Most people around the office use Shokz OpenRun headsets, but i’ve never liked bone-conduction headphones. It so happens that open-ear earbuds are now a thing. After trying a few models, i’ve settled on the Shokz OpenDots One, which offer the best compromise between sound quality, comfort, style, battery life, and price.

It’ll never not be weird to clip tiny speakers to my ears, but the tan version is as inconspicuous as it gets. Best of all, they’re supremely comfortable, which is something i can’t say about my AirPods Pro. The clamping force is perfect: tight enough that the earbuds don’t slide around even when i’m shaking my head, but not so tight as to pinch my ears. You need to angle the earbuds upwards, towards the ear canal, to get the best out of them.

The standard tuning is decent, with fairly defined highs and pleasantly rounded mids, but Shokz gives you three sound profiles and a five-band EQ to customize the OpenDots One to your liking. I’ve ended up boosting the bass and low-mids to compensate for their open nature. Dolby Audio support is, as always, a gimmick that does nothing but drown music in a sea of reverb and pierce your eardrums with overcooked highs.

I never felt the need to push the volume past the 50% mark. I can enjoy my music without my colleagues noticing, and i can still hear them clearly when they’re talking to me. The DSP seems to lose it at higher volume anyway — the high-mids get shouty and the bass gets distorted. I wouldn’t use them for calls either: they’re pretty much useless without environmental noise cancellation, but with it, your voice takes on a metallic quality reminiscent of late 1990s headsets.

The touch controls are reliable enough. A double pinch on the battery plays or pauses, and a long press on the left or right battery lowers or raises the volume. Speaking of the battery, i get a full day out of the OpenDots One per charge, with the case providing enough juice for a whole week. The earbuds are symmetrical, which means they go on either side of the case… and either ear. The case supports Qi charging, but doesn’t have magnets for MagSafe/Qi2 chargers.

Overall, i like the OpenDots One a lot. I’m even thinking of hiking with them, something i’ve never done with my AirPods because they always slide out of my ears. The price is right too. But as always with most wireless earbuds, it annoys me that they’ll end up as landfill because you can’t replace the battery easily. If only Fairphone made Open Fairbuds!

Music

Ascending by Delia Stevens & Will Pound. Who knew that the harmonica and melodeon went so well with the glockenspiel? And spinning bells? And another half a dozen percussion instruments? Well, Will Pound and Delia Stevens knew. Their recompositions of Gustav Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite and Planets are cheerful and effervescent. It makes their original about Holst’s missing planet, Earth, all the more haunting. Earth: The Silent Planet, with lyrics from Robert Macfarlane, is one of the most awe-inspiring things i’ve heard this decade. Absolutely brilliant.

Vol. II by Angine de poitrine. I’m always surprised that Emmet Cohen hasn’t recorded more albums, but then again, he recorded hundred of album-quality tracks… on YouTube. Angine de poitrine might the first band that only works on YouTube. Don’t get me wrong, Vol. II is a great release, at least if you like this kind of math rock. But it doesn’t click until you see them play — the papier maché costumes, the double neck guitar, the insane pedal work, that’s an expérience totale is there ever was one. Considering how much i missed my subwoofer when i listened to their album, i might have to see them live to get my share.

Speaking of the creative side of things: in my People and Blogs interview, i mentioned Architypes, my little side project documenting old-school French storefronts. In the few weeks since, it’s garnered more interest than in the 10+ years i’ve been talking about it here in France. Huge thanks to Cassidy, Matt, Marilyn, Nicolas, Chad and the others for shining a light on this tiny project of mine.

Books

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman. Richard Osman sure knows how to write a thoroughly enjoyable book, but i don’t know, this one felt a bit trite. Most of the characters seem to have been dreamed up by the publisher’s marketing team to hit all the “key demos” and the hops around the world seem to have no other justification than to offer regular changes of scenery for the eventual film adaptation. Even the seemingly obligatory mention of ChatGPT feels uninspired at best. I really hope that it’s not a sign of things to come with the next instalment in the Thursday Murder Club series. (That being said, Trouble is a great name for a cat.)

Links

“The next evolution of The Verge’s homepage is here” by William Joel. They’re living my dream of five years ago. Contrary to my last employer, they understand the difference between traffic and audience, and are doing everything they can to transform fleeting traffic into a long-lasting audience. I wish them well in their effort to build their own community on their own (eventually federated) platform. That’s where the money is, and actual tech journalism deserves all the money it can get.

“MacBook Neo and How the iPad Could Be” by Craig Mod. In order to justify its existence between the iPhone and the MacBook, the iPad had to be, to quote Steve Jobs, “far better at doing some really important things […] than a laptop or a smartphone.” Alas, Apple quickly lost that ambition and revelled in making the iPad far worse at doing a lot of really important things than a laptop or a smartphone. I agree with Craig: “the iPad should be a highly-focused touch playground. Weird as hell, one-of-a-kind apps. And MacBooks should be for multitasking, moving information and data around, building evermore powerful tools (tools within tools within tools), all bounded by a keyboard-first universe.” It’s high time that Apple, if not the whole of the computer industry, understood that “consistency” doesn’t mean “convergence”. Things can be consistent in principle and wildly different in appearance. People will figure it out, if only you trust them to be cleverer than most of Silicon Valley thinks they are.

“At Machine Speed” by Matthias Ott. We’re in the midst of what i called a “LLM-powered cultural DDoS attack”, but Matthias describes something more nefarious entirely, an actual LLM-powered DDoS attack. “Language models can find zero-days and write working exploits faster than we can patch them”, which is putting intense pressure on solo-run and open-source projects. I’m sure that OpenAI and Anthropic will tell you that the solution is simple: let LLMs patch your code automatically, and if they make mistakes, more powerful LLMs will patch them in the future. In short: remove humans from the equation entirely and let the machines talk to the machines. It’s going to cost us dearly, and not only in euros and cents.

Mechanical typewriters are wonderful machines that are entirely powered by your fingers. When you strike a key, your energy is transmitted through a carefully designed set of levers and springs, and the type bar strikes the paper. If you strike too hard, you might tear up the paper. If you strike too soft, you’ll get only a faint impression.

At the same time, the heel of the type bar touches the universal bar, which trips the escapement rocker. The loose dog is pushed away from the star-wheel tooth, the carriage moves exactly one space to the left, and through another ingenious set of linkages, the ribbon feed rotates to expose a fresh portion of ribbon. When you reach the end of the line, you push the return lever to return the carriage to its rightmost position, all the while rotating the platen by a set amount of line spacing.

Electro-mechanical typewriters feature the same components, but everything is powered by an electric-motor drive. When you strike a key, the type bar is sent flying away by a constantly rotating drive shaft. Even if you type with an incredibly soft touch, you’ll get a consistent impression, which means you can type much faster than on a mechanical typewriter.

This all depends on a mind-bogglingly intricate assembly of pulleys, belts, and cogs working in perfect harmony. If the motor is weak, if the pulleys are sticky, if the belts are loose, if the cogs are misaligned, if a lever is bent, if you breathe too hard, the timing will be off. The type bars will strike inconsistently (or not at all), the shift key won’t latch (or stop latching), the space bar won’t work (or stop repeating spaces), and the carriage return key won’t return the carriage (or trip in the middle

of a sentence). My Olivetti Lettera 36 exhibited each and every one of these issues. So much for it being advertised as a “fully working model”! First, the motor capacitor was dislodged. Without it, the motor can’t get up to speed. Then, the old grease had congealed into a gooey mess. After (sparsely) reapplying fresh lithium grease where it was needed and cleaning the perished lubrication where it wasn’t, the machine came roaring back to life.

I say “roaring”, but i should say “whining”. The belts were rubbing against the sides of the pulleys because they were far too tight. Following the service manual’s instructions, i loosened them slightly, which made the machine quieter. This was the end of straightforward repairs and the beginning of a tedious game of Whack-A-Mole. I reattached a spring to fix the space bar, but then the carriage return key started acting up. I bent a lever to make it more reliable, but then the shift key stopped working.

Just when i was thinking about going mad, a second Olivetti Lettera 36 showed up. (Don’t ask.) This one had the same grease and belt problems, but after a good cleanup and tuneup, it worked pretty much perfectly. It might not be a coincidence that it’s an earlier model from the early 1970s, as its funky Cooper Black keys attest, at a time when Olivetti was still proud to operate a factory in the heart of Barcelona.

A few years later, the Italian manufacturer had already begun outsourcing production (and even some of its engineering). The other – and still non-functional – model was manufactured in East Germany by VEB Robotron Buchungsmaschinenwerk Karl-Marx-Stadt. You can see the cost-cutting of the early 1980s at play, and it’s not pretty. In a twist of irony, Robotron improved on Olivetti’s design with the sturdier and quieter Erika Electric S2020. That was the end of the road for Olivetti, which stopped manufacturing typewriters entirely, and contracted the design and manufacturing of word processors and computers to Chinese companies.

Things

Olympia Carrera de Luxe MD. Speaking of typewriters, i learned that you could still buy brand-new Olympia Carrera de Luxe and Carrera de Luxe MD electronic typewriters. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was nothing more than a rebadged Nakajima AX/WPT word processor.

Words

Mendacity. It’s been a long time since i’ve learned a new word. “Mendacity” is “the quality of being untruthful”, which, unfortunately, is very much in the air these days.

Flânerie is a kind of reading of the street, in which human faces, shop fronts, shop windows, café terraces, street cars, automobiles and trees become a wealth of equally valid letters of the alphabet that together result in words, sentences and pages of an ever-new book. In order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.

— Franz Hessel, Walking in Berlin.

Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre.

— Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle”, Reflections.

I can’t stand self-aggrandizing “adventurers” who only deal in extremes. Their mere presence is a disruption that’ll precipitate the eventual disfigurement of the places they’re supposedly highlighting. How much carbon did they burn to get there? How many people did they exploit along the way? How much did they destroy with each footstep? They don’t care, because all that matters is that they were there. They need to travel to the wildest, highest, furthest, prettiest, and harshest places to stop feeling so insignificant. Consequences be damned.

I advocate for much more mundane – and sustainable – adventures. You don’t need to study psychogeography to enjoy the dérive, a method of drifting through space without thinking too much about it. A good dérive is all about feel. You should let the place guide you, even if it means retracing your steps down a slightly gloomy street, instead of trying to systematically explore. This isn’t a mere stroll — properly “unplanning” your journey takes a lot of practice and effort.

A dérive is hard enough in a place you’re not familiar with, because you might be tempted to first get a feel for it by looking at a map. It’s even harder in a place you’re familiar with, because you’ve already got a feel for it. You need to rid yourself of such notions as “purpose”, “itinerary”, “destination”, and “return trip”. (You need solid shoes and a water bottle, though.) The territory is the map, and if you’re mindful enough, it’ll lead where you actually needed to go.

I discovered my favourite café by crossing the neighbourhood through a street i’d never taken before. I found a book that changed my life in a derelict second-hand bookshop by going the long way around a tourist spot. I’ve taken a lot of pictures for my typographical project by aimlessly walking around. I also hurt my foot really badly by letting the place guide me far further than was reasonable. Now that’s a proper adventure!

This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, about “Adventure”, hosted by Pablo.

Books

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge. As always with Lodge, fiction doesn’t stray far from life. Before admitting that “the narrator’s deafness and his Dad have their sources in my own experience”, the British writer tried to hide his hearing loss for more than a decade. Deaf Sentence revisits Lodge’s favourite topics — the vagaries of academic life and the sexual (in)discretions of Catholics — without the acerbic tone of his earlier work. All in all, it’s a sweet story of an old professor confronting his own mortality by watching his elderly father wither away. It was Lodge’s penultimate novel before his death in 2025. (I pity the poor translators who had to translate the many plays on words, beginning with the title.)

Links

“The worst of us” by Ian Betteridge. Following Claude Mythos Preview’s announcement, most people focused on its cybersecurity capabilities that allowed it to find “thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser”, which is incredibly ironic considering Anthropic’s recent data leak. Ian went beyond the press release and read Mythos’ “system card”, which reveals its tendency to deliberately cover up its mistakes. Language isn’t intelligence, but it sure is powerful.

Music

BaRcoDe by Ben Wendel. Ben Wendel, Joel Ross, Simon Moullier, Patricia Brennan, and Juan Diego Villalobos capped their residency at The Jazz Gallery by recording BaRcoDe at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn. Even if he’s the driving force behind this intriguing blend of modern jazz and postmodern chamber music, Wendel plays his saxophone sparingly, to accentuate the percussion and delineate the mallets (vibraphone, marimba, and balafon). Adopting an architectonic approach to composition is always fraught with danger, but his use of shifting rhythmic signatures and immersive sound design is incredibly successful. What a treat.

After a bout of burnout, i was contemplating closing my long-running French blog, but watching this Italian fellow write in English with such confidence gave me another idea. Through The Forest, a discovery tool he created with Carl Barenbrug, i discovered a whole slew of ESL bloggers and was finally convinced that i could blog in English myself. A few months later, Z1NZ0L1N was born.

A year and a bit in, i found a new community around the IndieWeb Carnival and met amazing people on- and off-line. You can imagine how delighted i was when Manuel asked me to take part in his wonderful People and Blogs interview series. My interview is now live, and i hope it’ll inspire other people to keep the blogging spirit alive.

Books

Apple: The First Fifty Years by David Pogue. Simon & Schuster should be ashamed of themselves: Apple: The First Fifty Years looks like self-published printed-on-demand trash. The printed layout is atrocious and the electronic version is even worse. I long for a book about Apple made with the same care and attention as the products it describes. For all its faults, it’s also the best book i’ve ever read about Apple — and i’ve read them all.

David Pogue found the perfect balance between historical facts and fun anecdotes, pedantic comprehensiveness and literary ellipsis, minute technical details and broad strategic analysis. Apple: The First Fifty Years makes for an engrossing and informative read, which is a rare quality. Most of all, it doesn’t suffer from the issue that plagues most every book about Apple, lack of first-hand knowledge.

Apple: The First Fifty Years is chock-full of testimonies from people who were actually there, including Chris Espinosa, the only person who’s been at Apple for the whole ride. Even if the current crop of Apple executives are media-trained to the hilt, that kind of access is invaluable, and gives Pogue’s book a depth you won’t find anywhere else.

I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed by the media coverage of Apple’s fiftieth birthday. Even The Verge’s “Apple@50” package feels inconsequential, as if they started working on it three weeks ago. Pogue’s book is exactly the type of project that befits this momentous occasion. It’s the new reference book on the subject, and should find a permanent place on every fan of Apple’s bookshelf. (And i have to admit it was fun to revisit some of my scoops, like Kevin Lynch’s hiring to work on the Apple Watch or Michael Spindler’s death.)

Links

I don’t regret switching careers one bit, but i’m sure i’d have enjoyed working on Apple’s fiftieth. Here are a few good articles on the topic:

• “How Apple became Apple: The definitive oral history of the company’s earliest days” by Harry McCracken;
• “Between Jobs” by Jason Snell;
• “Tim Cook (Still) Believes in Crazy Ideas” by Ryan D’Agostino;
• “How the invention of QuickTime changed computers forever” by John Buck;
• “One of Apple’s First Employees Looks Back at 50 Years” by Kalley Huang;
• “Ronald G. Wayne Is More Than Two Weeks At Apple” by Ernie Smith.

Music

Chariots of Fire by Vangelis. The opening theme still sends shivers down my spine, but i have to say that the rest of the soundtrack is some of the lousiest synth jazz you’ll ever hear.

Each and every object was a promise i’ve made to myself — i’ll be a researcher, a musician, a maker, a writer. The whole collection is a record of which bets i stopped honouring without quite deciding to — i’m all and none of these people. Clearing out the decks wouldn’t mean giving up, it’d mean that i’ve already given up. That requires a strength of character i don’t always have. Keeping things around as a kind of alibi is decidedly simpler.

Each small letting-go is its own rehearsal for bigger (and more permanent) ones. You get better at mourning potentiality, at distinguishing between a closed door and an open one, at understanding what you’re genuinely still becoming. Someone else will read the books. Someone else will play the guitars. Someone else will repair the computers. Someone else will enjoy the pens. C’est la vie.

What i haven’t worked out is what fills the time and space when i stop propping up those futures. Objects are very good at providing the illusion of forward motion. While you’re planning, buying, faffing about, and generally not doing anything substantial, you’re in the cosy realm of potential. Strip all that away and you’re left with the harsh reality of the present. Adulting is hard.

Links

“People are not friction” by Dave Rupert. As i always say, tools have no intention in and of themselves, but shovels were made for digging and guns were made for killing. You could argue that LLMs were made for dispensing with those pesky designers, lawyers, accountants, marketers, and managers that don’t let engineers do exactly what they want exactly when they want to. “Sometimes I feel like there’s a palpable tension in the air as if we’re waiting to see whether AI will replace designers or engineers first”, Dave says, but “it’s a dangerous place to be when we start to consider people as friction”.

“The Shape of Friction” by Matthias Ott. It’s a dangerous place to be because “friction isn’t the enemy of good work”. “What the ‘frictionless’ vision really sells is the removal of dependency on other people’s experience and judgment”, which is verging on crazy when you realize that LLMs offer everything but judgment. People are so accustomed to getting everything with free one-day delivery that they can’t bear even the tiniest shred of inconvenience — and conversations are hugely inconvenient. When everybody acts like a spoiled child, we get “modern politics” and “artificial intelligence”, huge machines that keep saying “yes” to keep you engaged.

Music

Brad Mehldau and Christian McBride in concert. I can’t believe that, after 35 years, Brad Mehldau and Christian McBride had never toured as a duo. They’re the perfect pairing to prove that you don’t need drums to groove: Mehldau’s left-hand technique and McBride’s unique phrasing abolish the distinction between melody, harmony, and rhythm. While they paid homage to Wayne Shorter and Thelonious Monk, including an incredible solo rendition of Blue Monk on the bass, they also ventured into pop and R&B territory. I hope they’re planning on releasing a record.

The remote is a bit small (10 × 3 × 2.25 cm) for my big hands, but the main button seems to have been modelled on my thumb. The overall shape is atrocious, though. You either nestle your index finger around the “ergonomic” divot in the back, in which case you have to overextend your thumb to press the button, or you squeeze the button in between your thumb and index finger, in which case the divot is in the way.

I’m convinced the remote has been designed around the battery compartment instead of, you know, an actual human hand. At least it uses a single AAA battery that’s supposed to be removable… if you can open the incredibly tight battery door. But you know what? In spite of everything, i found the Kobo Remote to be the perfect companion for my Kobo Libra Colour.

Once it’s paired, it reconnects in a fraction of a second and can even wake the e-reader with the press of a button. On the train or in bed, i prop up the Libra Colour with its SleepCover and then can read in pretty much any position without straining my hands. I’ve got into the habit of simply dropping the remote when i need to grab something else and let it dangle from its wrist strap.

It’s made me acutely aware of the way that my hands influence my reading — i prefer softcovers over hardbacks, e-readers over softcovers, e-readers with buttons over e-readers with touchscreens, and now e-readers with wireless remotes over e-readers with buttons. The Kobo Remote might be an absolute piece of junk, but i dearly missed it when i forgot to pack it on this week’s work trip.

Movies

Superman by James Gunn. Superman has always been a superficial hero. He’s too alien to pass as an undocumented immigrant; too messianic to function as an exemplar; too red, white, and blue to have a consistent set of ethics; and even his biggest weakness is too neat (and too external) to have any moral significance. But at least he was something. James Gunn has robbed him of everything – backstory, personality, motivation, the tiniest shred of common sense – and made him a mere casualty in the launch of the umpteenth reboot of the comically bad DC cinematic universe. Woof.

Things

Lenovo ThinkPad P16s Gen 3. Speaking of my work-provided “beast of a laptop”… David Hill has been a faithful steward of Richard Sapper’s original design, and in the ten years since he left Lenovo, not much has changed. Nothing looks like a ThinkPad except for another ThinkPad, and if i have to work on a PC, i’m not mad that it’s a ThinkPad. The build quality is excellent, the screen is fine for the price, the trackpad is more than decent, and most of all, the keyboard is outstanding.

It would be a perfectly good laptop… if Intel and Microsoft hadn’t fallen so far behind in energy management. Windows keeps such a tight leash on the Intel Ultra 7 155H chip that, most of the time, this “beast of a laptop” feels slower than the slowest of smartphones. Even after tweaking every energy setting i could find, i have to use a 4K monitor to make sure the Nvidia RTX 500 graphics card kicks in and more power flows through the system. What a shame.

People think of the museum as a rainy-day fallback, but for me, the museum is the plan all along. When i survey the map of a city i’ve never visited, i don’t look for pretty viewpoints and famous restaurants, at least not at first. I search for folk, printing, design, natural history, applied arts and other museums. I’m not against fine arts, but i don’t mind skipping the umpteenth gallery featuring the works of 16- and 17th-century court painters and the vast halls filled with the speculative assets known as “contemporary art”.

What i’m really looking for, over anything else, is evidence of how things were made. I’m seldom struck by the use of chiaroscuro or a clever composition. I’ve been known to be overwhelmed by a single brushstroke. I often fail to see what other people see in the works of the “old masters”. I could spend hours commenting on the recreation of a 14th-century peasant’s dwelling. I like art. I prefer craft.

My love of fountain pens, typewriters and block printing isn’t rooted in nostalgia, but in the fact that they leave their mark on my work. The nib, the slug and the carvings literally imprint every decision, every mistake and every happy accident into the paper. They prove that i was here. At their best, museums do the same thing on a much larger scale. They prove that people were there.

There is also something to be said for the physical experience of entering a museum — the soothing drop in temperature, the surreal lighting, the hush that’s not quite silence. Turns out, conservation and contemplation want the same things. Once you are inside, the museum asks something of you that very little else does any more. Not the fractured, half-given attention of a screen, but something slower and more deliberate.

You stand in front of a thing. The thing doesn’t refresh. The thing doesn’t suggest a related thing that you might like. The thing doesn’t ask you to like and subscribe. The thing doesn’t care for your Instagram subscriber count. The thing simply exists like it’s existed long before you were born, like it’ll exist long after you’ve died. Just for a moment, you share the thing’s plane of existence and your life is a little bit bigger.

There’s this tiny book in Lyon’s museum of printing and graphic communication. It was printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice around 1514. It’s quite unremarkable at first sight — small, wrinkly, hidden in a corner behind glass. But it uses the italic types that Manutius commissioned from the engraver Francesco Griffo in 1501. This elegantly slanted type, based on a humanist script, was created specifically for this kind of pocket-sized book.

Every slanted character ever (mis)used goes back to this little book in a case on the first floor of a museum twenty minutes from home. Making a point in writing would be quite different if not for it. I visit at least twice a year, like a kind of pilgrimage (sadly, the museum is closed until next year for renovation). I don’t see the book. I see Manutius in his workshop, trying to find a way to squeeze more text on the page. Even writing this, i’m teary-eyed.

This is what museums are for — not the preservation of objects, but the preservation of connections. So i keep coming back. To the printing museum, to the dusty book in the velvet-lined case, to that strange feeling of standing at the starting point of something. And to other museums, seeking other connections, trying to understand what it means to be human. Surely it beats the beach, doesn’t it?

This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, about “Museum memories”, hosted by James.

Apps

Bloom. After what felt like an eternity, my friend Alexandre finally published his note-taking app in the App Store. Bloom is such a simple app that you might wonder what took him so long. Believe me when i tell you that simplicity really is the ultimate sophistication. It took a long time to distil the interface down to the core essence of note-taking and make it feel quick and effortless. There’s still a lot of work to be done on the iPad and the Mac, but knowing Alex, it’ll take only three to fifty more months. Time flies when you’re among friends.

Things

MacBook Neo. A lot of people spent the last week quoting Steve Jobs’s famous quip — “we don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk” — without ever putting it into perspective. It meant that Jobs didn’t know how to build a laptop with a sub-$200 bill of materials and still make $200 out of it. But Tim Cook does. Apple now builds every part that matters itself, when most PC “makers” are glorified parts assemblers. They waste a lot less money on distribution now that they have their own sales channels and the scale needed to enforce predatory contracts. Most important of all, they dramatically shifted their revenue balance from hardware to services.

That’s what’s making PC makers jittery. They spend a lot on part procurement and product distribution, and they already make all the money they can on crapware. They can’t replicate Apple’s strategy because they own nothing in the value chain and don’t earn a single cent after they’ve sold the hardware. They’re going to hurt big time. Meanwhile, Apple’s going to bring a lot more people into the fold and make even more money with services, enabling them to be even more aggressive with hardware. Their TikTok stories and Instagram reels might be cute and all, but their strategy is as ruthless as ever.

The same could be said about the job itself — i’m managing a creative team that builds learning and e-learning resources. I have to get familiar with a new commute and a new office, learn new faces and new names, grapple with new tools and new practices. Every single little thing is mentally taxing not because it’s hard, but because i have to think about it. As long as company culture isn’t second nature, i won’t be able to concentrate on the actual job.

It’s been a long time since i began anew, but i have a lot more experience under my belt. I need to build muscle quickly, that’s for sure, but i know that i also need to pace myself. I have to learn to walk before i can run, but believe me, i can’t wait to get there. I so missed learning new things. Even if some of them are how to use Windows 11.

Things

iMac M1. Apart from the screen size, what’s the difference between a 24-inch iMac and a 27-inch Studio Display? Both are computers powered by Apple Silicon. Both have Thunderbolt connectivity. Both have mediocre webcams and surprising speakers. Why, then, can’t i use my iMac as an external display now that i don’t need it as a computer anymore? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s not like Apple doesn’t know how to do this — older models had Target Display Mode. I shouldn’t have to throw away a perfectly good screen because i don’t need its computer parts, but here we are. So much for being “dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it”.

Once again, i turned to Ghost and Magic Pages to handle the content. I’ve sketched my idea on paper so many times that it took me only a few minutes to come up with a basic prototype. I’ve written the stylesheet myself because, believe it or not, “professional” developers’ disdain for “basic” web technologies has severely hampered LLMs’ ability to write cogent CSS. But i let Claude write every single line of the main (vanilla) JavaScript.

Under my guidance, it turned Ghost’s pagination into infinite scrolling, used the newish <dialog> element to build popovers, implemented keyboard and touch navigation, and fixed bugs along the way. Is it the code i’d have written? Well yes, actually, because it has this naive and repetitive quality that i like so much. But no, really, because i hate writing JavaScript so much that i’d have never made the effort.

In the end, it took less than six hours to go from idea to website. That’s awesome! Claude has enabled me to build something i’d have never built otherwise, not because i can’t, but because i’d rather use my limited time on Earth to do anything other than writing JavaScript. I’m uneasy about the environmental cost of my little experiment, though. It’s almost feels like taking a short-haul flight instead of a three-hour train journey. I have to reckon with that.

Apps

Current. Following up on last week: Terry has been working ’round the clock to squash most bugs. There are still some conceptual oddities and functional failures, particularly on the Mac, but it’s getting there.

Links

“The Galaxy S26 is a photography nightmare” by David Pierce and Nilay Patel. I wanted to write something about Samsung’s foray into productized lying, but Nilay said it better. At this rate, they’ll soon remove the cameras from their phones to save a few bucks, and tell you not to believe your own eyes when their generated nonsense doesn’t look anything like what you’re seeing.

Music

Bach Coltrane by Raphaël Imbert Project. I can’t believe i first listened to Bach Coltrane almost twenty years ago (and that Coltrane was born 100 years ago), but here we are. I’ve never been that convinced by Imbert’s analysis of Bach’s influence on Coltrane’s compositions – most of it is thoroughly ahistorical – but it’s a good musical hook. Coltrane’s influence on Steve Reich is more documented. La Trinité, a deconsecrated 17th-century chapel that’s now a “baroque and irregular music” venue, was the perfect setting to explore the melodic links between the three. Imbert’s bombastic presence and forceful playing were overbearing at times, but i absolutely loved his interpretation of Reich’s Clapping Music for the saxophone.