Tao of Mac

I’ve come across most of these, but I’m still stuck on the papercuts I wrote about a few months ago.

Work was gruelling this week, with the rather unwelcome result that I didn’t exercise at all.

In Nilay Patel’s Decoder conversation with Mark Gurman about John Ternus and Apple’s next big thing, Gurman describes something camera-equipped AirPods might eventually do: look at an email on your computer screen and help add an event to your calendar.

It’s a bit insane that we’re past mid-September and my living room is still sitting at 29oC at 7AM, but such is life in the late Holocene, I guess.

Still very much in line with the overall return to work mood of the past few weeks, I thought I’d post some notes about work gear.

As my AI policy points out, I do revise my posts with AI, but until now, I’ve resorted to post-draft LLM passes that take a bunch of SKILL.md files and either fix outright typos and misspellings or add editorial blockquotes to my drafts.

This is kind of huge, considering that I’ve always wanted an actual M8 (and built a headless one into a TrackerKB with its own keypad), but the hardware is extremely expensive.

Given how much time I’ve been spending on small native apps and my swift-app-template, Swift Build becoming the default in SwiftPM is probably the bit of this release I care about most.

Nothing blew up.

Following up on my testing of the LattePanda Mu and IOTA, this time I’m looking at the Sigma, which (as is becoming the norm with my recent pieces) I actually got before summer break.

AppleTalk is Apple’s networking protocol suite for classic Macs, used for file sharing, network printing and service discovery.

The M-VAVE FM-1 is a compact, battery-powered FM synthesizer with six operators, 32 algorithms, up to 12 voices and DX7 SysEx bank import.

Even though my personal calendar is now filled with a smattering of fresh events, I am quite happy about the ones that don’t involve health, legal and tax annoyances.

Besides the showmanship demonstrated by the keynote opening (nice touches there, Tim) and the visual effect when you open it, the iPhone Duo is… strangely familiar, and yet, somehow just strange as well: I am not a fan of the weird signal/battery status b…

Only yesterday I was discussing Mistral off-work and pondering what they might be up to, given both their EU lobbying – which fits rather neatly with the European AI pitch I wrote about in April – and the fact that they haven’t been doing a lot of actual…

My LG TVs are too old/dumb to fall into this lot, fortunately, but what I want for my next TV is a huge, dumb monitor, and reports like this are why.

The desire to own an Apple Studio Display has probably been hanging over most Mac desktop users since time immemorial (well, since 1998 at least, but most people are more familiar with the “modern” 2022-era look) for two reasons: It defines what a desktop…

As many people have remarked, the moat between ideas and technical execution is narrower than ever, and that has a number of consequences–both when it comes to investment (in this case, personal, although I am collecting war stories…) and focus.

I have a long and somewhat embarrassing history with LISP that goes back to the years when it was fading from academia and LISP machines were giving way to Macs and DECstations (a transition that should be familiar to anyone who read the UNIX-HATERS Handb…

This is indeed the end of an era.

A collection of tools, frameworks, and models built on or optimized for Apple’s MLX array framework and the Neural Engine (ANE) on Apple Silicon.

The Xteink X4 is a small open e-ink reader that has become more interesting because of the growing CrossPoint ecosystem around it.

The Pi coding agent is a terminal-first assistant focused on interactive workflows, extensibility, and running local agents with practical toolchains.

Reusable skill modules for agentic systems: prompt packs, tool recipes, and structured workflows that you can load into a running agent, adapt for a project, or keep around as references when shaping instruction sets.

Notes and resources on building and operating agentic AI systems, covering orchestration frameworks, task routing, memory, and evaluation approaches that extend baseline LLM capabilities.

This page is a collection of notes and links related to AI speech technologies, including Text-to-Speech (TTS), Speech-to-Text (STT), voice synthesis, voice cloning, and other related frippery in the modern AI space.

Tailscale is a centrally-managed overlay network VPN service that provides seamless connectivity across your devices no matter where they reside, with a few interesting features: Support for direct access to other LANs (and outbound Internet connections)…

This page lists a few “serverless” resources I find interesting.

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This is a stub to start gathering some resources on Swift, which won several of my personal awards for “most breakages between major releases” and has therefore not been something I’ve invested a lot of time on.

Easily the most well-known family of microcontrollers these days, which effectively kickstarted an entire wave of DIY electronics and Maker activities.

These little modules have taken hobby electronics by storm, so of course I grabbed a few of them and have been hacking away quietly on both the ESP8266 and the ESP32.

This started out as a mere stub while I put together some more resources, and over the years became a quite large list of LISP implementations I have kept an eye on.

The new hotness in the Linux container space (because nobody remembers LXC anymore).

A great systems-oriented programming language I’ve taken up to complement Python due to its ability to cross-compile and produce (mostly) self-contained static binaries.

A relatively underwhelming ARM development board to begin with that was upgraded to a very reasonably performing quad-core CPU in February 2015 and got built-in Wi-Fi in February 2016, and which eventually gave its name to an entire family of devices, from

I bought a Prusa kit on October 2014, and have been merrily twiddling its various bits over the years with considerable delight, since it’s a nice, slow(ish) hobby.

The SCM du jour, which replaced Mercurial for me, and with a number of followers largely due to the massive amount of projects managed with it (and GitHub’s rise in popularity).

Resources Category Date Link Notes Routing 2021-11 quagga A routing software suite for Linux, originally named zebra Stacks 2023-11 microtcp a minimal TCP/IP stack free5gc an open-source 5G core network 2021-11 SONiC Software for Open Networking in the Cl…

The one synthesizer I ever wanted to own back when I was a kid.

Python is one of my favorite programming languages due to its terseness and amazing flexibility, and after decades using it I find it quite amusing that it is now the language of choice for data science and machine learning.

Markdown is a text-to-HTML idiom, conversion tool and all-out ecosystem for web writers, content editors and… AI, allowing you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid (X)HTML.

One of my pursuits of yore and for ever more (in the sense that I stopped short of joining the Conservatorium when I was a kid and still maintain a somewhat active - if diffuse - interest in it).

Some pure maths and algebraic manipulation apps I’ve found: Resources Category Date Link Notes Applications 2012 R statistical computing environment Mathomatic command-line only Maxima a Mathematica analog available via Fink; runs under X, which is less a…

Schizophrenia for machines, in a nutshell.

Tao of Mac is my personal wiki.

XScreenSaver is the time-honored X11 modular screen saver suite written by Jamie Zawinski (he of Netscape fame), which is now available as a set of macOS screen saver modules.

Apple logo Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s company, if you remember that far back.

The Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a set of protocols and data formats for digital music instruments and music representation.

Emulation and hardware virtualization software of various descriptions, most of them obsolete by now: Category Date Link Notes 8-bit 2025 MCUME a multi-system emulator for microcontrollers chips-test a collection of Tiny Emus for 8-bit systems Amiga 2008…