/blog

A couple of interesting things have hit my inbox in the past week or so.

First, Nick reached out asking if I was interested in making a /friends page (see here for more details.)

/friends is described as:

A page on your site where you link to the people you like and follow. Make the Internet more human!

Yes, we already have blogrolls but this is meant to be something a bit more personal; not just a list of people you read.

I think it's a great idea!

I've got a couple of people in mind already, but I really want to think about this and do it justice.

Next, Oleh got in touch about a side project he's working on called Pixel Area:

Pixel Area is a 100×100 coordinate grid with room for 10,000 websites. Each pixel belongs to a real person and links to whatever they have online: a blog, a project, or just a small site they made.

You can find me here...

When I get time, I'm going to go through who else is included. Discovery is the hardest thing on the indie web and I love things like this that help solve that problem.

It's been two weeks since I took delivery of a shiny, new 15" MacBook Air M5.

And I love it!

It's in the sky blue colour but that certainly isn't overstated. From some angles, and in certain lighting, you wouldn't know it wasn't grey. When you do notice the blue, it's subtle and a refreshing change. Still, we're not in MacBook Neo territory by any means.

My old MacBook Pro (2015) was dying a slow death, both from a hardware and software perspective. It had topped out natively with MacOS 12 Monterey, but I had been using Open Core Legacy Patcher to keep one of the partitions up to date. That, however, stopped as of MacOS 15 Sequoia. With Tahoe finally dropping for all Intel models, even OCLP couldn't go any further and the project has shut down.

An increasing number of apps now require Mac Silicon, with no Intel // universal option, leaving you with no choice but to upgrade if you want to use them. Apple will be dropping support for Rosetta, the framework than translates x64 apps to run on Mac Silicon, next year so the problem is only going to get worse.

The poor device had been dropped more times than I care to remember. One of the USB ports stopped working after one incident then, miraculously, started working again after another but could be a little temperamental. Not ideal when you're trying to record and it "lost" the audio interface which crashed Ableton.

MacBook Airs may no longer be as thin and light as they used to, but they're still much thinner and lighter than my old Pro. Moving from an 11 year old device also means the performance is like night and day. The first time I exported audio from Ableton on the new Air, I thought I hadn't selected the range properly; it happened that quick.

Yes, Macs can be expensive but they are built to last. If I can get anywhere near 11 years out of this one I'll be extremely happy.