Computing
- I got a cheap (CA$25) bluetooth doorbell chime and plugged the receiver in at my office.
- Turned on Settings → Accessibility → Sound Recognition → Sounds → Doorbell on my iPhone.
The initial upgrade process to the iPhone 16 was weirdly buggy. After iCloud transfer from the old phone, it’d freeze up randomly. It turns out there was an iOS 18 update specifically for the iPhones 16 and everything has been perfect since. It’s still labeled as iOS 18.0 though.
I’m starting to dig in on the new OS features. One peculiarity of Sonoma is that my cursor won’t be visible on wake or sometimes when switching spaces. But once I do something like an exposé gesture it’ll show. 🤷♂️
This is a cool dotfiles repo for Mac. I keep dotfiles for unix-y stuff, but hadn’t considered it for macOS settings and even a homebrew install list. Via Syntax.fm
My new Mac Studio arrived! This is my first desktop computer since the 2008-era Mac Pro I had in grad school. It’ll also be my second M-series device, alongside my beloved iPad.
Now, what to name it?
Hacking push notifications for deliveries on the iPhone
My Mac Studio is arriving soon 🎉 and I need to sign for it. The problem is I’m usually working in the basement with headphones. My house didn’t have a door bell either. The result is I never hear when a delivery person knocks. So I solved it:
Now when the door bell rings I get a time-sensitive push notification on my phone.
As the saying goes, accessibility technology is for everyone.
Here’s what I’m going with: Mac Studio M2 Max (12 core, 38 core GPU) with 2TB storage and 96GB RAM. I hate closing windows and quitting apps for anything remotely in-flight, so 96GB it is. Overkill? Maybe? Will it last four more years? Hopefully. 🤞
Between going 100% indie with my software company, my MacBook Pro 2019’s fan’s screaming incessantly, and Apple dropping the M2 Mac Studio, it looks like I’m in the computer market again. Oh, and Chris Lawley says they fixed the fan noise. The question is, what spec?
Did anyone else get the Ulysses app newsletter on May 31st? I hope it’s a prank because yuck! gross! In the meantime, I’ve pulled my App Store renewal for it. If you care, maybe let your friends know about this too. [Update: apparently it was a “joke,” but I’m still moving away from Ulysses]
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/907/2023/dd75de23d5.png" width=“600” height=“467” alt=“Email screenshot from Marcus, Ulysses app co-founder saying “I love Elon Musk. [..] He’s a great innovator, probably a fantastic lover and an overall nice guy."">
The timeline isn’t settled. The @-mention isn’t settled. Nothing is settled. It’s 2003 again!
Robin Sloan’s A Year of New Avenues speaks to the renewed excitement I have about the web, and working on the web.
Via Mac Power Users #668 I found out you can follow YouTube channels in most RSS services. I’ve always wanted a distraction-free way to follow channels and sort them into categories and I think this is it.
Strimzi Registry Operator 0.5.0 released for Kafka
We just released version 0.5.0 of the Strimzi Registry Operator (see release notes). Strimzi Registry Operator helps you run a Confluent Schema Registry for a Kafka cluster that’s managed by the fabulous Strimzi operator for Kubernetes. The Schema Registry allows you to efficiently encode your Kafka messages in Avro, while centrally managing their schemas in the registry.
With the Strimzi Registry Operator, you deploy a Kubernetes resources like this:
apiVersion: roundtable.lsst.codes/v1beta1
kind: StrimziSchemaRegistry
metadata:
name: confluent-schema-registry
spec:
listener: tls
securityProtocol: tls
compatibilityLevel: forward
The operator deploys a Schema Registry server based on that StrimziSchemaRegistry resource and takes care of details like mapping the Kafka listener and converting the mutual TLS certificates into the JKS formatted keystore and truststore required by the Schema Registry.
We at Rubin Observatory’s SQuaRE team created the Strimzi Registry Operator back in 2019 to help us deploy an internal Kafka to power our ChatOps. Since then, this technology has become critical for other Rubin applications like the alert broker and the engineering facilities database (telemetry from the telescope facility). We’ve also gotten hints that the operator has been adopted by other Strimzi users, which we’re thrilled to hear of. Open source in action! ✨
To learn more, take a look at the Strimzi Registry Operator repository on GitHub.
httpie and GitHub Actions
I love httpie as an alternative to curl. It feels fresher, and is built for working with today’s HTTP APIs.
Anyways, I was using httpie’s @= feature for embedding file content in a JSON field within a GitHub Actions workflow and got an error:
Request body (from stdin, –raw or a file) and request data (key=value) cannot be mixed. Pass –ignore-stdin to let key/value take priority. See https://httpie.io/docs#scripting for details.
I didn’t think I was doing anything with passing standard input, and the command was running just fine locally, so I spent a good while finding possible solutions. Turns out I should have taken the error at face value. Somehow GitHub Actions runs commands in a way that triggers this stdin behaviour and need --ignore-stdin:
http --ignore-stdin --json post $REGISTRY_URL/subjects/testsubject/versions \
schema=@testsubject.json \
Accept:application/vnd.schemaregistry.v1+json