Joe Rosensteel (Mastodon):
Jason didn’t get that speed boost from an Apple-made wireless router, because Apple got out of making those long ago. He didn’t get that speed from a wireless router currently for sale at the Apple Store because the only two options are the Linksys Velop AX4200 WiFi 6 Mesh System, and AmpliFi Alien Router (with optional mesh extenders). Linksys does make a version of their Velop mesh network with 6E, but it’s not for sale through Apple.
Jason used an Eero 6E router, and wasted half a day trying to change his network topology to allow for it so he could see that speed difference.
[…]
Designing networking solutions in every device to work around the one component Apple doesn’t want to make is a lot of effort. The R&D can’t cost more than a self-driving, bread-loaf saloon, and the benefits of an Apple wireless router will lift all of Apple’s products. It’s time to head back to the AirPort.
Matt Birchler:
Apple doesn’t need to be in every market, but I do agree with Joe’s point that basically everything Apple makes relies on good wireless networks to deliver the best experience, and it makes sense for Apple to get back in the game.
Previously:
AirPort Extreme Base Station Eero iOS Mac Networking Privacy Security Wi-Fi
Mike Wuerthele and Malcolm Owen (via Ric Ford):
An issue preventing some external drives from mounting onto a Mac running macOS Sonoma has plagued users for months, and it probably was caused by changes Apple made to drive handling.
[…]
Unlike the Windows-preferred NTFS or Apple’s APFS, exFAT can be read from and written to by both Macs and Windows PCs without requiring any extra software assistance. In a multi-platform environment, it’s almost always the best formatting option for external drives.
[…]
Shortly after the introduction of macOS Sonoma, complaints started to surface on Apple’s Community Support forum. The complaints featured irate users discovering that their external disks were not reliably being mounted in macOS at all.
It seems like the last few releases of macOS have trouble with mounting external drives in general, even APFS ones. But there may also be an exFAT-specific issue here.
macOS Sonoma 14 Release Notes:
The implementations of the exfat and msdos file systems on macOS have changed; these file systems are now provided by services running in user-space instead of by kernel extensions.
Previously:
Bug File System Kernel Extensions Mac macOS 14 Sonoma Storage Windows
Google (via Hacker News):
To improve on this, we are introducing Jpegli, an advanced JPEG coding library that maintains high backward compatibility while offering enhanced capabilities and a 35% compression ratio improvement at high quality compression settings.
[…]
When images are compressed or decompressed through Jpegli, more precise and psychovisually effective computations are performed and images will look clearer and have fewer observable artifacts.
[…]
While improving on image quality/compression density ratio, Jpegli’s coding speed is comparable to traditional approaches, such as libjpeg-turbo and MozJPEG.
[…]
Jpegli can be encoded with 10+ bits per component. Traditional JPEG coding solutions offer only 8 bit per component dynamics causing visible banding artifacts in slow gradients. Jpegli’s 10+ bits coding happens in the original 8-bit formalism and the resulting images are fully interoperable with 8-bit viewers. 10+ bit dynamics are available as an API extension and application code changes are needed to benefit from it.
Previously:
Algorithm Color Compression Google Graphic Design JPEG Open Source Programming
Jan-Piet Men (2020, via Hacker News):
I can no longer sync iOS’ Contacts with my macOS Catalina’s Finder (the iOS sync portion of iTunes is now built into the Finder in macOS Catalina); the OS insists I’ve iCloud configured for Contacts which I do not.
[…]
I was spilling my sorrows on Christoph who simply said he avoids all those issues by using CardDAV. I slapped my forehead: I’ve been using CalDAV for years, for synchronizing two calendars across devices: my own calendar across two Macs, an iPad, and an iPhone, and the family calendar across the family’s devices. How could I have forgotten about CardDAV?
[…]
I then created a Baïkal address book for myself, set up macOS and an iPhone to use that, and created a pseudo person’s entry on the Mac and another on iOS, and experimented a bit with how long it takes either side to sync, etc. As soon as I was satisfied I copy/pasted all contacts from macOS’ internal address book to its CardDAV store.
[…]
CardDAVMATE is an Open Source CardDAV web client which is nice to use for editing some of the more esoteric (read: not available in the GUIs) vCard attributes, in particular those for spouse and the social profiles.
Previously:
CardDAV Contacts iOS iOS 13 Mac macOS 10.15 Catalina Open Source Syncing
