The Macintosh wasn’t my first computer — I started out with a Cosmac Elf, and then moved on to an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P, and finally an Apple II.

I ordered my first Macintosh a few days after it was released, but I didn’t receive it until February 1984, since they were in short supply in NY. I’ve owed many Macs since then, including a Mac Plus, a SE/30, which was my favorite early Mac, the original G3 & G4 towers, and many MacBook Pros.

Before the Macintosh, I wrote software for the Apple II, TRS-80, and Unix, but since then I’ve been focused entirely on Mac & iOS.

I will be blogging primarily on Medium, due to better discovery and distribution, with links here to my Medium posts.

Read the full post on Medium where I give some background on the 1802.

I have around 780 followers on Mastodon and 1200 on Twitter, but I get many more likes, replies, and reposts on Mastodon.

Yesterday I posted this same picture on both Twitter and Mastodon, and immediately got many more likes and reposts on Mastodon than Twitter.

There have been countless articles written in which the author gripes and tells why they’re leaving San Francisco, so I asked ChatGPT (French for “cat I farted”) to write one. Read the full post here.

A short summary of the last few years:

I left Line2 in 2017 when our engineering manager left and it seemed like there wasn’t much more to do there. The company was acquired about a year later.

Later in 2017 I got pretty sick and was out of commission for a few months.

I then worked for several startups over the next few years which went through major layoffs. My most recent company, which made educational software, laid off 50% of the staff only a few months after I joined.

In other news, I’m really excited about the projects I’m working on now at Line2. I also adopted a new kitten earlier this year.

For the last year, I’ve been wearing a Pebble Smartwatch and I’ve gotten used to receiving notifications on my watch. I got into the habit of keeping my phone in my pocket most of the time and just looking at my wrist when I get a notification.

The Pebble & AppleWatch notifications are very different. With the Pebble, the phone still makes a sound & vibrates, and then a few seconds later I’d feel a vibration on my wrist and it would appear on the Pebble. The Pebble often disconnected or would stop receiving notifications every few days. The AppleWatch notifications are more subtle and a lot less annoying – instead of vibrating, it makes a soft ‘ping’ and taps me on the wrist. While the Pebble always presents all enabled phone notifications, the AppleWatch only presents notifications when the phone is locked. The AppleWatch also gives you a lot more control over which notifications are presented.

I find that “activate on wrist raise” isn’t always reliable. I’ll often activate it unintentionally, and many times it won’t activate when I want it to. Hopefully future software updates will let you adjust the sensitivity.

I’m very happy with the AppleWatch’s battery life. After a day of normal use, the battery is usually at 50% or more, and I charge it every night before I go to sleep. The Pebble claims 5-7 days between charges, but I found about 4 days is more realistic.

Applications on the Pebble are an afterthought and are inconvenient to access, requiring navigating through the menu. Apps are a central feature on the AppleWatch and are a lot easier to access, by pressing the digital crown, although the app screen is cluttered and can be difficult to navigate. Hopefully the UI will improve in later software updates.

Glances on the AppleWatch make applications easier to access and launch, although having many glances enabled means swiping through a long list of items to get to the one you want. My favorite use of a glance is the Transit app, which can instantly show me the next departure time of the two nearest MUNI lines.

I was hoping the AppleWatch would replace my FitBit One, which I lost on several occasions and I often forget to put in my pocket. This is one area where the AppleWatch doesn’t quite measure up. I still use the FitBit for sleep tracking, and the AppleWatch doesn’t let you enter meals and doesn’t measure flights of stairs, like the FitBit does. I also find that the AppleWatch and FitBit report different numbers of steps and distance traveled.

Since my last post:

* I left Klip last June because I was getting tired of the commute, which was over 3 hours a day. Working with Alain Rossmann and the rest of the team there was one of the best experiences of my life. Unfortunately they weren’t able to get a big enough audience to monetize, so they shut down at the beginning of this year.

* For a few months I worked at a startup that was building a new social network, but I soon realized it wasn’t what I wanted. Although they’re great people, it wasn’t a service I actually wanted to use and I started to hate seeing the same tired memes and corny quotes posted repeatedly by our users. I also found the commute to a really bad part of SOMA even more unpleasant that commuting to Palo Alto.

* Since December I’ve been working at Line2. I’m really excited about working on an Apple Watch app, which we recently released.

* Cody died suddenly of an unknown infection in early March. He’s been immortalized in Cole Garage’s pet mural.