Zac West
@zacwe.st
iOS, macOS, everything-else developer. https://zacwe.st
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking ★★★★☆: I stumbled upon this “I should read that some day” book and enjoyed it. He does a phenomenal job explaining concepts from the ground up. The updates from years later were inspiring about humanity’s progress.
October 15, 2025 at 5:06 AM
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking ★★★★☆: I stumbled upon this “I should read that some day” book and enjoyed it. He does a phenomenal job explaining concepts from the ground up. The updates from years later were inspiring about humanity’s progress.
Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: I actually finished this shortly after it was released, but sat with it in my head for a while, not sure how I felt about my time with it. Incredibly compelling story, I couldn’t stop for a moment. The characters were just so fun!
October 1, 2025 at 4:47 AM
Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: I actually finished this shortly after it was released, but sat with it in my head for a while, not sure how I felt about my time with it. Incredibly compelling story, I couldn’t stop for a moment. The characters were just so fun!
Great totally unspellable idea for an assistant app from the wonderful Rob Words newsletter:
"NOMENCLATOR: a servant employed to ensure their master doesn’t forget anyone’s name"
"NOMENCLATOR: a servant employed to ensure their master doesn’t forget anyone’s name"
July 12, 2025 at 8:43 PM
Great totally unspellable idea for an assistant app from the wonderful Rob Words newsletter:
"NOMENCLATOR: a servant employed to ensure their master doesn’t forget anyone’s name"
"NOMENCLATOR: a servant employed to ensure their master doesn’t forget anyone’s name"
Haven’t been very successful with AI assistants writing production Swift or Objective-C, but I did find a valuable debug use: annotating code paths and methods in a file with print statements. Helps those gnarly timing or ordering bugs.
June 4, 2025 at 3:14 AM
Haven’t been very successful with AI assistants writing production Swift or Objective-C, but I did find a valuable debug use: annotating code paths and methods in a file with print statements. Helps those gnarly timing or ordering bugs.
The age plugin paper-age looks to be neat way to print small secrets on paper. I don’t see myself writing the passphrase onto it, though.
April 29, 2025 at 5:25 AM
The age plugin paper-age looks to be neat way to print small secrets on paper. I don’t see myself writing the passphrase onto it, though.
There’s something really soothing to my brain that Fedora 42 came out on the same day that baseball players were wearing #42 for Jackie Robinson Day.
April 17, 2025 at 3:01 AM
There’s something really soothing to my brain that Fedora 42 came out on the same day that baseball players were wearing #42 for Jackie Robinson Day.
Stalwart has Proton-like on-receipt encryption which encrypts incoming messages against a destination’s public PGP key. I’m not sure I have the willpower to self-host email but it’ll be tempting once it gains calendar/contact syncing and push on iOS.
April 9, 2025 at 3:51 AM
Stalwart has Proton-like on-receipt encryption which encrypts incoming messages against a destination’s public PGP key. I’m not sure I have the willpower to self-host email but it’ll be tempting once it gains calendar/contact syncing and push on iOS.
Starting off the season by emailing NBC Sports to ask that they please use a monospace digit font for the centered pitch clock countdown so it stops bouncing around.
March 29, 2025 at 8:55 PM
Starting off the season by emailing NBC Sports to ask that they please use a monospace digit font for the centered pitch clock countdown so it stops bouncing around.
Continuing what would be my normal complaining about baseball streaming costs, this year is such an improvement:
$20/mo for MLB.tv Giants. No commercials‽ This is heaven.
$26/mo for Peacock+Giants. Bad quality video, frustrating app. Easy “no.”
$85+/mo for anything else.
$20/mo for MLB.tv Giants. No commercials‽ This is heaven.
$26/mo for Peacock+Giants. Bad quality video, frustrating app. Easy “no.”
$85+/mo for anything else.
March 29, 2025 at 8:28 PM
Continuing what would be my normal complaining about baseball streaming costs, this year is such an improvement:
$20/mo for MLB.tv Giants. No commercials‽ This is heaven.
$26/mo for Peacock+Giants. Bad quality video, frustrating app. Easy “no.”
$85+/mo for anything else.
$20/mo for MLB.tv Giants. No commercials‽ This is heaven.
$26/mo for Peacock+Giants. Bad quality video, frustrating app. Easy “no.”
$85+/mo for anything else.
Unlike macOS, iOS and Linux, Android does not support a CNAME to private domains (in this case a Tailscale ts.net) because its resolver doesn’t request after it encounters one; it just fails. A tad frustrating since it means a significantly more complicated DNS setup just for the one OS.
March 1, 2025 at 5:49 PM
Unlike macOS, iOS and Linux, Android does not support a CNAME to private domains (in this case a Tailscale ts.net) because its resolver doesn’t request after it encounters one; it just fails. A tad frustrating since it means a significantly more complicated DNS setup just for the one OS.
“AI-free since 1990” is a great tag line for SiriusXM; doubling-down on not doing algorithmic radio is hopefully a long-term strategic success for them. Human-curated just hits differently.
February 22, 2025 at 12:17 AM
“AI-free since 1990” is a great tag line for SiriusXM; doubling-down on not doing algorithmic radio is hopefully a long-term strategic success for them. Human-curated just hits differently.
Enclosed is the platonic ideal of an encrypted pastebin: beautiful, performant, scriptable, open source and easy to self-host. It even supports file uploads.
February 21, 2025 at 4:10 AM
Enclosed is the platonic ideal of an encrypted pastebin: beautiful, performant, scriptable, open source and easy to self-host. It even supports file uploads.
Amazon is removing the ability to download purchased Kindle content, which is the only way to read it on my Kobo or elsewhere. What this means is I will no longer be purchasing (“a license to”–ick) any books by the mostly independent authors who exclusively publish there; just cancelled preorders.
February 12, 2025 at 3:07 PM
Amazon is removing the ability to download purchased Kindle content, which is the only way to read it on my Kobo or elsewhere. What this means is I will no longer be purchasing (“a license to”–ick) any books by the mostly independent authors who exclusively publish there; just cancelled preorders.
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying (Dark Lord Davi #1) by Django Wexler ★★★★☆: What a surprise! I went in somewhat blind expecting something softer like his Forbidden Library series and it is quite not. It’s a funny, violent, isekai-... https://zacwe.st/2025/01/07/how-to-become-the-dark.html
January 7, 2025 at 3:00 PM
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying (Dark Lord Davi #1) by Django Wexler ★★★★☆: What a surprise! I went in somewhat blind expecting something softer like his Forbidden Library series and it is quite not. It’s a funny, violent, isekai-... https://zacwe.st/2025/01/07/how-to-become-the-dark.html
I’ve been using my phone for sysadmin tasks as laptops are tough around young kids. Vim keybindings are so good! Significantly reduces the toil of editing on a phone. I want it in every app.
January 7, 2025 at 7:12 AM
I’ve been using my phone for sysadmin tasks as laptops are tough around young kids. Vim keybindings are so good! Significantly reduces the toil of editing on a phone. I want it in every app.
The new year means 20 new books on Standard Ebooks after entering the public domain. Nice assortment this year as well.
January 1, 2025 at 3:57 PM
The new year means 20 new books on Standard Ebooks after entering the public domain. Nice assortment this year as well.
My meal kit delivery is arriving 3 days late tomorrow. I wonder what temperature the contents will arrive at: clearly unsafe, of course, but how unsafe?
December 26, 2024 at 10:50 PM
My meal kit delivery is arriving 3 days late tomorrow. I wonder what temperature the contents will arrive at: clearly unsafe, of course, but how unsafe?
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett ★★★★★: Phenomenal fantasy murder mystery. My mental checklist was satisfyingly fully resolved in the last 10%.
December 25, 2024 at 7:55 AM
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett ★★★★★: Phenomenal fantasy murder mystery. My mental checklist was satisfyingly fully resolved in the last 10%.
send.djazz.se is a convenient way to send ePubs out-of-band to Kobo. Calibre and KoboTouchExtended automate it but the latter’s had a bug for a few releases causing whitespace issues and one of my books snuck through. It was easier to use this from my phone than getting out of bed to grab my laptop.
December 20, 2024 at 8:15 PM
send.djazz.se is a convenient way to send ePubs out-of-band to Kobo. Calibre and KoboTouchExtended automate it but the latter’s had a bug for a few releases causing whitespace issues and one of my books snuck through. It was easier to use this from my phone than getting out of bed to grab my laptop.
When Wizards Follow Fools by Andrew Rowe ★★★★☆: More depth to the LitRPG aspects is fun; definitely enjoying the increased understanding of the magic systems.
December 19, 2024 at 6:48 PM
When Wizards Follow Fools by Andrew Rowe ★★★★☆: More depth to the LitRPG aspects is fun; definitely enjoying the increased understanding of the magic systems.
All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★ (Spoilers): Inverted my expectations of lost siblings: strongly heart-warming rather than heart-breaking like Tigana. Loved the depth of lived religious experiences and how certain characters receiving an epilogue comfortably filled in the story.
December 6, 2024 at 6:47 AM
All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★ (Spoilers): Inverted my expectations of lost siblings: strongly heart-warming rather than heart-breaking like Tigana. Loved the depth of lived religious experiences and how certain characters receiving an epilogue comfortably filled in the story.
Arrived yesterday at an airport with less than an hour to departure time with a few checked bags. Barely made it on the plane, however one of the bags did not. Impressed with how fast American Airlines delivered it this morning. I enjoyed tracking it in Find My!
December 3, 2024 at 12:13 AM
Arrived yesterday at an airport with less than an hour to departure time with a few checked bags. Barely made it on the plane, however one of the bags did not. Impressed with how fast American Airlines delivered it this morning. I enjoyed tracking it in Find My!
Gitea’s mirroring of Git repositories proves useful with how often legal projects like DRM strippers are taken down. The utility I use to download & remove Adobe DRM is gone but still available on my server and in my backups. Presumably this new tool for Apple Books will suffer a similar fate.
November 28, 2024 at 4:06 AM
Gitea’s mirroring of Git repositories proves useful with how often legal projects like DRM strippers are taken down. The utility I use to download & remove Adobe DRM is gone but still available on my server and in my backups. Presumably this new tool for Apple Books will suffer a similar fate.
A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: Every Kay novel can be summed up as: thorough. This fills in the background of stories past–and works better knowing them–while feeling individually compelling. What rich characters, even the “villain” is once again somehow lovable.
November 27, 2024 at 5:21 AM
A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: Every Kay novel can be summed up as: thorough. This fills in the background of stories past–and works better knowing them–while feeling individually compelling. What rich characters, even the “villain” is once again somehow lovable.