Casey Liss

I have a bit of a messy setup due to availability issues and price fluctuations with the recent shortages. Currently, I'm using one LG UltraFine 4k display at 27" - it's beautiful, text looks super crisp and it works perfectly fine out of the box with my MBP. For a secondary display I use a 1440p BenQ which has been a source of pain with macOS, because macOS doesn't play well with 1440p displays. To make it work without looking like garbage I use betterdummy [1], but this also has the side effect of requiring a lot more window management that I sort of scripted with hammerspoon.

It's really not a good time to get a monitor for a macbook: the onboard display on the new ones is gorgeous and very little on the market comes close at a reasonable price point. This recent article [2] goes into the dismal state of affairs better than I can put here. If you're just getting into external monitors and have a pretty large budget, I would recommend the LG UltraFine 5k specifically for its ability to have a single cable work for display + power + USB-C hub. I wish I could get one but they're heavily marked up here in India.

1: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDummy

2: https://www.caseyliss.com/2021/12/7/monitor-liss

The issue of subscription apps came up a lot in recent months on ATP [0] regarding Casey's new app Callsheet [1]. They've been arguing heavily FOR the use of subscriptions, and I came around to agreeing with them. The part that especially convinced me is that subscription revenue creates an incentive for the developer(s) to keep working on the app, in particular after the big wave of launch sales is gone. (You could argue that a lot of apps don't necessarily need new features, but I feel like especially on macOS and iOS, you want the app developers to check if their app still works properly on the new major releases, and issue fixes if something breaks.)

The very important thing is the cost of the subscription though. It needs to be reasonable. I'm fine with paying a subscription even for a small app as long as it's a low yearly price (like 5-10$). I feel like that's the bigger issue with subscription apps nowadays - the prices are often unreasonable considering the type of app, and they end up charging 3-6$ A MONTH for apps that should be at most 1-2$ a month.

[0]: https://atp.fm
[1]: https://www.caseyliss.com/2023/8/7/callsheet

The Verizon versions of iPad Air, iPad Retina Mini, iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C are identical to those sold for AT&T and T-Mobile, and will work on any of those three networks[1]. (It's different/more complicated for older devices.)

Also, an agreement Verizon signed when buying their LTE spectrum from the FCC says that all Verizon LTE devices must be carrier-unlocked out of the box[2].

However, Verizon will refuse to activate any device that was not originally sold for use on its network (they use a unique device hardware ID for this). AT&T and T-Mobile don't do this.

Therefore, for maximum flexibility, buy Verizon versions of recent Apple devices. You can then switch to AT&T or T-Mobile (not Sprint), or back again to Verizon, at any time, as many times as you wish. This is what the author did[3].

[1]: http://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_2008_wireless_spectrum_auction#Google_involvement

[3]: http://www.caseyliss.com/2014/5/21/tmo-vs-vzw-plans

Migration Assistant does this quite well. This is the built-in first-run cloning tool when you start a new Mac. I'm on maybe the fifth or sixth generation of cloned user environment in however many years. Apps, preferences, data, all copied from older machines to newer ones.

I recently ran into a scenario where that didn't work (on an iPhone) when a device is managed by MDM. This is the first time I've seen it fail other than 15 years ago on an edge case.

For a Mac, Homebrew has an option (or maybe another tool leverages it) to create a manifest of sorts to reinstall all the right tools. That's a bit different. I know that Casey Liss, of the Accidental Tech Podcast (https://www.caseyliss.com, https://atp.fm) has talked about it on his blog. I just woke up, so apologies for not finding it for you.

> Apple is quite good for developers targeting their platforms

https://www.caseyliss.com/2020/11/10/on-apples-pisspoor-documentation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24410652

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/21/22385859/apple-app-store-scams-fraud-review-enforcement-top-grossing-kosta-eleftheriou

https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/apple-your-developer-documentation-is-garbage.html

> I don't expect developers targeting [. . .] consoles, to do it from other platforms either.

Consoles are poor example since I don't know a single console that lets you compile your game on it. All console manufacturers provide a development environment that runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, or a combination of those.

Until a few months ago, I had never really used BitTorrent to do anything - save for about 20 minutes back in HS almost 20 years ago (!)

(I think I was running uTorrent on Windows, it was weird and I really didn't know how to use it.)

However, in order to "acquire" [this][1], torrenting was realistically the only sensible option I had. A direct download from the Internet Archive would have taken roughly 7 hours @ 100 Mb/s. The torrent file was done in an hour.

To my great surprise, the link isn't dead, so...yeah :)

Transmission CLI FTW.

[1]: https://www.caseyliss.com/2021/2/14/a-concert-for-charlottesville