We are going (in person) to a (real) birthday party today, for the first time in…oh, never mind. Anyway, my daughter is jumping up and down in excitement, and that’s what is important. 😀🎂

I’m installing the Xcode 13 beta on my new Mac mini and I’m installing iOS 15 developer beta 1 on my old iPad Pro. I will probably install iOS 15 on my old iPhone 7 Plus later this weekend. Because I upgraded hardware this year, I actually have old devices kicking around for pretty much the first time ever. All it took was spending a ton of money!

🎬 My wife and I had only time enough to watch the opening number in In the Heights so far. We absolutely loved it and can’t wait to watch more tonight.

This is turning out to be a terrible year for Apple device spending for my family. I had to buy my wife a replacement Apple Watch yesterday because the screen stopped working on her Series 3 and it is out of warranty. It is the fifth Apple device I have purchased this year. 💸

I had forgotten that Apple said Siri will operate on-device starting in iOS 15. Tom’s Guide says it is a killer feature. My biggest problem with Siri is the “Siri is not available” messages I get a lot of the time. Maybe that problem will go away for me.

🎬 I can’t get enough articles about the In the Heights movie. Vulture has a fascinating one about how the “96,000” pool scene was filmed.

I have been following stories about aphantasia with interest because I am 99% sure I have it. Carl Zimmer reports in The New York Times:

Dr. Adam Zeman didn’t give much thought to the mind’s eye until he met someone who didn’t have one. In 2005, the British neurologist saw a patient who said that a minor surgical procedure had taken away his ability to conjure images.

Over the 16 years since that first patient, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues have heard from more than 12,000 people who say they don’t have any such mental camera. The scientists estimate that tens of millions of people share the condition, which they’ve named aphantasia, and millions more experience extraordinarily strong mental imagery, called hyperphantasia.

When I read a book, I never think about what the characters look like, or what the scenery is.

When I think, it’s all words. Torrents and torrent of words.

I don’t have the best visual memory for people or places, though I have good spatial awareness.

I think I can form mental images, or at least simulacra of them (wireframes, maybe). I mean, I did pretty well in organic chemistry in college, which is a subject that is, in part, about visualizing the rotation of irregularly shaped molecules. I don’t think I saw them in my mind’s eye, though. Not really. It was long ago, so I can’t remember reliably, but I probably figured out a different way to do it.

To me, it is interesting to learn that some people “see” mental images easily and think in an incredibly visual manner, because that is not the way I experience anything.

📺 I am looking forward to watching Loki tonight or later this week. Truth be told, it is the Disney+ Marvel series I have been least looking forward to, but I am bored with TV right now, and think it will be fun.

I have been listening to Apple Music’s “Made for Spatial Audio” tracks all morning with my external DAC and my closed-back planar magnetic headphones. So far, I have decided that I prefer the lossless stereo mixes to the Dolby Atmos mixes. I guess I prefer a narrower soundstage.

I am appreciating the lossless tracks on Apple Music. I probably don’t have the ears to actually hear the difference anymore. But my equipment is good enough to make use of the extra bits, I am listening more closely than usual, and I am enjoying it.

I discovered today that Windows 10 lets you change your mouse cursor’s color as well as its size. You have been able to change the mouse cursor set to a different one since Windows 3, I think, which would allow you to switch the color in a different, less flexible way. This feature is different.

I now have a slightly larger, bright-yellow-with-black-outline mouse cursor on my huge 4K monitor. It is much easier to spot when I am returning to my desk after a break. If only Microsoft implemented the “shake that mouse and the cursor gets bigger” feature from macOS.

My region’s climate has changed significantly in my lifetime, and, seemingly to me, more quickly than before in the past ten years. It is dismaying. Here are some of my observations of it from this week:

• It has been over 90ºF every day since late last week, and it is only early June. Ninety degrees is not just hot for June here: it is hot for summer.

• My daughter’s elementary school has two early release days in a row this week, due to excessive heat. I have heard of such things happening in the South, but never where I have lived (New Jersey now, New England before that).

• People (including my family) don’t have our kids play outside that much because is too hot, and the air quality too bad, to do so.

• I saw more people exercising after dark (after 9 PM) yesterday than I did out during the daytime.

Oh, cool: Apple Music’s lossless audio quality tier is now live. Check out iOS Settings > Music to turn it on.

Huh. No new hardware was announced at WWDC. I can’t wait to hear hot takes about that all this week and next on my nerd podcasts.

I’m looking forward to watching WWDC while thinking about the last virtual conference I attended, last week.

🎬 My daughter and I watched Raya and the Last Dragon this afternoon, partly because it is too hot to play outside. We really liked it.

🎬 I rewatched Wall-E today with my daughter and enjoyed it even more than the first time I saw it.

I have one hour to work on important stuff right now, and here I am, looking at my Micro.blog timeline instead. 🤦‍♂️

It’s my third day of attending a virtual conference. I have seen too many presentations in a row, and consequently my mind is now a blur. My biggest takeaway is that presenters often lack focus, which causes them to run out of time before they get to the most critical points.

I am feeling much better about the slide deck I am creating for a data calls talk that I and my team will present this summer. I soaked up presentation after presentation for the past month, and put a lot of it into practice today without even having to think about it.

We had a one-second power outage in my neighborhood two nights in a row, after 11:00 PM. I can’t figure out why.

I have been attending a virtual conference most of the day today. Technically, today is the pre-conference training workshop/training day. So far, it is pretty good and I am learning something.

I am sympathetic to Naomi Osaka’s mental health-based arguments for skipping press events during the French Open. I am also sympathetic to the French Open’s argument that participation in these press events is a mandatory part of her contract. While I am more sympathetic to Osaka’s position, I think we should all end the charade of bringing up an athlete in front of a media panel to answer for her poor performance or to gloat about her good performance in a match. It is frivolous and adds no value. Didn’t Bill Belichick expose the futility of the sports press conference twenty years ago or more?

🎮 I started another run at Hollow Knight after quite a while away from it. I have missed a step or two… 😅

‘60s pop like The Four Seasons sounds great from the tiny, terrible, mono Amazon Echo speaker in my kitchen. The music must have been mixed with transistor radios in mind.