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Happy birthday, Joe Biden, and thank you for four years of sanity!

I hope I’m wrong but it feels the world is going south.

I love how Robert De Niro does not hold back on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

I feel right at home when it comes to the walking speed of New Yorkers.
The other day, it reoccurred to me that maintaining my habitual pace allows me to mostly cross cross streets without delay. Myke Hurley has a similar realization on the latest Analog episode.

Antisemitismus hat in unserer Gesellschaft keinen Platz. Die Messerattacke eines Jugendlichen in Zürich schockiert mich. Ich denke an den Verletzten und unsere jüdische Community.

A few days ago, I could try Apple Vision Pro myself. I had a fantastic experience with Kevin, who guided me through the demo at Grand Central Terminal.

After putting on the device, light would initially leak in from the sides, causing some reflections similar to when wearing glasses.¹ With some repositioning and turning the Fit Dial of the Solo Knit Band clockwise again to tighten it more, the occasional flares mostly disappeared.

At first, the headset felt just a little front-heavy, but it was very comfortable during the entire demo, even with this strap. Only the power cord dangling on my shoulder — at times — annoyingly slightly distracted from the experience.

Finding the Digital Crown took some getting used to and didn’t start to feel natural after multiple attempts.

Calibration did not take long, and eye tracking seemed very accurate afterwards. Then, looking at the surroundings, they immediately felt very blurry to me, while the interface didn’t. This was likely due to pretty dim lighting.

Photos was the first focus of the demo in terms of applications. While “projecting” a photo onto a big canvas and looking at it is nice, looking at panoramas and spatial videos is where Apple Vision Pro starts to shine. However, moving people looked like they were flickering to me. In my eyes, there was no obviously noticeable difference between spatial clips shot on iPhone or Vision Pro. The demoed 3D movie² did not have as much of a spatial effect as the videos.

Almost all gestures were intuitively learnable. I did have trouble moving windows “away” from me, however. I was surprised to learn that the scrolling animation abruptly stops when not pinching one’s fingers anymore. There is no inertia when scrolling. I would have loved to quickly veer off script to access my website, not least to grasp how typing works. But unfortunately, the demo didn’t include any of it.

The immersive features are the most impressive by far. Be it the Environments — I was shown the beautiful Mount Hood scene with its rippling lake water — or the amazing 180-degree (8K) 3D videos with spatial audio.³ Speaking of which, it’s remarkable how being immersed distracted from the bustling Grand Central Terminal. I even perceived much less noise.
But I’m not sure of how people sometimes ghostly appear when nearby. There is, I think, some room for improvement in its implementation.

Overall, given its price, there is not enough value in Apple Vision Pro to me yet. But I see huge potential, especially for sports. If possible, immersive sports telecasts would be a killer application.

I filed a feedback with Apple:

Dear iOS team,
please introduce an option to only silence unknown callers on a particular line.
I, for example, would like to be notified about all calls on my main, Swiss, line but not about the multiple spam calls a day I receive on my U.S. line, which I mostly keep for iMessages.
Thank you!

Ich weiss nicht, ob einem ein Unternehmen wirklich sympathisch sein kann, aber mit den Positionen von Init7 bzw. CEO Fredy Künzler u. a. in Sachen Netztopologie und Überwachung bin ich sehr einverstanden.

Offenbar suchen gemäss Tages-Anzeiger andere denselben Laden für Panko auf:

[…] Nishi’s Japan Shop

[…] Eine Kundin erzählt uns, dass sie oft hierhergekommen sei, weil dies der einzige Ort in Zürich gewesen sei, an dem sie […] Produkte erhalten habe. Etwa […] Panko, ein japanisches Paniermehl aus Brotkrumen.

Im Tages-Anzeiger:

Auch einige Bündner Namen werden von Unterländern gerne falsch ausgesprochen. […] Aber rätoromanische Namen werden üblicherweise nicht auf der ersten Silbe betont. Richtig ist also: Curdín […] Cadonáu, […]

Matthew Perry’s humor has always been the one I wished I had more of. May he rest in peace.

There’s a nice shot of the University of Zurich in Oppenheimer. But it should probably be of its neighbor, the ETH, instead.

The latest Microsoft Teams feature is one I love: The app silently quits every time I connect an external display.

What were the odds that the Sauber logo would ever appear in an Apple keynote?! 🤯

We lost a true icon, today. One of the most famous fellow Swiss citizens. Rest in peace, Tina.

That the failing of a bank I had never heard of could lead to the collapse of such an institution this quickly, I didn’t think was possible:

The […] move represents the unwinding of a 166-year-old institution created to finance Switzerland’s rail network that ascended to the top echelons of finance, at times standing toe-to-toe with American titans like JPMorgan Chase.

I bought a ticket to tonight’s Nada Surf concert in February 2020. They’re that good.

I noticed that some of my (album cover) photos don’t display in Safari on the newly released iOS 16. Xe Iaso had already posted about problems, as well. To me, it looks like the exact same issue: AVIF images encoded with go-avif appear broken.
As there is a WebKit bug report now, I’m wondering whether the encoding is actually the problem, as the images have also been showing fine in Firefox and Chrome.

Update

The issue is fixed in iOS 16.1’s Safari:

Fixed some AVIF images not rendering because of their container format.

(Changing the “major brand” from mif1 to avif in the file type box of the images would have also worked.)

If you’re referencing “today” in a blog(!) post and no date is present (neither as content nor as URL part), you’re doing it wrong.

Apple — finally — brings back Mail Merge to Pages, after sacrificing its Mac OS version for iOS.
Or, as Dan Moren writes for Six Colors:

The feature […] got the axe in 2013’s version 5.0, when Apple redesigned its iWork suite to give even footing across the iOS, iPadOS, and macOS platforms.

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This might be the best Swiss team I’ve ever seen playing a tournament. What exciting hockey at the men’s world championship.

Radiotelevisiun Svizra Rumantscha (RTR): «Claudio Cadonau: ‹Igl è grev da chattar ils pleds›»

Tonight, I will attend a hockey game at Hallenstadion for the first time.

Mac Studio and Studio Display are pretty much what I’ve been hoping for. I didn’t expect them to be released already.