Haven't really had much to write about lately. I went through a ten day stretch where I was only getting three hours of sleep per night-- that certainly didn't help my energy levels. But, I've been experimenting with drug dosages, and may have reached a sort of balanced equilibrium between project passion and the need for sleep.

The five projects I have in mind, if I can ever muster the energy to work on them, are as follows:

• Create a game in Godot Engine, complete with my own musical compositions.
• Do piano lessons in GarageBand on my laptop.
• Make a CRUD-oriented "dApp".
• Create an ARKit demo app for iPhone.
• Write a tech website in Blazor Server.

Speaking of Blazor, I'm having an issue on both my laptop and the "installed" version on my phone, where the service-worker.js file gets erroneously cached by the browser, resulting in a hash check failure when attempting an update-- meaning I can no longer push application updates to those impacted browsers. I put a condition into the index.html file, apparently telling the browser to never cache that file-- but I'm not convinced it's working. Unfortunately, if you are using Gassy Girl you might need to wipe its data, clear browser cache, and basically "start over" to get my most recent and future updates. Check the "About" menu item, see if the app is version 1.1.

Blazor is a very young framework, I think this is just one of those kinks you'd expect, especially coming from a Microsoft product.

In other news, my iPhone 14 Pro Max came in on launch day, and it is phenomenal. Now I'm totally in the Apple camp, with my M2 MacBook Air and the new phone. What I appreciate so much about both devices is that you don't need to think about them while you're using them: "Ok, I'd better open this in just a certain order, or I'd better do these actions in just a certain sequence so things don't get wonky."

There is none of that on Apple products. I just flip the lid up on the MacBook, everything is just the way I left it, nothing ever breaks or acts strange-- it's like the laptop is just a seamless part of my life, versus something I'm wrestling with. The phone is very much the same way-- everything "just works". I press the side button, it recognizes my face, and I'm productive instantly. Any time I write a file to either device, it's almost instantaneously mirrored on the other: again, I don't need to think about it, "gosh how am I going to get this data over there now".

Not to mention, the iPhone 14 Pro is the fastest mobile GPU on the planet. My daughter got me into "Genshin Impact"-- a game I'll be reviewing eventually-- and it looks like a PlayStation 5 release running on the device's display: it almost creates cognitive dissonance, "how can this be running on a cellphone?" I even flipped on the game's 60 fps mode, and it runs flawlessly. I hopped into the game and took a quick screenshot just now-- which then magically appeared on my laptop in "Photos", without me doing anything-- just to give some idea. Click for the raw file, as dumped by the game.



For my upcoming birthday, the wife and kids ordered me a pair of the brand new AirPods Pro. I've been using Apple Music-- another phenomenal Apple product, incidentally-- on both my phone and my laptop, and it's super annoying jury rigging the audio with my headset back and forth. I'm expecting these new headphones to be typically Apple: I want to listen to music, the headphones won't care which of the two devices-- a simple tap on my ear or something along those lines will flip devices. I'll write about them in roughly a month's time, post-birthday.