One of the most impactful recent technology purchases I’ve made is the OtterBox 2-in-1 Charging Stand with MagSafe. (store.apple.com/xc/product/HPUG2ZM/A)

I’ve missed out on MagSafe till now, using a standard Qi charger, and moved to this unit since my iPhone 14 Pro Max wasn’t sitting well on it.

Since moving to this I’ve been enjoying movies in bed (we are anti-permanent tv in the bedroom), loved the ease of use, and find it so pretty. I enjoy the ability to pivot my phone to the angle I like and spin it in the case of watching a movie.

Y’all went to presale for T-Swift, I’m in line for Postal Service || Death Cab. 🎉

Planned a sleepover for the parents and kids @ another parent/kids house for New Years Eve.

Plan thus far is appetizers, lots of bubbles, cribbage and other games. Much excite

Watching Season 2 of Slow Horses and constantly jealous of all the public transit, and bike-ability.

Oh. And the show is great too.

Just found my mom made, froze and dropped off our family stuffing while we were out of town.

With the mess of returning from the Bay Area, and going to the hospital I thought it was not happening this year.

Delightful surprise. ♥️

Upgraded my garage chair situation with a gifted barber’s chair from a co-worker. Loving the relaxed seating and keeping warm by being raised off the bare cement.

Heating the whole house

We moved to a pellet stove insert mid winter last year, and loved it but always found the heating to not be as impactful as we wanted.

I have been researching and testing methods to push/pull heat around the house once generated by the stove and think I’ve finally found the method that works best.

Immediately above our stove is a 13 ft vaulted ceiling with a fan. Researched it, and found that our fan has a switch to change the direction of blade spinning. By changing it from counter clockwise to clockwise we are now pulling the heat down from the top of the ceiling and pushing it towards the floor.

A more scientific, non heat-push/pull novice would’ve collected more scientific data about speed and persistence of this method. Subjectively I’m now seeing higher temps faster in our further rooms and sweating while sitting in the immediate room with the heat source.

Economically efficient heating here we come!

Apple Music Sing

This is really cool!

www.apple.com/newsroom/…

Apple Music sing is introducing a karoke-esque mode with all Apple Music to be able to sing along with tracks, removing/reducing vocals and multi person sessions. Really cool stuff!

My daughter already loves sing along movies, but having just the vocals, giving her an iPad (Synced to TV) is really cool and could see her using this a lot.

Now….. it’d be cool to play with the voice isolation APIs…

Unauthorized tinsle @ work

Green, small fake tree lit with white and multicolor lights glows against a white wall

Found out today we lost another kiddo (3rd loss). Hits like a ton of bricks each time.

Sad to be a frequent flyer on this one.

On my last days of visiting The Bay Area: scheduled my day around which places I’m gonna have breakfast and lunch at. 🤤

Running iOS betas is all fun and games till your PhotoPickers and share extensions go sideways. 💥

I’ve been trying out moving fully here to micro.blog, helping me do that is the fantastic version 3 of the iOS app.

It’s in beta (posted on the forum), highly recommend checking it out:

testflight.apple.com/join/lWxM…

Went to Oakland Zoo today with the family. Amazing the variety of activities, amount of space and the gondolas! 🚠

two children smiling behind a gondola sign

.@joec inspired

Novel Tip: Setting breakpoint with command && continue

In some cases you want to be able to run a command once a certain part of your code is executed. An example is setting a breakpoint after BGTaskScheduler.submit(), which then executes a command to force run that task.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/backgroundtasks/starting_and_terminating_tasks_during_development

How this would work in real time:

  • Write BGTaskScheduler.submit()
  • Set a breakpoint immediately after submitting
  • Build and run
  • App stops at breakpoint
  • Run hand currated snippet
  • Continue

Instead, we can set the breakpoint and modify the breakpoint to handle all of that!

  • Set breakpoint where you wish Breakpoint set on submitting a background task to the scheduler
  • Go to breakpoints tab in left column
  • Right click on the new breakpoint, click Edit
  • Set Action to “Debugger Command”
  • Enter the command Secondary window, editing a breakpoint with options to complete actions and continue running app
  • Optionally, select to “Automatically continue after evaluating actions” which will continue running the app and not stop

Success! Now you will hit the location in your code, automatically input the command and (optionally) continue running your app without doing anything else.