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Dustin Curtis


DUSTIN CURTIS


DESIGNER, HACKER, INVESTOR, NOMAD.

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LUXURY FOR EVERYONE: THOUGHTS ON VISION PRO AND APPLE’S DNA

In 2009, Microsoft released an enormous 200lb coffee table with an embedded
30-inch touchscreen called Surface. Although the iPhone had been around for a
little while, the larger screen made Surface feel absolutely futuristic: in the
Photos app, you could toss around pictures like they were physically in front of
you. It cost $10,000. Very few people ever bought it.

A little more than a year later, Apple released the $499 iPad.

Microsoft had made a $10,000 table for no one, and Apple made a $499 tablet for
everyone.

This is a common theme among Apple’s most important products. They are usually
built around existing ideas and technologies that have been improved and then
repackaged into beautiful, premium experiences which are expensive but not
unaffordable. This happened with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
Whatever the product, Apple has always brought seemingly...

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May 4, 2021


CONTRIBUTION AND ABUNDANCE

Ben Horowitz gave this remarkable response to a question about joy and happiness
on Time Well Spent:

> In my experience there are really two things that lead to happiness and
> everything else is mostly noise. The two things are contribution and
> abundance.
> 
> Contribution is basically exactly as it sounds. If you can align your life
> with where you have the talent to make a large, meaningful, and real
> contribution to the world, your circle, or your family, then you can be very
> happy. As an aside, doing so often leads to making money because when you
> create great value like Elon Musk, you get a lot in return. Now, that doesn’t
> mean you have to be a business person to be happy, because happiness comes
> from the knowledge and impact of the contribution rather than the reward.
> However, this doesn’t quite work by itself, which brings me to the second
> point: abundance.
> 
> An easy way to think of...

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Mar 1, 2021


APPLE CARD DISABLED MY ICLOUD, APP STORE, AND APPLE ID ACCOUNTS

About ten days ago, when I went to update a few apps in the App Store on my Mac,
I was met with a curious error.



The internet is filled with stories from people whose Google accounts were
locked for unexplained reasons, causing them to lose all of their data,
including years of email, so I was somewhat concerned. But I’d never heard of
similar cases involving Apple’s services, and I wouldn’t expect such behavior
from a customer-focused company like Apple, so I figured it was a glitch and
made a mental note to try again later.

The next day, Music.app stopped working.



Now I was genuinely worried. I checked my phone and neither the App Store nor
Apple Music would work there, either. A few minutes later, Calendar popped up an
error – it had stopped syncing. I immediately tried to call Apple Support from
my Mac, but Apple’s Handoff feature had been disabled as well.

The first person...

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Aug 8, 2020


BILL GATES IS ANGRY

Steven Levy interviewed Bill Gates for Wired, and it is quite an illuminating
conversation. In past public appearances, Gates – like most experts – has
attempted to walk the line between antagonizing the Trump administration and
promulgating real science. But now he appears to be finished with that nonsense.
He almost sounds angry.

On the CDC, which has been conspicuously absent during this pandemic:

> You would expect the CDC to be the most visible, not the White House or even
> Anthony Fauci. But they haven’t been the face of the epidemic. They are
> trained to communicate and not try to panic people but get people to take
> things seriously. They have basically been muzzled since the beginning. We
> called the CDC, but they told us we had to talk to the White House a bunch of
> times. Now they say, “Look, we’re doing a great job on testing, we don’t want
> to talk to you.” Even the simplest...

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Jan 28, 2020


IPAD IN 2020

A couple of months ago, I switched entirely to an iPad Pro for about two weeks.
I did not use my MacBook Pro at all, and forced myself to do everything on the
iPad. After that experience, I planned to write some kind of review, but it
turned out that my conclusions were pretty simple:

iPad Pro running iOS 13 can technically do almost everything a MacBook Pro can,
but it is incredibly frustrating to use. Accomplishing anything other than
trivial tasks takes 2-5x longer with 10x more cognitive overhead than on a Mac.
iPadOS is simply an annoying operating system to use.

The iPad is amazing for content consumption and certain types of gaming, but no
matter how much Apple pundits might try to say the iPad is a device well-suited
for “creation,” it just isn’t – unless you are an artist using Apple Pencil.

And so, as the iPad turns ten years old this week, I agree with John Gruber’s...

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Nov 25, 2019


THE 16-INCH MACBOOK PRO: A FASTER HORSE

From Apple’s announcement of the 16-Inch MacBook Pro a couple of weeks ago:

> “Our pro customers tell us they want their next MacBook Pro to have a larger
> display, blazing-fast performance, the biggest battery possible, the best
> notebook keyboard ever, awesome speakers and massive amounts of storage, and
> the 16-inch MacBook Pro delivers all of that and more,” said Tom Boger,
> Apple’s senior director of Mac and iPad Product Marketing.

It’s almost unthinkable, but it appears that Apple compiled a laundry list of
customer complaints about the 15-Inch MacBook Pro and then simply addressed
them, matter-of-factly. Bigger screen? Sure. Unreliable keyboard? Reverted. Not
enough RAM? Fixed. There is no story behind the 16-Inch MacBook Pro. It has no
soul. It is just a larger, heavier 15-Inch MacBook Pro that lazily fixes some
serious flaws that have been left extremely conspicuously unaddressed...

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Nov 1, 2019


APPLE TV, APPLE TV, APPLE TV, AND APPLE TV+

‪Apple TV is a hardware device.

‪Apple TV is an app on Apple TV that curates content you can buy from Apple and
also content you can stream through other installed apps (but not all apps, and
there is no way to tell which ones).

Apple TV is an app on iOS/iPadOS devices that operates similarly to Apple TV on
Apple TV. Apple TV on iOS/iPadOS syncs playback and watch history with Apple TV
on Apple TV, but only if the iOS/iPadOS device has the same apps installed as
the Apple TV – and not all apps are available on all platforms. Apple TV is also
an app on macOS, but it does not show content that can only be streamed from
external apps on an Apple TV or iOS/iPadOS device.

Apple TV is an app or built-in feature of other devices, like smart TVs and
streaming set-top boxes, but when Apple TV is running on a third party device,
it does not show content from other installed apps on that...

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Oct 14, 2019


BUILDING NEW WORLDS

Earlier this summer, the New York Times published an opinion piece titled The
World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism, by Aaron Bastani:

> To say the present era is one of crisis borders on cliché. We inhabit a world
> of low growth, low productivity and low wages, of climate breakdown and the
> collapse of democratic politics. A world where billions, mostly in the global
> south, live in poverty. A world defined by inequality.
> 
> But the most pressing crisis of all, arguably, is an absence of collective
> imagination. It is as if humanity has been afflicted by a psychological
> complex, in which we believe the present world is stronger than our capacity
> to remake it – as if it were not our ancestors who created what stands before
> us now. As if the very essence of humanity, if there is such a thing, is not
> to constantly build new worlds.
> 
> If we can move beyond such a failure, we...

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Jul 21, 2019


BOURDAIN ON THE JOURNEY

> Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts,
> it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should
> change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your
> heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave
> something good behind.
> 
> Anthony Bourdain

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Published from Medellín, Colombia.

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Jun 3, 2019


HOW TO HOST A STATIC WEBSITE WITH HTTPS ON AWS, USING S3 AND CLOUDFRONT

Amazon’s AWS is an inexpensive and limitlessly scalable platform that can be
ideal for hosting fast, secure, and reliable static websites. I host several
sites using the method described below, and it costs me pennies per month. The
only problem is that getting things set up–especially with HTTPS support–isn’t
exactly straightforward.

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SUMMARY

 * We’ll create and configure two S3 buckets. One will serve static content via
   S3. The other will be used simply to redirect www.yourdomain.com to
   yourdomain.com.
 * We’ll create an SSL certificate using AWS Certificate Manager.
 * We’ll set up two CloudFront distributions which will use the S3 buckets as
   origins. (The website itself will be served through CloudFront’s edge
   locations, but the files will be stored on S3.)
 * We’ll set up DNS alias records which point to CloudFront, using Route 53.

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CONFIGURE S3

 1. Create two buckets in S3. It doesn’t...

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