Thanks to a bug in Apple Mail, my Gmail archive likes to revert to sort by ascending date every now and then. Today, I scanned through some of those early emails and stumbled upon this incredible artifact: the e-mail invoice from Apple.com for my first Mac. It was a build-to-order 12" iBook G4 in July 2004.

Besides being set in such carefully-coifed monospace plaintext, the invoice provides an almost hilarious level of detail and verbiage by today's standards. Also, it never gets old to marvel at how much computers have depreciated over time. A whopping $1,362.00 for a mid-tier build of Apple's smallest, cheapest laptop in 2004. That's $2,317.82 in 2025 dollars after inflation. Today, the cheapest laptop Apple.com will sell you is the M4 MacBook Air (in an unusually recommendable configuration), starting at $999.

Big thanks to my dad Fred for spoiling me with a second computer literally one year into college (for which he bought me a Dell in June of 2003), because I was so insistent on switching to the Mac. (I sure was an entitled piece of shit.) I really wish I'd managed to hold onto that thing—a lot of fond memories, looking back.

The full invoice follows:

Apple Computer, Inc.                               INVOICE RECEIPT

Please remit to:
FOR YOUR RECORDS ONLY

Customer Number    Invoice Number
900007             9212467049

Reference Date     07/14/04

Amount Due         .00


Please Reference Apple's Invoice Number on Your Remittance

Sold To:                                 Ship To:
Fred Searls                              Justin Searls
REDACTED                                 REDACTED
TRENTON MI  48183                        GRAND RAPIDS MI  49504
USA                                      USA

________________________________________________________________________________
Customer Number    Customer P.O. Number    Sales Order Number
900007             7346758400              7010461968

Invoice Number     Invoice Date            Terms
9212467049         07/14/04                Credit Card
________________________________________________________________________________

Item Product   Product                        Total   Total   Unit      Extended
     Number    Description                    Ordered Shipped Price     Price
________________________________________________________________________________

002 Z0A704KVH  IBOOK 12.1/1.GHZ/768/60G/COMB      1     1  1,362.00     1,362.00
               Original ordered material was Z0A7
               SerialNo.: ( UV42906LR73 )

               The unit above contains the following options:

               Memory                    065-5001  768MB DDR266
               Hard Drive                065-5004  60GB ULTRA ATA DRIVE
               Optical Drive             065-5006  COMBO DRIVE
               Airport                   065-5009  Airport Extreme Card
               BlueTooth                 065-5011  Internal BlueTooth Module
               Custom SW I               065-4683  Not Applicable
               Keyboard/Mac OS Language  065-5012  Keyboard/Mac OS

________________________________________________________________________________

Subtotal              1,362.00

Tax                      81.72

Shipping Charges

TOTAL  USD            1,443.72
                                    DO NOT PAY
________________________________________________________________________________
Questions? Call (800) 676-2775 Mon-Fri 8am-9pm, Sat-Sun 9am-6pm CT
________________________________________________________________________________
Salesperson   Contact  Entry Date  Ship Date  Routing   Waybill Number
              BD       07/11/04    07/13/04   FEDERAL EX658584351832
________________________________________________________________________________
Shipped From:
F/G Distribution Center
Elk Grove, Ca 95758



               Web Order Number: W8731448

               Billed To: Credit Card


________________________________________________________________________________
After Remitting Payment Retain This Portion Of Invoice For Your Records.

Please See Below For Terms And Conditions Pertaining To This Order.
________________________________________________________________________________

Apple Computer, Inc.
________________________________________________________________________________
TERMS & CONDITIONS OF SALE


ORDER STATUS  For order status information, you may visit
http://www.apple.com/OrderStatus or navigate to http://store.apple.com/ and click
the "Your Account" button to view the status of your order.

U.S. SALES ONLY  The Apple Store sells and ships products only within the
continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii. No shipments can be outside the
United States. You may not export any products purchased at the Apple Store.

SALES TO END USERS ONLY  The Apple Store sells and ships products to end user
customers only.

RETURN & REFUND POLICY   If you are not satisfied with your Apple purchase of a
pre-built product, please call 1-800-676-2775 for a Return Material Authorization
(RMA) request within 10 business days of the receipt of the product. If the item
is returned unopened in the original box, we will exchange it or offer you a
refund based on your original method of payment. The product must be returned to
the Apple warehouse within 10 business days of the issuance of the RMA. All
products must be packed in the original, unmarked packaging including any
accessories, manuals, documentation and registration that shipped with the
product. A 10% open box fee will be assessed on any opened hardware or accessory.
If you purchased your order using an Apple Instant Loan or an Apple Business
Lease, you may be asked to provide a major credit card (Visa, MasterCard,
American Express, or Discover) for Apple to assess the 10% open box restocking
fee.

Please note that Apple does not permit the return of or offer refunds for the
following products:

  1. Product that is custom configured to your specifications
  2. Opened memory
  3. Opened software
  4. Electronic software downloads

NOTE: Apple recommends that you (1) use a carrier that offers shipment tracking
for all returns and (2) either insure your package for safe return to Apple or
declare the full value of the shipment so that you are completely protected if
the shipment is lost or damaged in transit. If you choose not to (1) use a
carrier that offers tracking and (2) insure or declare the full value of the
product, you will be responsible for any loss or damage to the product during
shipping. Please note that the United States Postal Service (USPS) offers limited
tracking capabilities and that there is a 30-calendar-day waiting period before
the USPS will initiate a trace.

DEFECTIVE ITEMS  If you discover what you believe is a product defect for any
Apple-branded product, please contact Apple Care Technical Support at
1-800-APL-CARE (275-2273). Such a defect, if any, is covered under the terms of
your product's warranty. Please refer to the warranty information and other
supporting documentation that came with your product. (See Product Warranty
section below for specific information about Apple's product warranties.)

If you discover what you believe is a product defect for any third-party product,
please contact the manufacturer directly for information regarding the
manufacturer's warranty.

PROOF OF PURCHASE  This receipt is your proof of purchase from Apple.

CUSTOM-CONFIGURED PRODUCT  We are pleased to offer product that is
custom-configured to your specifications, and we encourage you to review your
order carefully. Since the product is built to your specifications, the order
cannot be changed, modified, or canceled once your order is in production.

SUPPORT PRODUCTS  Support products (such as the AppleCare Protection Plan) are
subject to the terms and conditions that accompany those products. By requesting

services under those products or completing and returning to Apple any
accompanying enrollment forms, you agree to the terms and conditions that apply
to those products. Those terms and conditions take precedence over any
inconsistent provisions in these Terms & Conditions of Sale.

SALES TAX  Apple Store purchases will include sales tax based on the ship-to
location and the sales tax rate in effect at the time of shipping. If you phone
in your order, the Apple Store sales representative will provide the final dollar
total of your order including tax and any applicable shipping charges at the time
you place your order. If the sales tax rate for the state to which your order is
being shipped changes before the product is shipped, the new tax rate in effect
at the time of shipment will apply. The proof of purchase that Apple mails to you
will include any applicable sales tax.

PRICES  The Apple Store endeavors to offer you competitive prices on current
Apple products and selected refurbished and clearance products Your total order
price will include the price of the product (on the day of shipping) plus any
applicable sales tax and shipping charges. Apple reserves the right to change
prices for products displayed at the Apple Store at any time.

Should Apple reduce its price on any shipped product within 10 calendar days of
shipment, you may contact Apple Sales Support at 1-800-676-2775 to request a
refund or credit of the difference between the price you were charged and the
current selling price. To receive the refund or credit you must contact Apple
within 14 business days of shipment.

PRODUCT AVAILABILITY  Given the popularity of some products, Apple may restrict
the number of such items that you may purchase. Any product limit restrictions
will be posted on the Apple Store web site.  This information is subject to
change.

PRODUCT WARRANTY  The sole warranty for Apple-branded product shall be Apple's
standard Limited Warranty as set forth in the documentation that accompanies each
Apple product.

Non-Apple-branded/Third-party products are sold "AS IS" by the Apple Store, but
may be accompanied by their manufacturers' standard warranties. "AS IS" products
are sold by Apple as is, where is, and with all faults, and without express or
implied warranties from Apple. If you have questions about any manufacturers'
warranties that accompany such products, please call 1-800-APL-CARE (275-2273)..

OTHER TERMS AND CONDITIONS
- Apple is not responsible for typographical errors.
- Apple reserves the right to change the terms and conditions of sale at the
Apple Store at any time.
- Title and risk of loss to all products will pass to you on delivery.
- All sales at the Apple Store are governed by California law, without giving
effect to California's conflict of law provisions.
- No Apple employee or agent has the authority to vary any of the Apple Store's
policies or the terms and conditions governing any sale.
- Additional terms and conditions may apply to Education customers purchasing for
personal use. Please refer to the Education Individual sales policies located at:
http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/salespoliciesEdIndividual.html


02-CONS-05-09-03

After almost two years of being annoyed by this, I finally submitted the most annoying bug I'm currently dealing with. Filed as feedback FB18414183 with description:

For like 2 years (ever since Oppenheimer came out)? I listened to ONE EPISODE of Script Notes by manually navigating to it in the Podcasts app and listening to it. Now, across all my devices—iPad, iPhone, and every Mac, as if it's on some kind of bizarre timer, the Podcasts app will launch to the Script Notes page. Sometimes it's once a week, sometimes I go a month without seeing it. Always happens while I'm actively using the device and steals focus. This has been annoying and confusing for years, but it's so erratic that I assumed nobody at Apple would ever look at it and figure it out. Nothing I do changes anything: I've followed/unfollowed and downloaded/removed to try to shake something loose, but nope. Keeps launching to this random podcast I don't listen to

As of macOS 26, however, this is the first time it actually breaks the app by showing this modal dialog with no views or controls on it.

Neat. 💣

What my Japanese friends imagined when I told them I was headed back to Florida

Earlier this year, I announced I was working on a Rails app called POSSE Party which allows users to syndicate their website's content to a variety of social platforms simply by reading its RSS/Atom feed.

Well, as of today, POSSE Party officially posts to just about everything I could want it to. This week, I locked myself in a tiny Tokyo apartment and didn't let myself out until I'd finished building support for Instagram, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, and YouTube. That brings the total number of platforms it supports up to 8. I've updated this site's POSSE Pulse accordingly.

I'm excited and relieved to have realized the vision of what I set out to build. I'll be discussing what's next… soon-ish. Probably.

Sure this ice cream killed me, but think of all the allergens it didn't have!

Nearly all Japan's overtourism woes could be solved overnight if the nation simply outlawed roller bags.

I feel like everything I try to do is so weird that when it doesn't work, I'm very often the first person to run into the bugs I discover, and I just ran into a pretty good example. Pretty sure Cursor ships with system prompts designed to prevent it from inserting smart quotes into code listings, because that would normally be a bug… but it also means the agent is constitutionally incapable of writing a script that searches for and replaces smart quotes.

It has been confused about why it can't type smart quotes for quite a while now. Neat.

Felt extremely stupid not knowing how to pronounce this fish.

Asked waitress. She didn't know

Neighboring elderly couple next to me didn't know.

Sushi chef across counter didn't know.

Took three staff members to identify it as "isaki"

Was an incredibly validating moment

These gummy candies are the first rainbow-themed things I've seen so far this Pride Month.

(I bought them. They were good 🌈)

An accident of language—the fact that "sour milk" sounds so unappealing—is probably why nobody in America ever considered making a "milk sour", which is just... exactly what it sounds like.

Milk and liquor, together at last.

Finally, a crane game where the prize is another crane game.

I have never wanted to press a button more than I want to press this button

Was hunkered down at a cafe in Yokohama's Chinatown earlier this week while waiting for Becky to finish a workout and looked up from my Steam Deck to notice I was simultaneously standing under the same gate in Like a Dragon: Yakuza's

One thing I love about Japan are all the obscure Metal Gear Solid spin-offs that we never saw stateside.

In Japan, it's common for bars to have a dice game with rules like:

• Snake eyes: free drink
• Even number: half off drink
• Odd number: double size, double price drink

I "lost" with both of these 1L whisky-fruit highballs. I sure don't feel like a loser, though.

I saw this promoted post in my Reddit feed and thought, "huh, maybe WaPo is trying to entice new readers with ads pairing gift links to articles and targeted demographics that might engage with them."

LOL, no. You click anywhere on this and you instantly get hit with a paywall.

Who is this for? Current subscribers that don't read the Washington Post? People who planned to subscribe and forgot?

Absolute idiocy.

One of my favorite things about OpenAI is when they A/B test ChatGPT responses and the computer arrives at two identical responses, but still insist you tell them which answer was better.

I'm feeling the response on the right, personally.

Searching for real estate in Japan has been a humorous lesson in the differences of how we market things here. You'd think of all countries, Japanese developers might be sensitive to promotional images that make their brand-new condo building appear to be radioactive. ☢️

Okay, so there's a great meme going around the /r/HomeKit subreddit right now, where folks are using ChatGPT to generate illustrations for each of their rooms in the Home app. Finally got around to joining in the fun.

Here's how I did it:

1. Take a vertical photo of each of the rooms in your home that you've configured in HomeKit
2. Start a conversation with GPT-4o and describe that you want vertical (9:16) illustrations for the Home app based on your photos, and any style preferences (I'll share my prompt below)
3. One at a time, feed it your photos, and offer feedback until it gets it right
4. Save each photo to a new album in Photos so you can reference it from the Home app
5. Over in the Home app, for each room:
   1. Select the room (on iPhone, tap the ellipsis in the corner; on iPad or Mac, select it in the side bar)
   2. Tap the ellipsis in the top right and choose "Room settings"
   3. Choose an image for the room background
   4. Select the image from your Photos library
6. Do this on every device, because (of course) the Home app still doesn't sync background images

I had a blast setting these up and didn't hesitate to repeat it for all my devices. The bland, samey look of the default HomeKit room design makes it easy to confuse where you are in the app, and these illustrations are nothing short of delightful. Apart from the tremendous image generation capabilities of ChatGPT 4o, photographing rooms without resorting to a comically wide angle fisheye lens is very difficult, and an artistic touch can emphasize the "feel" of a room better than a photo can.

Here's the full set of my rooms:

Oh, and here's the prompt I used:

I have a fun project for you! Please make stylized background images based on the photos of each room in my home that I send you. I'm going to use these as background images for each of my rooms in HomeKit. Important to note, these images must be vertical. 9:16!

Very excited about this. Would love for you to take each image and then remove any clutter (idealize it a bit), use your imagination to come up with an appealing sight line and focal length a bit, and then draw each image in a consistent color palette, namely with a hyperrealistic Japanese animation style that could only be accomplished by pixel-peeping with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects.

(Humorously, if I let ChatGPT reply to this with text, it would say a variation of, "okay, I'll make some Makoto Shinkai-esque illustrations!" and then, because a particular artist was named, all subsequent images generated in the chat would be found in violation of Open AI's content policy. Amazing.)

Do you HomeKit? Go give this a try and melt some of Sam's GPUs for me. Send me your best rooms. 🏡

tl;dr it works. You should try it.

I finally got around to trying the new Agent functionality in GitHub Copilot.

You gotta really know when to ask an LLM for help, though. (I wrote last year how I decide whether to reach for an AI assistant, if you're interested.)

My experience and recent research both indicate that AI works best for creating new stuff from scratch, especially when that code is perfunctory and typical and conventional. That's the reason there's such a divide between people who've had terrific experiences with "vibe coding" and others—like me—for whom all the hours fucking with AI to make it do my job for me have mostly been a waste of my time. Every other time I've tried to use an agent mode in Cursor or Claude Code, I've asked it how to do things that most "staff" or "principal" or "distinguished" engineer have never tried and would have no idea how to do, so naturally they never went well.

But today I'm finally starting work on a new gem, and I had an annoying task that wasn't a legacy rescue, or exploiting a brand new language feature, or doing something totally unlike anything anyone has ever done before. So I fired up the agent mode using Anthropic's 3.7-sonnet model and let it go to work.

Specifically, I asked it to stub out a Rails engine to use as a starting point for moving over existing login functionality into a gem. It did basically everything in the same order and way that I would. It commented out additional hooks I'll probably need, which is nice.

It also gave me instructions for wiring up the new engine from the project I'm extracting the behavior from, which is a nice bonus.

Did it work? Yup:

Cool.