diff --git a/blog/apple.md4tj b/blog/apple.md4tj new file mode 100644 index 0000000..60c6367 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/apple.md4tj @@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ +@@META charset UTF-8 +@@META name viewport content width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0 +@@TITLE My Thoughts on Apple +@@CSS ../css/main.css +# The Jerks +## Blog +[Back to blogs](https://www.thejerks.club/blog.html) + +### My Thoughts on Apple +@@BLOGPOSTTITLE My Thoughts on Apple +@@BLOGPOSTDATE 1690205391 +#### Introduction +Due to some recent conversations I've had, I thought it best to clarify my thoughts on Apple products so I could have something to point to when people point out my apparent contradictions in reasoning. Anyone who knows me knows that it was only a few years ago that I was a stark, raving mad Stallmanite who refused to even consider using Apple products and viewed Apple users as haughty dilettantes that don't understand the value of a dollar. Many things have changed in recent years, including but not limited to: finishing puberty, going from a dedicated Stallmanite to more of a cheerleading role, having a job in tech (unless you don't consider being a PhD student a job), flagship and even non-flagship Android smartphones being similar if not greater in price to Apple's smartphones, and the fact that my wife's computer is over 5 years old and is still on the latest operating system. Previously, the only Apple devices I've used are: the iPod Touch 4th gen, the iPhone 4 (well after Apple quit supporting it), numerous virtual machine hackintoshes, and the latest Macbook Pro with all the bells and whistles (for work, I didn't have to pay for it). I have fond memories of the iPod Touch, it was the last device to max out at iOS 5, the excellent skeumorphic interface that unfortunately ceded to the soulless flat design dominating the industry nowadays. The iPhone 4 I was less fond of, as I used it as a fallback phone for a couple of years (my main phone was a Motorola Moto g5 which I accidentally dropped in the toilet after reading a particularly heated Reddit thread) well after Apple quit supporting it, so I was met with the frustrating "this app was not made for your device" whenever I tried to install anything. For reasons unknown to me at this moment, I never jailbroke it which would have enabled me to sideload apps, perhaps I was too lazy or maybe the phone was in a weird configuration that disabled jailbreaks. The hackintoshes went largely unused, for as any distrohopper soon discovers all operating systems nowadays are essentially the same, and there is nothing on MacOS that I would want to run that wouldn't run on Linux. This leads me to the current Apple device I use, the Macbook Pro M2 16'', the most overpriced computer I've ever used (but my workplace paid for it). In all honesty, I use this computer solely because it's a convenient portable device that contains all work-related stuff on it allowing me to maintain the delicate work-life balance every sane PhD student (or professional, for that matter) must have, the screen is excellent, and it interacts well with Zoom where my Linux machines do not. I have the most experience using MacBooks and not iPhones, so the majority of this blog is going to be on the former, not the latter. +*TL;DR: I would never use an Apple device for personal use, but the hardware design is fascinating.* + +#### Construction +It baffles me to this day how the rest of the industry has not caught up to Apple in this respect. Every MacBook is made of sturdy aluminum, making it a good weapon but more importantly being more resilient than crappy plastic cases. My first computer was some budget Toshiba laptop that was basically immobile after about 3 years because the plastic housing the hinges degraded, which meant I had to manually hold down the hinge when I opened the laptop lid; I eventually just gave up on closing the laptop entirely. MacBooks will almost certainly never have this problem. The keyboard is also excellent, I'm able to maintain a high WPM which is not the case with other laptops. All keyboards also feature backlighting which I honestly consider a mandatory feature nowadays, yet is relatively rare to see on consumer models (perhaps I am not looking at a high enough price point). One of Apple's trademarks is the ability to open all their MacBooks with one hand, by just slipping your fingers underneath the lid and pulling it up; you don't need to hold the base to ensure the entire laptop doesn't go up with it. I never realized how convenient this was until I started doing it, and I honestly don't want to go back. Finally, every MacBook has an oversized trackpad which is absolutely essential in any desktop environment that makes heavy use of the mouse. I am baffled at the size of trackpads on competing PC models; it is $CURRENT_YEAR and GUIs have made no indication of reducing the usage of the mouse (in fact, it seems to be increasing), how is this not a standard feature? On the other hand, the diversity of ports is quite irritating. There are no USB-A ports on modern MacBooks, only USB-C. All my devices are still USB-A and I'm not switching any time soon. Of course, as with all Apple devices, the purpose of each device is to pull you further and further into the Apple ecosystem, and Apple has moved on long ago from "legacy" USB-A so there is no reason from Apple's point of view to include them; this does not stop me, the end user, from complaining about this however. The MacBook Pro includes an HDMI port, which is essential because it is $CURRENT_YEAR and there is still no widespread, well-supported standard for streaming screens wirelessly. Apple may expect me to use all of their devices, but it is unrealistic to expect my workplace to also use all their devices. Unfortunately, the MacBook Air does not include an HDMI port which in my opinion makes it useless for work. Bafflingly, both Pros and Airs still feature Headphone jacks, but I suppose that this is a temporary arrangement until the headphone jack becomes the limiting factor in thinness or they invent some other stupid reason to eliminate it. Interestingly, they have still not eliminated the SD-card slot - that, if anything, is legacy hardware but I'm not complaining. + +#### Software +Yeah... I hate MacOS. It is such an odious beast, refusing to fit into my workflow that I've developed over the course of about 5 years now. Yes, I technically could learn all the keyboard combinations and shortcuts that enable me to not use the mouse, but I expect that once I graduate I will never touch another MacBook again so there is no point. I drank the kool-aid on tiling window managers long ago, and I'm constantly having to struggle with arranging windows such that they don't overlap. MacOS is a very mouse-centric operating system, but my workflow has adapted to almost entirely eliminate the use of the mouse entirely; this adaptation has taken the form of key combinations that are just muscle memory at this point. A colleague of mine shilled [yabai](https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai), a tiling window manager for MacOS but yabai purports to be an all-in-one solution which is not what I'm looking for, the window manager I use on Linux is dwm with my own modifications and I don't want to waste time configuring yabai for my purposes. My workflow is now forced into some caveman-level configuration where everything important is a fullscreen window to avoid annoyances with floating windows. Beyond trivialities with the front-end, the most irritating thing about MacOS is that they don't allow the running of 32-bit applications. As far as I know, this was a **software** mandate as this "feature" popped up in Catalina, not necessarily with a new generation of hardware eliminating 32-bit emulation. Less importantly, this means pretty much any video game not specifically compiled for 64-bit will not run on Mac, even with Winebottler (the equivalent of wine for MacOS). Most video games, as far as I know, are still compiled for 32-bit. More importantly, this makes MacOS basically useless for embedded system development as those softwares are all super old and definitely are not compiled for 32-bit support. Apple decided to grant us a pittance by allowing us to dual-boot Windows with MacOS but that in and of itself requires rebooting the computer to run certain applications. Another annoyance is the fact that you need an Apple account to download apps (I don't have an Apple account anymore and I will not create one for my work computer) but this is alleviated by [Homebrew](https://brew.sh). Homebrew is essentially a package manager for MacOS featuring most of the apps I use on my Linux computer. I am not familiar with the internals of Homebrew (nor do I care to learn), but as far as I can tell Homebrew is tightly integrated with git, meaning package listings are stored in a git repository on Github, for some reason this means updating the repository takes an eternity to run. The Homebrew packagers don't create an "app" for every package, so some need to be run from the command line. One can use [Platypus](https://sveinbjorn.org/platypus) to automate the creation of an app from an executable, but this is still quite inconvenient. Linux had this figured out trivially: all binaries are stored in various "bin" directories and these can be turned into "apps" via a desktop entry placed in the `/usr/share/applications` directory, I don't understand why I have to go through this dog-and-pony show just to get something to show up in the Finder search. There is also the issue of the "right click", which has been ingrained in computer users since the dawn of time. It took me way too long to figure out that holding down ctrl and clicking is the equivalent to a right-click. I thought the only way to right-click was a "two-finger tap" but this has never worked consistently for me. Regardless, I should not have to use both my keyboard and mouse to initiate a right-click. + +#### Hardware +This is where MacBooks shine in my opinion. Yes, I know that Apple has had a history of selling snake-oil in the form of off-the-shelf x86 processors and soldered-on, miniscule amounts of RAM with a ridiculous markup for the "Apple tax". This has all changed however. The new M2 chip is an ARM processor designed (and undoubtedly codesigned with software) by Apple with competitive results in benchmarks. I'll defer to the tech-geeker sources that actually run these benchmarks and display them for the entertainment of tech-addicts. The choice of ARM is interesting in and of itself, as they are undoubtedly paying massive fees for using ARM and even more fees for extending it. I suppose it is on the open hardware developers and academics to legitimize RISC-V and other alternate ISAs before Apple will consider them. What interests me the most is the neural engine (or NPU), which is a machine-learning accelerator implemented on-chip (which also happens to be my current area of research). Of course, very little details have been released about this chip, but I suspect there's a lot more to it than the conventional large systolic array design seen in products such as the [TPU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit) and basically any state-of-the-art accelerator architecture in the literature. This has, of course, enabled spying on the content of an individual's computer at an even higher scale, but it is programmable and integrated in with Pytorch. As I use my computer only for work, I really couldn't care less but I would never own a modern MacBook for personal use. The memory is unupgradeable, but my system sports 32 GB of RAM (the lowest amount possible) which is more than I'll ever need unless I start running large training workloads, but a MacBook isn't really meant for these purposes. The memory is "unified" which I suppose means that the CPU and NPU address the exact same memory, without the conventional need to explicitly offload data to the accelerator. This is important as ultimately, machine learning workloads will be memory bound, not compute bound. Compute can be added in a linear amount of processing elements to to the systolic architecture, but the memory speed will probably not grow to a point where the accelerator can take advantage of this extra compute. Some credence can be lended to this idea by the fact that the Google TPU really only supports 128x128 matrix multiplications, with the exception of the [IPU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphcore) the state-of-the-art accelerators use expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and the main improvement of the TPUv4 over previous iterations was the use of optical interconnects to allow easy reconfigurability. The M2 chip does not use HBM (or else MacBooks would be way more expensive than they already are), so the next best thing is to prevent offloading entirely and simply address the same memory as the CPU. There's also the marvel of the fact that Apple can pack this much performance into such a thin case with little overheating. I have also heard reports of [Apple's CPUs' massive reorder buffers](https://dougallj.github.io/applecpu/firestorm.html), which dominant the size of conventional reorder buffers. This allows a massive amount of speculation in comparison to its peers, but of course it had better have an excellent branch predictor to be able to take advantage of this speculation. + +#### Ideology +This is where I vehemently disagree with Apple. I am always apprehensive of a company trying to force me into their products, and in fact for my personal use I have a wide diversity of hardware, from Logitech to Dell to Raspberry Pi. The reason these are all able to be used in a relatively unified experience is that they conform to **standards**. The inability to run 32-bit applications on Mac is a deal-breaker for me. Apple devices refuse to fit into any workflow but their own, which renders them useless to me. I demand the ability to be able to remote into all my devices via ssh, including my TV and mobile devices, for the cases when the system freezes and I want to force a restart or perhaps to grab a file stored on these systems from the comfort of my desk. Believe it or not, Apple's lack of repairability is not really a bother to me as nowhere is the "[right to repair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_repair)" guaranteed. The right-to-repair puts an unnecessary burden on companies and restricts a possible income source. Apple has a certification program for repairing devices, and if the average Joe down the street in the rundown strip mall can get one I assume anyone can. This strikes a balance between a company's need to make money and the growing e-waste problem; I will not use a device that is not repairable at all if once it breaks its only destiny is the landfill (or India, where we can look down our noses in our ivory towers at those people for advancing our carbon emissions when they are tasked with eliminating the world's waste AND managing the waste of 2 billion people; curiously, [the waste generated by the average Indian is not even close to the waste generated by the average American](https://www.recycling-magazine.com/2020/05/06/waste-management-crisis-in-india/)). All that said, I will in every case choose to repair my own stuff rather than offload repair to a company; this has been wired into my behavior by my father and grandfather. +Apple has also been investing heavily in its privacy marketing. This is funny, as I somehow don't have to worry about privacy since all my communications are encrypted by an open standard, my operating system does not have a home to phone to, and my browser is as hardened as possible while still maintaining usability. As long as your operating system is closed-source, you can never trust it. As long as Apple has your data, they can be hacked, implement a new policy that allows data sharing, or be forced to disclose information by the government so it is important to own your own data in this day and age. I will conclude this section with a copypasta I've seen floating around /g/: + +> Every breath you take +> www.inverse.com/article/16929-apple-watch-will-now-remind-ou-to-breathe +> Every move you make +> www.komando.com/security-privacy/secret-map-tracking-apple/465598 +> Every bond you break +> acecilia.medium.com/apple-is-sending-a-request-to-their-servers-for-every-piece-of-software-you-run-on-your-mac-b0bb509eee65 +> Every step you take +> www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2020/09/08/iphone-tracking-everywhere-you-go-how-find-setting/5695132002 +> I'll be watching you +> www.thehackernews.com/2017/10/iphone-camera-spying.html +> +> Every single day +> https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/ +> Every word you say +> nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/08/13/siri-is-listening-to-you-but-shes-not-spying-says-apple +> Every game you play +> techstory.in/apple-slammed-by-epic-games-chief-for-spyware-tools +> Every night you stay +> www.iphonelife.com/content/your-iphone-spying-you +> I'll be watching you +> www.foxbusiness.com/technology/apples-siri-is-eavesdropping-on-your-conversations-putting-users-at-risk +> Oh, can't you see +> You belong to me +> truthout.org/articles/apple-employee-blows-whistle-on-illegal-spying-and-toxic-working-conditions +> +> How my poor heart aches +> With every step you take +> www.macrumors.com/2011/04/25/federal-lawsuit-filed-over-apples-location-tracking-in-ios +> Every move you make +> www.stopspying.org/latest-news/2021/10/1/stop-condemns-apple-for-tracking-iphone-location-when-turned-off +> Every vow you break +> appleinsider.com/articles/16/09/29/apple-acknowledges-tracking-imessage-metadata-and-sharing-it-with-law-enforcement +> Every smile you fake +> abc4.com/news/tech-social-media/yes-your-iphone-is-taking-invisible-pictures-of-you +> Every claim you stake +> wonderfulengineering.com/u-s-apple-store-employees-are-working-to-unionize-and-theyre-using-android-phones-to-keep-apple-from-spying-on-them/ +> I'll be watching you +> www.computerworld.com/article/3628454/apples-plan-to-scan-us-iphones-raises-privacy-red-flags.html + +#### Conclusion +There are a lot of things to love and hate about Apple. Their hardware is good, their software is basically unusable if you are already accustomed to a different way of working, their computers are way too expensive, and they cultivate a cult-like mentality when it comes to their products, locking you into their ecosystem until it becomes financially unviable to check out. However as a researcher in the hardware world, I find their systems fascinating and look forward to more disclosures (or reverse-engineerings) of the inner workings of their system. I may expand on this post in the future to go more in-depth into why I find Apple hardware fascinating, but I will save that for a different post. diff --git a/blog/tipsforflying.md4tj b/blog/tipsforflying.md4tj new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b78fd9c --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/tipsforflying.md4tj @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +@@META charset UTF-8 +@@META name viewport content width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0 +@@TITLE Tips for Flying With Airplane Ear +@@CSS ../css/main.css +# The Jerks +## Blog +[Back to blogs](https://www.thejerks.club/blog.html) + +### Tips for Flying With Airplane Ear +@@BLOGPOSTTITLE Tips for Flying With Airplane Ear +@@BLOGPOSTDATE 1690829347 +I have an affliction known as [airplane ear](https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/ear-barotrauma-facts) (undiagnosed, but most doctors and insurance companies don't really take it seriously in my experience), which basically means that by default I am in a lot of pain when going up or down in an airplane and my head feels like it's going to explode. My parents recognized this when I was a child, and as a result we drove everywhere for trips but now I've been flying more and more as I'm no longer living in the Midwest so some places in the nation are intractable by car for me now. Unless you're [Lars von Trier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_von_Trier#Mental_health), you probably will need to fly at some point so hopefully this post will help people out in my situation. Obviously, **I am not a doctor** so talk to your doctor if you have doubts about all this; I'm just enumerating what makes flying bearable for me. + +#### 1. Use Earplanes +[Earplanes](https://www.earplanes.com) are plugs that go in your ear that magically help your ears adjust to the pressure changes. They're sold at pretty much every convenience store in American airports. I actually used these as a kid, but I wasn't inserting them correctly which is why I was still in pain. You need to use the hand opposite to the ear in which the plug is being inserted to pull up on your ear, then insert the plug and twist a couple of times until it is snug. Yes, I know [doctors do not want us to stick stuff in our ears anymore](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/14428-ear-wax-buildup--blockage) but I would rather avoid ear pain; flying is actually unbearable for me without these. + +#### 2. Use a drug cocktail to ensure clear sinuses +Blocked sinuses exacerbate airplane ear, so I always take a what I affectionately refer to as a drug cocktail beforehand to absolutely ensure my sinuses are as loose as possible. This drug cocktail is composed of [Sudafed Sinus Extra Strength](https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-6340/sudafed-sinus-extra-strength-oral/details) which I take about 1.5 hours before takeoff, [Afrin](https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-6667-214/afrin-nasal-spray-nasal/decongestant-drops-nasal/details) which is a nasal spray I take right before entering the airplane, and a [saline nasal spray](https://www.webmd.com/allergies/saline-spray) which is a nasal spray I also take right before entering the airplane. I use generic brand versions of these to save money. This combination causes my nose to drip a ton, so I also keep tissues on hand. Again, I am not a doctor so don't do this unless you know it is safe for you. + +#### 3. Use high quality airlines +Yes, I know they're expensive but avoiding the ear pain is worth it to me. It sucks that I will never be able to get $30 tickets to Vegas, but this is the cross I bear. I currently have flown American Airlines and Delta with no issues, and those are the ones I'm sticking to in the future. I haven't been to Europe in a long time but I assume anything affiliated with American Airlines (e.g. British Airways) will be fine. I've been told to avoid Southwest, Frontier, Spirit, and Avelo but I've never flown these. + +#### 4. Use gum +This one is common knowledge, but it really works. + +#### 5. Have a drink of some kind on hand for takeoff and landing +Gum helps, but ultimately the way the pressure is relieved is by swallowing. If I can't swallow fast enough to keep up with the changing pressure, the pressure will keep increasing and I start panicking especially since vigorous swallowing dries out the throat and I can't produce enough spit to keep swallowing. This is where a drink comes in handy, it allows me to keep swallowing at a higher rate. + +#### 6. Do not fall asleep during takeoff and landing +I've been told to just take Benadryl and sleep through the flight. This is an awful idea, as I would wake up in excruciating pain. I need to be awake so I can vigorously swallow during ascent and descent to relieve the pressure. To this end, I consume an energy drink before takeoff although the extreme anxiety I feel usually keeps me awake enough. If I need to sleep, once I hit cruising altitude I set an alarm for roughly 1.5 hours before landing so I can be awake for descent. + +#### 7. Larp as a germophobe for two weeks before the flight +If you're a germophobe, you can safely ignore this one. I do a strict handwashing/sanitation routine in the 2 weeks leading up to the flight, I make sure to get at least 7 hours of sleep every night, and I load on vitamin C every day in the form of either gummies or fruits. Flying while sick is uncomfortable for normal people, but extremely painful for me so I make sure I don't catch anything. I haven't flown sick since I was a child, but I don't want to reexperience that pain again. + + +Following these 7 tips, at best I feel no pain and at worst I have some residual pain for a day. I know it is common knowledge that [you can pop your ears to equalize pressure](https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/pop-your-ears) but none of the methods in that link have ever worked for me besides swallowing. Perhaps I am not doing them right, I don't know. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/restaurants.md4tj b/restaurants.md4tj index 2f9fbc3..202c7ee 100644 --- a/restaurants.md4tj +++ b/restaurants.md4tj @@ -62,7 +62,10 @@ This year I had to work the day before, the day of, and the day after Valentines Happy birthday to me! My husband took me out here for my birthday per a recommendation from some acquaintances at church. After spending the entire day shopping we headed here for dinner. Luckily my birthday was on a Sunday this year so there wasn't't too long of a wait; just long enough to walk around the nearby Target. Once we were seated we were directed to create an account and upload our credit card information and start ordering. You ordered one thing at a time through this account and then when you were done you closed it out and paid through your phone. Our food was brought to the table by different members of the staff each for each item we ordered. The restaurant also told us they pride themselves on paying their staff a livable wage for Raleigh. (Side note that livable wages will look different based on your location. Now to rant about the negatives of my experience. There is no physical menu, and they do not accept cash. I think it is an unfair assumption that all patrons will both have access to a smart phone and understand how to order/pay. Not mention they then add on a tip your server with the minimum being 20% when you did not even have a server in the first place. (Livable wage???) The food was alright and the drinks were okay. They mainly serve street tacos so they were on the small side. Order more if you have growing boys in your party. The atmosphere was instragrammable with hanging baskets around the light features and warm lighting, but overall it left much to be desired. Not to mention the lack of parking meant walking quite a way to even get to the door. I will not be returning to this restaurant any time soon. 3/10 #### Trophy Brewery - Raleigh, North Carolina -Apparently millennials have a thing for microbreweries and as a zillenial I feel it is important to keep this alive. Trophy is the best place to go and drink a beer and play a game if you go to their tap room or eat a pizza if you are at their restaurant. The beer is much better out of the tap than a can with my personal favorite being the Milky Way. While at their brewery I love to play games with my husband or my brother when he is in town. It is the perfect vibe to chill out and rewind after a long day with the low lighting and swanky music. You cannot go wrong with any of their pizza choices and they have something for every diet. This is a 10/10 place that everyone should visit when in Raleigh. +Apparently millennials have a thing for microbreweries and as a zillenial I feel it is important to keep this alive. Trophy is the best place to go and drink a beer and play a game if you go to their tap room or eat a pizza if you are at their restaurant. The beer is much better out of the tap than a can with my personal favorite being the Milky Way. While at their brewery I love to play games with my husband or my brother when he is in town. It is the perfect vibe to chill out and rewind after a long day with the low lighting and swanky music. You cannot go wrong with any of their pizza choices and they have something for every diet. This is a 10/10 place that everyone should visit when in Raleigh. + +#### Toast - San Francisco, California + @@LASTUPDATED