Kevin Yank

Recent Notes

Another 2023 special edition release from #Lamy, and this one I hadn’t seen rumoured anywhere: the dialog cc All Black. I loved the studio All Black in 2018, and the regular editions (Dark Blue and Piano White) are lovely. Looking forward to seeing this in the flesh! #fountainpens

Product photo of the Lamy dialog cc All Black fountain pen, with the nib retracted and extended

I’ve had a weird macOS networking glitch confined to my M2 MacBook Pro for months. Wish I could figure out the root cause. #Apple https://kevinyank.com/posts/weird-mac-networking-glitch/

HomeKit has done that thing where it has forgotten where I live, and now all my “First person arrives” and “Last person leaves” automations are tied to a McDonald’s 2km away. Of course, Apple offers no UI to correct this. It’s mAgIc! 🪄🌈✨ #Apple

Missing product: a very small battery backup UPS that can deliver a full 10A to (say) a NAS for just the second or three it takes the house to switch to battery during a grid outage. You can get high-current/high-capacity and low-current/low-capacity, but not high-current/low-capacity. #solar

Siri, define irony. 😂

Cc: @siracusa@mastodon.social

Email screenshot:
  
  Hello Hypercritical gold tee owner. We have received word from a few of you that the size tag is clearly visible on the back of the shirt when worn. It’s not supposed to be like that. The size tag should be printed in a light color or light enough ink that it is not visible through the shirt when worn.
  
  If you received an incorrectly printed shirt and would like a replacement, please reply to this email by the end of this week (Friday, September 29). Please include a photo to confirm that the size tag can be seen through the shirt material when worn. We will happily replace the affected item. No need to return the original. Please allow a few weeks for us to print the new shirts. You will receive an email with tracking information once the replacement ships.

Neither @Obscura@indieapps.space nor @halide@mastodon.social does the automatic depth map capture for retroactive Portrait Mode that the first party Camera app does on #iPhone 15 Pro. Assuming there is API support for this, it’s a race for the first 3rd party camera app to support it. #Apple

The #iPhone 15 Pro is still quite heavy compared to my iPhone 13 mini. #Apple

I asked Siri “Is brontosaurus real?” and it replied with a confident reassurance that it is, in fact, real … sourced from godzilla.fandom.com. 🤨 #Apple

Flip-flopped and changed my iPhone 15 Pro order from Natural, which was just too drab, to Blue. Also switched to in-store pickup, so I’ll get it on launch day. #Apple

The most annoying bug left in macOS Sonoma GA is inserting hyperlinks in Notes using the keyboard (⌘K) only works about 50% of the time. #Apple

Trying out tsup to see if it can replace our hand-rolled tsc build to produce CJS+ESM packages. François Hendriks’s How To Make Tree Shakeable Libraries gave me hard-to-find confirmation that we want to avoid bundling of our packages. Thankfully, tsup supports the option to disable bundling. #JavaScript

Can’t wait to use the iPhone 15 Pro Action Button to open a third party camera app. #Apple

There should be some kind of teardrop tattoo equivalent for JavaScript engineers who have seen into the abyss of TS → ESM/CJS package publishing.

@acemarke@mastodon.social’s operatic record of his own journey is but a taste of the horrors. https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2023/08/esm-modernization-lessons/

Every time I think I’m ready to take stock and sum up my own experience, another layer of badness reveals itself.

A career highlight: #mollyholzschlag complimenting me after my talk at the Fundamentos Web 2006 conference in Spain. #rip

Kevin sits on the edge of a stage while Molly stands in the pit, head cocked with a look that says “you did good!”

A little story about a time I spent with #mollyholzschlag in an airport, stranded between Sydney and Spain. #rip https://kevinyank.com/posts/did-not-depart/

Much less well-coordinated than the worldwide drop of the scala majestic jade earlier this week, both the #Lamy studio rose matte 2023 Special Edition, which matches the marketing photo out of China that I spotted back in January, and the aion deep dark blue 2023 Special Edition seem to have dropped at a couple of online retailers. #fountainpens

product photo of a Lamy studio fountain pen with a light pink, matte finish

Thank you to @paulrobertlloyd@mastodon.social for his continued work on #Indiekit! Trying out the current main branch, which adds UI support for posting photos. Working great for me!

Screenshot of the Indiekit admin interface, with the details of a photo post displayed

My #PlayDate finally arrived! The lack of Bluetooth headphones support gave me a reason to dig my Twelve South AirFly Pro out of the closet. This setup works great, with only very slight audio latency that won’t bother me for most PlayDate games.

A PlayDate game console with an AirFly Pro bluetooth transmitter connected to its headphone port next to a pair of AirPods Pro earbuds

Last year’s #Lamy scala infinite orange limited edition (1,350pcs) turns out to be the first of an annual tradition! Today Lamy released the scala majestic jade limited edition (1,500pcs) at retailers worldwide (except Australia, which trails behind as usual). I’m surprised that the size of the edition has increased, since infinite orange didn’t sell out and is now being discounted all over the place. I continue to love the scala even though I agree it’s over-priced. #fountainpens

Product photo from Lamy showing a pen, ink bottle and converter in a hinged black box

Doomed startup idea: crowdsourced proofreading for the Web. A free browser extension lets individual users persistently adjust text on sites they visit, to fix typos that bug them. Websites pay to get notified of corrections reported by their users so they can fix them for everyone.

Today, the 25th anniversary of the original #Apple iMac G3, is good day to revisit Jason Snell’s final entry in 20 Macs for 2020 (article & video): https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/12/20-macs-for-2020-1-imac-g3/

Home from a month overseas. Despite all my preparation, my home network and servers collapsed a week in along with the VPN server I used to access them remotely. Turns out my Telstra router responds to multiple power failures in quick succession by factory-resetting itself, bringing down my whole house of cards. :P

Solved the #macOS WindowServer hangs I was seeing by removing all the widgets from Notification Centre. Now I have to add them back slowly, one at a time, to find the culprit.