Ventura’s new System Settings app, replacing System Preferences, removes the ability to control quite a few important things. One of those is whether or not the system goes to sleep automatically. Well, it does let you control this setting but only for when the system is on mains power: By default the system will sleep… Read more
Say you want to perform some operation after a delay, and/or at regular intervals, inside a Swift actor – maybe your actor represents a weather station and you want to periodically fetch the latest weather information, automatically. How do you do that? You could punt the problem to some other code, outside the actor –… Read more
Casey Liss mused about a home project to wire his whole house with ethernet, in several ATP episodes. Coincidentally around that time I had need to run ethernet to a specific device anyway. So I thought – well, if you’re going to do something, do it ad stupidium… Read more
The Nikon Z9 is supposed to be able to work using USB power. And it appears to – if you have a battery installed that’s not flat. Otherwise, it refuses to function – showing a “Shutter release disabled. Recharge battery” message in the viewfinder for a second or two before turning itself off again. I… Read more
Nikon Rumors recently ran my Nikon Z9 second impressions as a guest post on their site. That was very flattering. It was also a novel experience for me – generally nobody reads what I post here on my blog, and it’s as much for my own benefit as anything else (e.g. a form of “rubber… Read more
I’ve been out using my Z9 every weekend, but a bit behind on actually going through all the photos. Just now I was reviewing some and was surprised to realise there were no GPS coordinates. In any from that day. Where I was outdoors for hours in a flat grass field. I then discovered that… Read more
Google had (has?) a tongue-in-cheek achievement system built into the employee directory. Anyone can define a new achievement and award it to whomever, provided they can create (or pirate) a neat little icon for it. Lots of people have over the years – there must be thousands of distinct achievements possible, at this point. It’s… Read more