It’s March 2022. Spring is finally here. Moreover, among us, Apple Silicon, first announced in June 2020 and massively available since November 2020. Furthermore, also available is Center Stage, a new feature introduced with the 2021 iPad Pro and now available on the MacBook Pro and more recently the Apple Studio display.

Here’s the thing. Microsoft Teams, currently at version 1.5 still isn’t supporting Center Stage and worst, Apple Silicon. Running Teams on any recent Mac is an execrable experience: slow, bad image quality (compared to Zoom for example) and consume far too much memory. How is it possible for a company the size of Microsoft who’s so slow to move and fix Teams? I don’t buy the argument about Teams being built with the Electron framework. The latter already supports the M1 chip. Microsoft is supposedly working on Teams version 2.0 which will be presumably built on WebView2. They’ve been working on this since June of last year.

It’s highly frustrating. Sorry for the bad mood, but Teams is one of the most used application for work giving me the right to vent my frustration.

Dear iOS developers, dear @Substack, when building screenshots for the App Store, show us your software, not the device on which it is running. Thank you. With love. The Direction.

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.

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?

Well, well, well, it seems that data portability among CMS is an issue. Who knew! I’m trying to find an easy way to move a few posts from my WordPress blog into my Ghost website. Exporting data from WordPress seems like an all-or-nothing situation. There are a few plugins available for this. The problem is that the content isn’t easily imported into Ghost. The latter does have a plugin, but it doesn’t support selecting posts. I don’t want to do this manually.

Any idea or suggestions?

Update 2022-02-16: There is a follow-up to my quest, read all the details here

As reported in my previous blog post, I had a chance to perform a “tech refresh” of my sister’s WiFi installation at her house. As a satisfied user of Ubiquiti product, the Dream Machine, I suggested to go with a lower end model, the Amplify HD. She has a big two levels home, with numerous rooms that poses a challenge for good wireless connectivity. It was a delightful experience, from the unpacking to final configuration. It’s a beautiful device with an informative display.

The setup was simple. Turning off the AirPort Express after taking note of the SSID, so I could reuse it with the same password. This prevents the reconfiguration of every device connecting to the WiFi with an already known SSID-password combination. After the initial power up sequence, the router will ask the user to download the configuration application from the App Store. An account has to be created with Ubiquity. Thankfully, Sign In with Apple is available.

The next phase happens on the iPhone with an initial discovery over Bluetooth. The setup process is quick and flawless. As expected, a firmware update was waiting to be applied. During the update process, it was the right rime to deploy the two WiFi extenders, in strategic places where the WiFi signals used to be weak. Once completed, I could name each devices with a more meaningful name, to represent where were each device. All in all, the process took less than 30 minutes. It’s a very Apple-like experience. The following table shows the situation before and after the new router. Numbers speaks for themselves.

Mission accomplished. Another happy customer. I came back with the old AirPort Extreme. No idea what to do with it.

I find it surprisingly hard to find a simple MP3 player for an iPhone these days. I mean, just a simple application capable of downloading an MP3 file locally on the device with good playback controls, simple library management, nothing fancy. Readdle’s Documents (which I know very well) and EverMusic seem to be popular options. Documents offers a good user experience, albeit its multipurpose mission with documents management.

(I’m a moderate consumer of Soundcloud (paid subscription) and use Downie to download files from the service. Those files are stored on my DS720+ Synology NAS.)

What’s your experience in playing MP3 files on your iPhone? I’m curious.

I’m nearly done with my Notion to Craft migration. I know I’ve been lazy; I’ve been using Craft for many months while my old content was still sitting there in Notion. While doing the migration, I realized, again, that I don’t really like Notion’s handling of a document. It just feels unnatural and quirky. Export options are very limited, which makes my job much harder. I’m also losing some metadata along the way (and database content too). I don’t have high hopes for a Craft eXtension to support Notion’s API to help users do this kind of rich content migration. I expect to finish the migration in the coming days.