A Musing Bean

The Mac Studio Display

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 21:45:00 PDT

The Mac Studio Display

I held onto my 2014 27" 5K iMac (the OG) for over 7 years hoping for an M1 replacement, but alas it was not to be. Instead, Apple is pushing us to buy a Mac Studio ($2,000) and the Mac Studio Display ($1,600). That’s a total of $3,600 for the base models compared to the $1,800 I paid for the iMac. Sure, inflation has been up, but it's not been 100% in 7 years.

Of course, I could get an M1 Mac Mini ($1,100 for a 16 GB RAM + 512GB SSD model) with the display, for a cheaper $2,700 total, but that's still a lot of money.
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Success = Talent + Technology

Sun, 20 Feb 2022 15:00:00 PST

Success = Talent + Technology

Question: How many piano prodigies were there in the past 10 years?
Answer: Just as many as any 10 year period.

But few people know or care who they are. ...

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Why other people's opinions don't matter at all

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 22:13:00 PDT

Why other people's opinions don't matter at all

It's a cosmic accident that you happen to be alive at this particular time. You could have just have easily been born a hundred years earlier, or a hundred years later. Think about the kinds of things people believed a hundred years ago, or might believe a hundred years from now. Would you agree with much of them?

Do the things people believed a hundred years ago bother you today? Should anything anyone else believes now or in the future bother you today?

Related: Thinking.

The Stairstep Rule

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 10:51:00 PDT

The Stairstep Rule

When refactoring code, there's a rule to either change the structure or change the functionality, but never both at the same time.

This applies to other areas of life.
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Moving to a Surface Laptop from MacBook Air

Sat, 13 Apr 2019 12:33:00 PDT

Moving to a Surface Laptop from MacBook Air

After waiting years for Apple to release a decent laptop, I finally gave up and ordered a Surface Laptop today. It's a new 1st gen, 2017 model (i7-7660U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, burgundy red) for under $800.

I'm a bit surprised at my own decision, which I think sheds a bit of light on just how badly Apple has lost their way.
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Amazon's Echo Dot Kids Edition

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 21:08:00 PDT

Amazon's Echo Dot Kids Edition

This is both the most remarkable and most unremarkable thing I've seen recently. Unremarkable because is an obvious line extension. I thought Amazon already sold a kids edition of the Echo.

Remarkable because this is obviously the future, here today.
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Renaming file extensions in Mac OSX Terminal

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 10:12:00 PDT

Renaming file extensions in Mac OSX Terminal

I had a lot of .jpeg files that I wanted to rename to .jpg. No big deal I thought, just run “mv *.jpeg *.jpg”. Nope, that doesn't work.

According to Stack Overflow, the way to do this is: “for old in *.jpeg; do mv $old `basename $old .jpeg`.jpg; done”.
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Hosting Static Websites on Amazon AWS S3

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 13:03:00 PDT

Hosting Static Websites on Amazon AWS S3

In the past, I've hosted this blog on site44.com, which works great, is easy to use, and fairly reasonable at $4.95 / mo. However, I wanted to experiment with even cheaper hosting options, which led me to try Amazon S3's static website hosting.

Following the steps on Kyle Galbraith’s excellent article, it took me less than 15 minutes to set up. And it works like a charm!
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Knowledge has a Half-Life

Sun, 04 Mar 2018 13:02:00 PST

Knowledge has a Half-Life

Think of all the knowledge and skill it took to navigate a sailing ship in the 1600s to the other side of the world. It is the equivalent of piloting a spaceship to the moon today. Worth many fortunes in its day. Yet, that enormous trove of knowledge is completely obsolete now. It has no economic or social value.

Before around the 1970s, people in technical fields who mastered advanced algebra held an advantage over their peers. But with the widespread use of electronic calculators, those set of skills became nothing more than a curiosity.
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Three Learning LifeHacks from Marc Andreessen

Tue, 31 May 2016 17:10:00 PDT

Three Learning LifeHacks from Marc Andreessen

Lots of great content in this a16z Podcast where Don Faul interviews Marc Andreessen, but 3 unexpected learning hacks pop up right at the end:

Stick a bluetooth headset in your ear to listed to podcasts and audiobooks all day.
Use the iPhone's text-to-speech tool to read any web page to you, such as Wikipedia pages.
Research papers are under-exploited. Find the top professor in a field, and read all their published papers.

Related: Business.