Author: mike

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My MacBook Pro 14” M1 Max arrived yesterday. My concerns about fan noise have been unfounded thus far.

I haven’t done any real heavy work yet. However, while installing a 2GB OS update and a few dozen apps (Xcode, FCP, Office…), the fans stay off most of the time. When they do spin up, they are at ~2300 rpm, and are inaudible from typical working distance in my quiet office.

If I hold my head close to the laptop, I can _just_ hear the air movement. At that point, my idle 16” MacBook Pro that is six feet away sounds louder. Heck, even my previous quiet Mac benchmark, a 2013 Mac Pro, is louder from 6’ than the 14” MBP from 6 inches.

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Really impressed with the memory bandwidth of the M1 Max… 400GB/s is way faster than DDR4.

Single channel DDR4-3200 is only 25GB/s, so even EPYC servers with 8 channel memory only run at half the bandwidth.

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A reminder to check your backups periodically. I was about to do a quick Time Machine restore this morning only to find my backups haven’t been running for the past 2 months.

I disabled them while traveling to avoid sending so much data over the VPN connection home.

Luckily, I had the files in another spot so I avoided data loss. Which brings up another topic…have multiple backups.

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I’ve been MIA online a lot lately. For awhile I’ve been focused on this… It’s a ’94 Miata that my parents owned but wanted to get rid of since it needed a lot of engine work.

My wife and I took it on and ended up having the engine replaced (it took a shop 3 months). When it was finally ready, we flew to California last month to pick it up. We spent a few days putting a new canvas top on it and making some additional repairs.

Then we drove it 2700 miles along I-40 and stopped at sights along Route 66 on the way back to Michigan.

A friend described what we did as having open heart surgery and then running a marathon. That feels like an apt comparison. The trip went more smoothly than I could imagine though.

It still needs some work, which I’m excited to learn how to do myself. It could use a good paint job too. But welcome to the family, little Miata.

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Seeing huge performance gains after implementing Seasonality’s Particle Mode in a Metal compute kernel. Able to simulate 12x the number of particles at 3 times the frame rate, using less than half the CPU.

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I just released a new app…this is my first game and it’s called Tower Mixup. If you like puzzle-style games, this one’s for you. I developed it using SwiftUI over the last two weeks. Check it out and let me know what you think…I’m releasing it for free with ads.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tower-mixup/id1565219152

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What an amazing game! I thought they were going to double OT for sure… UCLA has been so fun to watch during this tournament and Gonzaga had to dig deep to pull this one off. Let’s see if they can wrap up a perfect season in the Championship game.

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And today, I’m working on converting thousands of lines of OpenGL code to Metal. Decided to write a Renderer abstraction layer that supports both frameworks to make a smooth transition. Goal is to get it done by the end of this month.