32-bit float audio recording is not a panacea

Waveforms from the Final Cut Pro timeline of Tascam Portacapture X8 recordings showing the difference between Auto Gain and constant gain

I recently replaced a horrible, dodgy Zoom H4n with a Tascam Portacapture X8, for recording (primarily) theatre and music performances. One of the appeals was 32-bit floating-point recording which was literally promised to eliminate concerns about input levelling, clipping, and noise: The reality is, with 32-bit float recording you can turn on your recorder, hit… Read more

‘Fake error’ about immutable values when using popFirst() on Array

It’s been a while since I wrote any meaningful Swift.  How I didn’t miss the Swift compiler’s bullshit error messages. That yields, on the popFirst() method: Cannot use mutating member on immutable value: ‘someArray’ is immutable. No it’s not.  It’s simply not. For whatever reason, if you instead call popFirst() on ArraySlice – ostensibly indistinguishable from… Read more

Your system has run out of application memory HUR HUR HUR

Screenshot of the macOS dialog saying "Your system has run out of application memory"

I hate this dialog with the fire of a thousand suns. When this appears, it basically means one (or both) of two things: Quitting any of the listed applications is rarely the correct move.  It’s often enough the case that none of them are the root cause, and you can kill all of them if you… Read more

Nikon SnapBridge

Finally. Nikon have released the SnapBridge app so that the much-touted Bluetooth+Wifi capability of the D500 can actually be used.  A mere eight months after it was announced.  Fuck you too Nikon. However, as I’d clearly forgotten, it’s not very useful anyway.  It doesn’t work with raws, you see.  Doesn’t even acknowledge that they’re in the… Read more

Silent data corruption

Alternate title:  Apple’s file system engineers are sadly naive. I was quite disappointed to see that APFS isn’t even trying to provide data integrity.  Data integrity is kind of step 0 of any file system, and checksums or use of ECC is pretty much standard in modern & leading-edge file systems.  APFS doesn’t want to… Read more

Why I cancelled Backblaze

This is the feedback I sent to Backblaze shortly before I cancelled my account with them. For the additional context – the restore failure I alluded to was basically that: So, the departing ‘support’ ticket I filed with them (#167833): Maybe this’ll help your future would-be customers. The main reason is that when I tried… Read more