You’d think a couple of years after release with regular world updates and patches that most bridges would now be modelled as bridges, and not photogrammetry draped over elevation data. At least significant landmark bridges such as the Golden Gate and Bay Bridge are now (very beautifully too) modelled accurately and yes you can fly under them without hitting a brick wall:
Bay Bridge, San FranciscoGolden Gate Bridge, San Francisco
You don’t have to fly too far however before you start to see these again, here’s the Carquinez Bridge in Crockett, about 6 miles to the NE:
Carquinez Bridge
Don’t try flying under this one, it doesn’t end well.
I downloaded the Windows Insider beta of Windows 11 for ARM, and took a look at what’s involved to get it installed and up and running under UTM?QEMU on a Macbook Pro with an M1 CPU (ARM).
First, since the download is a .vhdx disk, I used the import option in the UTM frontend to import from the downloaded file. I also checked the option for the Spice drivers:
After starting to boot, the installer requires a network connection and it appears to get stuck:
Articles such as this one recommend to press Shift-F10 to get to a command prompt, and then enter this command to continue with the install skipping the requirement for a network connection: oobe\bypassnro
At this point the installer reboots and restarts, and this time you get an additional option on this dialog allowing you to skip the network requirement during installation:
After a short setup of a couple of minutes, Windows 11 desktop!
Next, the resolution seems to be fixed at 800×600, so knowing I checked the box in UTM for the Sprice/virtio drivers, I noticed there was a CDROM iso mounted on drive D:
Running the installer, it started up, and keeping all the defaults for now, installed without any issue:
All in all, pretty easy, only about 20 mins setup and it seems pretty snappy so far!
I’ve written before about the importance of keeping your skills up to date, and this is a followup to a previous post, answering the question ‘how do you decide where you should spend your time?’
You can never keep up with everything, every new programming language, every new tech stack, every new trend; you need to understand and acknowledge that first.
Next, decide what matters to you, and where you want to spend your (limited) time keeping up to date. This is different for everyone, but it could be any combination of:
– keeping up to date with the tech you’re currently working with (all or parts of)
– keeping (or getting) up to date with ‘something else’ that maybe next on your horizon
– keeping an eye on upcoming and emerging tech trends. Trends come and go over time, some last longer than others. You can’t jump on every new thing that comes up, so you need to make your own decisions on whether something is likely to be part of your future or not. In other words, would it be worth investing your time in this trend or not?
The last point is hard when starting out because you have no past experience to compare against, but spending some time reading the chatter online will give you a rough feeling of whether something is increasing in popularity or not.
As with everything, you need to sensibly assess tech trends in order to work out what is pure hype and will never go anywhere, vs things where there’s some substance and is likely to evolve into something you should get more familiar with.
The Apple Lisa is probably a great example of tech that was too soon, it was ahead of it’s day and failed to be successful. It did pave the way for the release of the Apple Macintosh however. The Computer History Museum have obtained the source for the Lisa from Apple and you can download it from CHM’s site here.
