• The Apple Watch Series 12: Return of the (Ceramic) King

    The last time I wrote about the Apple Watch, I was stuck deciding between the regular, traditional stainless steel and the incredible, futuristic, space black stainless steel of the Apple Watch Series 4. I never posted a follow-up to that post, but I ended up buying the regular stainless steel, combined with a Milanese loop to get a discount on the latter. And when the Apple Watch Series 9 rolled around, I ordered the regular stainless steel version again, content with my decision to get maybe not the flashiest watch overall, but definitely a classy — some might even say timeless — watch in its own right. And for the three years where I owned an iPhone 14 Pro with its polished stainless steel sides, it nicely matched my stainless steel Apple Watch Series 9. Can’t do that with a space black stainless steel.

    For reasons unknown, the Apple Watch I wanted both of the last times I’ve been in the market for the Apple Watch, hasn’t been available. By the time the Series 4 rolled around, Apple had put the ceramic edition of the Apple Watch on a year-long hiatus, only for it to return the very next year with the Series 5. Yeah, I have no idea why, either. Then when the Series 6 came the following year, ceramic was gone again! Madness.

    Not that the ceramic Apple Watch would have been a financially viable option for me at either of those points in time anyway. In those days, the ceramic editions sold for almost twice the price of the stainless steel, which already carried a hefty premium over the aluminium models while providing the exact same functionality software-wise. Ceramic pricing was so far up and to the right, that ceramic watches even cost more than the luxe titanium and luxury Hermés models, representing the most opulent Apple Watch Edition of the time. Even if my heart wanted one, my bank balance vehemently disagreed. Yeah, no thanks.

    But with the Apple Watch Series 12, the ceramic is back. And while it’s still pricey, and costs more than the titanium versions which in turn replaced the stainless steel models this generation, it doesn’t carry such an extreme price premium over its ceramic predecessors. This time around, the ceramic is less than the Hermés, even if I think at least a third of the Hermés pricing is the Hermés band you get with it. While I think the lack of stainless steel is a conscious choice now that no iPhone of the same generation uses the material, I think the price is reasonable. Best of all, the ceramic Apple Watch Series 12 is still available in the glossy white that previous ceramic Apple Watches came in. It’s finally back, better than ever, and should be the easiest day-one purchase I’ve ever made.

    Or is it?

    There are two issues preventing me from having pre-ordered one. First, I’m going overseas in December, so if I want to claim the GST back on my new Apple Watch Series 12, I need to wait until I’m within the 60-day tax-free window. So I have a little time to decide. To ponder, to muse. To be certain that the ceramic is what I want, not just some new shiny.

    The second issue far more insidious.

    For whatever reason, the Apple Watch Series 12 has an interesting design decision compared to previous Apple Watches. To be clear, this doesn’t seem to be unique to the ceramic, just affects it disproportionally due to the price difference. While the Series 10 introduced a design change that slightly increased screen size and made the watch overall have more gently-rounded corners instead of the rounded-but-square corners of previous Apple Watches, the Series 12 now has a bigger glass front that was previously taken up by your case material of choice, i.e. aluminium, stainless steel, or titanium.

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  • New theme: Endgame

    The Avengers: Endgame movie header image

    If you’re reading this, then I’m afraid to tell you that it has all gone off without a hitch and the great blog migration of 2026 has been completed successfully. We’re now live on a new host, in a new country, on a new continent, and with a fresh coat of paint to boot.

    I’ve never been particularly fussy about my theme here. While I’ve definitely had preferences, and have never shied away from moving something around, or changing something here and there, I’ve never been particularly bothered about anything overall. Despite a number of theme changes over the years, Show Off by WooThemes (Internet Archive link, because the original is long gone) has been a fine theme that I’ve been happy with for many years. But we’ve had Show Off for a long time now, and for a few years, I’ve had a few ideas about what my blog would look like, if it was something I had to design “from scratch”. But hold onto that thought, because we’ll come back to this.

    Email receipts show I purchased Show Off from WooThemes in November 2013. How soon I implemented it after that is a mystery; a post from October says I updated some post visuals, but there’s no posts around that time that indicate I changed themes entirely, at least not in the same way that there were the previous times this happened. Which, surprisingly, turned out to be quite a few times in the first few years’ of this blog’s infancy. Let’s chalk the rapid change of theme to the rapid pace of change of the web at the time, my own changing preferences as I learned about what I wanted and what I didn’t, and probably a little too much time on my hands. How else would I have gone looking for WordPress themes? Where there’s lots of low-quality themes, outright scams where you might download some malware instead of a theme ZIP file, and all of that is before getting to designs I actually like? Anyway, for all I know I could have sat on Show Off for the better part of a year, and only made the switch around the time I changed from shared Australian hosting to a VPS in New York from Digital Ocean, where my blog has happily been served for over a decade now. But we’ll come back to this, too.

    And while I’ve never really hated the current theme, I’ve never really loved it, either. It’s been firmly ensconced within “acceptably OK” territory all this time. Framework themes are a bit like that. They’re over-engineered to cater for a wide variety of layouts and tastes and styles and personal preferences, but at the same time, lack the kinds of personal flairs that make a personal blog, well, personal. I’ve never needed WooCommerce compatibility, nor a fraction of as many plugins as they offered at the time. I enjoyed the flexibility of being able to customise the theme to my liking, and based on screenshots of the original theme I did exactly that, but even then, that was a one-and-done thing to setup the look and feel until I had something that I was happy with, not something that I continually re-visited on an ongoing basis. And now that I’ve been there and done that, all that flexibility is just extra baggage. Useful and necessary, at the outset, but now just something you’ve been dragging around on your journey when you could have had something more sleek and lightweight.

    And as the years have rolled by, and both cosmetic and technical baggage has accumulated, the time has come to swap themes yet again.

    But to what? Another framework theme seems ill-advised, given what we’ve just covered. Besides, it’s 2026, are there even WordPress theme shops in this day and age? Surprisingly yes, and I even think Elegant Themes were selling Divi over a decade ago, but that still doesn’t make them a good option. I don’t care how many times “performance” is mentioned as a selling point, the fact that it’s mentioned in the first place is a dead giveaway that maybe the theme isn’t as performant as it could be. But like I said, that comes with the territory when it comes to all-in-one framework themes.

    Clearly, the best option is to do what I’ve always wanted to do, and design my own theme from scratch. Paid themes might come with customisability advantages, but that’s only because they’re the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none option. If I design my own theme from scratch, and include the features and layout that I want, then isn’t that the better deal overall? Where I won’t need to spend a bunch of time customising the theme to my own liking, and can instead spend that time fixing other issues along the way?

    But if I am going to design my own theme, I don’t want to design something only for the current flavour of the month to change. That means Liquid Glass is out, despite how technically impressive and cool it is. Or uncool, depending on what you think of the latest iOS and macOS releases. The Okta app’s recent rounded redesign is exactly the kind of thing I want to avoid. I don’t think it looks bad, in fact it’s much more aligned to the overall design language of iOS 26 and 27, but what’s it going to look like in 5, 6, 7 or 8 years when design language changes again, and there are new paradigms to incorporate into our designs? I don’t think overly-textured, reality-mirroring skeuomorphic design was necessarily a net positive for design, but neither were the flat, lifeless landscapes that replaced it. Like all things, maybe the answer was a bit of both, which seems to be what we’re moving back towards. If I want to design my own theme, it has to have a textured background, a slightly raised reading surface, dark mode, and be responsive so it looks good no matter what device you’re reading on. It’s 2026, for crying out loud, and my current theme doesn’t even support dark mode. I know changing designs isn’t a big deal, but look at Instagram’s new font. It’s… wild. Maybe that’s 2026 for you.

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  • New PC: Crinus Muto

    Boxed PC parts arranged photogenically

    I have now painstakingly assembled all the parts to build an almost entirely new computer, reusing only the graphics card from my current PC. Over an extra long weekend, a handful of weekends ago, I just as painstakingly attempted to assemble them into some semblance of a computer, repeating events that occurred nine years ago.

    Which is to say, it’s been a while since I’ve built a new PC.

    Just like last time, I’ve been thinking about putting together a new PC for a while now. I haven’t, mostly, because while my PC may be getting a little long in the tooth, it still plays the games I want to play. I’ve upgraded it a little since then  — a new graphics card, and a new NVME SSD to add to the pre-existing NVME boot drive, but apart from a few peripheral changes — which I don’t really count as upgrades per se, as they’re, you know, peripherals, that’s it! It’s as stock as the day I put it together, all those years ago.

    Because as much as I wanted to upgrade my PC, there were things that just took precedent. Other, adult stuff. But bit by bit, piece by piece, I knew what parts I wanted, even if I wasn’t sure what the overall platform would be, or even when I would be building it.

    Type Item Price
    CPU AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D 4.7 GHz 8-Core Processor $879 @ Scorptec
    CPU Cooler Deepcool LS320 WH 85.85 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler $89 @ PLE
    Motherboard Asus ROG STRIX X870-A GAMING WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard $799 @ Computer Alliance
    Memory G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-7800 CL36 Memory $230 @ second-hand
    Storage Intel Optane 905P 960 GB 2.5″ NVME Solid State Drive $711 @ Newegg
    Storage Crucial P3 4 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive $331 @ Amazon Australia
    Storage Kingston KC3000 4.096 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive $379 @ Centrecom
    Video Card EVGA FTW3 ULTRA GAMING GeForce RTX 3070 8 GB Video Card $1149 @ Mwave
    Case Fractal Design Torrent RGB ATX Mid Tower Case $299 @ Scorptec
    Power Supply SeaSonic VERTEX PX-1000 1000 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply $409 @ Scorptec
    Headphones SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7P Headset $239 @ Amazon Australia
    Keyboard Ajazz AK820 MAX Triple-mode hall-effect keyboard $108 @ AliExpress
    Mouse Logitech G Pro X Superlight Wireless Optical Mouse $50 @ second-hand
    Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
    Total $5672
    Generated by PCPartPicker 2025-02-28 01:10 AEDT+1100

    While that all seems like it adds up to a pretty big number, it’s all been spread across a few years. It’s honestly a pretty mediocre time to build a new computer. It might be an OK time to build a new PC if you’re planning to reuse your graphics card, as was the situation that I found myself in, but if you want to buy a new graphics card, then it’s a terrible time to build a new PC. Your graphics card will be the most expensive component by far and might even be the entire cost of the rest of your PC depending on which model you’re buying, if you can even find one in stock to buy in the first place. Like I said, terrible time to be building a new PC if you need to buy a new graphics card right now. Might be better in the coming months, but that remains to be seen.

    As for me, I’m reusing two parts from my current PC. A 4TB NVME SSD, and my beloved RTX 3070 graphics card, which technically makes it the first part I purchased for the new computer, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I bought a 3070 in 2021, right in the middle of Covid and paid an embarrassing amount for it, as was the custom at the time. While I kinda wish I waited for 3080s to be in stock, I had a good reason for upgrading at the time, because my just-as-old GTX 980 was showing worrying signs of instability and was likely on its last legs.

    And if we’re not counting peripherals, I bought an Intel Optane SSD back when you still could in 2023, with the intention of using it solely as my boot and temporary ShadowPlay drive. While I don’t think I’ve had an SSD die on me due to exhausting its write capacity, I know it’ll be hard to kill an Optane drive with writes, even if I’m trying to. For context, my current nine-year old boot drive, a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro, has had about 50 TB written to it in that time.

    I picked up a DeepCool 120mm AIO mid last year for about a third of the price of what a Noctua NH-D15 G2 would have set me back, and as the 120mm variant was also quickly becoming unobtainable, I could have it in any colour, as long as it was white. Which pretty much sealed the deal on whether I’d be doing an all/mostly-white build, because next was the case. I’ve wanted a Fractal Torrent ever since I saw reviews of it a few years ago, and I ended up grabbing the white RGB version in the middle of last year, around the same time as the cooler. At the time I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do an all-white build, but I figured I at least wanted a white case and white cooler, even if the rest of the system was black. I think the contrast would have been nice.

    And over the past six to eight months, the system has come together all by itself, bit by bit, piece by piece. Another SSD was next, then some RAM, and evidently the marketing is working (or I’ve been watching too much LTT), because I had my heart set on a Seasonic PSU and wouldn’t settle for any other, even if there were technically better options available with the requirements that I had (80 Plus Platinum or better, ATX 3.0 or better, Cybernetics A or better, etc). While I consulted the PSU tier list, the models at the top of the list either weren’t available in Australia, or commanded a higher-than-expected premium over competitors, with the rest of their A-tier PSUs being more or less the same. So, the marketing worked, and I now own a Seasonic power supply. PSU tier list be damned. While the original plan was for more RGB, I’m still on the fence whether I want to do that, and/or some custom length sleeved cables. As nice as it might be, as much of a little pizzazz that it would add, it seems like a bit of a pain to have to undo all my hard work when I spent two hours cable managing the thing. We’ll see.

    With the rest of the system now put together, all I had to do was decide on the platform. If the graphics card is the most important component of any higher-tier gaming PC, then the CPU and motherboard are undoubtedly number two and three.

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  • Thirty Four

    Something interesting that happens when you do a little introspection is that you start to realise how effective fate really is.

    I’ve never really put much stock into fate. Instead, I’ve chosen to believe that everyone is a master of their own fate, and make their own fate through the decisions that they make in their lives. But as I’ve grown older and theoretically wiser, it’s become clear to me that both can be true; people can make their own fate, and fate can have an effect on their lives that they might not even be aware of. As we live our lives and make decisions, those decisions lead to more decisions, those decisions lead to even more decisions, and in amongst all that unbridled decision-making, fate comes out to play.

    Because as much as we think we’re in control of our own lives, sometimes life has other plans. As much as we can decide to do one thing, or as much as we can decide to have control over the things we want to do, the kind of job we want, the people we make friends with, some of the time, it just doesn’t work out that way. And if that doesn’t perfectly describe fate, what else does?

    I don’t think this is a bad thing, necessarily. Don’t you think it would be a little boring, if things always worked out exactly as you planned, exactly as you wanted?

    When I think about what I do for work these days, the people I work with, the social activities I’m a participate in, I wonder about how different it would be if things worked out even slightly differently. I’ll never tell anyone I work with, but I applied for my job on little more than a whim, based on not getting offers in a different part of the org. I thought the role looked OK and interesting enough (obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have applied), but it wasn’t my first choice, and honestly, wasn’t even my second. But looking back at it now, I have zero regrets and I’m infinitely glad things worked out as well as they have. I’m so grateful for the people and teams that I work with, the people I’ve met as part of my role, and all the friends I’ve made along the way. It sounds trite, but it’s true.

    But every time I feel appreciative of where I’ve ended up, I can’t help but wonder how things would have worked out if, somewhere along the way, something had gone even slightly differently.

    Because I can’t help but wonder what my life looks like if I had received and accepted an offer for the first position I applied for. What would I be doing if I had accepted an offer in a completely different department, doing completely different work? What does my life look like if I hadn’t ended up staying until the very end at Vita Group? What does my life look like if I ended up getting into my first preference at uni? Different, undoubtedly, but how so? Would I be married now? Or have kids of my own, like my parents did at my age?

    But that’s playing the what-if game, and that only leads to more questions, and not answers. A fun thought experiment, but not something I should dwell on or take seriously.

    So, what lessons can we learn here? What wisdom can I carry into the new year, given that I’m now a year older, and wiser is said to come with the territory? Am I supposed to understand that sometimes things don’t work out how I want them to, despite my best efforts? Is the universe telling me that things will work out, or they won’t, based entirely at random? Because I would like to think I’m already acutely aware of that fact, based on previous lived experience. I didn’t get into my first preference for uni, but maybe I was never supposed to. Fate, it seems, had other plans. Looking back at it now, I don’t think I could have done anything too differently. But given that I missed out by that much, maybe I didn’t need to, and all I needed was a little nudge from fate.

    But again, how is this any different to everyone else? I don’t think I’m unique in this respect, or in many others. Everyone has decisions they’ve made to be where they are today, and everyone has had fate intervene in their lives in such complex, unimaginable ways that I can’t even begin to fathom how things would be different if things hadn’t gone exactly as they had. I think if there’s any lesson to be learned here, it’s that even the best laid plans can be completely upended by factors outside of your control. And as much as recency bias puts fate working in ways that negatively impact me and my life, it’s probably worked in just as many ways that have a positive impact, too. Fate works in mysterious ways, as they say.

    To be clear, I’m not bitter about anything that’s happened. Just pensive, I guess. Introspective, of course — but it’s that time of year to be, as I look over the year gone by, and put another notch in the old belt.

    And as I continue being an adult, whatever that entails, I’ll occasionally wonder about what fate has in store for me next.

    You know, to keep things interesting.

  • The Best Part

    Installing Microsoft Office 2011 on a MacBook Air

    At its peak, the Australian Apple Premium Reseller known as Next Byte had more than 20 stores around the country, and I spent most of my earliest possible employment years at just one: Next Byte Hobart. Today, the Apple landscape in Australia is a lot different to what it was over a decade ago. Thanks mostly to the iPhone, Apple is the largest company in the world. Apple owned-and-operated retail locations don’t so much compete with general electronics retailers as much as they offer an experience of their own. But as any reseller will tell you, slim profits on Apple products means it’s extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to match Apple when it comes to the unparalleled customer experience that Apple Retail can offer. Any third-party Apple presence is either small enough to fly under the radar, or niche enough to carve out a market of their own. For the rest of us, Apple retail stores in every capital city CBD besides Melbourne, Darwin, and Hobart means our in-person sales and service needs are fulfilled, with any gaps covered by Apple’s online store and mail-in repair programs. I have plenty of stories from my time at Next Byte. Maybe one day I’ll even write about a few of them, once I’m a little more comfortable the statute of limitations has passed. The one I’m telling you about today is not really about anything in particular, but it’s also about all the things I found great about working at Next Byte Hobart.

    It’s January 2nd, 2025. Sometime around ten years ago, in December 2015, Vita Group announced the closure of Next Byte stores Australia-wide.

    By that time, I was almost a year into my first real corporate job; an IT Service Desk gig where I was, theoretically, putting my degree to some use. At that stage, I had no real idea what I was doing, or how things would turn out, but I was helping! (I hope.)

    During my time at Next Byte I was lucky enough to work in both sales and service. Both sides of the fence, so to speak; both figuratively and literally, as sales and service were physically separated by a dividing partition in our building. Sales and service were the two main pillars of the business, and because I was really the only person that worked in both parts, I was often asked which side I preferred. Sales, or service?

    My answer, honestly, was both.

    I liked sales because it put me in front of customers where I was given the opportunity to impart some Mac knowledge onto them, or help them find some kind of solution to their problems, and occasionally, if the situation called for it, maybe even make a sale. While service didn’t have as much of the face-to-face aspect of customer service, performing repairs on machines let me roll up my sleeves and get something done that benefitted everyone; the customer, the business, and the satisfaction I got from fixing hardware or software issues.

    Because as much as I enjoyed talking with customers, it was just as satisfying to focus on one thing at a time and smash out some repairs. Just zone out, twiddle some screws, and get some repairs out of the way. Service was methodical, organised. Parts would come in the morning, we’d do the repairs during the day, and ship all the broken parts back at the end of the day. This routine was only interrupted by customers picking up their fixed machines, or customers bringing in their broken machines for us to repair.

    Sales, by comparison, was anarchy. As anyone who has ever worked retail will tell you, it was entirely random whether it was busy or not. Sometimes it would be dead, with nary a soul to be seen. Sometimes it would be chaos, absolute bedlam, and you’d never know which was which until you were right in the thick of it.

    But as much as I enjoyed working in both sales and service, if you asked me what the best part about working at Next Byte was, I’m not sure I could decide on one specific thing.

    Because most of the time I worked weekends, some of the best times were when I was working full time. Usually in school holidays, or in between uni semesters. I liked being the full-time casual, and the permanent Saturday shifts were great, but with only sales staff working on the weekend, it often felt like part of the business was missing. Working during the week made me feel like I was part of a real team, doing real work, with everyone having their own responsibilities and their own work to do. Myself included.

    One of my favourite things about Next Byte were the good times that we shared between colleagues. Whether it was inside joke, or just something funny someone had found on the internet — never mind that we weren’t, strictly speaking, supposed to use the internet for non-work purposes, a policy almost impossible to police — the best times were when we approached customers to ask them if they needed anything with tears in our eyes from laughing so hard. They say retail jobs are hard, but as a naïve teenager, I thought retail was great.

    And it was those mood-setting moments, however fleeting, that made it the best part.

  • The Goruck GR1 — The Best Backpack

    The Goruck GR1 backpack
    The best backpack: the GoRuck GR1

    I’ve wanted a Goruck GR1 for a long, long time. The first mention of it on this very blog was all the way back in 2016, although at that time I had probably known about it for a year or two prior to that. It’s been a while.

    But every time I was in the market for a new backpack — which, perhaps surprisingly, turned out to be a couple of times over the past 10 years or so — and my gaze once again fell on the GR1 as a potential candidate, I told myself that I didn’t need such an extreme durability backpack, given my generally less-extreme nature. Or that it was too expensive for what it was, or that the USD exchange rate was too awful right now. Or that it was crazy to spend that much on a backpack without having seen or touched it in person, despite being universally praised wherever and whenever I read about it online. All valid enough points, but for the longest time, it was easy to look past a Goruck GR1 for cheaper and more locally-available alternatives, even if they had other compromises and weren’t as durable. Even if I had to buy multiple backpacks after successively running each previous one into the ground, the chances were good that I’d still come out ahead than if I had picked up a GR1.

    And as the years came and went, I still found myself glancing at the GR1 occasionally, like an old crush that I never quite got over. As much as Instagram tried to tempt me with “ultimate travel backpacks” or whatever other flavour of the month was being marketed by influencers, the GR1 lived entirely rent-free in my head. I might not have ever owned one, but I had never forgotten it, either.

    And then I saw it. The first-ever Goruck GR1 I’ve seen in the flesh. It was in Tokyo, between the flagship 12-storey Uniqlo and heading back home for the night, a lovely Steel-coloured version that had a nice “this is fine” patch. In that moment, I decided that I needed to have one, and after many years spent coveting the most durable backpack, I purchased my first Goruck in November 2023: a GR1 in Wolf Grey and Black.

    Only after waiting months for the darn thing to be in stock in a colour other than black. I don’t generally mind black backpacks. But if I was going to carry the backpack around for at least the next few decades, then I wanted something a little lighter in colour. I was tempted by the GR2 in a lighter colour while waiting for the GR1 to be restocked in a lighter colour, but stayed strong and made myself wait.

    And wait I did while it was shipped from the USA. And while I waited for it to be shipped, doubt started to creep in. What if I had waited all this time, only for the backpack to be entirely mediocre? Or, worse, for it to not meet the exceptionally high standards I had placed upon it after so long? Would I have been better buying something locally for a third of the price that would last a few years? Or was the GR1 really going to the be-all, endgame backpack that I had wanted for years?

    I was wrong to doubt. The GR1 is the best backpack I’ve owned, no doubt in my mind. I’m a year into GR1 ownership, have already taken it overseas, and customised it with my own Australian flag patch1. and it has been the ideal backpack in pretty much every situation. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn close.

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Benny Ling's Bling

Computers are like a bicycle for our minds.