🔗 Does gear matter? — arun.is // Arun Venkatesan

The problem is with the question itself. It’s one of those questions that can’t be answered with much aside from “it depends”. It depends who is using the gear. It depends what they are using it for.

To the novice me, believing that gear mattered and accumulating it helped me come to my own conclusion. Along the way I tried a wide variety of cameras — old, new, cheap, expensive, film, digital, fixed lens, interchangeable lens, etc. This variety of gear helped me build up of a wide library of skills.

It’s my wonderful wife’s birthday and we celebrated doing all Jo’s favorite things! 🥳 Including a hunt for 30 balloons hidden throughout the house. Phin might have had the best time of all of us! 🐶🎈 📷

Had the best time summiting Algonquin and Wright Peaks with Jeanne and Jessie yesterday. Our stoke was as high as the wind speeds, which is to say “quite high”. And we met a furry friend! 📷

🆕📝 7 Things (Which Are My HomeKit Tips) This Week [#133]

🆕📝 Crashing Clockwise #541: ‘Peripherereral Free’

In which I turn one of my favorite podcasts into blogging fodder each week.

🔗 A Conspiracy To Kill IE6 • Chris Zacharias — blog.chriszacharias.com

One of their engineers testing in IE6 had noticed the YouTube banner pretty shortly after it went live and immediately took it to their manager as evidence as to why they should do the same. Shortly thereafter, the Google Docs engineers whipped up their own IE6 banner and pushed it into production, presumably under the mistaken assumption that we had done our diligence and had received all of the necessary approvals.

This story is just the best. Should we? Could we? We did. Now everyone is!

Warm weather had the usual spot looking sketchy but we still found some ice for @adkiceclimbermeetup last night. Thursday nights, 6ish to 9ish at Pitchoff Quarry (or Pitchoff Right in this case). Keep 🤞 for ice regrowth in March! 📷

🔗 A decade of working remotely | Lynn Fisher

I’ve seen execs point to a super productive off-site as proof that in-person is better. But in reality it showed what the team could do when they’re able to focus on one thing, uninterrupted, and with the usual decision blockers removed.

An excellent point and good reminder that interpretation matters.

Micro.blog just got 5x more valuable and was already leading the way. Love this service.

Today that’s changing. We are getting rid of the per-blog pricing. Instead, there will be three simple plans, and Micro.blog Premium will now include multiple blogs.

• $5: one blog with all the basic features
• $10: Micro.blog Premium, all the advanced features and up to 5 blogs included
• $15: Micro.blog Family, same as Premium but up to 5 users can post to any of your blogs

In which Apple isn’t quite the price hog it’s thought to be.

That leaves the Mac Studio. The [best Ultra model comes] with the RAM and storage spec I want, but it is $5,000. With a display, it will be over a thousand dollars above my inflation-adjusted target. But hang on, because the CPU upgrade is $1,000 on its own; with the base Ultra SoC, I am just above the inflation-adjusted budget. That is close enough for my books, and a surprising result: you can now get the second-best SoC available on any Mac with a display for basically the same as the highest-end 2017 iMac.

🆕📝 7 Things This Week [#132]

Don't skip the 'Take a Chance' link this week. Well, don't skip any of them, but especially not the TAC. 🤭

🆕📝 Apple Return Policy PSA

A note for folks looking to get the most out of a generous return period/policy.

🆕📝 So Much To Do

In which I don't follow my own advice, but I feel okay about it.

Uh oh, time is already so easy to lose in Vision Pro. Watch out TikTokers. If Reels debuts, I’m doomed.

Apple’s Vision Pro headset now has a native TikTok app, the shortform video service has announced.

The interface will look relatively familiar [...], with a vertically oriented player for videos as well as buttons to like, comment, favorite, and share. But the company has taken advantage of the increased screen real estate [...] to spread out other interface elements, showing comments and creator profiles on a pane [...] so they don’t obscure the main video player.

Busywork isn’t always bad. I turn to it when I can’t deal but still need to get shit done.

A web designer told me busywork serves as “productive procrastination” when she’s avoiding more complex tasks. A woman in sales and marketing said she values the solitude of rote tasks, and retreats into spreadsheets “when everybody’s annoying and I’m peopled out and my bullshit meter is filled.” A senior research program manager at a nonprofit explained that she values how data cleaning [...] creates an intimacy with the information she’s processing.

This is so tempting. I can’t imagine Apple will make a “headless” laptop, but they should.

Luke Miani (who runs a great YouTube channel I’ve been following for a while) has created the sort of beautiful monstrosity I would absolutely consider for my own workflow: he was able to remove a display from an M2 MacBook Air and use the remaining “macOS slab” as a fully functioning computer for the Vision Pro’s Mac Virtual Display mode.

I just made one, and you should too!

St. Jude lets you send a digital Valentine's Day card to kids receiving treatment. It takes seconds and could brighten someone's day ❤️

https://www.stjude.org/get-involved/send-virtual-cards-online-to-childrens-hospital-patients/valentines-day.html

I don’t use omg.lol, but I continue to think that it’s one of the best deals on the internet. And today especially!

omg.lol membership is 64% off today with code LOVE https://home.omg.lol/referred-by/robb

You get an email, blog, mastodon instance, all sorts of stuff and @adam is great too

🔗 Apple Music launches new personalized ‘Love’ and ‘Heartbreak’ stations — 9to5mac.com // Benjamin Mayo

The ‘Love Station’ has a romantic theme featuring songs about falling in love, whereas ‘Heartbreak’ features tracks about heartbreaks and sad love. Apple says these stations are deeply personalized to select the best music for each user, drawing from Apple Music’s catalog of more than 100 million songs.

I’m a heavy user of the personalized stations. Glad to see they’re rounding them out with more moods and things — keep ‘em coming!

🆕📝 Crashing Clockwise #540: ‘I Did Something Bad’

For months, I’ve wanted to get the heyjb.me domain for my links because it’s easy to say and, unlike my name, easy to spell. But when I’ve checked for it on Hover, it’s been taken. Bummer. Today, when glancing down the list of domains I own, what do I see? I already own heyjb.me. 🤦‍♂️

So which superb owl won last night? 🦉

Mountainfest was a joy this weekend! So many quiet badasses here, ready and willing to share their knowledge. I feel so fortunate to live somewhere that an event like this exists to bring climbers and other outdoor adventurers together. 💪 📷

🆕📝 7 Things This Week [#131]

🤔 Super curious that I got offered this “loyal customer” discount only after transferring my line away from Verizon last night. 🙄