "Hell Valley" Sunrise over Lake Tōya…
Last year I shared my predictions for the 2024 season and I'm back again on the eve of the first race of the 2025 season to make this a yearly tradition! But before we get to that, let me quickly grade my 2024 predictions: Prediction Outcome Max wins drivers' championship with fewer than four races remaining. He doesn't win as many races as he did last year. There are three other race winners…
Well, I was never tagged in a blog challenge before but I saw Rachel sharing her answers and kind of tagging everyone. So here I am, hopping on this bandwagon to answer some questions about my blog! Why did you start blogging in the first place? The first time I remember doing something somewhat close to what you'd consider blogging was when I left Thailand to attend high school in the US as an…
2024 was a big travel year for me. While the number of miles flown didn't top 2023, I was on the move a lot. All told, I was away from home for almost 10 weeks! I flew 30,172 miles on 6 domestic and 7 international flights, spending a total of 69 hours on airplanes. The average flight time was 5 hours and average distance was 2,321 miles. The longest flight was 15 hours from Toronto to Taipei…
For my upcoming scuba diving trip, I didn't feel like bringing my heavy DSLR with me so I'm instead bringing my old Minolta X-370s 35mm film camera. It's been collecting dust for the past few years, but in getting it ready for the trip I found out there was still half a roll of the Ilford HP5 Plus film in it. I also found a fully exposed roll of the same film sitting in a drawer. I had no clue how…
As you almost certainly have heard and seen countless photos of at this point, there is a huge solar storm bombarding earth right now, which gave millions of people spectacular shows of northern lights last night. Not wanting to miss out on this, I drove north of the city away from light pollution and was treated with a stunning display. This was the first time both Jess and I had seen auroras. It…
Last Updated: 6 August 2024 (after my trip back to Krabi in July) Recently I've had occasions to offer recommendations to a few people visiting Krabi for the first time. I've just been passing along a private note with this list of places, but I figured I should share that here. One disclaimer though: while I like to call these my local recommendations since I grew up there, I haven't lived in…
After a long winter break, it's finally race week! Inspired by The Backmarkers podcast , I figured I'd write down my predictions for the F1 2024 season to see how many of these I get right by the end of the year. If you follow the sport, you'll know a couple of these predictions are unlikely to happen. But obviously I am biased, and those are more of my wishcasting than anything. Max wins drivers'…
Over the past couple of weeks, there have already been enough takes on the Apple Vision Pro and the internet clearly does not need another one from somebody like me. Still, I just wanted to jot down some thoughts and observations from my personal experience—for my own records, if anything. This was the first Apple product that I was there for on launch day and that was a really fun experience. You…
I'm thrilled to announce a major update to my space launch schedule app, Liftoff ! The app was initially released in 2016 and was due for a facelift. Since the summer of 2021, I've been slowly and intermittently working on a complete SwiftUI rewrite to bring in a fresher look and introduce new features. In Liftoff 2, you can now easily switch between recent and upcoming launches. Every launch in…
I was just reminded of this video I put together for a dive trip I went on with my friend Indira back in 2016, and it got me thinking about sharing it here along with some quick thoughts. The highlight of the trip was undoubtedly the USS Spiegel Grove wreck. Exploring the ship's eerie interiors was absolutely exhilarating and I wished I could stay down there longer than I did. I'm so excited to go…
Inspired by Rebecca Owen's post and over 130 others from the community as of this writing, I am also joining the trend of sharing my current default apps list. I've done something similar back in 2017 with my checklist of apps and configurations when starting fresh on a new Mac, and my Uses page also contains a smaller list of software. But this will be a more complete and up-to-date list at the…
Since we moved to Colorado, I had this goal to one day hike one of the state's numerous fourteeners . Jess and I go hiking often around here, but we'd never attempted one of these. The closest one to us is Mount Bierstadt which is considered one of the easiest fourteeners to climb. From the Denver metro area, it only takes about an hour and a half to drive there. Due to that, this is probably the…
All my other WWDC wish list posts: 2016 , 2017 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 . I've been closely following WWDCs and their announcements for at least ten years now. And every year I wish I could visit the conference in person, but due to various reasons I never made it happen. Well, this year is going to be different as I will be traveling to Cupertino for the WWDC23 week! Though unfortunately I was…
Reuters : Thailand's opposition secured a stunning election win on Sunday after trouncing parties allied with the military, setting the stage for a flurry of deal-making over forming a government in a bid to end nearly a decade of conservative, army-backed rule. The liberal Move Forward party and the populist Pheu Thai Party were far out in front with 99% of votes counted, but it was far from…
At the end of last year, I went on a long overdue trip back to Thailand after three years. Like any other big trip, I lugged my Canon EOS 6D with me all the way there, but this time I barely used it (the reason for which is a topic for another day). So all of these were taken on my iPhone 14 Pro . I suppose it's about time I share some photos from the trip, only just four months after I came back…
Now that it's finally getting warm again after a brutal winter here in Colorado front range, I'm really itching to do more outdoor activities. One of those activities with the lowest barrier of entry for me is golf. I recently played at a nearby city-owned golf course and quite enjoyed it. So as a way to incentivize myself to play more this season, I figured I should sign up for their men's…
See my other top books of the year posts: 2020 , 2021 . Since I began setting concrete reading goals in 2018, I was always able to meet and exceed those goals of around twenty books per year. In the past couple of years, I even felt that I was setting a pretty low bar for myself and that I should increase the number. But last year I failed to even meet my typical twenty-two-book goal, having only…
The last time I traveled outside of the US was late 2019 in the beforetime, but earlier this month that thankfully came to an end. I am now spending the last month of 2022 in Thailand. To make the long journey and the stay in Thailand more streamlined, I created a few Focuses on my Apple devices to help with that. Travel Traveling between Colorado and Thailand takes at least 24 hours, so it was…
Back in August, Heroku announced that they will no longer offer a free tier for their services starting on 28 November. That would become an issue for me since I have a small Spring Boot service with a Postgres database deployed there, and they would end up costing more per month than I wanted to pay for. In the past few months, I have been hearing more good things about Linode , so I decided to…
As I said in my Apple's Far Out event post , this year is my iPhone upgrade year. Coming from iPhone 12 Pro, the iPhone 14 Pro is not that huge of an upgrade. But it's different enough for me to have a few things to say about it. Pre-order The pre-ordering experience itself appeared to have gotten quite an update. After the announcement, I could pre-configure the phone with all the details from…
I said in my previous post that I was not thrilled Apple decided to remove physical SIM card slot from the new iPhone 14 models sold in the US as that would make traveling outside of the country more troublesome. But that wasn't big enough of an issue for me to not pre-order the new iPhone 14 Pro. I'm sure I could figure something out when the time comes. So to get ahead of the iPhone release day,…
Like a lot of Apple nerds, I'm on a two-year cadence with my iPhone purchases and this means my iPhone 12 Pro I bought in 2020 is due for an upgrade this year. So I was pretty eager to see what Apple would announce today at their annual iPhone event. But before we go any further, September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and for the past 4 years the fine folks at Relay FM podcast network put…
I recently got an invite to DALL-E so I'm here to share some of the images it generated with my prompts. Two Formula One cars driving through snowy Yellowstone National Park at sunrise Not bad, but those don't look at all like F1 cars. An orange tabby cat driving a Formula 1 car in Monaco at night Looks like he's having a blast in that Ferrari. Now I figured I'd try something that might be easier.…
Back in March Jess and I took a trip out to Colorado. As per usual it took me forever to process the photos I took and get around to sharing them. Here are some of my favorite shots. iPhone 12 Pro, 26mm, f/1.6, 1/3500s, ISO 32 View of the Flatirons from the beginning of the trail. This was our first hike on the trip. We went from sea level in Florida to 5,700 feet above sea level at the start of…
As I mentioned in my WWDC 2022 reactions post on Monday, one surprise feature for iPadOS 16 is Scribble in Thai. Strangely there is no mention of this anywhere on the feature list page and only shown briefly on the feature tiles slide at the end of the iPadOS section in the keynote. I would not have guessed Thai to be the third script to gain support after Latin and Chinese. There are so many…
Overall Event Impression Over the weekend and today, my Twitter feed has been filled with people going to the event at Apple Park. They get to tour the new Developer Center and visit the Ring Building itself. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel some serious FOMO. Craig really took it up a notch with his showmanship during the presentation. They’re definitely really playing up and leaning into our…
All my other WWDC wish list posts: 2016 , 2017 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2023 . We're less than two weeks away from WWDC 2022 ! Like the past two years, this year's WWDC is going to be fully online which I think makes for a much better and more accessible way to hold this conference. Last year was the first year that I participated in surrounding events and met people in the Apple developer community…
Not many people will disagree with me when I say that The Lord of the Rings trilogy by Peter Jackson is the greatest film trilogy of all time. Despite having watched the extended edition of all three films through many times, I had never read the book. For years it was a goal of mine to do so, and in my top books of 2021 post I committed myself to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings this…
I didn’t think this event was going to be anything that exciting. Just a regular spring event for iPhone SE, iPad Air, and perhaps MacBook Air refresh. But boy, was I really in for a treat this time. As you may know, for a few years now I had been pleading for a new less expensive Apple-branded display. Here’s what I wrote most recently back in June of last year : Again, here is all I'm asking:…
John Siracusa wrote up this great post listing out what he thinks are the very basic functionalities every streaming app should have: Obviously, a list of even the most rudimentary features can’t help but also be opinionated. Though my tastes have surely influenced this list, I really do think that any streaming app that fails to implement nearly all of these features is failing its users. Again,…
After years of anticipation, Apple officially announced at WWDC 2020 that they were beginning the transition of the entire Mac lineup to the ARM architecture. Since then I had been itching to get my hands on one, but the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip did not fit the bill. I was waiting for that long-rumored all-new MacBook Pro. Fast forward one and a half years later to…
See my other top books of the year posts: 2020 , 2022 . A couple of years back, I rediscovered the joy of reading physical books after having exclusively been buying ebooks for years prior. Since then I had bought more and more books, which filled up my bookcase faster than I could read them. So in an effort to not have shelves full of books I haven't read, I made a decision to suspend all my book…
Overall a very informative and approachable book for such a mindblowingly complex subject. The text is easily digestible and engaging in the Kurzgesagt style I’ve come to know and love. There are a lot of analogies to illustrate scale or purpose of certain immune cell features which I found tremendously useful. And those beautiful graphics throughout the book really help visualize what our…
I totally agree with the main thesis of this book and she gives a lot of good advice and examples on how to apply it. And there lies the problem I have with this book. A large portion of it is just dedicated to examples and stories that I don’t really care about or add much to the central theme of this book. I found myself skimming through a lot of them so that I can get to the actual good parts.
Domain names are the face of the web and any time I had to register one my brain always defaulted to using Latin letters. For my own personal site here, despite its domain name being my first name I opted to use the romanized version of it, never thinking that there was actually another option. That was the case until recently when I realized that I could register a domain name entirely in my…
All you need to know about this book: replication crisis . Which is a shame because there are a lot of great ideas here.
All my other WWDC wish list posts: 2016 , 2017 , 2019 , 2020 , 2022 , 2023 . It's becoming such a cliché now during this pandemic when we say that time is a weird concept. But the other day I was in for a rude awakening when I found out that it's almost June. I say this every year but this year really did fly by. On the bright side, we all know what this means: it's WWDC time! To keep on the…
If you listen to Accidental Tech Podcast, you are probably aware of the running joke on the show about how incredibly long episodes covering Apple events usually are. During the most recent episode the hosts talked about how they were about to spend such a disproportionate amount of time discussing the Apple Podcasts announcement (which Tim Cook spent precisely one minute and quarter covering).…
Engaging read with lots of insights and data as to be expected from him. I finished it feeling more optimistic that we can tackle this climate problem.
See my other top books of the year posts: 2021 , 2022 . If there was one good thing that came out of the horror of 2020 for me, it's that my reading habit got more solidified. Given that we can no longer go out to restaurants, sitting down to read a book after dinner has become a must-do daily routine. Even though I did not read as many books as I'd like with all the time available, this year I…
MacRumors : Apple in iOS 14 is planning to introduce a new App Tracking Transparency feature that will let users know when companies want to track them across apps and website. Following outcry from developers like Facebook and ad networks unprepared for the change, Apple delayed the implementation of the anti-tracking functionality until early 2021. Craig Federighi, in an interview with The…
MacRumors (via Hacker News ): The M1 chip, which belongs to a MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. According to the benchmark, the M1 has a 3.2GHz base frequency. [...] In comparison to Macs , the single-core performance is better than any other available Mac , and the multi-core performance beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro…
A few weeks ago after iOS 14 came out, the App Store was suddenly flooded with apps designed specifically around the new Home Screen widgets and customization. Some of them are Widgeridoo , Widgy , and the most notable one being "Underscore" David Smith ’s wildly successful Widgetsmith . An idea with a simple premise popped into my head: I wish I can have customizable Home Screen widgets that can…
Course: Wekiva Golf Club , Longwood, FL, USA Par: 72 Tee Box: White - 6,427 yards Course Rating: 71.5 Slope Rating: 129 Date: 26 September 2020 Tee Time: 2pm Condition: Mostly sunny Heat index: 40ºC (105ºF) It’s been a long while since I played any golf, with the last full round of 18 holes being back in March. But at last, in recent weeks, I started picking it back up and going back to the range…
Apple Newsroom : Apple Central World’s distinctive architecture is brought to life with the first-ever all-glass design, housed under a cantilevered Tree Canopy roof. Once inside, customers can travel between two levels via a spiral staircase that wraps around a timber core, or riding a unique cylindrical elevator clad in mirror-polished stainless steel Really great looking store. The all-glass…
This year's WWDC keynote felt much denser than in years past. I think this is partly due to the fact that the entire keynote was prerecorded ahead of time, and compared to regular live stage keynote, this allows for a more fast-paced presentation. I surely felt quite overwhelmed afterwards with all the information that was bombarded at me for almost 2 hours. But despite everything that's going on…