I have a pair of the first generation AirPods Max. They leave dents in my scalp if I wear them for any real amount of time. I've been an Apple person since the 1980s. This is one of the most disappointing Apple products for me ever, and I really don't want to know how much $$$$$ lifetime customer value I've contributed to Apple's bottom line.
A spherical balloon 20cm in radius is displacing 41g of air. Even ignoring compression (which I don’t know enough to quantify the effects of, except that it will make the numbers more unfavourable), nitrogen’s 3.3%-lighter gives you a budget of only 1.35g for the balloon. I believe balloons hare heavier than this, so the balloon will still sink (a little more slowly than an air-filled one, but I’m not sure how noticeable the difference will be).
> which I don’t know enough to quantify the effects of
You probably do, actually! People constantly underestimate the grand utility of their basic education.
At near-atmospheric pressure and typical ambient temperatures, the ideal gas equation (PV=nRT) from introductory physics works very well and indicates that a 3% overpressure would make gases 3% more dense (linear direct proportionality). At some threshold of high pressures/ low temperatures, you'd want to switch your equation of state (EOS) from ideal gas law to something else. Peng-Robinson would be a good choice for a non-polar gas like Nitrogen, if its >10-50 atm pressure and/or < -50C temperature.
At 20 degC, 1.00atm to 3kPa gauge pressure, ideal gas law predicts nitrogen would increase in density by 2.9608%. Whereas Peng-Robinson predicts it would increase in density by ever-so-slightly more, 2.9623%. This is truly negligible, so better to use the simples EOS for explainability (which would be the ideal gas law).
I feel like people really need to learn basic physics.
The gas inside a standard party balloon is generally compressed 3% to inflate the balloon. This wipes out even the theoretical buoyancy of nitrogen. And trust me, there was never any practical buoyancy to begin with. You’d need a ridiculously large balloon in a room with impossibly still air and impossibly null thermal gradients to even measure the buoyancy of nitrogen vs air. The buoyancy of nitrogen vs air would never be perceptible to human senses in any real-world setting.
It would be the same as just filling the balloon with air.
> I feel like people really need to learn basic physics.
I'm 20+ years out of college and I asked a question specifically because I was unsure. Give me a break. I'm sorry if "party balloon buoyancy physics" wasn't the part of my college classes that stuck with me.
Is the computer in question really "more than capable" if it "can't play the games [you] want to play"?
I've used geforce now on my mac before and didn't have latency issues. I wasn't using it for any competitive games where you need ultrafast twitchy response, but I did use if for plenty of FPSes and never had any issues. And I don't have super fast internet, just the basic package from Spectrum. So I wouldn't say it's bad, though admittedly it might not be the best latency achievable in the gaming world.
> - Dumping all open Safari tabs to an Obsidian doc
I'd love to do this too. Would you mind sharing how you do it? Or is it trivially easy and not worth explaining? (I haven't looked too deeply into HS yet.)
It's not trivial, but roughly: use AppleScript/osascript to get the URLs, but mostly pass them to a ~50 line Bash script which:
- Brings in the date path components for the dumped-to folder
- Makes a hash of the URL for an Obsidian doc (each tab gets their own doc)
- Uses Chrome command line (--headless --disable-gpu --dump-dom) to save a snapshot of the page contents
- Uses it again with --screenshot to make a thumbnail
- Create an Obsidian doc from a template
- If it's a single tab dump, pass -o to the script, which opens it in Obsidian for review
Lastly, I use the relatively-new Bases feature in Obsidian to make a nice "cards" view of the docs with their thumbnails.
I'm hoping to clean it up at some point and maybe release it, but it's one of those classic one-shot systems that just works for me for now.
> - Uses Chrome command line (--headless --disable-gpu --dump-dom) to save a snapshot of the page contents
> - Uses it again with --screenshot to make a thumbnail
You could combine both of those into "run Archivebox somewhere and pass the URLs into that" (which is what I do for "URLs I save to Instapaper" - they go to my Linkhut, Pinboard, my Archivebox, and once I've fixed my code, to archive.org as well.)
Nice, thanks for the vote on it. Been meaning to look into a personal archiving solution, and now the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of homelab for me so it's on the list.
How does Hammerspoon help with this? Seems like just AppleScript and bash.
Also if I may ask, how do you like Obsidian? I had never heard of it until now. Seems like a competitor to the Notes feature of iOS/macOS, but with its own subscription for syncing independently of iCloud?
I mean, in this case, the Hammerspoon part is really just the hyper keybind and the easy run of AppleScript text inline. But... once you've got some stuff going, it's easier to hook into Hammerspoon as the "frontend" for other things as your systems grow.
Obsidian is good! This use of Bases is really my only "proprietary" use of anything Obsidian-specific. The rest is a combo of personal reference, brainstorms, intricate client work specs or outlines, and the beginnings of a personal wiki. The keybinds are great, everything is in one big folder for now, and the fuzzy search makes it fast. For sync, I just have my vault in a folder that is part of my overall Syncthing, so all my computers can access it. On mobile (iPhone moving to Android, and iPad) it's just read-only for now; not using their sync or doing any writing into the system from mobile.
Somewhat relatedly, I just got Standard Notes going on all systems (Mac/Linux/iPhone/Android/iPad) which is good for reliable capture at all places for me right now. I'm not paying, so I don't have (Markdown or other) formatting like in Apple Notes yet.
Ah. Given the context, I had assumed it relied more on hammerspoon and less on applescript. I'm a bit less excited about it than I was, but I'll still look into doing similar sometime since I'm a habitual tab-opener.
I have no idea how that person is doing it, but I suspect it could be using osascript. Here's how I do it from my homegrown Go bookmark tool:
const fetchTabsScript = `
tell application "Brave Browser"
set output to ""
repeat with w in windows
repeat with t in tabs of w
set output to output & (URL of t) & "|||" & (title of t) & "\n"
end repeat
end repeat
return output
end tell
`
func GetOpenTabs() ([]Tab, error) {
cmd := exec.Command("osascript", "-e", fetchTabsScript)
output, err := cmd.Output()
// ...
}
I think there are a number of reasons why Apple specifically hasn't done this. In addition to what others have already mentioned (demand, segmentation, profitability, etc), another factor would probably be difficulty with the overall design.
Part of why Apple's products are often praised for their design is that they do a few things really well and focus on those things, instead of trying to do absolutely everything. Consider the iPod, the iPhone, Apple TV, etc -- they're all pretty focused on doing certain things and Apple's really polished the experience. The Mac desktops and laptops kind of stretch this by allowing more things, but they still largely try to focus the user into certain workflows, via the plethora of apps that come standard with macOS and the vendor lock-in that they push.
Making a phone that can also be a full computer goes against these design principles. Apple's closed the gap a bit in recent years by making macOS and iOS a bit more similar than they used to be, but they're still pretty different. If you're on a M1/2/3/4/etc processor laptop and you've tried using an iOS-specific app (not ones that's designed for both phone and desktop) on it, you'll see some of those differences (interfaces tuned for touch are weird with a mouse, things are sized wrong for desktop, file restrictions can be weird, keyboard input can be lacking, etc etc etc), and it's not enjoyable. Going the other direction, the first thing that pops into my head is: how in the world would the mac desktop be represented on iOS? I'm someone who keeps a lot of files on his desktop, grouped in different sections of the screen for different reasons, and I have no idea how that would be represented on a relatively tiny phone screen (at least in a way that didn't destroy my intentional groups). There are other aspects of macOS that would prove tricky to have analogs on a phone screen, too, but this reply is already getting so long that very few will read it...
Now that's not to say that it's impossible. In fact it probably isn't. But there would be compromises (and those compromises would be on top of the compromises already present in iOS/macOS). To do it well, it'd be a much bigger project than most people realize. It's not just changing a few options and letting us use our phone that way. It'd be more akin to designing the first iPhone. Note that it's not just Apple who hasn't done this yet. Literally _no one_ has done it well yet. I truly hope one day Apple (or someone else, even) does it well, since that'll be a glorious day. But it'd be a huge project, so I'm not holding my breath.
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