Given the rumors that (a) all of their OS’s will be getting a redesign that has similar elements throughout them, and (b) that they’ll all be re-numbered with the year (next year) “26”, I’m going to predict that Apple will introduce a whole new name for their full software ecosystem. A name that spans iOS, iPadOS, macOS, visionOS, tvOS – and brings them all together into a single name. I’m guessing that name will be Apple OS 26.

I think this idea makes sense because so many of the Apple services that we use (e.g., Messages, Notes, Reminders) span across the various hardware platforms and OS’s on those devices, and Apple has done well in the past few years with keeping those services at feature-parity across platforms. Being able to refer to ecosystem-wide features by the “Apple OS” version that they exist within just makes sense.

I believe that they’ll start by announcing that new name, Apple OS 26, and then they’ll break with the traditional format of the WWDC keynote, and instead of going through each OS one by one, they’ll go through everything by feature or by service. Probably starting with the design changes that are coming everywhere, but then getting into the specifics of individual apps and services. For example, discussing new Messages features, not as an iPhone feature, but as an ecosystem feature. If they’re going to get similar UI/UX updates everywhere, and they already get new features everywhere, it only makes sense to talk about them all together.

I’m sure I’ve heard some of my favorite podcasts mention this format shakeup as a possible change they could make over the past few years, but I didn’t hear anyone say it last week, so if it happens today, I’ll claim credit for it. And I’ve not heard anyone ever mention the ecosystem-wide name, so that one’s totally mine.

What are the odds on any of this happening? Easily under 30%, I’d say

As Spring came along this year, I knew I wanted to do even more gardening. This year I also felt like I wanted to plant some vegetables too. I’m not really sure why, other than just for fun. I mean, I do like to eat veggies, but it’s so easy to get them from the store. I don’t expect that anything I grow will be better, although maybe I’ll be surprised.

It was around the middle of March when I first got the itch to start this project. But, a little bit of research and asking around quickly led me to realize it was too early to actually plant anything outside. So instead, I started down two paths that I could pursue indoors, while waiting for warmer weather.

First I bought 16 different packets of seeds – 8 types of flowers, and 8 vegetables (I let the kids choose the flowers; they let me pick the veggies). Next I ordered 2 different seed trays from amazon (one) (two). A few days later, the kids and I spent a couple hours after supper one night filling the trays with potting soil and planting our seeds.

The kids had more fun than I would have expected. Other than the fact that they didn’t like getting their hands dirty planting… They also helped with daily watering. And we were all so excited after a week or two, as little seedlings started to emerge.

Meanwhile, the second leg of my gardening adventure was to build a raised garden bed. I found a pretty simple design online, picked up some cedar at Home Depot, and, well, then I let it stand in the garage for a few weeks… But eventually I got to work with my mitre saw and drills, and after a few evenings, wouldn’t you know it, I had a raised garden bed to call my very own!

Finally, we just had to wait for the weather to get warm enough, and a pocket of time to open up, where we could transplant all our little flower seedlings into pots and other spots around the yard, and into the garden for the veggies.

We’ll see what happens next. I went ahead and bought a few more store-grown flower pots for the front porch, just to add some color while we’re waiting to see if any of these guys bloom. But, I think I achieved my real goals already: Lots of fun, and some good new memories with the kiddos.

Of course, the next day, I was reading a book and came across this line:

The short version:

• Unscrew the bottom of the case
• Confirm the switch is loose by grabbing and wiggling with tweasers
• Add a little solder to the loose switch
• Put it back together.

Simple, and effective!

This time, I’m going to do my first rewatch of all of the 21st century series. That is, I’m going to be doing my first ever rewatches of Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and I think I’ll include the Short Treks.

I’ve decided not to include either of the 21st century animated series at this time – that is, Lower Decks and Prodigy. I’ve seen them both, and even though I did like them as I watched them, I’m not really drawn (pun) to rewatch them, at least not at this time.

The next question then is how to sort the episodes. Especially since that this will be my first rewatch of these series, and given the highly serial natures of the stories in Discovery and Picard, I think it would be a mistake to split up the seasons of these shows (as I’ve done in my last few 20th century rewatches). So my goal will be to watch entire series straight-through.

Since it is the 21st century, all of the seasons are quite a bit shorter than the 20th century shows – only 10 to 15 episodes these days, compared to a reliable 25 or so from the previous era. So shorter seasons should keep things fresh and interesting, as long as I rotate between series at the end of each season.

At this point, with both Discovery and Picard being out of production, we have 5 seasons and 3 seasons, respectively. Right now there are only 2 seasons of Strange New World, though season 3 might drop while I’m doing this rewatch – we shall see. Those numbers (5, 3, 2) work out nicely. I’ll plan on using Discovery as my “pace maker” – meaning every-other season that I watch will be Discovery. Then on the gaps between Discovery seasons, I’ll toggle back and forth from Picard to Strange New Worlds. And since there are only a handful or so of Short Treks (in 2 seasons), I’ll throw those in at the mid point and end points of the sort.

In other words:

• DSC:1
• PIC:1
• DSC:2
• SNW:1
• DSC:3
• ST:1
• PIC:2
• DSC:4
• SNW:2
• DSC:5
• PIC:3
• ST:2

This should be fun! And it was nice to spend some time in a Google Sheet to make my plan. Thank you to Memory Alpha for the episode listings.

As I recently mentioned, I have a pretty good system for organizing my computer cables. It’s easily the best system I’ve ever had. Which isn’t saying much, since all previous systems were simply huge tangled rats nest messes, with zero actual organization.

The approach is simply to use gallon-sized zip lock backs, labeled with the connector types; then place those bags in a plastic storage bin.

I’ve got the following bags in the collection today:

• USB-C → USB-C
• USB-A → USB-C
• USB-A → Lightning
• USB-A → mmmble-USB (no idea ever if mini or micro or what – just rando non-A or C USB)
• USB-C → Lightning
• Miscellanous

Pretty exciting stuff!

As an aside, I know some people think that all furniture belongs in the middle of rooms, not against walls… We will save that discussion for another time.

Anyway, I’m assuming that it was the somewhat sharp bend in the cable that was causing the failure. So, I got a different cable (from my super-well organized bin of labeled bags of USB cables (no snark!)), replaced the bent one, and pulled the dresser another inch or two out, so it wouldn’t stress the cable so much, and all was working fine.

But I realized then and there, that what we needed was a charger that let the cable come straight down, e.g., at a 90º angle, or parallel to the wall. There may be better ones available (though I failed to find any from the normal accessory brands I use (Anker, Belkin)), but I went with this one (with a standard-issue amazon product name):

65W GaN USB C Charger,2 Port Flat USB Wall Charger,flodable Plug for Travel, with PD3.0&PPS for MacBook,Laptops,Tablets,for iPhone,iPad Pro,S22,XPS,with 3.28ft 100W Charging Cable, White

It is super thin – just over half an inch, and I like that it has both a USB-A and USB-C port, because we are still in that transition period between A & C (and probably will be for another decade, honestly). At 65W, that’s fairly high power I take it, which is nice too.

I’ve just ordered my second one of these and can see more in the future any time I need a charger behind something.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get my snow blower to start… I’m guessing the issue is a combination of trying to use old gas, and/or its carburetor being, I don’t know, dirty or gummed up, or something. I don’t know if I have any real reasons to suspect that, but it’s what I’m going to go with. So, I’m going to try to replace the carburetor. I have YouTube videos that show how to take it off and put it back on, and ordered a replacement on Amazon for only $18, so I figure it’s worth a try. I’m choosing to view it as a fun project.

In the meantime, without a machine to clear our driveway (and no teenagers who knock on doors and offer to do it for us), I had to do it by hand. Well, by shovel. Despite losing a lot of weight last year, I didn’t necessarily gain much strength or muscle, so it was a pretty exhausting experience. I did wisely (if I do say so myself) split the task up into four batches, about 30-45 minutes each, so that made it overall fairly tolerable.

By Thursday they reopened school, but drop off and pickup lines were both quite a bit slower than usual. Then, overnight and in to Friday morning, another round of snow came, this one delivering another couple of inches, and cancelling school yet again!

However, now that we live in the future, our school district only permits three actual snow days per year, which meant that Friday was our first virtual school day since the good ole days of COVID-19. It went fine for everyone, with one special highlight: for FACS, my 7th grader got to bake brownies

• ColdTrack – to write down either important happenings, or things that I did for the “jobby job”
• QQQ – again, to log any significant work done there
• Home – for writing down anything notable that I did around the house, or with the family
• Watching – to keep track of what shows and/or movies I’ve watched
• Reading – to keep track of what book I’m working through

I’ve found it a slightly useful exercise to spend 5 or 10 minutes every weekend sitting down to reflect on each of those categories. But, even more interestingly, now that 2024 is wrapping up, and I’ve got more than a full year of these log entries, I thought it would interesting to take a look at all of my entries for each of these categories, to give myself a snapshot view of what the year 2024 looked like for me.

find . -type f | sort | xargs -I % sed "/\#\#\#\ QQQ/,/\#\#/p;d" "%" | grep -v \#\# | grep -e "- .*[a-z]"

I really enjoyed spending an hour or so looking back at these summaries of my year. Somewhat like a personal version of Spotify Wrapped. Here are some of the highlights:

QQQ Headlines

QQQ saw a wide variety of new features this year, covering the full spectrum of backend, middleware, and frontend enhancements. Some of the bigger efforts were spent on getting data in and out of the material dashboard UI in better ways, with Saved Views, Saved Reports, and Bulk Load v2.

• MongoDB backend
• Saved Views
• Dashboard “Blocks”
• Schedule Manager (including Quartz and Simple Scheduler variants), and Scheduled Jobs table
• Saved Reports
• Sharing (initially for Views and Reports)
• Process Locks
• New formal concept of System User Session
• Connection pooling (C3PO) and read-only database connections
• Published version of qqq-starter-app along with youtube intro video
• “State Machine” flow for Process steps
• Initial build of Android frontend app
• OpenAPI definition of middleware
• Bulk Load v2

Books

I’m such a slow reader, but I actually had more books on my list than I would have thought. There were also 2 or 3 that I started, but bailed on. The books I completed this year are:

• Julia (a retelling of 1984)
• The Expanse 6.5 (Strange Dogs) (short story)
• Contact
• Diaspora
• The Expanse 8 (Tiamat’s Wrath)
• A Scanner Darkly
• Off to be the Wizard

Shows

I was most surprised by how many different TV shows I watched this year. It’s been a few years now since I started watching shows other than just Star Trek reruns while I exercise, and it is something I really enjoy doing. I guess that’s not much of a headline, that somebody likes to watch TV… but, it is still somewhat new to me, as I used to identify as someone who didn’t really watch much, and I always felt left-out of conversations that I’d hear coworkers having about shows that they were watching. Of course, a solid half of the new shows that I watched were either Star Wars or Star Trek based. But all of the old shows I’ve watched are something different.

New Seasons of Current Shows

• For All Mankind
• Star Wars: The Bad Batch
• 3 Body Problem
• Star Trek: Discovery
• Shogun
• Dark Matter
• Star Wars: The Acolyte
• The Bear
• Star Trek: Prodigy
• Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy
• Shrinking
• Silo
• Star Trek: Lower Decks
• Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

Watch-Throughs of Older Shows

• Mr. Robot
• Invasion
• Chernobyl
• The Wire
• The Good Place
• The West Wing

Movies

I only watched just more than a handful of movies in 2024 (six, whereas a handful is (obviously) five). I do prefer shows to movies, but these were all okay, I guess:

• Tetris
• Glass Onion
• Oppenheimer
• Blade Runner 2049
• Terminator
• Terminator 2

Personal

Finally, there’s the stuff that I file under the “Home” heading in my weekly log. I’ll omit a lot of the more personal and family-related items from this list, but there were some good accomplishments in here too, which I’m happy to share:

Technology

• Pre-ordered an Apple Vision Pro on 1/19, at the minute they went on sale!
• Vision Pro came on 2/2/2024!!
• Got new wireless headset for use at my mac
• Bought wireless game controller, to connect to vision pro, to play emulated classic nintendo games
• Got M4 Pro mac mini
• Switched to Keychron Q11 keyboard

Around-the-house

• Cleared washing machine drain with a drum auger
• Fixed mom’s radio with soldier (!!)
• Planted 2 trees in front yard
• Bought some flowers for the front porch and pots in the back
• Bought new Washing Machine
• Built small wall of landscaping bricks around back yard rock bed
• Installed water hammer arrestor on fridge ice maker
• Planted grass in the front mostly where the old tree was. Filled in ~12 bags of dirt in the hole there too first.
• Added White Marble rocks in the bed in front of the garage. Re-did the edgers in front, and added them up the sides too.

Health

• Did bloodwork that was ordered about 9 months ago, revealing high cholesterol – which is bad to have – but good to know about, because now I can work on it.
• Started morning Yoga 2-3 days per week (done in vision pro)
• Started recording meals with FoodNoms app
• Changed to eat salads for lunch every day
• Switched to new dentist
• Ordered 5 pound dumbbells. Started using them after exercise bike 4x per week. (Later moved up to 8 pounders!)
• Got new recumbent bike, after pedal fell off old one.
• Weight under 180 lbs for the first time since 2011
• Went back to the doctor. Got an updated Blood test. Cholesterol went down by 10, but still 43 higher than goal, so more work to do!
• Ending the year under 170 lbs, down a total of 60 since I started eating better after that blood test.

I suppose looking back at it all, the biggest thing was really my weight loss. I’ve had similar (though not quite as big) diet periods before, but they all felt much more forced, and more of an effort. This year, for the most part, I don’t find myself “suffering” at all to loose weight, and hopefully that means I’ve actually changed my relationship to food and eating, and it’ll be a permanent change.

Off to Home Depot