Andrew Haglund

Almost done migrating my site to Micro.blog. I’ve been enjoying how easy it is to post here compared to 11ty! Wish the Mac app handled in-line images better (for pages or long posts). Kind of a drag adding alt-text.

Still debating if I should transfer my mastodon followers or rely on cross-posting.

I was laid off a couple years ago. Long story short: the startup ran out of money. It was not ideal, of course, but I was able to join my wife’s health insurance and pick up some freelance work. I was OK.

A few months later I landed a job with John Deere and it’s been wonderful. I was not looking for or wanting a change, but it ended up working out much better for me financially and I love the work and enjoy working with so many super talented people.

I guess I just wanted to share that layoffs suck. If that’s happened to you recently: hang in there. I’m sure it will lead to new and better things.

I’ve removed news sources like Political Wire, The Index, and NPR from my RSS app (NetNewsWire) and will reconsider in a month.

These were all fairly new additions to my lineup leading up to the election and I think unwinding this is what’s right for me right now. Keep my feed focused on blogs.

I distinctly remember listening to the previous Holiday Party in 2016 after the election. A lot has changed since.

John and Merlin have done it again. I’m only through the first 20 minutes but I can tell it’s gonna be a good one. It’s a powerful 20 minutes.

(It’s been a week.)

Having fun watching teardown videos of the new Mac mini. Some legit “back of the cabinets” vibes with its insanely tidy interior.

Still considering getting an M4 Pro variant but the upgrade prices quickly skyrocket to Mac Studio territory… which then has me questioning everything.

(It’s been a nice distraction this week, if I’m being honest.)

Dan Moren writing about the new Mac mini with M4 and M4 Pro, writing at Six Colors:

… it’s basically a smaller version of the Mac Studio, which was itself a taller version of the Mac mini. Time, as they say, is a flat squircle.

Dan Moren cracks me up.¹

I’m certainly tempted by the new Mac mini. I have a great desktop setup — two displays, continuity camera, great speakers — but the brains are a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) in clamshell. It’s a great machine but you can always use faster when doing SwiftUI development.

I’d love a machine that’s always ready for me at the desk but my hangup is: do I really need two Macs? I feel like if I get the mini I need to trade in my laptop. There are times I want a Mac to-go though and Apple silicon MacBooks have almost zero compromises.

The correct decision is to not buy anything. We shall see.

After months of listening to Manton Reece on Core Intuition I’ve decided to move to Micro.blog. My domain name will carry on but I’m not 100% sure if my RSS feed will transition gracefully? 🤷 Worst case I’ll let all 12 of you know with a final post in this feed.¹

My current site is built with Eleventy and while I’ve enjoyed the experience of learning web development and entering the world of static site generators, I find there’s just too much friction with writing new posts — especially from my phone.² It’s enough friction where I tend to just post to Mastodon or sit on a pile of unused ideas for months.

In this process I’ve learned that I enjoy writing. I like even more that I’m writing at a domain and site I control — not some out-of-his-mind billionaire. What drew me to Eleventy was the idea that I could mooch indefinitely off of GitHub pages (free!) and only pay for my domain renewal fees. Unfortunately the convenience is just not there.

Enter Micro.blog which hosts your site, lets you blog, cross-post to Threads and Mastodon (and others), and podcast hosting (you never know!) for $5/mo. I always have this fear of thinking of monthly costs for my website, which often goes like this:

If I want to have a website my whole life that’s… hmm let me do the math… $5 × 12 months per year × 90 years. Shit.

But the reality is that $5/mo is, at least for most people, nothing. This is “cup of coffee” territory.

Micro.blog also has a social aspect, but without all the algorithms and engagement bait that makes using Threads or certain unnamed sites such a hellscape at times. I want to take this as an opportunity to rethink my relationship with social media more broadly.

I’m pumped to try Micro.blog and I can already tell I’m going to be a happy paying customer. We need more people like Manton building platforms based on the open web and I’m happy to support their work over there. Write on!

I heard Nvidia overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world today. Their insane growth has been driven by the need for GPUs to build data centers and models for companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.

What I find interesting is that the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, wrote an essay where he stated that the next generation of AI will take somewhere around $100 billion to create. That’s a lot of money and it’s difficult to see the path from iterating on LLMs to get to “intelligence”. One very likely possibility is that companies like OpenAI run themselves into the ground chasing this fantasy.

All along the way, Nvidia will happily take their cash today selling GPUs who may go out in a burning blaze of glory burning the cash and energy to make the AI of tomorrow¹. Regardless on your feelings of AI², you gotta hand it to Nvidia for leaning into this and being a critical ingredient for all these companies: they’ll be the one left holding the bag.

The past few months have flown by. Our kiddo is almost 5 months old now and I was lucky enough to spend September home with the family. We went to a wedding, a close friend’s wedding shower, the World Dairy Expo (grilled cheese and milkshakes, yes please) and snuck in a number of family visits.

I feel so fortunate to have a job that offers paid time-off. John Deere went through layoffs and I was lucky enough to be spared. It reminds me that no job is 100% secure, even at big companies. I don’t take it for granted.

Other things of note:

• My grandma and her sister made a day trip to visit us back in July.
• We visited Columbia, MO, for our niece’s birthday.
• Traveled home for my brother’s 30th birthday party.
• Took so many pictures of our kid. It’s not even funny. (Thank goodness for iCloud Shared Photo Library.)
• Listened to many hours of Roderick on the Line on our several road trips.
• Went axe throwing at a work event. Fun!
• Replaced the power lift gate on our RAV4 that was stuck shut. Not fun!

During the evenings when everyone went to bed:

• Worked on a big update to MapKeep and a few smaller updates. It was great having some spare brain power to refactor the app after a year of stumbling through re-learning app development.
• Played Zelda Twilight Princess on my newly arrived Odin 2 mini as I waited for Zelda Echoes of Wisdom to arrive.
• Finished Pokémon Crystal.
• Added a now page to this site where you can see what I’m up to outside of blog posts. I also upgraded this site to Eleventy version 3.
• Listened to new albums by Maggie Rogers, Charly Bliss, Clairo and discovered American Football after learning their house is near me.

TV shows watched:

• The Acolyte (Star Wars) had so much potential. Interesting themes but strange pacing and seemingly low-budget at times (despite having a massive budget).
• 30 Rock seasons 4 and 5.
• Penelope was slow to start but we loved it. Reminds me to savor nature. I heard about the show in an episode of The Town with Mark Duplass who self-funded the show.
• Sunny had a great hook, fantastic style, Rashida Jones, Japan… but it felt a bit all over the place like it was confused about who was doing what and why.

Started watching The Penguin, Rings of Power season 2, English Teacher (Stephanie Koenig is a treasure), and Hacks is outstanding.

Despite Coldplay’s new album Moon Music not coming out until Friday, I found a way to listen to it.

In a world where many people tune into endless playlists and mindless lo-fi music on YouTube, I’m an old school album guy. I love discovering new music but I can’t latch onto an artist without sinking my teeth into an album or an EP. The album is a work of art: What is its mood? What does this collection of songs in this particular order say about the people who made it and the time in which it’s made?

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Coldplay is their dedication to the album. It’s certain to be a commercially-driven strategy: the duration between albums, time spent on tour, and how long they drip and hype a new release is like clockwork. Each album is an era which its own unique art style, show, and through line.

That brings me to Moon Music (which is Coldplay’s second collaboration with Max Martin and billed as a follow-up to Music of the Spheres) which has a semblance of continuity, hung together loosely with what I would call spacey sounds and (like 99% of pop music) simple ideas about love.

Here are my thoughts after a first listen.

(Listen to this album with some good headphones, you’ll thank me later.)

It begins with a gorgeous intro, the titular Moon Music, from Jon Hopkins. To my knowledge it’s the first time he’s been credited as a “featuring…” on a Coldplay track (as opposed to being relegated to liner notes) but he’s worked with Coldplay as far back as 2008’s opening track on Viva La Vida. The opener here too is absolutely brilliant and I was completely lost in it.

Feelslikeimfallinginlove has a strange combination of having energy — especially in the chorus — while being a slow, low-key rhythmic vibe. It was a solid choice for a lead single.

We Pray is a more successful version of Princess of China with Rihanna, or Hymn for the Weekend with Beyoncé. I don’t know the artists featured but I enjoy how different this song feels and it has definitely grown on me.

Jupiter is an absolute joy that fills your heart with an upbeat message. Ya gotta love the acoustic guitar and cello.

Good Feelings with Arya Starr is a funky good time with a stellar guitar riff halfway in. It sounds like it could have been on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories or on a Passion Pit record.

Rainbow is filled with dreamy synths, ripping guitar, a beautiful piano interlude, and spoken audio from Maya Angelou reminds me of M83’s Hurry Up We’re Dreaming.

Iaam (“I Am a Mountain”) is like a throwback to Glass of Water from 2009 but without the heart. The mix itself is hollow: tonally, lyrically, and energy. It stays at one level the whole time.

Aeterna is a groovy tune my brother. I’m looking forward to hearing many remixes that take this jam to full-on EDM music. Nice vocal outro too. (I think they played this live at Glastonbury and it looked like a rockin’ time.)

All My Love is a classic, piano-centric Coldplay love song with a great string ensemble. It feels like this song has been in the air forever yet is somehow new. (Reminds me of their demo of Wedding Bells many moons ago.) I wanna sit down at the piano and learn it.

One World has vamping synths, piano, guitar which fall away to a hundred humming voices then trails to another breathtaking string piece. Some Pink Floyd vibes at the very beginning then goes straight to M83 for its crescendo.

(The outro had me wondering if they forgot to come back and record the words — but there’s also something charming in its rawness.)

There’s a lot of variety in Moon Music and a lot to like. Musically there are some incredible moments, especially in the more complex instrumental compositions. Lyrically it left me wanting with two too many songs rely on “la la la” as a chorus.

As a continuous listening experience, it moves nicely throughout but there’s an unevenness. (The incongruity from We Pray to Jupiter is a bit of whiplash.)

To be sure, there is some beautiful music here (if you like Coldplay) but time will tell if this is a good album that stands out in the annals of time like Viva la Vida. Maybe by my tenth listen I can check back in.

My first listen was laying in bed with headphones and I’m looking forward to hearing it on my speakers tomorrow for a totally different listening experience.

Seth Godin’s 20 Questions post has some good considerations for starting a new project. I think it’s mostly in the context of consulting but I’ve been thinking about this as a solo app developer.¹

I have an idea for a simple (in theory) app but I’ve been having a hard time deciding if I should even start it or not. I haven’t yet had the time or skills to make MapKeep fully featured and I feel like I’d be leaving it unfinished. At best my time would now be split between two apps (and all my other interests, such as my child and gaming).

The upside of starting this new idea? It could have a broader appeal than MapKeep and I think more likely to made some coin. (That’s not my main goal but it’s always in the back of my capitalistic mind.)

Big picture is I often wonder how others seem to juggle so many projects and I feel like I can’t measure up to them. Erving Goffman would say something like don’t compare someone else’s frontstage to your backstage.

M.G. Siegler tosses out a few interesting ideas for how Apple Vision Pro could be re-envisioned as accessory to the iPhone. Let the iPhone be the brains and the battery for headset and have that be the tethered thing (instead of that jumbo battery).

The hole there is that ultra low-latency for passthrough mode is essential so people don’t get motion sick (and so you could play ping pong) while wearing it. Maybe that could have been solved to some degree, but I assume the physical proximity from silicon to display is a key factor.

Overall I like spitballing on “what if” scenarios for Apple Vision Pro successors and Siegler has some good points. I am intrigued by products like the XREAL glasses for projecting my Switch or iPhone and less keen on an entire new computing platform.

Version 1.3.5 of MapKeep will hit the App Store shortly and adds support for dark and tinted app icons for iOS 18.

Thanks to Louie Mantia for his dark mode app icons blog post. He inspired me to use a sunset in the background (as opposed to Apple’s default gradient) which strikes a nice balance between fitting in and standing out.

I hadn’t touched the artwork for the app icon since 1.0 last summer so it was fun to get back in there and experiment with color and transparency for these new variants.

I’ve been busy with making a few substantial updates to MapKeep this summer so I avoided touching the betas. The main item on my todo list is supporting the new app icon tinting and I’m glad I waited. It’s great seeing what many apps have done, courtesy of the App Icon chapter in Federico Viticci’s iOS 18 review. Now I have some fresh ideas and hope to release something in the next week or so.

Update September 20, 2024: After using iOS 18 more I’ve noticed how glaring apps look that don’t support the new icon styles. It’s not for me, at least not yet, but it shines a big light on apps that don’t update. Some will translate just fine but more colorful icons like NetNewsWire and my own just get lazily darkened by 20%. iOS 13, when Dark Mode was introduced, was not this noticeable: now without even opening apps you can see which apps have done the work and which haven’t.

I don’t begrudge Apple with how they rolled this out, just an observation.