Welp, here we are — December 2020. TDay is now firmly behind us, Christmas is still ahead of us, and the long shadows of winter sunshine makes for short days and chilly evenings.
Things at work are starting the wind-down that happens in the last few weeks of the year — when everyone is either on vacation, or at work but still mostly on vacation. 🙂
I’m setting up for my personal end-of-year rituals; data storage and archive maintenance, physical paperwork filing maintenance, password and login maintenance… All of the things one needs to do in this robots and flying cars era to make sure they don’t get digitally mugged.
I’m also starting the acquisition of supplies for Christmas dinner. Today was making sure I have enough paper and plastic supplies for the event.
I’ve been using “Instacart” quite a bit over the last six months or so — in fact my latest grocery order for the above items just arrived a little bit ago. It’s a bit more spendy than actually going to the shops myself, but I don’t have to actually go to the shops so it allows me to get more done in less time…
The hour that someone else is spending driving to the store, making sure their mask is on according to mandate, going the right way down the isles, and maintaining social distance is an hour I get to spend cleaning the house, working on the car, doing laundry, or some other chore that needs to be done over the weekend. So it works out for me.
Lets see… Oh, the M1 MacBook Air is still impressing me. I’ve been using it daily as both a replacement for the 16″ MacBook Pro I used for work and the iPad Pro I used for watching “TV” in bed.
With regard to work, I have a hard time seeing the performance difference between the thousand dollar Air and the five-thousand dollar Pro. At the same time the Air makes a better iPad than the iPad because it runs longer on a charge, has a better screen, and has far better audio.
Definitely a win for Apple — it’s a really impressive bit of kit.
The new iMac is impressive as well. the 5K screen is gorgeous (as expected) and it runs all of my x86 tools and games with aplomb. It’s amazing with this new remote work paradigm as well with its new webcam and pro-grade mics. With the amount of time I spend in front of a computer for both work and entertainment, it’s nice to have top-of-the-line gear.
So, I guess my Christmas / Birthday gifts to myself worked out this year. 🙂
The last two Christmas gifts to myself are custom-made leather accessories. One is a bespoke case for the Air and the other is a custom watchband for the Apple Watch…
I seem to have a bit of an issue with the Apple Watch in that it irritates my wrist where the sensor sits. I’ve had similar issues with glass-bottom watches in the past, where they don’t allow my wrist to ‘breathe’ and I get a bit of a rash.
The leather band that’s being made is pretty similar to the bands I used in the 80’s in that it’s a leather cuff that the watch sits on top of, though now said cuff has a round hole in it for the watch sensors. Hopefully this will still allow the watch to do all of its watch-things while getting the sapphire sensor off of my wrist.
We shall soon see, as the shipping notification for the watchband just arrived in my email. 🙂