Mattie B

iOS 18.1, and the "clinical grade hearing aid" transformation of AirPods Pro 2, are just around the corner, but as of today, not yet officially released. For years now, though, I've been able to tune my first-generation AirPods Pro and my Lightning AirPods Max to the hearing test results I got from my audiologist. This allows me to hear music and phone calls in a way that compensates for specifically for my hearing loss. I discovered the other day that I can't on 18.1. But what I did discover...

In light of how AirPods Pro 2 (I guess they're "2" now, now "2nd Generation") are about to be "clinical grade hearing aids", it's worth digging a little bit into the history of the thing. AirPods have been doing some really nice things for those of us with hearing loss for some time. I wrote about it two and half years ago, in fact! In short, we've been able to take the hearing tests from our audiologists (or apps, but the app tests have been… ehhhh at best) for years now, load them in, and app...

I think it was 2022. 2021? My family doesn't celebrate Christmas in December because it's too difficult to get people together in December. In January, we're all recovering. So we usually end up doing something in February, usually. Whatever year. A white elephant exchange is common. In that year, I ended up taking home the Running Press Bob Ross bobblehead. "Deluxe Mega Kit!" the shiny silver banner proclaimed. "With Sound!" "Spreading Branches of Wisdom!" "$12.95 in U.S.A., $16.50 in Canada!"...

gbfs-web has been fixed (and updated a little!). It was my fault, not Chrome's. Chrome wasn't actually shuffling the files around while assembling the Blob that eventually became the ROM with the attached GBFS file—rather, I failed to notice (even though I swear I checked this at least once) that the directory entries were doing a Spiderman and pointing at the wrong files all over the place. The offending code was formerly this: let totalSize = directory.offset + directory.size; const objectPro...

Back in June, I wrote a little bit about how I use an old Nintendo DS to dump GBA ROMs as well as dump and restore the save files. I also teased that I had a magical solution using TFTP to use WiFi instead of doing endless SD swaps. Well, thing is, it's not magical. It's actually some of the most imperfect software I've ever worked on, and that's why I haven't released it for fifteen years. I sucked it up and ended that streak four days ago, with a little bit of a caveat. transfile (transing ...

Content warning: grief. Also note: if you've been around the fediverse since before 2021, you may have a personal connection to this grief. Of all the half-written or half-formed pieces I've had floating around in recent memory, parts of this particular one have dwelt in that limbo state the longest, I think. I was never quite sure what to say. I just… felt. But on a recent morning's commute, I was listening to the end of Collapse Under the Empire's The Fallen Ones, having picked it out of my ...

It (currently) says right on my "about me" page that I'm a Muppets nerd, and that is accurate. I grew up with The Muppet Show. I watched the first three Muppet movies over and over and over again as I was growing up. It was a toss-up between Caper and Manhattan for favorite. My uncontested favorite Disney World attraction remains Muppet★Vision 3D. I had a Fozzie plush in my crib and a Kermit puppet was one of my favorite toys for years. And while I enjoy Christmas Carol as much as the next per...

The Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS homebrew scenes are amazing. Full stop. One of the stars of that particular galaxy I leveraged for 4-e was Damian Yerrick's GBFS, a set of tools that pack files up into an archive that can then be concatenated onto the end of a ROM, and a library to compile into that ROM that can work with those files. 4-e uses this to let you attach your own set of e-Card .bin files to the ROM that I build and release, yielding a custom 4-e build without having to compile ...

Super Mario Advance 4 is more than Super Mario Bros. 3. When this final game of the Super Mario Advance series launched, it of course had Bros. 3 for its main draw. But it also went all-in on Nintendo’s e-Reader, a special cartridge with an optical scanner that could read specially-encoded data on cards that Nintendo distributed. Nintendo published over a hundred cards for Advance 4. These e-Cards were power-ups, switches that changed the game (like adding Super Mario Bros. 2 turnips to pull u...

I try not to think too hard about how old the Game Boy Advance is. Back in its heyday, I bought many games for it (the Super Mario Advance series, the Golden Sun series, Rhythm Heaven, anything The Legend of Zelda…) I also dabbled a bit in third-party devices to copy the games’ saves and restore them, as well as copy the games’ ROMs themselves to play them on computers or experiment with them. When the Nintendo DS hit, sporting its SLOT-2 (which, contrary to popular belief, wasn’t just a Game ...

In this post: My experience with the d-pad How I save time and risk opening up my Pocket, including how to avoid having to detach the infamous display cable The solution I used and why it works for me And, as usual, plenty of story time But first! I’m gonna talk about how I take apart my device here. If you do that and you break your stuff, you get to keep both pieces. More clearly: I take absolutely no responsibility for any damages that occur as a result of anything you read here, inclu...

This post is spoiler-free, as best I can make it. That said, the time to read it might be when you've wrapped up chapter 7 of Xenoblade 2. Last night, I finished Xenoblade 2. I left a bunch of quests undone, which is a very different place than I'd ended up with Xenoblade. I am not gonna fire it up to find out, but probably 95% of what that game offered me to do, I did. 2 was a different animal. Like many reviewers, I found 2 a bit obtuse in introducing its systems. Eventually, though, and wit...

With Nintendo shutting down online play for Wii U and 3DS in about a month, and given that I had just finished the absolutely fantastic Xenoblade: Definitive Edition on my Switch, I recently dusted off the ol' Wii U and unsealed (!) the copy of Xenoblade X I had bought way back in… well, looks like 2015, I guess, since I bought the limited edition? It took me four tries to get through the original Xenoblade, actually. The first time was the original US Wii version—the one you had to get at Game...

Every year around this time, my ability to enjoy the arrival of spring is severely impacted by the fact that I'm struggling to adjust my circadian rhythm to what we all know is the worst idea we've ever had as a society—daylight saving time, or DST. So, this year, I'm gonna try opting out. I think it's rather telling that I had a plan to do this a few months ago. Then had this persistent impression I was getting the direction of the time adjustment wrong. I went back and forth like this for aw...

I got super interested in colorimeters a year or so ago. I have had this 2009 Panasonic plasma TV since, well, 2009. And I've always loved it and it's still going strong. Except it was always kinda enthusiastic about the red. This particular TV gave you no color controls save the "color" (saturation) and "tint" (hue) controls that were basically holdovers from the CRT era. So I was never really able to mess with it, and I was always kinda scared of the AV experts' warnings about service menus...

Do you really qualify as "trans"? Please take this quiz. Does your gender ever misalign with what people proclaimed you were when you were born? If you answered "yes" to question 1, then you qualify! If you wish to call yourself transgender, then congratulations! Here's your membership card. You might not want to show it at the border crossing into Florida. But I really do get the question. It's a question I've asked myself so many times. Telling myself "no" What feels like an eternity a...

I was in the car the other day, trying to think of what I wanted to listen to. After revisiting CHVRCHES’ “The Bones of What You Believe”, I found myself in the mood to dig out an old favorite. I've been an Apple Music subscriber since the beginning, when it was mostly famous for deleting or not deleting your music files. (I never lost anything, but also would keep opening my phone to find The Love Club had vanished from its original album and now appeared on one featuring a giant duck inflatab...

I recently wrote a new shell library called portable-color. Its job is to colorize shell output, but be much more respectful of the environment it's being executed in than just jamming ANSI color codes (now ECMA-48; see "SGR") into stdout. I'll talk more about portable-color itself on another day. Today, what I wanted to do was figure out how to actually install a shell library on my system. You see, there's not a standard for this—at least not one I can find. Executing shell scripts in the co...

It's been a good while since "HD" was acceptable for computer monitors. Thing is, operating system people seem to have not really caught up to this idea. Not even Apple, whose "Retina" branding for HiDPI monitors is dangerously close to becoming generic like Kleenex is for facial tissues. (Who calls them "facial tissues", anyway?) I've also been running Ubuntu Desktop for some things lately, and the situation isn't great there either—but here, I'm also not surprised in the slightest. After all...

I had been tracking the macOS public beta on my M2 MacBook Pro for a little while in the hopes they were fixing a particularly painful issue with Linux Rosetta support. Because I've experienced some serious pain before running a beta as my daily driver, I opted to run the beta in a partition and leave my production macOS alone. This worked pretty well for a time, but then I decided to clean it up. Inside Disk Utility's partition dialog, I saw my main macOS partition, my beta macOS partition,...

I've been working on a little project for a few evenings now: folding my old domain and old blog into this one. The old blog was built with a static site generator called Felix Felicis (yeah, it makes me wince now, too). I got to write posts in Markdown, then run a Python program to build all the HTML that I'd then rsync on over to my OpenBSD server hosting zigg.com. Honestly, I might even still be using it today, if it weren't for Python rot. I used to adore Python, oh my gosh. Before I star...

I recently upgraded my nearly-five-year-old MacBook Pro with one of the shiny new M2-based ones. (I do work with these, so the company I work for contributes toward their cost.) Prior to that, I had the 2018 MacBook Pro. That was the one that had the best version of the worst keyboard. Not content with that, it had another controversy swirling around it—apart from a headphone jack, it only had USB-C ports. Before the super-thin 2016-2018 MacBook Pros came around, we had machines with the headp...

One of my essential macOS apps is George Brocklehurst's Choosy. I maintain Safari as my personal browser (it's convenient, particularly cross-device, and Advanced Data Protection now covers bookmarks too!) and Chrome as my work browser. What Choosy does for me is inject a quick step after clicking links that prompts me to pick one or the other. We also use Miro quite a bit at work, both internally and with clients. And there's one workflow that has always ticked me off—clicking a Miro link pra...

While hunting for white elephant gifts, I came across something really neat. A company called ULUZE (what is with the myriad company name concotions from online sellers?) makes a combination 3x3 cube and LEGO knockoff I had to get for myself. ULUZE's Magic Cube, a 3x3 Rubik's-like cube with LEGO-knockoff 2x2 plates for faces. It's been rearranged so the faces are in checkboard patterns. Okay, so, this thing is really neat. First, I wouldn't mistake it for a speedcube. (I ...

Last August, I wrote a post over at Atomic Spin on calling macOS APIs in Automator workflows. My impetus was to control the amount of space iCloud Drive was taking up on my Macs with smaller disks. I don't know how many people actually read that post, because nobody seemed to notice I didn't actually need to write a Swift script to accomplish the task at hand. Because brctl exists. (Mind you, I'm glad I wrote the post and did the exploration. I think it's really valuable not just from an Autom...

I realized that I have been using the figcaption HTML element incorrectly, when I originally added the photo of a Nazi book burning to my post about Twitter and the pink lists. I was trying something like the following, to get text to land below my images:  <figcaption>A caption.</figcaption> This isn't using figcaption correctly, though. And I needed some negative top-margin to align the caption a little closer to the image, as well as so...

That was an interesting journey. I'd never really invested the time in creating my own really complicated iOS Shortcut from scratch before. The limited debugging options and figuring out how it all worked, step by step by step, reminded me a bit of my early days programming as a kid, bewildered but steadily figuring it out. Okay, but to back up for a minute: my goal was to teach Siri how to record a transaction in You Need a Budget—YNAB, for short. There were, of course, already-written solut...

I went smart garage door shopping a little while ago. After looking around at the options, I settled on the Chamberlain Smart Garage Control. But wait, Mattie! You're deep, and I mean deep, into the Apple ecosystem. This ain't a HomeKit deal. And I'm in it for good reason. I mean, I was chomping at the bit for my HomePods to get upgraded to audioOS 16.2 so that I could get into Advanced Data Protection as soon as possible. End-to-end all the things! But the Smart Garage Control had a few thin...

We live under capitalism, so of course there are eleventy billion ways to play a song, many of which are hoping to get you to commit to subscription fees. All hail the subscription economy! I'm the Apple Music type of consumer, owing in part to my stack of Apple stuff but also because I can upload music to it that isn't in the catalog. (Streaming rights being what they are, this has turned out to be a critical need. That and yt-dlp have kept me listening to stuff I wouldn't be able to otherwise...

Content warning: religious hate of queer people, queer self-hatred. Some of this has been a long time coming. Parts can be found in several drafts hiding out in my private notes. Until today, I've been too afraid to say what I need to say. But something I came across gave me a nudge. This poem from Jay Hulme has been making the rounds. (Jay wrote about this, if you're interested in more.) Jesus at the Gay Bar He's here in the midst of it - right at the centre of the dance floor, robes hitch...