Disqus - Latest Comments for nathany

Re: Rebelle 6 Released: All Tools under One Roof

Nathan Youngman — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 16:07:46 -0000

When will there be native M1 Mac support?

Re: Best iPad drawing accessories

Nathan Youngman — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 13:20:50 -0000

For stands, also take a look at the Sketchboard Pro.

Re: MacBook lineup likely seeing more updates this fall following Pro refresh

Nathan Youngman — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 15:19:53 -0000

Apple hasn't given developers a heads up to port their Mac apps to ARM, so possibly sticking with Intel for the next round? Intel's 10nm Ice Lake just launched with systems shipping for the holidays -- maybe October in the case of Apple? It has WiFi 6, integrated Thunderbolt 3 (vs. a separate chip), and faster integrated graphics. The Air's current 7W chip may be upgraded with the 9W chip, and it would also bring Bluetooth 5.0 for longer talk time on v2 AirPods. Even though the MacBook Pro was just refreshed, Apple did an independent Vega graphics refresh last year, so two refreshes in one year isn't unheard of. The 13" MacBook Pro got a same generation speed bump this year, whereas the Ice Lake chips could be a significant update. The 15" MacBook Pro got 8-cores and there isn't yet an Ice Lake chip for that, but maybe there will be a 14nm 8-core chip with WiFi 6 and such. The only new Intel chip suitable for the 12" MacBook is Lakefiled, which has a single Ice Lake core with 4 low-power Atom cores. Not sure how that will perform.

Somewhere I read that with Intel’s Ice Lake “webcams will no longer need a MIPI-to-USB chip in the laptop bezel.” That could allow room for better quality webcams or maybe even FaceID.

I'd like to see Apple come out with a 12" MacBook ARM (A13X or derivative), though it's going to be tough to get apps for the first while. Also wouldn't be surprised if Apple launched a premium 16" MacBook ARM with a tapered design, showcasing what is possible with their tech.

Re: What to expect for MacBook, iMac, and Mac mini at Apple’s October 30th event [Video]

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 21:21:23 -0000

The newer MacBook/Pro keyboards are quieter, but still super shallow.

Re: What to expect for MacBook, iMac, and Mac mini at Apple’s October 30th event [Video]

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 21:10:41 -0000

Personally I'm most curious about the 12" MacBook. To differentiate it from the new "Air", I speculate that it will be upgraded to a Pro designation, despite running the low-power 5W Amber Lake chips. There is the rumour of TouchID which also means a T2 chip for security. Competitors like HP have added eSIMs for LTE to their laptops, which would make it the ultimate little travel machine for business people. Maybe Apple could also give it a DCI-P3 display, 720p FaceTime camera, Thunderbolt 3, and perhaps even the option of up to 1TB of storage? The Amber Lake chip moved more things on package, so I hope the tiny mainboard could fit the Alpine Ridge controller for Thunderbolt, the T2 chip, and more storage. Given the success of the AirPods, dumping the headphone port for a second Thunderbolt port wouldn't hurt my feelings.

I think the "Air" (13" MacBook) could have more in common with the chunkier MacBook Pro Escape than the 12" MacBook, but with some cost-cutting measures to get the starting price down. Like a lower-cost Retina screen (not DCI-P3) or perhaps using USB-C Gen 2 instead of Thunderbolt 3. The Whiskey Lake chips are 15W and still need a fan, so it needs to be a thicker design than the 12".

It looks like all the 8th gen Intel NUCs are 4-core machines, so the Mac Mini is sure to be a major upgrade. Who thinks it will get a Vega GPU on the high-end like the NUC Hades Canyon and 15" MacBook Pro?

Anyone think the "display upgrade" for the 5K iMac will be ProMotion with 120 Hz?

With 10nm Canon Lake pushed back until 2019 and Whiskey Lake having only some hardware-based mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown, I do wonder if it isn't best to wait a year though, especially when it comes to the 12" MacBook (no hardware-based mitigations and most needing some extra performance).

Re: Kobo Forma e-reader will be available on October 23rd

Nathan Youngman — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 19:35:05 -0000

The embedded video says it has an HD Carta screen whereas your article states Mobius. What's the difference? [update: Is Carta related to the resolution and Mobius related to it being plastic?]

Re: Amazon Kindle Oasis (2017) review: Hands-on with Amazon’s bigger more waterproof premium e-reader

Nathan Youngman — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 16:49:10 -0000

"a massive 7in screen, the largest ever on a Kindle"
Not actually -- I had a Kindle DX back in the day (9.7").

Still, this looks pretty attractive. Looking forward to your full review.

Re: The best mini-ITX PC cases

Nathan Youngman — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 20:47:42 -0000

Which Phanteks case? This article mentions two.

Re: The best mini-ITX PC cases

Nathan Youngman — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 20:44:46 -0000

I would've preferred the simplicity of a heat-sink/fan for the CPU cooler, but in the case of the Phanteks Shift, there is room at the bottom for a radiator/fan but not a whole lot of clearance where the CPU is. Only low-profile fans would fit, so it depends on which CPU you are using. For an i7-7700K, I ended up using a Corsair H80i V2 liquid cooler.

With a different case, such as the NCASE v1, a tower CPU cooler would fit, and that case has less room for a liquid cooler's tubes. So it just depends on the build.

In terms of performance, I don't imagine the H80i V2 (120mm radiator) is any better than a good tower cooler for a CPU.

Re: The best mini-ITX PC cases

Nathan Youngman — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 20:35:41 -0000

Right now I'm finishing up a Phanteks Shift build -- not for the living room, just for my desk. I only need one GPU, though it is limited to dual-slot GPUs. Component selection requires a little more forethought, but it looks fantastic IMO. Here in Canada, the case was priced the same as the larger S340 Elite from NZXT, but I prefer the materials and smaller footprint.

Re: Hands-on: Akitio’s portable 4-Bay Thunderbolt 3 external storage solution turbo-charges your Mac [Video]

Nathan Youngman — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 16:27:35 -0000

Yup. When rebooting to Windows off the internal SSD, I had to unplug the Thunderbay mini, otherwise Windows would crash. Eventually that got fixed though, so it's not a problem in the latest Windows 10. It also worked great under macOS the whole time, besides the fan being a bit annoying.

But I sold off my ThunderBay mini and iMac, so I can't test it out any further.

Re: Hands-on: Akitio’s portable 4-Bay Thunderbolt 3 external storage solution turbo-charges your Mac [Video]

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 10:11:19 -0000

I had the Thunderbay 4 mini (Thunderbolt 2) with SoftRAID and 4 SSDs, but the fan on the back was pretty noisy. They look fairly similar, but if passive cooling is sufficient for SSDs, that fan switch would be really nice. The individual USB 3.1 enclosures I'm currently using are passively cooled, so it should be fine. I'm curious what Jeff finds out regarding the noisy power connector.

The other issue I had with the Thunderbay 4 mini was that Windows would crash on startup when using Bootcamp. That eventually was resolved, but I don't know that it ever got proper Windows support, in case you want to actually use a drive in Bootcamp.

Re: Writing An Interpreter In Go: The Paperback Edition

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 23:51:10 -0000

You might consider print-on-demand through both CreateSpace and IngramSpark. https://www.ingramspark.com/

I don't know if Ingram reaches Amazon.in, but that would cover more retailers, such as Chapters Indigo here in Canada.

Re: O’Reilly is closing their digital bookstore

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 22:03:20 -0000

O'Reilly posted a follow up that explains the change:
https://www.oreilly.com/ide...

Re: Apple HomePod Music Speaker Debuts, Canada Misses December Launch

Nathan Youngman — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:33:05 -0000

There is a "first listen" over on AppleInsider suggesting that they sound pretty darn good.

Re: With the possibility of Apple Watch ‘smart straps,’ which interests you most? [Poll]

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 19 May 2017 21:49:43 -0000

While I don't need glucose monitoring, I think it would be interesting to track or even get notifications.

Last year I cut most free sugar from my diet and subsequently lost 70 lbs. Huge impact, and hopefully sparing myself from a slough of chronic diseases that travel with obesity. I really hope the researchers and engineers at Apple are successful, that Apple brings attention to the health concerns, and that many people live healthier, happier lives as a result -- including those who aren't diabetic or don't know that they are pre-diabetic.

That would be way more valuable than an iPad with a bigger screen. 😜

Re: Edmonton-based Jobber opens Toronto office to tap into sales and marketing talent

Nathan Youngman — Tue, 16 May 2017 13:13:50 -0000

Congrats Jobber!

@jessica FYI, paragraph 6, "is committed is committed" -- so really committed then? 😉

Re: HTTPS adoption has just reached the tipping point

Nathan Youngman — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 17:38:43 -0000

There is something along these lines called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). If you visit www.example.com, the server can redirect to https and tell the browser to use https for all future requests to that domain. There is also an HSTS Preload List so that even the first visit goes to https instead of http.

It may still be a while before all websites are expected to be https -- alleviating the need for HSTS. Something like what you're describing will surely happen eventually.

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go, and why we’re not going back

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 18:54:11 -0000

"Perhaps the fact that makes it simpler in ‘Go’ is that there's usually one limited set of tools to work with, which you use repeatedly and get a chance to master."

There is something to that, I'm sure of it. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Comparing Elixir and Go

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 18:40:36 -0000

Thanks for sharing this.

After using Elixir for about a year and Go for several years, what I find most interesting is how they have very different approaches to reach the same goals.

For example, both Erlang and Go have an emphasis on reliability. Elixir has immutable values, super visor trees, and hot code reloading. But Elixir is a dynamic language with a virtual machine whereas Go looks to static typing and compiled binaries to help with reliability.

Their concurrency models are quite different to work with, but both have green threading that scales to multiple cores, making them both good choices for web services and web applications.

Both languages are well worth learning in my opinion. Have fun!

Re: Comparing Elixir and Go

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 18:26:47 -0000

Have you read "errors are values" and considered the many ways to handle errors in different situations? https://blog.golang.org/err....

Though Erlang/Elixir provide supervisor trees and exceptions, Elixir often uses multiple return values (like Go) for error handling.

"In practice, however, Elixir developers rarely use the try/rescue construct... Elixir provides a File.read/1 function which returns a tuple containing information about whether the file was opened successfully" http://elixir-lang.org/gett...

Re: Rust vs. Go

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 02:17:57 -0000

Despite your differences, it sounds like you are in agreement with the original post on this point: "NTP’s potential contributor base is mainly C programmers. Thus, advantage goes to the language with the easier learning curve for that population."

Learning a language is a one time fee * the number of developers. Go has its quirks, to be sure, but the overall simplicity and similarity to C are benefits that should not be overlooked. Companies employ developers with various skill levels and the same applies to open source contributors.

Of course ease of adoption isn't the only consideration when choosing a tool.

Rust brings some interesting new ideas to bear, concepts that other languages may also adopt. Swift 4 may add borrowing and members of the Go team have expressed interest in Rust, though who knows if Go will ever adopt any of its ideas.

The original post is phrased as a competition, yet there is no reason for it to be. We're all just programmers building things with the tools we know. Take a look at this post from top gopher Russ Cox for his perspective: https://research.swtch.com/...

There is no argument that Rust is a newer language, with Go 1.0 coming out three years prior to Rust 1.0. As time goes on, the number and quality of resources to learn Rust will improve. Personally I'm looking forward to reading Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development.

@mmstick you know the Rust language and the blessed crates that the original poster missed. Based on this thread, you clearly like writing. That makes me curious. How would you build something "real" like an IRC server in Rust? And could you explain it to a new Rustacean with a series of blog posts, linking out to other resources as necessary?

You may not change the original poster's mind, but there will be others who want to learn Rust. If you understand what struggles newcomers to Rust face, and invest time into making it more accessible, that's a win for everyone! Thanks.

Re: My Go Resolutions for 2017 Posted on Wednesday, January 18, 2017.

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:28:23 -0000

This reminds me of a talk I saw on Swift a while back, though not specific to immutable types. If I recall correctly, generics in Swift are implemented as an optimization by the compiler. So the compiler can choose between the tradeoffs of space (multiple implementations) vs. runtime (by the sounds of it, essentially interface{} and reflection). Of course those smarts likely contribute to greater compiler-time.

While I tend to be in the "keep the language simple" camp, it certainly is worthwhile to evaluate the design space. Thanks so much for everything you do Russ -- this is going to be a great year for Go!

Re: Our Favorite Mechanical Keyboards

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 01:28:42 -0000

Hey Kimber, you mentioned a hardwood wrist wrest [sic]. I'm curious what specific accessories you recommend when getting a mechanical keyboard such as the Code 87-key?

Re: Comment: Apple is cutting it (ultra)fine for December availability of that LG 5K display

Nathan Youngman — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 20:10:12 -0000

Not so sure whether 5-6 weeks is accurate for the 4K UltraFine. Both my Sandisk USB-C SD card reader and 4K UltraFine shipped well before the estimate on the purchase page. Of course that's no guarantee you won't be waiting until late January.