I cannot put into words how cool and frustrating this video is.

In it, Scott 3D prints a case for an M1 Mac Mini that he marries up with his iPad Mini as a display.

This is cool.

What’s frustrating is that I’ve noodled around with this same idea for years. When I lived in Tokyo I used my iPad Pro as the occasional display for my 2011 Mac Mini Server (Ama no Gawa) using both Duet and … ugh, the same basic technology but it used a dongle for improving display quality instead of a cable … ugh.

Anyway, it worked great for me but was sadly not as portable as I would have liked.

Scott’s design, which I’ve also considered using a Raspberry Pi 4 (with VNC) in place of the Mac Mini, IS PORTABLE … if one does not need it to be wirelessly portable.

Writing my thinking like this is bringing me to a fresh idea — what if I carried both? The Mac Mini for the more intensive work and the very light RPi4 for tooling around where I need more than the iPad Mini alone can provide? The lighter setup can be powered by a standard battery to be mobile.

Hmmmm.

Baby eating toast in an otherwise unrelated context

I’ve never liked Twitter threads.

If one wants to write a longer piece, there are better ways than to make readers either navigate around interstitial comments or use a 3rd party service — old school web posts immediately leap to mind.

Also, reading longer pieces on Twitter was never good. They were in a narrow space meant for 140 characters. The expansion to 280 characters felt wedged in when read in Twitter’s tools.

If EMu is genuine in taking Twitter to 4000 characters, then welcome to a web product you likely abandoned. I will not join you.

Getting my pair when I did was a great move, but better now:

Why the HomePod? That’s a good question. It’s a piece of Apple history, perhaps; you need two of them for stereo or more for whole-home audio; and unlike its more affordable successor the HomePod Mini, it’s acoustically quite good. My colleague Jen Tuohy has also explained that the smart home is one of the few places where Siri actually excels. She thinks people are realizing it’s the only other option besides the worse-sounding HomePod Mini.

(Via Sean Hollister at The Verge)

Siri is.. not bad on the iPhone either? Or the Watch? Possibly this is because people do want a good-sounding speaker and are willing to spend a little more because they aren’t finding what they want. (Marco Arment complained about this on the most recent ATP podcast.) How ironic if the big HomePod finds its market only after being discontinued, like Sony’s AIBO robot dog.

( Via Charles Arthur at The Overspill)

While living in my sister’s guest room during the pandemic I decided to take a flyer on an OG HomePod. They dropped to a more reasonable $299 and I was tired of listening to things on tinny speakers. I knew from hard earned experience that Sonos was not the way to go. I was in the Apple ecosystem, so it seemed a better investment than another Sonos disappointment or the tin-can-on-a-string acoustics of an Amazon device.

Two key items, both unexpected, sold me on the platform: it sounded good and crisp at low volumes (important as my nieces’ rooms were on either side of mine) and the Siri integration proved more useful than expected. My Siri & HomePod journey has not been without frustration and doubt, however.

Today I have a stereo pair in my family room for home theater audio from my Apple TV. The lesser HomePod minis are in my living room and bedroom for low stakes audio. When I need real sound upstairs, I have my actual stereo setup with wired speakers that plays actual physical media. Before I got the second pair of Minis I looked on eBay for the OGs. They were already at what I’d consider a premium in January. I almost bought another pair when they went end-of-sale, but I had other priorities. I kind of wish I had now, but speculating on what tech becomes lamented and prized is a fool’s errand.