HiWire

I'm curious about how they sound – will they compare well against Sony, Bose, and Sennheiser, for example (at nearly double the price)?

20 hours battery life... that is a step up from the Airpods Pro (5 hours). I guess this is where the Beats acquisition starts to show. Pricey as usual.

I started reading Neal Stephenson's Seveneves again. It has a different urgency now, partway through the pandemic.

https://youtu.be/6e1q_unPddo Heart's Nancy Wilson teaches guitar ... and backstage (1977)

Orbital (1991) Listening to this now, I find it strange that I found it boring before. I guess I was looking for something lush and complex, which is not the point of this album. In Sides was my first Orbital album on CD and it took a while for me to go all the way back in their catalog.

Great article. It's dark out there but there are still rays of hope on the horizon.

Like a Matthew Sweet song!

Version 2.0 – Garbage

Dark Hearts – Annie

... back when digital compact cassettes were cool. Wait, DCC was never cool?

Happy Birthday!

Blue Lines – Massive Attack Referencing the Sony Boodo Khan headphones Heart Still Beating – Roxy Music

Walkman hacks (no soldering)... for a player I don't own:

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny A genius book. I get the feeling that books as disparate as Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos (and Ilium / Olympos, of course), Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon trilogy, Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi, and even David Brin's Kiln People (and so many more), were directly inspired by Lord of Light.

Happy Birthday!

And it looks like the new MacBooks are reviewing well: MacBook Air: https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/macbook-air-m1-2020 MacBook Pro: https://www.laptopmag.com/apple-macbook-pro-13-inch-m1

Gene, it sounds like you need a local record store where you can sample the records. It sounds old-fashioned, but that's the only way to be sure when you're spending so much money. I've noticed a bunch of negative online reviews in the same vein over the last few years – it sounds like some of the labels are pushing records out without any kind of quality control – perhaps they are outsourcing the operation.

Exit Planet Dust – The Chemical Brothers

That would explain why my App Store updates weren't working. Thanks for keeping us updated. I think I'll try to download it tomorrow or later.

Good luck! The Ars Technica review of macOS Big Sur is out: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/macos-11-0-big-sur-the-ars-technica-review/ There's nothing specifically in there that I would classify as a must-have feature, but I imagine there might be a few performance and security enhancements that will pay off in the long term. I'll be installing it to a test volume this afternoon.

As suspected, there aren't a lot of differences between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro: https://www.macworld.com/article/3596752/apple-m1-chip-13-inch-macbook-pro-macbook-air-performance-battery-design-display-price.html The MacBook Air is a better pick for most people. I don't think the slightly brighter screen or higher clock speeds make any difference to the average user. The 512GB version of the MacBook Air has an 8-core GPU instead of the 256GB's 7-core, so that would be a good place to start. Also, I've decided to revert the 2010 MacBook Air to macOS 10.13 (unofficial patch) as it runs too slowly on 10.15 to be useful. I found out the hard way that it's cleaner to remove the Data partition when you're still running macOS 10.15 – boot to the Recovery Volume and delete from Disk Utility. Otherwise, the Data partition remains if you install 10.13 to the Macintosh HD partition. It doesn't seem to affect anything, but I'd rather have the system run without it.

It's not particularly compelling to me, either. A bigger battery, slightly better FaceTime camera, and a bit more thermal capacity than the Air. Its Intel predecessor could be upgraded to 32GB RAM and 4TB of storage. I'm thinking about moving to Catalina now (it's running on quite a few of the old spare Macs) and I'll be installing Big Sur on a test system when it releases on Thursday. DeaDBeeF may be a weird name, but I found out there is a fine (deeply nerdy) tradition behind it (Wiki): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(programming)#Debug_values "Magic debug values are specific values written to memory during allocation or deallocation, so that it will later be possible to tell whether or not they have become corrupted, and to make it obvious when values taken from uninitialized memory are being used. Memory is usually viewed in hexadecimal, so memorable repeating or hexspeak values are common..." "DEADBEEF (hexadecimal number 3735928559)... Famously used on IBM systems such as the RS/6000, also used in the classic Mac OS operating systems, OPENSTEP Enterprise, and the Commodore Amiga. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, marks freed kernel memory (KMEM_FREE_PATTERN)" Looks like a good music player. I'm getting tired of iTunes bloat (the PC versions stopped playing my movies until the latest update).

It turns out the RAM may be part of the whole SOC package, so no DIMMs. The people who are screaming the loudest about Boot Camp compatibility probably own multiple computers. This finally gives Apple an edge while the unwritten mantra for the Intel era has been "It's just like a PC, but thinner and more expensive and the ports keep disappearing!" That being said, I may need to buy a few Intel refurbs for work before the new era fully begins.

One More Thing Boo-urns to Intel and some bold claims on the new Apple silicon in the new Macs. The claimed performance and battery life improvements are compelling – the ball is in the developers' court to develop native apps to maximize these gains. To me, the only fly in the ointment is the 16GB RAM on the 13" MacBook Pro – the older Intel MBP can be configured with up to 32GB (they probably have a lower than 5% takeup rate on that configuration, though). It's really great to see the Mac Mini get some love – they're super handy for HTPC, developers, and all sorts of people. And it's great that they are holding the line on the prices. Some of the Macs were starting to look like a really poor value with mediocre performance/features and old silicon.

Happy Birthday!