Technology – Spectre Collie

Look Back With Creepy Eyes

My experience on the Apple Vision Pro after a year

I guess there was an anniversary for the Apple Vision Pro a while ago, because I kept seeing people doing retrospectives on it, and I figured I should probably write about my own experiences. If only because I spent so much time leading up to the launch writing about how hyped I was, but then never did a follow-up after the honeymoon period was over.

But that idea, like the headset itself, went back to sitting unused on a shelf.

Even though I almost never use it, I don’t regret getting it, and I don’t have any real intention of trying to sell it.¹ With all my back-and-forth trying to talk myself into getting one, the thing that finally pushed me over the edge was simply owning the device itself. Like the Apple Watch “series 0,” the first iPad, the first iPhone, one of the original iPods, and the used Macintosh SE I’ve got sitting on my desk, I like having it as a kind of landmark of consumer technology history more than for its practical utility. In other words: I still just think it looks neat.

I still think that a lot of the negative reviews early on had too much of a We were promised jetpacks! vibe to them. There’s still an amazing amount of groundbreaking technology crammed into the headset, all in service of trying to make the experience of using it as frictionless and approachable as possible, and it still seems short-sighted to be dismissive of all that to focus on frivolous complaints.² Essentially complaining that it’s only 10 years ahead of its time instead of 20.

Ultimately, pretty much everything I like and dislike about the Vision Pro is a result of one key decision Apple made when positioning it as a product: they want it to be a “lifestyle” device instead of an “enthusiast” one.

There’s nothing surprising about that, and it was pretty evident even before the device launched. The Vision Pro in its first incarnation feels like something that could only be made by Apple, because of the industrial design, the focus on interconnected devices, vertical integration, tight connection between hardware and software, and the years spent advancing and refining the state of ARKit on iOS devices. But that also means that Apple would need the device to sell at iPad or Mac levels to make any sense as an Apple product, and it’s probably impossible to get those numbers from being limited just to gamers or fans of the Quest.³

What did surprise me was how much that one decision rippled out into everything else, and how much it’s keeping the platform from feeling like it’ll find its audience.

1
And if any early adopters are still considering selling theirs: good luck with that! It sure feels like all the interest dried up not long after the initial hype did.
2
Such as, of course, the complaint that it messes up your hair.
3
And Apple just doesn’t sell hardware at a loss, which Facebook is more willing to do.

Kobo Libra Colour: Reader-Centric

An important addendum about e-readers and what we should expect technology to do

I’ve already written about the Kobo Libra Colour e-reader — one could even say I’ve written too much about it¹ — but I keep falling back into the style of aping internet tech reviews. I haven’t called out what might be the best thing about it.

One of my key takeaways is that it just “gets out of the way,” which is underselling it. The entire UX — and the distinction between user interface and user experience is especially significant here — is designed around letting you read (and annotate, if that’s what you’re into) your stuff.

There’s absolutely still a Kobo store selling DRM-protected licenses for books, just like on Kindle devices, but the key difference is that it feels designed around convenience instead of consumerism. It’s never more than a couple of taps away, but the key difference is that it’s always at least a couple of taps away.

On the home screen, the Kobo brings your existing library to the forefront, along with multiple entry points to OverDrive (if you have it connected) to get books from your library. On the “My Books” tab, the search bar defaults to searching through your library, and you have to explicitly choose to look through the Kobo store instead. Even on the “Discover” tab, which is essentially the Kobo storefront, OverDrive is given a prominent position at the top. Half the screen is dedicated to a daily sale offer, to get a recommended book for one or two bucks. And there are algorithmically-generated lists of recommendations to buy higher-margin books, similar to the Kindle. But it also gives prominent placement to your own wishlist, the books you’ve explicitly said you’re interested in, as opposed to the books that are being shoved in front of your face.

That’s in addition to the more “open” feel of the Kobo in general. There are multiple routes to getting your own DRM-free books and documents onto the device, whether it’s Dropbox, Google Drive, or a USB cable. It’s directly integrated with Pocket, if you want to read articles you’ve saved from the web.² Even the books sold through the store and containing DRM are typically in a variant of the standard EPUB format, instead of Amazon’s proprietary AZW variants.

It’s subtle enough that I didn’t think to call it out. And that’s a shame, because it’s a huge part of why I chose the Kobo in the first place.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve suddenly become one of the hard-line “no ethical consumption under capitalism!” types. Or for that matter, any of the people who’ve been running around the internet since the early 2000s like Charlton Heston at the end of Soylent Green, screaming “you’re the product! You’re the product!!!“

Partly because it seems false, but also because it’s infantilizing. We’re undeniably influenced to make decisions based on what profit-driven companies decide to present to us, but we’re still adults making decisions. I still would recommend a Kindle to anyone who’s still comfortable buying from Amazon, because they’re well-made devices being sold at a price that’s affordable due to Amazon’s margins. It’s all about each responsible adult choosing the point at which the concessions are more than they’re willing to put up with.

I think it requires consumers to be mindful-if-not-absolutist about the choices we make. And companies to keep the balance in mind, making sure that their responsibility to customers is the most important constraint. I feel like it’s easy for people like me looking at consumer technology, including something as innocuous as an e-reader, to pay too much attention to how sharp and high-contrast the monochrome Kindle renders its shopping cart on every page, instead of asking why there needs to be a shopping cart on every page.

1
And just so there’s no confusion: I’m obviously kidding about getting ad revenue for these posts, since this blog doesn’t have ads. It’s just my latest hyper-fixation, and I think it’s neat.
2
And you don’t mind using a product from Mozilla, since I guess everybody is a bad guy these days.

Weekly e-Reader

An update on the Kobo Libra Colour after a week and a half

Recently I wrote about buying a Kobo Libra Colour e-reader, and even though I could never seem to decide on how to spell “e-reader” or “e-Ink” consistently, I did decide that I liked it.

But that was a week and a half ago! How has it been holding up now that the initial honeymoon period is over? I figured I should write an update ~~to take advantage of that sweet sweet SEO revenue~~ to give people more information if they were looking for an alternative to the Kindle.

Overall

I still like it a lot!

It is a pretty simple slab of plastic, so it doesn’t have the same I just enjoy holding this allure that weirdos like me find in some gadgets. But it does what it’s designed to do and gets out of the way. It’s already settled into its place as my preferred e-reader, and I’ve used it almost every night since I got it.

The Screen

Below are some more close-ups of the Kobo Libra Colour’s screen than I gave in the last post, showing what it looks like with a little bit more color and also what it looks like with just text.

Clarity: Since I’ve been using it long enough that it’s become my “baseline,” I decided to get out the Kindle Oasis again and do a side-by-side comparison. It’s undeniable that the Libra Colour lacks the clarity of the Oasis; the color filter adds a faint-but-noticeable texture over every screen, whether it happens to be showing color or not.¹

The close-up photos below show the effect, especially when you show the close-up of text on the Kobo Libra Colour vs the Kindle Oasis. It’s that denim-like diagonal texture that appears over everything. The photos are somewhat misleading, though, since I can’t see that texture in person; my eyes simply can’t focus that close to the screen. Instead, it appears as a subtle newsprint-like graininess to the display, which makes the text seem less sharp than on a black-and-white e-Ink display like the Oasis.

No doubt that some readers find it intolerable, and I’d say that they have grounds to complain, since the super-sharp text is one of the main draws of e-Ink. But personally, I think the novelty of color makes up for it, even if you don’t intend to read comics on it. Most of the time I forget the grainy texture is even there, unless I’ve got the devices side by side.

Ghosting: I’d mentioned in the last post that ghosting is more noticeable on the Libra Colour than on previous e-readers I’ve used. It’s a side effect of the technology that makes e-Ink displays possible, and it’s fixed by a full-screen refresh. But it does seem to be more noticeable with a color display, especially in areas of red.

You can see it in the screenshots below in the cover thumbnail of Silver Nitrate, where the text that had appeared on the previous screen is still faintly visible. (You can just make out the words “whole day” and “with Dorotea”). Because the home screen is a scrolling list of color thumbnails, and the scrolling area isn’t updated every frame, it seems to be more noticeable here than anywhere else on the device.

Battery Life: The battery life on the Libra Colour has been good if not spectacular. I’ve never done a stress test to see how long it lasts, and I’ve never needed it and not had a charge available. But I’m so used to these things going days and still reporting nearly-full battery, that it’s just odd to see a battery icon on an e-reader at the 50% mark unless it’s been sitting in a bag for weeks.

1
I haven’t seen a Kindle Colorsoft in person, but I suspect it will have the exact same effect since it uses the same screen.

Paperlike Like

A review of some good iPad screen protectors with some great customer service

A few days ago, I acknowledged that even though I’m pledging to make a break from Amazon, they’re still hard to beat purely in terms of customer service. So when a smaller company with fewer resources meets or beats them in customer service, I think it’s worth calling out.

Last year I wrote a review of Astropad’s Rock Paper Pencil screen protectors, and I gave them an A-. The advantages¹ were that they can be removed and replaced pretty easily, and the included replacements for the Apple Pencil tips have a finer point that feels more like a ball point pen than a rubber stylus.

The more I used it, though, the more I got distracted by how much the Rock Paper Pencil degrades the screen clarity of the iPad. It’s certainly not unusable, but it’s definitely noticeable if you spend most of the day looking at higher-resolution screens. I also fell out of like with the feel of writing with the metal tip on the coarser screen protector. At first, it felt nostalgic like writing on the ruled paper inside my old Trapper Keeper, but over time it felt more like writing on the plastic cover of the Trapper Keeper.²

So I decided to go back to the Paperlike, which I’d used for a long time on previous devices and never had any major problems with. They’re more expensive, but keeping in line with Apple philosophy, it feels like getting the version without compromises for a device that I use a lot. As part of the pledge to break from Amazon, I ordered a couple directly from Paperlike, reasoning that the extra time spent for delivery would be worth it for the feeling of smug superiority for ordering from a smaller business.

The problem is that I’d completely forgotten that I’d already gotten one back when I upgraded my iPad. It had been sitting there unopened and uninstalled the whole time, and I gradually forgot about it as I labored on, drawing with rubber on unprotected glass like some kind of animal.

The company has a satisfaction guarantee, so I sent a note asking if I could return the extra one. I soon got an email offering me a store credit (for 150% of the cost of the item!) instead of returning it. That alone is pretty great customer service. But the downside to being a company that does one thing really well is that I didn’t need anything else from the store. I explained as much in a follow-up email.

And then, they just gave me a refund. They said I could keep the extra to pass along to a friend. I was so pleased by how easy (and non-wasteful) they’d made it that I felt like I had to spread the word.

This kind of thing isn’t exactly unprecedented, if you’ve been dealing with Amazon for a while, but the assumption is that they’re so big that they can write off the losses without a second thought. I’d imagine that it costs them more to do a return than it would just to let customers keep what they’d bought and issue a refund anyway. I don’t want to make it sound like Paperlike is some tiny mom & pop shop, but it’s also a bigger relative hit for them to favor genuinely good customer service, and it deserves a call-out.

As for the screen protectors themselves: they do exactly what they set out to do, which is improve the feel of using an Apple Pencil on the device, with as little degradation to screen quality as possible. And the latest version is all but undetectable once it’s applied; it just gives your screen a matte texture.

I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like writing on paper, but it’s definitely less slippery and more satisfying than writing on glass. And it has less grip than Astropad’s screen protectors, which means that writing or drawing for an extended time isn’t as prone to tiring out your hand.

My biggest criticism — only criticism, really — is that the process of applying it is kind of a pain. They do every thing they can to make it easier. There’s an instructional video that takes you through it step by step. It comes with a microfiber cloth and wet wipes, to clean everything at multiple steps through the process. And there are various stickers to guarantee that everything is lined up perfectly.

When you first open the package and see all of the guides and stickers, it can seem a little anal-retentive for something as simple as putting on a screen protector. But after you try it once, and at least in my case invariably fail, it all seems like a necessity.

Each package includes two screen protectors, ostensibly so you only need to buy one set for the lifetime of your iPad. But in my experience, it’s a necessity because the first one always gets messed up. You practically have to be in a NASA-style clean room to avoid getting nearly-invisible specks of dust or dirt or stray whiskers that’ll get stuck underneath.

I tried applying one to my 11″ iPad, after re-watching the video, cleaning off my desk and everything around it, carefully following every step, cleaning and dusting the screen thoroughly, and I still managed to get a tiny speck of dust trapped under the screen protector. It left the smallest air bubble in the center of the screen, which was barely perceptible but I knew would drive me insane over time. I’d decided to just relax and not stress about it and use the thing anyway, which is when I noticed that I’d applied it upside down. The screen protector was covering the iPad’s camera, and video from it had the Vaseline-smeared look of late-in-life TV footage of Elizabeth Taylor.

So it might be a good thing I have an extra package, since it might actually take me four attempts to get it right. Regardless, I don’t want my general ineptitude and lack of cleanliness to scare anybody away from the brand; they make the application as straightforward as is possible, and once you’ve got it installed, it works great and lasts for years. I’m a fan, and I wish I’d just kept using Paperlike all along.

1
Apart from the obvious advantage that they’re lower-priced than Paperlike
2
That’s the kind of solid analogy you don’t get from product reviews on The Verge.

The Kobo Libra Colour, or, In Praise of Increasingly Necessary Devices

First impressions of a new color e-ink ebook reader, along with an explanation of why I got it

Around four years ago, I bought a Kindle Oasis, refurbished, with ads, using store credit, and I still felt the need to write a blog post furiously justifying it. It’s darkly comic reading that post now, since while I was trying to get comfortable with being further entrenched in the Amazon ecosystem, I actually said that Amazon was one of the more benign of the tech giants!

But I was talking in terms of being consumer-friendly. And it more or less stands; you’ll have a hard time beating Amazon strictly in terms of convenience or cost. You just have to be willing to ignore all the shady stuff that they do to guarantee that convenience and undercut their competition.

That Kindle Oasis is still perfectly fine, and I still like it quite a bit. More than Amazon does, apparently, since they’ve discontinued the model. I still have enough unread books in my Kindle library, and it’s so straightforward to check out library books using Libby and read them on the device, that I could go for at least the rest of the year without having to buy anything else from Amazon.

But a Kindle, no matter how well it’s designed or how much it seems to be tailored to the reader, exists primarily to sell more Kindle books. So along with canceling my Prime account, it seemed like a good opportunity to make a clean break and upgrade my ebook reader to be free of Amazon completely.

I chose the Kobo Libra Colour (“colour” because Kobo is a Canadian company).

Perfect, No Notes

My long-running frustration with finding the perfect tablet has reached the point where I’m blaming the tech industry as a whole

After a lot of stressing¹ about buying yet another tech gadget, I got an iPad mini last spring. I’d been impatiently waiting for Apple to release an updated model, but it eventually became clear that a) they wouldn’t, and 2) I didn’t really need an updated version, since the current one (“6th generation”) does everything I wanted one for.

I had imagined all the ways that my new life post-iPad mini would be so much richer and more fulfilling. With such a portable and powerful device, I could have all the best of an e-reader and a video player and a word processor and a sketch pad and a notebook! I would take so many notes. It would break whatever mental block had taken over in 2024 and make me super ultra productive. All the time I waste with social media would now be spent with personal and professional enrichment. I could satisfy my reading goals and also get back into comics! It would encourage me to practice drawing every day, like my artist and cartoonist heroes, as I’d idly whip out a sketch and see my work improving over time. I’d start journaling again! I’d become one of those people who seems deeply contemplative until he’s suddenly struck with inspiration and simply must pull out a pen to take down a brilliant insight.

Surprisingly, these things did not happen.

At some point between 2013 — when I first picked up an iPad mini and felt a shaft of heavenly light spotlight me in the middle of an Apple store — and 2025, the device that had seemed like the ultimate concentration of personal computing power in the most perfect form factor had become instead a bunch of disappointing compromises.

For reading anything besides comics, a dedicated eInk-based ebook reader is better. And for reading comics, a larger iPad is better. I’ve gotten dependent on a larger iPad for drawing art for my games, and the 11″ iPad also turns out to be better for anything that needs a keyboard, making it nice for when I’m traveling and don’t want to carry a laptop around.² And as for portability, the iPhone is the only device that I’m pretty much guaranteed to have with me at all times, so I tend to use it for photography, quick bursts of reading books, watching videos while traveling, and listening to music.

Maybe the most damning: I’ve tried every single note-taking app I can find on the iPad mini, and none of them works exactly like I want. Every single time I’ve been inclined to take down notes or capture ideas, I’m instead distracted by thinking of all the ways I wish that the note-taking app itself were better.³ I’m still planning how my own perfect notes app will function once I actually develop it, which I’ll surely do in my clearly infinite free time. But that will require me to re-re-learn how SwiftUI works and Apple’s ML frameworks for shape and gesture recognition, so I’d better go onto YouTube to see if there’s an easy-to-follow tutorial, and by that point I’ve forgotten what I wanted to take notes for.

Normally, when I find myself in the middle of a tantrum about how I can’t have my One True Perfect Computing Device, my first impulse is to blame myself for being spoiled. Oh, you’re able to get state-of-the-art technology that’s the result of decades of research and people working tirelessly to build it for the tiny sliver of the world’s population who’s able to afford it, and you’re disappointed? Are you sure you’re not just grouchy from having to sleep with that pea under your mattress?!

But looking around now, not just at the sorry state of tech in the US but the specific reasons I’m looking for a new device, it’s become undeniably clear that I’ve been expecting perfection from companies that are financially incentivized to keep their products imperfect.

1
About 70% legitimate, 30% performative
2
My main computer is a 14″ MacBook Pro, so the only reason I don’t want to carry it around isn’t because of the size of weight, but because I’m too paranoid about anything happening to it!
3
For the record: Goodnotes is still the front-runner, but it still feels kind of clunky and inelegant to me.

The Ladder

My first time playing through the novel escape room by Hatch Escapes

Last night, we played through The Ladder by Hatch Escapes in Los Angeles. I’ve been vaguely aware of it since we moved to LA, but hadn’t tried any of the Hatch experiences yet. After last night, I can understand exactly why there’s been so much positive buzz around them.

Just to establish where I’m coming from: I’d rank myself as maybe “intermediate” with escape rooms. Definitely not an expert, but I have played through at least a dozen. And immersive entertainment has been kind of like a mechanical bull throughout my career; every so often I’ll be able to get ahold of a contract or an interesting project before it bucks me off and I’m back out of the loop. So I’m tangentially aware of the state of the art, but undeniably behind on seeing the latest and greatest.

By the way, I’m going to keep calling The Ladder an “escape room” even though it’s technically not. One of the things I like about it is that it isn’t as precious about its artistry or innovation like immersive entertainment can sometimes be, insisting that you use the correct terminology for the experience or you’re doing it a disservice. Here, you’re doing 90% of the same type of stuff you’d do in traditional escape rooms: you’re in a group of 4-10, together in the same space, solving thematic puzzles, but your goal is never actually to escape from a room. Instead, it’s tracing a career over the course of several decades, with a light-hearted story — which is genuinely funny and clever throughout — about corporate espionage and back-stabbing.

Until last night, Palace Games in San Francisco were the most technologically advanced escape rooms I’d gone through. The Ladder is extremely ambitious with its technology. I don’t recall any single effect being as dramatic as some of the entire-room transformations as in Palace Games’s best, but The Ladder spreads clever use of tech through every part of the experience. I was especially impressed that Matthew McClain, credited as the “Creative Technologist” for the experience, was selling copies of his book Arduino for Artists in the lobby, encouraging more people to learn how to make creative installations.

At several junction points in the game, the group has to make a choice from a menu, and each one had an ingenious interface that perfectly fit the theme of the room. Even if the rest of the experience had been a disappointment, I was so impressed with the initial room’s selection interface that I still would’ve considered the whole thing a success.

The most unique thing about The Ladder, at least compared to all of the similar experiences that I’ve tried before, is that it’s replayable. And not just in the sense that you can repeat it, but that you might be eager to go back as soon as possible and go through the experience again, so that you can improve your score. Probably the biggest problem I have with escape rooms is that they’re so prone to quarterbacking; one or two players can take over the experience, leaving the rest of the group with little to do.

The Ladder is designed around independent activities with a common theme. There is a main story-based puzzle that you’re working to figure out, but there are also multiple other puzzles or games in each room that you can complete just to improve your team’s score. Our team didn’t accomplish the main story goal, but I get the impression that we would’ve needed to complete the story and earn a sufficiently high score in order to get the best ending(s). And a recap sheet that you’re given at the end of the game reveals the fact that there are several different possible endings.

Our team had four people, which was the minimum number of players allowed in the experience, and frankly isn’t enough to do very well. I’d guess that the ideal number is around 6. The company sets the upper limit at 10 players, but I can’t imagine that many people crammed into the small rooms that make up most of the experience.

I’m being deliberately vague to spoil as little as possible, but if it’s not clear, I highly recommend The Ladder to anybody in southern California that has an interest not just in escape rooms, but theme parks or interactive entertainment in general. It’s really funny, and it’s designed to respect your time and let you have fun. I can’t wait to try Hatch’s other experiences, and especially to see what they do next.

Sound Check

Early review of using Apple’s AirPods Pro as hearing aids

Yesterday, Adam Savage posted a video to YouTube describing his experiences using the AirPods Pro as replacements for the traditional hearing aids that he’s used for years. It’s a good video, matter-of-factly going over his history of hearing loss, the expensive hearing aids he used when he was on television regularly, and the cheaper ones he currently uses from Costco. (I never in a million years would’ve thought to check Costco for them). Not to spoil the video, but his verdict is that the AirPods are the first OTC ones he’s used that he actually likes.

It reminded me to try the hearing test included on the iPhone as of a recent update to iOS and the AirPods Pro firmware. I’d last tried it a couple of months ago, but I’d get 1/3 to halfway through the test before it errored out. Where I live in LA, we tend to have helicopters flying overhead, or low-T dipshits recklessly drag racing out on the street, so we’re never guaranteed more than 10 minutes of uninterrupted silence. My latest test, however, completed successfully.

I’ve known for a while that I’ve got some degree of hearing loss. I’m having more and more difficulty hearing movies and TV shows, but I just blamed that on a combination of middle age and audio engineering in a post-Christopher Nolan world. More concerning is the number of sounds that I just can’t hear at all. My husband often hears our front gate opening when I don’t hear anything. There’s a set of lockers at my office that have digital keypads that beep on lock or unlock, but I was completely unaware that they beep until a coworker told me. None of it has seemed essential, but enough to be reminded that I haven’t been hearing everything.

The iPhone’s hearing test involves tapping on the phone whenever you hear it play a sequence of three beeps, which vary in frequency and volume. For a lot of the test, I felt as if I was having to skip so many of them that it would just end abruptly and flash a dire warning that I needed to see a hearing specialist immediately. As it turned out, though, it simply ended with a notice that I had mild hearing loss in one ear, and moderate in the other. Not very surprising.

It then offered to have the AirPods Pro correct for my affected hearing, which was as simple as reading some warning messages and then pressing a button. I’ve been wearing them around the house last night and a few hours today.

The effect was initially jarring. Because Disney Parks are my frame of reference for literally everything, I immediately was reminded of Sounds Dangerous, a show at Disney/MGM Studios where guests would be brought onstage to add sound effects to a movie clip playing behind them. Everything I did sounded as if it were being given over-loud sfx from a clumsy and amateurish foley artist. My footsteps were cartoonishly loud and sharp, opening and closing drawers sounded like I was throwing a tantrum. Even sliding into bed sounded like sandpaper against satin, punctuated with a sound like a zip cord-powered toy car as I put my legs under the sheets. And getting out of bed sounded like someone twisting a bundle of celery.

All of that is likely to fade into normalcy the longer I wear them. And everything else is markedly better. In particular, the “light rain” noise machine that we’ve been using at night actually sounds like light rain again, after a year or so of it getting quieter and quieter until I started to wonder what was the point of using it at all. And I can now make out voices on TV more clearly, with the volume set to 8 or 9 less Volume Units than I’d had to set it before. (Normally I have to set it to 24 to hear it comfortably, but now I can hear it at 16 or 17. Am I the only one who wishes there were consistent units for TV volume across all TV and audio setups?)

These still have the limitations of being AirPods, which make me reluctant to wear them all day. My own voice sounds disturbingly tinny and electronic. My chewing or swallowing noises are unbearable. And there is an occasional very-high-register snapping sound that seems to be a side effect of the signal processing.

But as a feature included with the ear buds I was already using, it’s just an amazing addition from Apple. It’s exciting to think I’ll have it available when I most need it, either when I need to actually hear my coworkers, or when I want to watch TV without having the volume set so high it’s painful for everyone else in the room.

And even better, it’s convinced me that the benefits are enough for me to consider getting tested for a real hearing aid at some point. Even knowing that my hearing was deteriorating, it’s unlikely I would ever have tried to get confirmation and a diagnosis. Apple’s made it easy enough that there was no reason not to.

Nostalgia Buffer Overflow

Classic computers, emulators, and realizing I need to upgrade my computer memories

I’ve spent years talking myself out of buying a “vintage” Macintosh or trying to upgrade my old one, each time thinking I’ve put the compulsion to rest for good, only to have it reawakened a few weeks or months later, the second I see a compact Mac in the background of a YouTube video, or I see a screenshot of an old ICOM game.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to stop the lambs from screaming, and I bought a Macintosh SE from a collector on Craigslist. I spent more than was recommended by people online,¹ but it included the original keyboard, mouse, manuals, and box, and it appears to be in excellent condition, so I’m satisfied.

It’s pretty easy to find tons of software for vintage Macs — more than I ever would’ve been able to get in the late 1980s — but actually getting it from the internet onto an actual computer means using a device like the BlueSCSI. I ordered an external one and received it about a week later, and it was so straightforward to use that within a few hours, I’d already ruined it.

That’s just me being over-dramatic. I’d just made it so that the BlueSCSI keeps booting into Dark Castle, which was designed to run from a floppy, meaning it never returns control back to the Finder. So I had a dedicated Dark Castle machine, which honestly wouldn’t be so bad, except that I at least want to be able to run HyperCard as well.

It’s not that complicated to fix, but it does mean re-installing the Basilisk II emulator on my MacBook Pro to fix up my SD card. And running the emulator on a modern computer, with gigabytes of ram instead of 1MB, and a high-speed connection to the internet, and a processor that’s so fast it makes everything open and run instantaneously, is a stark reminder of how much computers have improved since the late 1980s.

And it’s actually made me reassess what kind of nerd I am, and exactly how much. The Mac SE I bought only has 1MB of RAM, meaning it can barely run System 6 comfortably², and can’t run System 7 at all. I ordered an upgrade to 4MB over ebay³, which seemed like a no-brainer, but now has me more than a little anxious about trying to install it.

There’s no shortage online of instructions on how to open up a classic compact Mac, and they all come with warnings about how dangerous it is to work around a CRT. I’ve spent enough time working with PC motherboards that I believe it’d be easy enough for me to do, but there is something that would be even easier for me to do, and that’s not bother with the memory upgrade at all. It already feels like with a machine this old, I’m playing Russian roulette every time I turn it on, just daring the hard drive to finally fail, the power supply to go out, and the computer to demand I leave it to its well-deserved eternal rest.

What kind of computer nerd is reluctant to open up a machine and do a simple memory upgrade? I’m starting to think I’ve spent the last several decades in denial about what kind of computer nerd I actually am.

1
Although honestly, the “never spend more than $50” advice seems unrealistic based on everything I’ve been seeing for years. I’ve never seen a listing for a functional one including mouse and keyboard for under $150.
2
Hence all the disk swapping I had to do on my Mac Plus back in 1988
3
Which, hilariously, cost as much as 16GB in modern RAM

Rock Paper Pencil review

A handwritten review of Astropad’s screen protectors for the iPad

To test out the astropad screen protector specially suited for hand writing, I wrote a review using the screen protector and pencil. (Alt text for those who can’t read my handwriting will be appended to the end of this post).

But At What Cost?!

Thinking about cost vs value, and living in a world where computers are status symbols

One thing to know about the Vision Pro headset is that it’s very expensive. If you weren’t aware of that, I’m not sure exactly how, since people will remind you of it every possible chance they get. Even though it’s been several months since the initial announcement, and everyone’s had a chance to get over the initial shock, and everybody’s had time to decide whether or not it makes sense for them to buy one¹, it’s still near-impossible to see or hear anyone mention it without also mentioning the price. I’d been wondering whether Apple had maybe stealth-changed the name of the thing to “The $3500 Apple Vision Pro.”

And I’m not claiming it’s inexpensive; it’s objectively not. I’m a lifelong gadget hound who’s been obsessed with AR and VR to varying degrees over the past several years. When I first tried the headset, I felt like I’d been teleported a decade or so into the future. And even I had considerable difficulty spending that much money.

But what’s been confusing to me is why this product in particular is getting singled out as beyond the pale. Camera drones have gotten pretty popular, but I can’t recall ever seeing a comment to the effect of “Glad you paid $1200-$2100 for that video of your backyard, chief!” Cell phones crossed the $1000 barrier a while ago — and that’s not even mentioning paying $1500-$2000 for an Android phone if it’s got a folding screen on it — but I don’t hear a lot of, “Nice work, boss, you spent over a thousand bucks to send text messages!” I keep seeing recommendations for this video from The Verge about a popular fixed-focal-length, point-and-shoot camera that “won’t break the bank,” and I was stunned to see that it was $1600! And some of the people who most relentlessly kvetch about the price of the Vision Pro will often, in the next sentence, casually mention that they use an Apple Studio Display, which is an Apple-branded monitor that costs $1600.²

I’m proficient enough in arithmetic to recognize that the headset is more expensive than any one of those examples, but it’s also got a lot more stuff in it. It’s essentially an M2 iPad Pro with a secondary processor dedicated solely to passthrough, two displays with bleeding-edge pixel density, a couple of really good speakers, and an assload of sensors and cameras. (Not to mention the polishing cloth). If it were simply a case of dollar-per-component, the math doesn’t justify the outrage.

I didn’t really get it until just recently. I was watching a video on YouTube, and the Algorithm must’ve been so pleased with itself for choosing a video so specifically suited to me, because it was about a bougie gay couple going on a Disney cruise. As they were describing the boarding process, they showed their luggage, panning over a stack of suitcases. And right there at the top of it was the unmistakable white, puffy Vision Pro case from Apple, which retails at $199.³

And even as somebody who’s a fan of the device, who’s a strong believer in grown-ups being able to make their own decisions about what they spend their money on, and who was able to (after some effort) come up with a justification for buying one for myself, and who’s even considered taking it on a flight and Disney cruise in the near future, I had an immediate, visceral reaction to seeing that case:

“Man, what a douche.”

1
And again: even as a fan of the device, I still say it doesn’t make sense for most people to buy one
2
At least Apple includes the stand with that one, as far as I can tell.
3
For the record: the case I bought for mine was $20 on Amazon.

Not That Many Unhappy Returns?

Reporting on whether people online have been returning their headsets says more about the state of tech journalism than anything else

Last week, The Verge and the shambling leftovers of Gizmodo were both eagerly trying to make a news story about the huge wave of unsatisfied customers returning their Vision Pro headsets to Apple stores. It was interesting to watch as it took over the corners of social media that I still follow: apparently, the feverish mass hysteria leading up to release had finally broken, and people everywhere were furious to discover that the emperor had no clothes. It’s just a VR headset. It seems magical… until it doesn’t. Damn!

As far as I could tell, the source for these stories were a couple of posts on Reddit and Twitter, and a smattering of “Apple fans” that weren’t entirely unbiased, and not necessarily the representative sample they’d have you believe. Last week, it was made to sound as if there were an epidemic of returns. This week, I’m hearing that the return rate is actually estimated to be less than 1%, which is kind of low for computing devices.

I will tell you that I am an “Apple fan” who is most definitely biased, but I still couldn’t tell you which version is correct, or even if it does or should matter to anyone outside of Apple. All it tells me is stuff I already know:

VR headsets aren’t for everybody, and a lot of people will find them uncomfortable.
There is not yet a use case for the Vision Pro that makes it a must-have outside of die-hard early adopters and people developing software for it.
A lot of people have more credit cards than they have patience, and they wanted a take-home demo instead of the 30-minute in-store one.

Even though I’m both literally and figuratively invested in Apple, and I am the owner of an infrequently-used Vision Pro, I don’t feel like I need to go out of my way to defend it. Even die-hards like me will acknowledge that it’s not for everyone, and it will need some significant hardware revisions to get traction outside of the die-hards.

So what bugs me isn’t that people are talking trash about my shiny new toy. It’s that if I, a layperson, know enough to have a realistic idea of this device’s appeal, how come the writers and editors of tech blogs don’t?

I’ve repeatedly made fun of The Verge‘s review of the Vision Pro, but because it’s largely irrelevant to me, not because it’s inaccurate.¹ Screaming “BIAS!!!” whenever I read a review I don’t agree with is something I’ll leave for trolls on YouTube and comments sections. But I do get concerned when it seems like they’re working hard to make something a story when there’s no real story there.

I won’t claim to be entirely high-minded about it, since it’s mostly because I’m a fan of gadgets and devices and computers finally being able to do the things I imagined they’d someday be able to do when I was a teenager. And since Yahoo seems to be hell-bent on destroying Engadget, there’s not a lot of reputable, sufficiently-funded options out there.

But I think it’s worth at least mentioning that the companies that tech sites are covering are the companies that are gaining increasingly outsized influence on everything. There needs to be some real journalistic rigor happening, beyond just product reviews and attempts to turn Reddit threads into news stories.

For instance: I still don’t understand how the hype around Elon Musk every happened at all, much less was allowed to grow to the extremes it did. I’ve seen a lot of comments to the effect that he was misleadingly insightful until he suddenly went batshit insane — the phenomena of those bumper stickers on Teslas that say “we bought this car before we knew he was an asshole” — but I’m not buying it. Every time the guy opens his mouth, a flood of red flags comes pouring out. There were plenty of people writing for papers and blogs who came into frequent contact with him, years and years before he bought a social media site to prove to the world what an asshole he is. So why were they perpetuating the “real life Tony Stark” nonsense instead of calling him out?

Anyway, as I said: I’m not actually trying to draw a real connection between anecdotal stories being turned into “news,” and the rise of our corporate-ravaged cyber dystopia. I’m just saying that the audience for tech journalism is much wider and more relevant than it was even ten years ago, and we should keep that in mind.

In my opinion, a much better story than “Are People Returning Their $3500 First-Generation VR Headsets?!” is “Is Apple Committed to the Vision Pro as a Long-Term Computing Platform?” Granted, that’s a little harder to glean from Reddit posts and a few tweets, but it seems to me to be far more relevant. You’ve got a lot of people who spend a lot of time seeing every new product that comes out, dealing with companies a lot both directly and indirectly, and overall spending a lot more time immersed in consumer technology more than I’d be able to.²

It seems like they’re in a unique position to see trends, make insightful observations about how things fit into company’s overall strategies, and make predictions about where the technology might be headed. That requires making observations that go deeper than companies’ PR, not just in the vacuous gainsay “Apple doesn’t want me to call this a VR headset, but that’s what this is and you can’t stop me!!!” version of “keepin’ it real,” but in having a frame of reference that goes beyond the past six months and actually trying to put new developments into the proper context. That kind of coverage seems a lot more useful than filming a video wearing it on the subway or while cooking or skiing. I’d rather get a clear-eyed and realistic assessment — even if it’s one that I don’t agree with — of what it means for computing in its current state and how it might evolve, than a warning that it might mess up my hair.

1
Earlier I did say that it was misleading, if not outright wrong, to say you can’t share your content in the headset with other people, since you can cast it over AirPlay to a TV or iOS device. But the spirit of the criticism is valid. It is an almost entirely personal and private headset. And it seriously needs to have support for multiple accounts and not just its insufficient guest mode as currently implemented.
2
Or would ever want to.