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I am extremely lucky to have a display problem. I have a small home office and a studio setup. At home, I sometimes have my laptop under my screen and sometimes to the left. In the studio, I have two external screens, one of which I switch to 1080p when recording videos. So that’s four potential screen configurations. I have always found screen configuration on macOS relatively smart and reliable. It tends to remember individual screens and automatically switch to the configuration you last use...

What do American Online, the Apple Newton, DVDs, Tamagochis, MP3, PDF, and Sony Discmans all share in common? They were all products born in (and some dying in) the 1990s. An era I remember vaguely well as I spent most of my mid to late teenage years in it. And now I see the fashions and band T-shirts from that era back on the streets and…

It’s been a few years since I attended Berlin’s Internationale Funkausstellung, better known as IFA. And after several slow years for conferences and trade fairs, capped off with a slowdown in tech and tech-adjacent spending, I was interested to know what the show floor would feel like.

About 18 months ago, I covered my attempts to replace Evernote. I was surprised by how popular that post was and how much feedback it received. Unsurprisingly, I have adapted and changed my setup since then and in this post, I cover what I now use and how I use it. Hopefully, with the same level of readers and feedback 😁.

In this post, I cover how I use Aeon Timeline, an application for building interactive narrative timelines. If you want to read more, then take a look at the post I wrote on the Setapp applications I use regularly.

Welcome to Setapp Month! I have been a user of Setapp for quite a while now, almost ever since the service launched, and I visited Macpaw’s offices in Kyiv, touring their awesome Apple museum and meeting the office cats. Setapp is a macOS and iOS application subscription service, where for $9.99 a month, you get access to dozens of applications, large and small, complex and simple, old favourites and new arrivals.

Generative AI tools and platforms are not just the flavour of the month (for now), they’re the flavour of the year, if not the decade. Many of these are web platforms, and I have always been the first to admit that I prefer good old-fashioned, offline-first native desktop applications. As many of the new wave of services were smart enough to include an API option, this has made it possible for enterprising developers to create any other type of application they want to, including, in the case...

In my previous post I covered my creative writing setup and the post proved quite popular, so I thank everyone who read and left comments for that. Next in this series of posts covering my various setups is my setup for technical writing. In this post I use the term “tech writing” to cover my documentation, blog post, and longer form technical writing work. My technical writing setup is also far more defined and established, with less areas where I am “still deciding” what’s best for me. My set...

Or how Google IO made me realise I probably need to find a new job in 2 years Squeezed into the remodelled Google Berlin old medical school theatre I have a lovely glass of wine ready to go as I attempt to live blog a keynote for the first time in a while. I love watching American keynotes with Europeans, as we are much more… sceptical. One person in the crowd cheered for an announcement once and everyone looked at them like they were crazy. OK, this is all pretty unstructured as I don’t have...

I didn’t attend Detroit last year, but did attend Valencia, and while it was great to be back at a reasonably large in-person event again, the event did feel slightly subdued. I worried that the past few months of leaner times and layoffs for the tech industry might mean that this year’s KubeCon EU might also feel muted for different reasons. I couldn’t be more wrong. I admit that my memory of pre-2020 EU KubeCons (and I’ve been to most of them) is a little hazy, but this year in Amsterdam felt...

In my last post, I looked at the decision process I went through in deciding what to migrate my long time Jekyll-powered website to. I arrived at Astro and in this post I cover my experiences in migrating to and using Astro.

Last week, I stupidly left the apartment to take a stroll with my office keys. As I shut the front door to double lock it and stared at the wrong set of keys in my hands with disbelief, I realised my mistake. To make things worse, I was sick, the weather was foul, and my wife wasn’t due to return from a work trip until late evening. Resolved in the fact that I was stuck with just my wallet and phone for the day, and thanking the stars I had the option to go to the office, I headed in. I wonder...

The docs as code trend, where technical writers and developers work more closely using similar tools and processes, has grown in the past few years. For some tech writers, who come from technical backgrounds, have always worked on technical projects, or were able to pick their toolchain, it's the only workflow we've ever known. Developers use myriad tools and frameworks daily, many of which tech writers will also find useful. One such tool is the IntelliJ-based suite of "integrated developer...

I finally finished my first fiction novel after two years of work and have already begun work on my second. I’ve also produced several short stories and have some game supplements in slow progress. So, as people seem interested in knowing these things, I thought it was about time I shared my setup for creative writing. I specify “creative writing” as I have different tool chains for my different writing activities. You can read more about those in future posts.

Some time ago, [I mentioned a process I tried](https://medium.com/geekculture/migrating-applications-and-data-to-a-new-mac-without-using-time-machine-240e1de77892)that allowed me to partially recreate my Mac setup on another machine with scripts. As part of that process I attempted to add my home folder configuration to version control so that I could keep track of changes to it, and again, use it on other devices if needed. To accomplish this, I made use of three tools mostly, plus several symbolic links and aliases.

I have stuffed so much into [my website](https://github.com/ChrisChinchilla/chrischinchilla.com) over the years it was starting to creak at the seams. For most of its life, at least the life I can remember, I used [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com). When the life of this website began, Jekyll was still fairly new and my mind was blown by static site generators (I probably migrated from Drupal, which was my thing back in the early 2000s). When I reworked it a couple of years ago, I considered other options but ended up settling back to what I already knew well. In honesty, Jeky...

I have long been concerned about the state of browsers and the dominant hegemony of one browser engine. OK, to be fair, it's a duopoly, but one of those options is almost exclusively restricted to one platform, so it's... Like many things in tech, it's complicated.

Or, maybe in a more click-generating sub-heading, “how to combine creative writing and programming to create interactive fiction”. In this post and the accompanying video version, I look at how people have created works of fiction where you have a degree of control over the narrative for the past 60 years. This includes paper-based books, computer games, and much more. I realise that the history may go further back than the 1970s, but that’s where I chose to start my adventure, and maybe I’ll l...

For Windows and macOS users, Docker Desktop has been the main way to use Docker containers for many years. While it remains a viable and usable option for hobbyists and small development teams, recent pricing changes for larger user bases sent people looking for alternatives. I am not looking to replace Docker Desktop myself, but I was interested in trying the alternatives and seeing how they compared.

I have been using Parallels for a couple of years now, primarily for running Windows virtual machines (VMs), but occasionally Linux VMs too. I mostly use it for playing games, testing, and the occasional Windows-only application. There are some other long-standing options such as VirtualBox, QEMU, and VMWare. I am intentionally ignoring anything that also runs containers, such as Docker, as that’s a different use case, and a whole other gamut of options. Recent changes in macOS suddenly bought...

Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar is a regular time to take a look at what experienced industry experts think might be the next wave of tools, practices, and technologies to consider or stop using. I always look forward to adding many new “blips” to my list, or seeing which are growing in adoption since you last took a look. Version 27 is out now, and it continues some trends that the radar has been following for a while, such as “platform as a service” or forms of group programming. This round-u...

I have always loved messing around with operating systems and desktop environments. I believe my first graphical operating system was AmigaOS. In the decades since I have worked through various Windows versions, every version of macOS since 7.0, different Linux flavors and combinations, and many other small niche OSs I have forgotten about in a sea of windows and menus. I first heard about SerenityOS via a news item on the Changelog. They mentioned that a handful of open-source programmers were...

It's Cybersecurity awareness month every October and this year I thought I'd share something relevant from my recent trip to cover IT Arena in Lviv, Ukraine. While I was there I bumped into some of the team from MacPaw a macOS and iOS software company based in Kyiv, Ukraine. I have met MacPaw employees many times at conferences over the years, and even once visited their wonderful offices in Kyiv where I saw their famous Mac museum and met their equally famous office cats. They are probably b...

I have been to many tech conferences over the years. I have sat in so many startup pitches and talks that are barely masked marketing pitches. I have introduced myself and told people what I do and where I am from so many times that it all becomes something of a blur. Despite the repetition and occasional tedium, I still enjoy attending these events, especially after the best part of a two-year absence. There’s the opportunity to meet new people, and visit new places, and typically amongst the...

Well, it’s August… The silly season, or the quiet season for news depending on your perspective and country. Still, before we all prepare for packed announcement times in September and October here’s a few observability and cloud native related nuggets from across the interwebs.

Every time Apple announces a new macOS beta, I am tempted to somehow figure out how to install it alongside my daily operating system. I then realise it's harder than I hoped, or that I don't have a large enough external drive available, and then give up on the idea.

Well hello there! If you’re reading this monthly round up of Observability (and related) news, then you’re one of the few not on vacation and I thank you 🙇 . That last sentence was basically me making an excuse for not having too much to write about, but there’s just enough Interesting tidbits, so let’s get started.

Ian and Chris speak with Cristian Heilmann, Principal Program Manager Developer Tools at Microsoft about his long career through developer relations/evangelism, teaching technical skills, and so much more!

Learn about the unintended environmental impact and cost of the proliferation of cloud services, frameworks, and "throw an other service at it" development.

Phew! A group of Chronospherians attended Monitorama back in person in Portland and we had a whistlestop (partial) week meeting customers and observability enthusiasts. I had a talk which sparked a lot of interesting discussion, we hosted a very successful whisk(e)y tasting, and all in all, had a great time.