“Review: Brompton Electric T-Line with E-Motiq”

Chris Haslam, writing at WIRED:

The typical commuter electric bike weighs between 40 and 65 pounds. The battery, motor, and components needed to hurtle you up hills can double, or even triple, the weight of a traditional bicycle. The new Brompton Electric T Line e-Motiq weighs just 31 pounds, and that’s with its 345-Wh battery attached. Remove the battery pack and it is a diaphanous 24.6 pounds. In comparison, the original steel Brompton Electric weighed 32.4 pounds, plus an additional 6.4 pounds for the battery.

Virtually anyone who has ridden an electric bike will attest to the fun, freedom, and convenience they offer. Almost everyone who has tried to lift a electric bike up a flight of stairs or onto a roof rack will be able to recommend a good chiropractor. For those without a garage or easily accessible shed, they can often feel as portable as a motorbike, just twice as easy to steal.

Man, an electric T-Line sounds almost perfect. 24.6 pounds without the battery sounds amazing, and the 32.4 with it is about the weight of my non-electric G Line. The two big cons: the almost $8,000 price tag and the 15 MPH limit. The former is expected with the top-of-the-range offering here, but the latter is unforgivable, since they already dealt with that issue on the electric G Line, which can go the full Class I 20 MPH. That extra 5 MPH is important—it’s the difference between being able to keep up in traffic, and just getting blown out of the way.

The third big con: I found the classic Brompton 16-inch wheel models to be too twitchy for my liking. Still, it’s a pretty nice next step for Brompton electric bikes.

The Folding Brompton Electric T-Line Is a Stylish Commuter Dream

Brompton’s latest folding electric bicycle is beautiful, genuinely portable, and doesn’t quite go fast enough.

www.wired.com

“Doubling the voltage: What 800 V architecture really changes in EVs”

This is a good, basic primer on why 800V architecture matters in EVs. We’ve dealt with a similar topic in RVs. The Volta system in our Storyteller Overland MODE4x4 has a 58V architecture, while many similar RVs run at 12 or 24V systems, with similar rationale. Obviously, EVs run bigger capacities all around, so they benefit from higher voltage architectures.

Doubling the voltage: What 800 V architecture really changes in EVs

Confused about electric vehicle voltages? You won’t be after reading this.

arstechnica.com

www.bbc.com:

A cardboard box found in a collector’s “ramshackle” collection of vintage films contained two episodes of Doctor Who that have not been viewed since airing in the 1960s.

The episodes feature the first incarnation of the Doctor, played by William Hartnell, tackling a Dalek plan to take over Earth, the solar system and the galaxy in a storyline only ever shown in the UK.

While the First Doctor was never my favorite, this is still very cool. I’d love to see these early episodes.

Lost Doctor Who and the Daleks episodes discovered in ‘ramshackle’ collection

The Doctor’s assistant Peter Purves was invited to a screening of the episodes in Leicester.

www.bbc.com

Dell Cameron, writing at WIRED:

A bipartisan privacy coalition in the United States Congress introduced legislation on Thursday that would impose a strict warrant requirement on the FBI’s backdoor searches of Americans’ communications, aligning federal law with a 2025 federal court ruling that found the warrantless practice unconstitutional.

I wish we insisted that our congressmembers treat the fourth amendment as being as important as the first or second.

US Lawmakers Move to Kill the FBI’s Warrantless Wiretap Access

A bipartisan bill would force the FBI to get a warrant to read Americans’ messages and ban the federal purchase of commercial data on US residents ahead of a critical April deadline.

www.wired.com

Garrett Murray, writing at Karbon Based:

I am so disappointed Apple decided to discontinue the 32-inch Pro Display XDR. After so many years, I assumed Apple would at least maintain the product and push an update similar to the 27-inch version they just released, but obviously they didn’t see enough traction with this high-end, limited-audience display and just decided to scrap it entirely. As Wade said, while the new 27-inch Studio Display XDR features are welcome improvements, downgrading to a 27-inch main display is not something I’m interested in. I will likely just accept the lower brightness and contrast ratios of something like the LG UltraFine evo because, for me, the screen real estate and density are far too valuable.

As I wrote earlier, I agree with this sentiment. Hopefully our Pro Display XDRs last a long time, time enough for something better to come along.

Karbon Based — Studio Display XDR vs Pro Display XDR

Karbon Based is the internet home of Garrett Murray. Garrett is the Founder & Managing Director of Karbon, a mobile apps design and development agency. His current interests include mechanical keyboards, video games, technology and photography.

karbonbased.io

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

“…which is when I got ‘the call’—I was going to be on Jeopardy! in one month.”

Very cool! As a life-long viewer of Jeopardy! and a long-time follower of Snell’s, it’s fun to see those worlds cross over. As he points out in the article, this means that Six Colors has sent three of its number to play on the Alex Trebek stage…pretty amazing. I’d have seen it anyway, but I definitely won’t miss next Thursday’s game now.

I’ll take ‘beach reading’ for $1000, Ken

So I had a pretty weird January. While planning for a week on vacation, two things happened that totally derailed me. The Wall Street Journal asked me to review David Pogue’s book “Appl…

sixcolors.com

This look into the creative process behind Apple’s spatial environments in the Vision Pro was fun. Most of the article focuses on the process behind bringing Jupiter to the platform as an enviroment, and is worth a read.

Crafting the Cosmos: The Design Behind Apple Vision Pro’s Environments

There is a particular quality of stillness that descends when you put on an Apple Vision Pro and find yourself at the edge of a mountain lake—not in a room anymore, but not quite elsewhere either.

coolhunting.com

The MacBook Pros with M5 Max & Pro

While they’ve been overshadowed in the press by the introduction of the new, entry level MacBook Neo, Apple introduced new MacBook Pros as well. Dan Moren covers the basics well over at Six Colors:

Apple debuts MacBook Pros with M5 Pro, M5 Max chips

Day two of March’s Apple product extravaganza, uh, marches on with the announcement of MacBook Pro models bearing new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, updated wireless capabilities, and both more and…

sixcolors.com

While these could be dismissed as just the same thing with new processors, there are a few other upgrades worth taking note of. First, the storage speeds are just bonkers: these new MBPs have double the already blazing speeds of the SSDs in the previous generation M4-based MBPs. They also have faster memory bandwidth, and the new N1 chip, which adds WiFi 7.

A personal detour

I’ve been a long-time laptop-as-main-computer guy, way before it was cool—or wise: my first go at the portable main computer was the PowerBook 1400cs. Of course, PowerBooks and then MacBook Pros have been the form factor for many years.

However, when the Mac Studio debuted, I thought I might give a real desktop a spin. Since COVID, I’m mostly working from home, after all. I bought a Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra, and it was certainly a worthwhile machine. But I did get a bit frustrated with having my portable machine, whether an iPad Pro or a MacBook Air, not have my stuff on it, especially my dev environment. Last year, I sold my Mac Studio in favor of another experiment: I started maining a 13″ M4 MacBook Air, maxxed out with 32GB RAM and a 2TB SSD. It’s a great computer, and the portability/form factor is awesome.

But: you know how I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I’ve been working on a new tool for maintaining this website? That tool I’ve been making is a Mac-native app (with accompanying iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS counterparts). And you know what takes a crap-ton of horsepower? Native app development. Here’s how it’s been going:

Full circle

If you read my last article on the XDR, you’ll see a parallel: my computing life has been a bit of an experiment the past 3 or so years. (And I haven’t even gone into the experiment with a Framework Desktop running Omarchy Linux, with a side of Windows 11!) With my monitor sorted—and being almost happy with my journey away from MacBook Pros—I’ve decided I want the horsepower, so it’s time to stop screwing around and come home.

Sold: the Framework machine. For sale: the M4 MBA. Incoming: a 14″ MacBook Pro with the M5 Max. I’m sure I’ll have more to say once I spend some time compiling and running test suites on it.

RSS Making the Rounds

There sure seems to be a lot of RSS-related stuff going around recently. I’ve seen some interesting articles and even new software being released. First up, NetNewsWire: I mentioned about a month ago that NNW just turned 23 years old, and its 7.0 release has a fresh, Liquid Glass update. (And there’s an even more recent release updated for older OSes for the anti-Tahoe crowd.) Good stuff from a venerable RSS citizen.

I can’t remember the order I came across these other bits in, so I’ll just start with…

Caroline Crampton:

I read a lot on the web. I almost never look at websites, though. I consume almost everything through an RSS reader. As AI reshapes the way online information is organised and consumed, it increasingly feels like I’m behind the scenes, watching the performance from the wings rather than seeing it from the front as intended. I thought I’d tell you why I do this and what it looks like.

I enjoyed this look at RSS through someone else’s eyes, especially someone who relies on it so heavily for their work.

The View From RSS

What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds.

www.carolinecrampton.com

I’ve only noticed a site putting out RSS-only content for search engine optimization a few times, and it was always Outside properties, like Pinkbike. They would put an article on Pinkbike that was only a title and a link to other Outside articles on other sites. Pretty lame.

I saw this article being discussed on Hacker News, and I got a fun dose of TIL in the comments there:

“Reddit also has RSS feeds, add `.rss` to urls.”

Neat!

Cory Doctorow, blogging about “Personal Disenshittification”:

For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It’s a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:

https://kottke.org/rolodex/

I disagree that it’s been dormant, but it certainly hasn’t been mainstream for quite some time. I’ll agree with him that it “continues to be a power user-coded niche”. But let’s not let that Kottke link go by unexamined: it’s a pretty nice take on a blogroll that includes the most recent posts in the listing. He explained it when he introduced it here:

The KDO Rolodex Is Now a Wee Feed Reader?

Hello, good afternoon! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a bunch of new stuff for KDO in the pipeline. I’ve been focused on backend infrastructure recently

kottke.org

And Manton Reece of Micro.blog, who has been a consistent proponent of RSS, introduced a new feed reader yesterday, Inkwell.

Manton Reece - Introducing Inkwell

www.manton.org

There have been others too! It might be too early to declare an RSS renaissance, but this flurry of activity is a good sign.

While this article follows from the opening, “Know what I miss? Sports photography”, I enjoyed the musings about tennis, which resonated with me. I really liked the insight:

Because matches are “best of,” (best two out of three or best three out of five), if the match is lopsided it’s over quicker, and if it’s closer and more competitive it lasts longer.

Along with several other points, I found this a good read. Another observation that I have feelings about:

Tennis does have one huge weakness, though, which is that it’s being swiftly replaced at the amateur level by pickleball and padel and might not even survive more than another few decades.

I’ve been playing pickleball quite a bit lately, and really enjoying it. Whereas I was never able to keep tennis in my repertoire, mostly because none of my friends wanted to play, I have found that pickleball is more accessible and fun for them. So, pickleball it is. But if pickleball’s rise leads to the fall of tennis, that would make me sad.

Sports Photography | The Online Photographer

Get more from The Online Photographer on Patreon

www.patreon.com

I’m working on a new tool to publish this site (more on that soon), and I accidentally changed the guids for items in the RSS feed, making the last few show back up as new in feedreaders. Sorry about that!

The Apple Studio Display XDR

Last week, Apple released a whole bunch of new stuff, including a couple of things I found particularly interesting. But perhaps the most interesting was the Studio Display XDR. If you’re unfamiliar with it, I like Marques Brownlee’s take as an introduction:

Apple Studio Display XDR Review: We’re All Pros Now!

The Studio Display XDR is really good. And really expensive.MKBHD Merch: http://shop.MKBHD.comApple Studio Display XDR: https://geni.us/eVYQk (Affiliate Link…

www.youtube.com

I bought a used Pro Display XDR after working on a lower-pixel density but ultrawide monitor for over a year, and then temporarily using a Retina external display again, which made me realize I missed the higher density. At the time, it did occur to me that the XDR was long in the tooth, and it could be replaced in the lineup soon. Buying used made taking that chance more acceptable, but if they released an update that improved on the things that I really wanted from the XDR—large size, high resolution, Apple aesthetics—at a more reasonable price, I’d be sad. But Apple updates its monitors so infrequently that it’s a fool’s errand to try and make any decision based on when an update might come.

The Studio Display XDR is a kind of replacement for the Pro Display XDR, though Apple isn’t calling it a replacement. The new XDR is a 27″ 5K monitor, not a 32″ 6K one. It is also less expensive than the Pro Display by half-ish. Among the improvements over the Pro Display XDR are: many more local dimming zones for better contrast with less blooming, higher brightness specs, a built-in web camera and speakers, and an included adjustable stand. Those are all notable and interesting to me, especially the increased local dimming zones. But by far the improvement I’m the most jealous of is that the new display can run at a 120 Hz refresh rate.

Now, I don’t care much about the parts of the Pro Display XDR that makes its insane price justifiable to some, like those who work in high-end color correction and video production, which is why I refused to pay full price for one. But the Studio Display XDR targets exactly the kinds of things I do care about, so I’m happy that Apple decided to aim it at people like me more precisely. And, don’t get me wrong, I’d likely have pre-ordered one if I hadn’t already bought the Pro Display XDR.

But I love big monitors. The reason I strayed from Retina in the first place was to get away from dual 27″ monitors and get more real estate on one screen. I got other benefits too, and they’ll sound familiar: OLED (better blacks/contrast) and a 120 Hz refresh rate. (Well, technically, the monitor could do 240 Hz, but my Mac couldn’t push it at that, and 120 is fine for my eyes.) So, while I’m jealous of the other improvements, the downgrade in real estate is going to keep me on the Pro Display XDR. In fact, I’m happy I made the jump, and am more secure in that decision now that I know about the new monitor.