Mike PJ's Words

I had a great time at the #NSSpain2026 conference this past week! The workshops and presentations were excellent and I met so many devs (shoutout to Los Shady Shaders, you know who you are). Logroño knows how to party too.

If you’re thinking about going, but not sure about the language barrier, just go. I know hardly any Spanish, and it wasn’t an issue.

Hope to make it again in the future…

When Jobs introduced the iPhone, he said “if you see a stylus, they blew it”. Now the iPhone Duo has Apple Pencil support…

My teammate Fatih Ozkul wrote about the process that was used to convert the Doximity app newsfeed from UIKit to SwiftUI. Read more about it here:

https://technology.doximity.com/articles/migrating-doximity-s-ios-newsfeed-to-swiftui-without-disrupting-users-or-development

DALMAC is complete, I made it a total of 335 miles from Lansing to the Mackinaw Bridge! Today was a relatively short 56 miles, but had over 2,000 ft of climbing! The steepest hill I went up was over 11% grade.

I reached Mackinaw City around 3pm where Katrina and the girls were waiting for me. ? It was so nice to see them again.

I’m finding the ending bittersweet. I’m glad to have made it and my body is asking for some rest (and it’s great to be back together with the family). On the other hand, it was so much fun that I wouldn’t have minded going another few days riding instead of going back to work on Tuesday. On a bike tour, even though it’s hard work, you can just relax and take in the sights. I didn’t have to think about anything except pedaling, and that was refreshing. I loved it!

Thanks to all my family and friends who have followed along and offered support and words of encouragement. It makes a huge difference to help me through the tough moments. I appreciate you.

DALMAC Day 4 is finished…just one day to go! I biked 74 miles today with a total of 2700 ft of elevation gain.

This was the day where my bike just about broke. After the heavy rain two days ago, my gears have been grinding progressively worse. The suspect was a worn out chain and cassette, and the only chance at a fix would be to make it to the bike shop in Petoskey before they closed through the rest of the holiday weekend. If I didn’t make it, at best tomorrow would be really annoying with gears grinding constantly, and at worst the chain would break and I wouldn’t finish the trip.

This afternoon I pretty much went straight through without stopping (much) so I could get there. I made it at 4pm. They ended up replacing my freehub (the part that the gears on the back wheel mount to) in about 30 minutes and had me back on the road. Shout out to Mike at Latitude 45 Cycles.

I still had plenty of great times along the way. I wish I could have stopped longer in Charlevoix, because that’s a great downtown area. Maybe some other time.

Just 56 miles left of the tour! It’s hard to believe it’s almost over. Check the photos below for more stories from the day.

DALMAC day 3 is done, and we’re more than halfway to the bridge! Today at 54 miles was much shorter than the previous two 75 mile days, but the hills were a force to be reckoned with. I logged 1800 ft of ascent, and most of it was during the second half of the ride. I was cruising this morning only to run out of steam mid-day in the hills. I took some breaks and got back on track, reaching Kalkaska around 3pm.

This afternoon is the first time I’ve felt sore at the end of the day on this tour. Trying to do some stretches and feel better by tomorrow morning. While Thursday (day 2) was the longest day with respect to number of miles, tomorrow is almost as far and over 2400 ft of ascent, so I suspect it will be the toughest day of the week. It’s also going to be the most beautiful day though while we ride along Torch Lake, so I’m looking forward to it!

As always, more comments in the photos…

DALMAC Day 2 was the training check. I clocked 78 miles today, from Vestaburg (near Alma) to McBain (near Cadillac). This will be the longest day of the tour.

The mileage and almost 2000 ft of elevation gain wasn’t the biggest struggle though: the biggest hurdle was the weather. I managed to miss the morning thunderstorms (see photo comments below), but the afternoon ones were unavoidable. I was riding in rain and thunderstorms for over 3 hours. The rain gear kept me dry for awhile, but it eventually saturated through (and even just dripping off my helmet down my back). It was a wet slog for about 40 miles. Tonight, I’m trying my best to dry out my cycling shorts, shoes, and everything else.

Looking forward to knocking out an easier 50 miles tomorrow, if the weather holds. The last two days look much nicer.

DALMAC Day 1 is complete! It was supposed to be a 72 mile ride, but I clocked 74. It was hot and humid all day, with heat indices in the mid-upper 90s. Fortunately we didn’t get rained on though, so I’ll take it.

It was really something to be pulling into Alma this afternoon after starting the morning in Lansing. I still had another 13 miles to go at that point, but that struck me as a long way to ride.

Tomorrow is a few miles longer than today, but it should be 10 degrees cooler. Rain could be an issue though so we’ll see.

Check the photos below for comments about the day.

DALMAC Day 0: The family brought me down to MSU to check in and help me setup camp so I can get started first thing in the morning.

Tomorrow I’ll be riding 72 miles to Vestaburg. I’ll likely start around 7am in an attempt to beat the heat. It’s really humid here tonight with a dew point of 73, so hopefully I’ll be able to sleep.

Yesterday I biked 70 miles—one last training ride before the DALMAC. Starting Wednesday I’ll be biking 325 miles over 5 days from Lansing, MI to the Mackinaw Bridge, camping along the way. Feeling a little anxious about the ride, but it’s going to be a fun week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY

This is terrifying. Offline AI agents not only discovered a vulnerability to gain online access (and communicate between each other in the process), but then further was able to use that access to break in to a third party service. The fact that all of this was an unrelated side-effect to the active task is also very disturbing. Imagine the possibilities for agents actually instructed to find and exploit vulnerabilities.

Today I passed 2,000 miles on my road bike since I bought it in April of last year. Riding again has been a great way to reduce stress and get some fresh air.

I’ve been putting a new 16″ MacBook Pro with M5 Max through its paces. It’s about 20% faster across the board when compiling a large project in Xcode than my Mac Studio with a 28 core M3 Ultra.

The drawback? While the Mac Studio is completely silent all day long, the fans in the MBP ramp up pretty quickly (to 3500 rpm in automatic mode, and 5000 rpm in high power mode). I’ll miss a quiet office, but the speed improvement is too big to ignore.

Switching to high power mode increased the compiling speed by only a fraction of a percent, so I’ll stick with the quieter automatic setting.

Our oldest daughter learned to drive about a month ago. This evening I took her out to teach her how to drive a manual transmission. She did great, even with the sharp clutch engagement on the WRX.

Watched Project Hail Mary last week. Thoroughly enjoyed it so I started reading the book. About halfway through it and, as expected, it’s even better than the flick.

The end of an era, but we knew this was coming ever since Apple decided not to support PCIe GPUs on Apple silicon. With hardly any supported PCIe cards of real value, the Mac Studio is just the better option, period.

Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future hardware

My WRX is in the shop for a check engine light. It threw the same code as it did 3 months ago when I supposedly had it fixed. The shop looked at it for a couple of days and still can’t find the problem.

Only thing left to do is pull the engine and check all the timing components they can’t get to with it in the car.

Been planning to buy a new car sometime this year, but was hoping the kids could learn to drive on this one. Here’s hoping the fix is reasonable and that can still happen.

Just saw the Studio Display XDR. $3300 for a 5K 27” display? No thanks. The brightness, mini-LED pixels, and 120Hz are nice, but there are tons of other options with similar features for a third of the cost.

I bought the Pro Display XDR years ago. It was outrageously expensive, but at the time it was the only 6K display on the market (and had a 32” size to match). That extra resolution and size made it worth it to me. I’m kind of surprised that Apple is replacing it with a smaller model.