On March 13th, in 2020, the world flipped, my world flipped. So many things are different now. This short blog post is about reflecting on the last two years and how they became the foundation for what is to come in my life.

Time flies and making judicious decisions is more important than ever. Working from home is important. I’ll never return full time at the office. Even if I move to another job, working from home is now a requirement. Visiting customers for the sake of shaking hands no longer make sense to me. There has to be more than this. The price is too high to pay: wasted time.

Traveling is more important than ever too; that’s the only way for me to do more photography. Something that I didn’t do much in the last two years. This visual work posted in April of 2020 was the trigger to write this blog post. I’m sad about this because photography is my most important source of inspiration and my biggest creativity playground after writing. Still on the travel subject, I can envision traveling abroad for more than two weeks now and splitting my time between leisure and remote work. Leaving for a month or more is now possible.

Speaking of writing, I’ll probably continue to write but probably not as much as in the last two years. A more balanced life is taking place and will take away some of my writing time. It’s ok. It’s also part of making better choices.

The last two years of COVID-19, the more and more frequent climate disturbances and the recent events in Europe are telling me this: the world is more than ever in a constant state of emergency. I better learn how to cope with this otherwise I’m not finished at being in constant consternation mood while reading the news.

Thanks for reading this. I know your time is precious too and you made the decision to read this short piece.

It’s now official. Apple will host another virtual event next week, on March 8th. It’s the first Apple event of 2022, but it’s far from being the first real event of 2022. Current events happening in Ukraine are troubling and make me pause on a lot of things. Apple-related stuff is one of these. I’m not in the mood for that. My thoughts and energy are diverted, seized. I don’t care if it’s a new iPhone SE, a beefed up Mac mini or whatever else. These look so irrelevant in this incredible and terrible era. Low interest indeed.

I asked for this since the beginning of the Ukrainian war (on Twitter: first here, then here, then here), and today Apple delivered. Apple’s products are no longer being sold through its online store. While the App Store is still working apparently, I’m ok with their decision. On top of that, Apple will donate money, twice the amount that employees will give to help Ukrainians. It’s a good move, the only move, without using real arms, to make an impact. It’s even more powerful when many companies are doing exactly the same.

Yep, finally.

I don’t know about you but I find current events in Ukraine very disturbing and distracting. As much as I’m happy to see Russia being more and more isolated every hour, I can see its leader being more and more pissed off and willing to commit the worst. The world seems to go in a spiralling direction toward even more violence and hard to resolve situations.

The news of the Russian criminal invasion of its sovereign neighbour, Ukraine, is appalling. Putin and his regime is committing an aggression that shall be punished, at the right time, at the right place with the right means. I cannot believe that we’re seeing such an invasion in Europe, in 2022. What’s next? Who’s next? We’re all going to suffer at various degrees from this utterly criminal invasion. I pay no respect to Putin, his government, his propaganda machine and every single Russian who support this aggression. This is an act of war against democracy.

No wonder why Ukraine wanted to stay in NATO camp, because Russia is simply an antidemocratic land. Democratic governments and systems are far from perfect, but they are the least imperfect solution.

For now, I’m sending my positive waves of support to the Ukrainians community of Montreal, Canada. I cannot wait for the next demonstration, so I can show my full support of the Ukrainians.

Hitler must be so proud.

If you own a desktop Mac, you probably use an external drive for Time Machine. If you use a portable Mac, most likely not, and according to the Tidbits article, you’re not alone. The portability of the Mac is hindered by having an external drive hooked permanently. I, personally, have a different strategy: I use a Synology NAS DS720+ with Time Machine enabled to do my backups over the wireless network. It works perfectly, but I don’t do a full backup of my MacBook Air. Files that are part of iCloud Drive are excluded (read more here, you’ll find out why it’s a good idea). In fact, most of the files are excluded, except a few critical folders, outside the scope of any cloud syncing services. Applications aren’t backed up either (easy to recover in case of lost). Backups are small but are just what I need to protect my work.

Even after reading this excellent article by the guy behind Halide, I’m still mystified by Apple’s ProRAW format. The question that keeps popping up in my mind is: if computational photography processing is involved in creating the ProRAW file (in DNG format), how can we still call this a variant of a RAW image?

Photo credit: Jason Strull on Unsplash

Today, I finally saw the Dune movie, by the Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve. As a Canadian myself I’m so proud of him! It’s not a movie review, far from it. Let me just say that when I think about this movie, the word “equilibrium” comes to my mind. The movie is well balanced: storyline, intrigue, visual effects (visual effects serving the story), music, Dune’s world imaginary world. But the best for me were those “ornithopters”. Wow, they were sooooo cool! Can’t wait for the next part.

Have you seen the movie? What do you think of it?

From 1993 to 1994, I owned a PowerBook Duo 210 sporting a trackball, a low-profile keyboard and a grayscale screen. I didn’t like the trackball as the pointing device. The keyboard wasn’t that great either. But, it was small, highly portable. Coupled with the Duo Dock and an external monitor, it was a cool and novel setup. It’s been a long time ago. This article was written using a M1 MacBook Air, in a coffee shop.

Why is Carrot Weather so popular? I’m a weather enthusiast and I like trying new weather-related applications. I use many all year long, but Carrot Weather is not part of my application arsenal. They recently introduced updated weather maps, but to get a sense of them, I would need to subscribe for a year subscription. Most of the interesting features are available in the premium tier. I like the maps feature, but I wonder how better they will get compared to the ones that I’m already using in MyRadar. iOS 15 brought a significant update to the weather too, but I find the maps lacking radar resolution.

If there are users of Carrot Weather subscription, tell me more, tell my why it is so nice?