A blog? Sure, why not.
Saturday 5 October 2024
Finally something good about video games.
Monday 23 September 2024
Thoughts on macOS & Windows
Ok, so now that it's out Sonoma is installed and for the most part, it's much the same as what was in place before. The one new thing that I'm really playing around with is the iPhone mirroring.
Having the ability to just hit the iPhone and grab 2fa tokens, or poke a App on the device that I don't have sitting around on the computer is neat. I'm, not sure that it's a game changer but it's something that you just don't get on a Windows device at this point.
The integration that Apple has on it's ecosystem is something that's really easy to overlook if you are looking at any one device. There are computers that can outperform, there are phones that have more unique features or better performance, there are better headphones, but as far as I know there are no combinations our there where I can be listening to audio from my computer and have the wireless headphones flip back over to the phone when a call comes in.
And I'm sure there may be some, but not ones that I've come across that just freaking work right out of the gate like Apple's stuff does.
At the end of the day I would love to see Microsoft get to a point where it's got the same level of integration that Apple has, but at that point I don't see how you could do that given the number of different companies making machines that run Windows.
Saturday 21 September 2024
Macbook Pro - M3Pro - What's it like now that the new toy feel has worn off.
Whenever you purchase a new toy there's always a period where it feels like the greatest thing that you have ever bought. After a while, once the newness of whatever it is has worn off, that's when it's interesting to hear what people think of the purchase.
For the Macbook Pro that I picked up the newness has kind of worn off, and it's kind of time to update my thoughts on the device.
For about 80% of what I'm using it for it's overkill.
There were a lot of things that I used to justify the purchase, and there's not a lot of point in going into them again, but at this point the device still feels like it's a good purchase. While it's overkill right now as new versions of macOS show up and things change over time having the extra headroom will be good to keep the device from becoming obsolete overnight. The screen kind of hits the sweet spot for me, sitting between the 15 and 13 inch options on the MacBook Air's and having one that runs at 120hz is definitely something that I'm enjoying.
It's almost got me thinking about getting a higher refresh rate display for my desktop machine.
Either way, still satisfied, and hopefully this will last a good long time before I have to worry about replacing anything.
Saturday 14 September 2024
Is it just me, or is the gaming industry a bit of a hot mess right now.
Sunday 8 September 2024
And here we go...
I'm thinking that there will b a settlement at some point, so likely a quiet boring outcome, but still interesting to see the shots fired.
Uni-taskers vs. Multitaskers - round 2
So, last round I was singing the praise of the Kindle, a purpose built book reader. Now I'm going to talk about the other side of the coin and another device that I have in my bag.
Thursday 5 September 2024
VMWare, Proxmox, and other fun things (if you work in IT).
So, a while back VMWare was purchased by Broadcom.
If you work in IT you already know where this is going. If you don't there are a couple of things that you should know.
VMWare makes a number of products, one that I have worked with quite a bit is called ESXi, it's effectively a platform that lets you run virtual machines so that you can run multiple things of of a single piece of hardware. It's a huge thing if you work in IT or like to pretend that you do. One of the big reasons that it was popular was because VMWare basically let you use ESXi for free and you would have to pay for some of the more advanced features.
While those advanced features were freaking cool you could still get a lot done with the free version of the platform, with a little more running around and manually poking at things.
When Broadcom bought VMWare a lot of people started to worry about what Broadcom was planning since they have a bit of a reputation as to how they handle companies they purchase. Sure enough earlier this year they killed off the free version of ESXi and then started putting the screws to people who are using their software with price increases.
Strangely enough they have released VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion, the desktop versions of their hypervisor, as free for personal use.
Regardless seeing the writing on the wall I was already looking into other options for running virtual machines and in the end Proxmox became the platform that I decided to put into production in places where I needed something. And when the time came to put other projects underway VMWare was basically ignored as a potential platform just because of the pricing and uncertainty regarding what was going to happen.
I'm very glad that the FOSS options managed to get caught up to VMWare - at least as far as I needed it to get for my workloads.