I’ve missed you, too

I haven’t had a lot of time for personal projects lately. Partly because I switched my ADHD meds to Vyvanse, which isn’t great for my attention but does keep my bipolar in check, meaning I’ve had moderate concentration abilities combined with a complete lack of all-night manic coding binges. Which, by and large, is better for my productivity overall, but definitely means less time spent on side projects. I’m at a point in my life where that’s the preferable outcome.

That said, I’ve pushed some updates to Doing recently, and have been working on a Bunch bug or two. Marked has gotten a couple of bugfixes pushed, and we’re so close to getting nvUltra out the door. Between Fletcher and I, time for it has been tight, but we’ve put a feature freeze on it and are just finalizing the MAS testing for the in-app purchase and subscription setup we’re going to use to allow us to offer a free trial and a sustainable pricing structure. More soon.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten some new hardware recently that I thought warranted a quick post.

First, I got my new Mac Studio. I didn’t go all out on it; I got the Max with 64G of RAM, but it leaves my M1 mini in the dust. Compiler tasks that took about 30 seconds on the mini now take 5 seconds on the Studio. And the test suite for Doing used to take about 72 seconds to run, and now takes 30 — which is impressive mostly because what slows those tests down is a ton of file read/writes that processor speed can’t improve anyway. So I’m very happy with the purchase, and if you’re looking for a Mac with top performance, the Studio is an excellent choice.

Second, I got an OWC Express 4M2 for work with a couple of NME SSD cards and I’m so blown away by the speed that I’ll soon be purchasing a second one for myself. 1345 MB/s read and 1436 MB/s writes. It’s crazy fast for an external drive, and you can put together terrabytes worth of storage for less than buying individual external SSD drives. I also got a G-RAID for 36TB of backup space, and over a Thunderbolt 4 connection that one gets 482/514 MB/s even with platter drives. Now I just need a faster Synology…

Well, that’s my update for now. I know my posting pace has slowed a bit, but I’m grateful to all of the BrettTerpstra.com readers who support my work with monthly donations. I’ll keep putting out (and supporting) new stuff, and I’ll be working to post a bit more often.