I’m doing pretty well with YNAB so far. Having fixed expenses in their own bank account was a great idea, too. I should be able to start funding some of next month’s expenses when I get paid tomorrow, which is much better than I had been doing. My immediate goal is to be funding 30 days in advance.

Trying to get into the sport of precision pistol shooting. It turns out it is pretty difficult to hit the middle of a target one-handed from 50 plus feet away.

Has anyone experimented with integrating AppIntents as a sort of core part of their SwiftUI apps architecture? It seems like it could be an interesting idea at least for manipulating data? AddItemIntent().perform()?

I know how I would define the difference, but I’m curious for others — how would you explain the difference between a View Model in MVVM and a Controller in MVC?

Kind of nuts, I can’t use SwiftUI’s TextEditor for something as simple as basic syntax highlighting. It’s easy enough to pull in NSTextView, but still, it’s surprising how not-powerful the text editing abilities of SwiftUI are.

I don’t understand how people drive fancy cars. I got a Subaru Outback, which is nice but not fancy, and the payment is $701 a month with only 2.5% interest. I wanted all of the fancy safety features, and that’s been worth it, but after this, I’m never buying a new car again.

Don’t get shingles. It’s the worst thing.

Have about 15 rolls of film to scan 😅

I’m playing with the NextStep emulator at infinitemac.org. This must have felt like it was sent from the future in the 90s. This really feels like early Mac OS X with a different UI, and that UI is kind of awesome.

All this talk of Swift NSCache replacements makes me want to make my own, even though there are seemingly multiple good ones 🤣

I’ve been doing a really good job at work lately, and also figuring out my financial stuff to be more sustainable. Feeling good about life in general.

I’m a little nervous getting rid of my credit card, but I think it’s probably silly. I have great credit. If I really needed money fast, I could get a short term loan for a way lower percentage, or worst case, another card pretty much overnight.

By the end of this week, I’ll no longer have a credit card. I get that some people make them work, but they aren’t for me. I think this is going to make things a lot easier going forward.

I am going through and cancelling any subscriptions I don’t need, and wow, a lot of websites don’t make it too hard, but a lot do.

The reasons I hear people use Substack are that it’s easy and has a community. My experience with a basic WordPress.com account is that everything is taken care of for me technically and that I get a decent number of views from the WordPress Reader community.

This typography page in the Apple HIG is so useful I have it pinned open for my work profile. developer.apple.com/design/hu…

Has anyone ever made an a single SwiftUI app which spans watchOS, tvOS, iOS, and macOS? I seem to remember an initial promise being that you’d just have one app with a bunch of build targets but the platforms are so different I almost can’t imagine what that would look like.

My feeling with custom control styles on macOS is that either they’re really different and adding value in some way, or we should be using the standard controls. Being slightly different means we’re putting the work to customize the styles and create custom controls without adding value.

After work today, I need to collect all of the rolls of film I took on this trip. It was several. Part of me wishes I also had a digital camera in addition to film. I’m disappointed that I will never be able to afford a digital Leica. They just aren’t made for people like me.

Even posting inconsistently, I find having a blog is as feasible and worthwhile as it’s ever been. If I post things people like, I still get as many views as I did years ago. And it’s not like I’m some kind of influencer; I’m just a normal guy with a WordPress.

AOC is the only Democrat who is a generational talent in Congress right now, and instead of lifting her up, they sideline her. It’s like if Obama gave his 2004 speech and they made him wait until 2024 to get any power.

I turned off predictive completion in Xcode. It doesn’t work well enough to be useful. The code it writes is too often broken in really dumb ways (leaving off a parenthesis), which makes it more of a hinderance than anything else.

I feel like a little bit of a traitor for this as a person who develops for and has worked at Apple — but I think I’m going to start using Google Maps. The UI isn’t as nice and I hate that it doesn’t integrate with Contacts on iPhone, but otherwise, it’s got a lot going for it.

I just heard that Gen Z plays beer pong with water instead of beer? That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.

Something cool about Portland is that we seem to have more homegrown regional stores. I’m thinking of WinCo and Bi-Mart. WinCo is employee-owned and gives equity to employees. I’ve stopped shopping at Target at all since the election and don’t miss it. #Portland

If you ever need to diff a repo, Kaleidoscope is absolutely worth the $14/month. kaleidoscope.app

I would always take something being less sweet but using natural sweetener over artificial sweetener. I can’t stand the taste.

So does everyone have that one sibling who brags about how rich and successful they are until someone in the family — like your parents — needs help and then they’re nowhere to be seen?

Spending a couple of hours going through the Rails “Getting Started” guide to get up to date on things that have changed or basic things I might’ve missed or forgotten about was a very useful exercise. Probably worth doing every couple of years.

I mean, aside from the fact that these macOS redesigns have not made things “better.” At best they’ve been different, and usually worse. Snow Leopard or Mavericks might have been the peak? Yosemite was okay. The current one was definitely a regression.

God, Apple, please don’t redesign macOS again this year. The last one just got good enough I’m not annoyed by as much anymore. We don’t need it. I don’t want to be on a cycle where whenever the design gets halfway stabilized, they decide it’s time to shake things up again.

I rarely ever manually long lines of code. Either I need to break it up in some way, or I let the editor wrap things for me.

The Ruby on Rails guides are pretty good. If you already know how to program, you could probably just read these and then pick up anything else you need as it comes up.

If I was going to write a real desktop app, I would use Swift, but for wrapping shell scripts or making a UI for your library, Glimmer DSL for LibUI seems like a really great fit.

Considering how much pain I’ve been in and how much has been going on, I think this week of work has gone pretty well.

I love setting up a nice little logging system. It’s a small thing that brings me joy.

Man, all of the Copilot plugins outside of the VSCode one are really crappy in comparison.

Building a little multi-threaded chat server thing in Ruby for fun. I’ve always wanted to make a MUD. Maybe this is a start? 🤷‍♂️

The thing with shingles is that it hurts a lot. You start to feel better, think maybe it’s over, and then the healing starts to hurt almost as much. It’s also triggered by stress, and so whenever you get shingles is probably going to be the worst possible time.

I am kind of surprised Apple has let Terminal.app stay in its current state so long. If it had 24 bit color, better unicode, and splits, it seems like it would compare favorably to most of them? Maybe adding those things would mean rewriting the app.

If the west had stood up to Putin in 2014 when he invaded Crimea, and Europe had not been afraid to lose access to cheap Russian oil, what are the odds the Ukraine war never happens?

Me and my friends playing music together. #BelieveInFilm #FilmPhotography

Ruby LSP has sure gotten a lot better since the last time I used.

On the next episode of Rooftop Ruby, Joel and I discuss the value of Time Machine backups after Joel learns about me deleting my Application Support directory right before we were set to record 😑 #ruby

I wonder if anyone has ever been able to find an eyeglass screwdriver at the time they needed it. I only ever find them immediately after buying another.

I never notice how many little Collin-isms until I spend time around other people.

Remember when Sketch 1.0 came out and it basically didn’t work at all? I remember being frustrated with how basic functionality like undo was entirely broken. It’s pretty incredible that they stuck with it and turned it into what it is today.

I’m calling this Federighi’s Hierarchy of Needs:

If there isn’t an app for it, try Notes or Numbers. If Notes or Numbers won’t do it, start writing Shortcuts. If you can’t do it with Shortcuts, start learning Swift.

#ios

I wrote a shortcut that lets me hit the action button on my watch or phone and save the current GPS coordinates to a text file. I think this might be able to replace using a heavier-weight app for film photography.

I would love to see proper tagging in Micro.blog, with its own out of band field, I could use go discover people I want to follow.

I still don’t understand. What is the benefit of Substack over a blog on Wordpress or Ghost or something? Especially for all these journalists. It doesn’t seem to offer any features over a Wordpress.com business plan or whatever and you’re tied to this kind of questionable platform.

This Section 31 movie is baaad. I like all Star Trek and I don’t know if I can finish this.

Starting to worry I did something to piss one of my friends off without knowing it. I really hope I didn’t 😟

My last question at an interview is always “who’s your favorite Star Trek captain?” I think it’s a pretty good one.

Managed to go to bed and wake up at a reasonable time today, which has not be the norm. Hopefully I can keep it up!

We already knew that all of these corporations and CEOs were full of shit pretending to care about diversity or marginalized groups, but the rapidity at which they have dropped it as soon as they no longer saw it as politically expedient to pretend is still impressive.

Back when I lived in San Francisco, I would average walking 10,000+ steps in a year, with some months averaging 15-16,000. Now it’s maybe slightly more than half that. Not owning a car had benefits.

Looking at the different time tracking apps, I think that I’m going to go with Session. There are more automatic options out there, but Session also has the advantage of being a Pomodoro app, which helps me stay focused.

Harvest looks good too, but I think I’d rather not migrate off FreshBooks.

Romans didn’t do the “Roman salute.” It was created in the 19th century for theater set in the Roman period. And regardless, that’s just a different word for a Nazi salute. I don’t even know what people are trying to say with that.

I think the next four years are going to be a lot worse than the first time around.

Does anyone have a time tracking app for Mac that they like that is good for freelance work? I’m using Freshbooks for invoicing, but would like something that isn’t web-based and lives in my menu bar.

Pixelfed is great, but it’s not even close to an Instagram replacement, unless what you’re looking for is Instagram from 2011. A lot of people do want that, but I don’t think it’s a very large number. If you think it is, I can only think you’re not very aware how people use Instagram.

Turned off the “type to Siri” feature on my phone. That gesture is way too easy to trigger on accident.

I would like the categories feature in Apple Mail about 10x more if it was available on macOS as well. Categories messages on your phone is really tedious.

If you don’t think Elon did a fascist salute, go to a public place, film yourself doing what he did, and post it online. Post it on LinkedIn. If that’s not what it is anyone who thinks so is reading into it, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Shit. I just realized I’ve got at least another four years of hearing everyone’s shitty Trump impressions.

Watched nothing and read almost nothing about what’s going on today. Won’t help anything, so I’m not doing it.

Serious question — who will buy all the stuff from these companies if they replace large parts of their workforce with AI or whatever? Isn’t having fairly compensated employees who can afford the things their own and other companies make a virtuous cycle?

The Pixelfed app has a lot of rough edges. I’m afraid millions of people are going to try it, bounce off due to a lack of polish, and never come back. I don’t mean this to disparage the developers, because it’s a ton of work to make an app, and they’re not getting paid.

Instruments is indispensable for me when I’m doing any kind of iOS/macOS etc development. I’m always surprised how many people don’t seem to know much of how to use it or haven’t even tried it at all. #iosdev

Really wish there was a way to turn off notification badges on macOS for the Messages app when it’s not active.

Since people seem to be getting on Pixelfed, that is yet another place you can follow me. pixelfed.social/collin

The thing I don’t like is project file conflicts.

This probably sounds silly, but one of the things I like about working on a Mac or iOS app is that I spent zero time thinking about what editor to use. It’s just Xcode. It has everything in it, and it’s pretty good.

What are some useful scripts you’ve written for yourself that you use on your Mac? I somehow don’t really have any.

It’s going to be a pretty chilling moment when all of these unqualified and corrupt Trump nominees fly through confirmation. The last time wasn’t great, but the nominees mostly had some connection or experience that they could argue was relevant, but these people are next-level bad.

I met these two very nice individuals, Ebony and Phoenix, on the train ride downtown. I love this photo I took of them.

📷 Leica M2 🎞️ Kentmere PAN 400

#filmphotography #leica #believeinfilm #pdx

Thinking of getting a GoPro I can strap to my chest when doing photo walks and then edit them together into little YouTube videos showing the shots I took. Maybe a cool idea?

Trying out using MetaImage instead of exiftool for tagging my scanned film negatives. It seems to work okay. I need to figure out a way to automate the process.

What’s in your macOS dock on your Macintosh computer? Trying to decide what to remove/add.

I just learned you can insert spacers in the macOS dock. Not sure how I’ll like it, but I’ll definitely give it a try. #macOS chrispennington.blog/blog/add-…

Today I learned that Candace Owen’s sincerely does not believe in the moon landing. What a dunce.

I like this photo not just despite it being out of focus, but possibly because it is out of focus.

📷 Leica M2 🎞️ Kentmere PAN 400

#filmphotography #leica #streetphotography #pdx

I turn 40 tomorrow, so I plan on saying “my 30s were an era of working very hard – and playing hard too” to excuse anything shitty I’ve said or done previous to that date.

Sometimes on my Macintosh, I run defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock to reset my dock to its factory state and then set it up again from scratch. Am I weird or do other people do this?

Took this photo walking down the sidewalk in Saint John’s, N. Portland, the other day. I like that there’s something a little off-kilter feeling about it.

📷 Leica M2 🎞️ Kodak Tri-X 400

#filmphotography #leica #streetphotography

I realized at some point that if you ever wonder how someone can afford to do something creative full-time or constantly travel for it, the answer is usually that they’re rich or subsidized — and effectively doing cosplay.

If I ever wondered how well air purifiers work, the amount of dust on my film negatives when I run it versus when I don’t indicates that the answer is “very well.”

I have a friend with 10 years of experience working on games up to the AAA level doing concept art, UI design, and animation. If I know anyone who would be interested in hiring such a person, get in touch and I can connect you.

Starting a new macOS project on Monday! Need to follow-up with a bunch of other inquiries as well.

Ride hailing apps like Uber and Lyft and rental apps like AirBNB were a mistake. Cities should have regulated them out of existence before they could gain a foothold.

My hot take is that ordering food on DoorDash or similar constantly is pretty wasteful and expensive, but that getting groceries on Instacart is a pretty good deal if you buy their membership.

The ultimate hidden truth of the world. I like this one. It’s a little Friedlander.

🎞️ Kodak Tri-X 📷 Leica M2

#filmphotography #believeinfilm #leica #streetphotography

The ultimate hidden truth of the world. I like this one. It’s a little Friedlander.

🎞️ Kodak Tri-X 📷 Leica M2

#filmphotography #believeinfilm #leica #streetphotography

For shooting concerts, I’m thinking of bringing two cameras so I can get a couple of different focal lengths without changing lenses. My thought is my 35mm Summicron for my Leica, and my 105mm Nikkor for my Nikon. I’d bring a 50mm as well just in case. Opinions?

I switched from Kindle to Kobo, and I think I like it better? The hardware might be slightly less refined, but everything else is better.

I don’t know for sure how Steve would have comported himself in the Trump era, but I kind of wish we could have seen it.

Lloyd Center mall is less dead than I expected. I’d say it’s only about half dead. I could see them redoing the facade to look less foreclosed and doing some weird stuff in there like an indoor farmers market or something. #pdx

I mean, there are better programmers than me who don’t know the first thing about C or pointers or any of that, and I’m sure better photographers who only shoot in auto modes. That doesn’t mean it’s not still a useful exercise to do those things.

Much like how learning to program in C requires you to understand how memory works, using entirely manual cameras has forced me to really understand how focus, exposure, and metering work. I think that’s worthwhile and makes me a better photographer, even if I use more featureful cameras later.