zerosleeps

Episode 641 of 99% Invisible is excellent. I love the way Roman Mars’ mind works. Here’s one of the questions he was asked during this episode:

A city hires you to make their residents’ lives 10% better without spending any money. You could only rearrange, remove, or repurpose things that already exist. What do you do?

When applying this to Melbourne city and its immediate surroundings I didn’t even have to think about my answer: give trams priority at all junctions. Simple as that. It’s stupid how much time cars get at junctions while a tram with 200+ people on board is made to sit and wait. And of course the overwhelming majority of cars have one person in them. Stupid.

I reckon this would have some lovely knock-on effects: it would make driving in the city even less tolerable than it already is, reducing road traffic and in turn making the city much easier for pedestrians as well.

Bonus answer which applies to the whole of Australia but isn’t low-cost because it would require a massive public-awareness component: eliminate the practice of allowing cars to turn into junctions when pedestrians are allowed to cross. In other words, if pedestrians have a green or flashing red light, give cars turning into their path a red. Not a day goes by where I don’t witness a driver ignoring give-way rules, or even worse not seeing pedestrians already in the crossing. I don’t often play the “in the UK” card, but this rule-of-the-road continues to piss me off. It’s bad at junctions where cars can turn left into an active pedestrian crossing, but it’s terrifying at junctions where cars can turn right into an active crossing.

Unease about the direction macOS is heading continues to get louder. Craig Hockenberry:

And along comes Alan Dye with his standard cockpit, that is beautiful to look at and fun to use on curvy roads. But also completely wrong for the jobs we’re doing.

Jason Snell in their comments on that article:

I don’t know what the answer is, and Hockenberry’s suggestion that it might lead technical users like him to look for an exit from the Mac platform is deeply troubling.

If you take a look at my last dozen-or-so posts you’ll see that I’m not happy with macOS at the moment, and I’m not particularly looking forward to macOS Tahoe either. The new user interface isn’t being well received by those who have tried it or developed for it.

As I said in one of my tantrums about mediaanalysisd, I don’t want a new interface or a new Journal app or more crap which prevents me from doing what I want. I want a rock solid operating system that feels like it’s been crafted by people who love the Mac. But I don’t think Apple loves the Mac any more. They certainly don’t care about macOS the way they used to. They’re making fantastic Mac hardware at the moment but they seem to have stopped enhancing the core of macOS in a way which benefits anyone other than themselves.

Here’s a comment on Hacker News from today that resonates with me:

I’ve been so disheartened by things like this, and I’m confident it represents the end of an era so to speak, that I’ve already come to terms with it and started moving off of Apple’s ecosystem.

For me, the move is a matter of pursuing systems which allow me a bit more freedom. Apple has restricted me in ways that I permitted for decades now, but I permitted it because the compromise was worth it. I don’t see it being worth it in 5 or 10 years, so I’m starting the transition now.

Fixing bugs doesn’t make for exciting marketing material, but being able to answer your iPhone on your MacBook does so that’s where the time and money goes. My /Applications folder is slowly being taken over by Apple apps that I’ve never once opened, or even wanted to open.

Does Tahoe make it possible for me to view logs generated by my own computer? Will my MacBook running Tahoe sleep when I tell it to and stay asleep? Buggered if I know. I wouldn’t think so. All Apple wants me to know about is some stupid new feature they added to Image Playground, or how I really need to give them even more money so I can use Apple News.

Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that I’m not the target audience for the Mac any more.

I continue to not trust macOS. I was working on a little development project at the weekend which involved downloading some code samples. One of those samples included a handful of image files that mediaanalysisd choked on, and since ~/Downloads isn’t in my Spotlight exclusion list my Mac has been strangling itself for the last 4 days.

I’ve been poking at this issue with no luck since I first noticed it, and spent a bit of time yesterday trying to figure out how to see the stuff marked as “<private>” in the system log. It seems like it used to be possible to install a mobile configuration profile, which is a bullshit solution but it doesn’t work in macOS 15 anyway.

The only official mention of this mechanism I’ve found is in Apple’s own manpage for os_log:

The unified logging system considers dynamic strings and complex dynamic objects to be private, and does not collect them automatically.

It goes on:

In situations where it is necessary to capture a dynamic string, and it would not compromise user privacy, you may explicitly declare the string public by using the public keyword in the log format string.

It doesn’t say if there’s a way to override the “does not collect them automatically” thing, so I assume the only option would be to change the log emitter - mediaanalysisd - which I can’t do.

And to nobody’s surprise this just makes me more angry. This is my computer - who are you keeping the log contents private from?!

The Eclectic Light Company has some interesting articles about Spotlight, mediaanalysisd, and macOS system logging, but the last paragraph of this article says it best:

The unified log is not Apple’s <private> playground. It’s a shared space, with users diagnosing problems, developers hunting bugs, support staff fixing glitches, and system administrators managing their networks. For us all to get benefit from our logs, Apple needs to provide a supported means of temporarily disabling this censorship in the unified log. If it won’t, then it’s time for Apple to admit openly that it doesn’t really want anyone else using the unified log.

Press release from the UK government, via Daring Fireball.

Well at least it’s not just the Australian government that doesn’t have the first clue about technology. I don’t know if I find that comforting or terrifying.