I’ve been on a nostalgia trip.

Sometime last year I got the urge to go back and watch the television I loved as a teenager. Top of that list was Star Trek. Not the original series - the new generation, as I still think of it: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

So I downloaded all three shows in their entirety and started at the beginning.

I watched in the gaps. While cooking, while cleaning, while getting ready for bed. An episode here, an episode there. All in, it took me somewhere in the region of 11 months to get through every season of all three.

I’d not watched most of this in about 30 years. These are my thoughts on it, mostly for my own benefit.

The Next Generation

Obviously a show of its time. It’s very post-80s, and the majority of episodes are episodic in the way all television was then. There’s a lot of alien-planet-of-the-week, where the crew get...

If you’re wondering how to keep your EcoFlow Delta Pro Ultra charged during an extended power outage while it continues to power your home, this guide is for you.

I’ve installed the EcoFlow Smart Home Panel 2, the Delta Pro Ultra inverter, and accompanying battery system into my home in Ontario. I don’t yet have solar installed (though that’s on the roadmap) but I wanted a resilient home backup power solution after experiencing a devastating ice storm earlier this year that left us without electricity for more than four days. That blackout caused thousands of dollars in damage, and I knew we needed a better plan.

Why I chose EcoFlow

I didn’t want to rely on a large, noisy, fossil-fuel-guzzling generator. I was also drawn to the idea of building a system that could later integrate with solar power. After a lot of research, I chose the EcoFlow Delta Pro Ultra ecosystem.

An electrician...

As a longtime Mac user and Minecraft content creator, I’ve been playing and testing Minecraft performance on Apple Silicon since the M1 first dropped. With the release of the new M4 chip, I decided to pit the entry-level M1, M2, and M4 Macs against each other in a series of performance tests using Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.5.

Watch on Youtube

⚙️ Test Environment & Setup

All tests were run on:

• Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.5
• Screen resolution: 2560x1600
• Settings: All video settings maxed out
• RAM Allocation: Increased to 4GB
• Render Distance: 32 chunks (except on M1)
• Optimization Mod: Sodium (tested for added performance)

Tested in three environments:

1. Single Player
2. Multiplayer Server (Igniter SMP)
3. Hypixel Minigame Server

🧪 Single Player Results

Brand new single player world tested in 1.21.5. Loading new chunks and entities.

I first became aware of The Last of Us series of games because I saw Jacksepticeye play through the Last of Us II on YouTube when it was first released. I was blown away by the story and visuals in this game at the time, so decided to seek out the first in the series and play it myself. I did this at the beginning of the pandemic and I wrote a post about that at the time.

This came back into my consciousness due to the excellent TV show adaptation of the first game, which was a scene-for-scene replica. It was immaculately made and captured all the brilliance of the game’s story. A brilliant story of love in a world of pain.

It’s got me excited about the franchise again and I felt reinvigorated to try playing through the sequel. I saw TLOU II as an offer for only £8 on the PlayStation store so purchased, downloaded, and started to play this game that I always wanted to get around to...

It’s been a few years since I last did one of these. 2020 was my last entry after the first 10 months of the Covid pandemic.

Since then I’ve largely followed the same formula of contuning to build strength in favor of time spent on cardio, utilising Fitbod to drive a lot of those workouts.

I also have stopped tracking using my own spreadsheets and graphs - that process was quite laborious and the main reason I’d not completed another blog post on fitness since. The app I was using (HealthFit) to sync Apple Fitness data to Google Sheets only allows one-by-one entry selection for a sync, or everything at once. I have over 5000 entries now which times out the sync for all, and I’ve left it too long to go back and select several thousand entries to sync manually - so that’s never happening again.

Thankfully, Fitbod continually gets better, and this year (I noticed) they improved their...

UPDATE
I have a new video comparing Minecraft 1.21.5 on M4, M2 and M1 Macs. Check it out: https://youtu.be/ctE8DSa7O24

I love to play Minecraft on a Mac. Yes, I’m one of those people and I’ve tested Minecraft and the way it behaves on Macs quite a lot over the years and that’s what I’m going to do today with a combination of the M1s and the M2s to see how they perform and how things have changed since the 1.19 update now that we have native ARM support for Apple silicon in Minecraft.

I’ve done a lot of testing over the years that has helped me learn that Minecraft is mostly a CPU-bound game, but depending on the graphic settings you decide to apply the GPU comes into effect a fair amount. Comparing an M1 to an M2 mac on paper - the GPU is what’s changed the most. I have three Macs to test with today; I have an M1 MacBook Pro (a standard M1, no Pro/Max), I have an M1 Max maxed out...

UPDATE
I have a new video comparing Minecraft 1.21.5 on M4, M2 and M1 Macs. Check it out: https://youtu.be/ctE8DSa7O24

I love to play Minecraft on Macs. I previously posted videos on the performance of Minecraft on the M1 chips for both vanilla and Optifine.

Now I’ve done similar performance tests for the M1 Max.

The M1 Max is available in a number of configurations. The one I have to test is a maxed-out Max. It has the 10 Core CPU, 64gb of unified memory, but most importantly for these tests it has the 32 core GPU. I also still have the M1 (nothing) which I also retested under the same conditions for comparison.

These chips are in a variety of machines, but whether you’re running it on a Macbook Pro or a Mac studio, the results should be identical. What affects your performance the most in Minecraft is the resolution you play at, and the graphics settings you choose in game.

UPDATE
I have a new video comparing Minecraft 1.21.5 on M4, M2 and M1 Macs. Check it out: https://youtu.be/ctE8DSa7O24

I had a good reaction to my post testing vanilla Minecraft on the M1 Mac at various resolutions, and people have been asking in the comments about the performance when using Optifine.

Optifine is a mod that is designed to make Minecraft run better, and also provides a bunch of additional graphics related settings, giving you more control over your Minecraft experience. I always use it when playing as I find the experience to be better. But just how much better does it perform on the M1 Macs?

I ran the same series of tests, but the same caveats apply here about Minecraft still running in Rosetta, and everything else I mentioned in my last video along with details about my setup and how I ran these test. Go read that post for more details.

I had almost all...

UPDATE
I have a new video comparing Minecraft 1.21.5 on M4, M2 and M1 Macs. Check it out: https://youtu.be/ctE8DSa7O24

I’ve been playing Minecraft on my M1 Mac mini now for a few months, and the good news is it works great.

Many people have been asking me in the comments on my Let’s Play YouTube series - how does Minecraft perform on M1 Macs? Specifically, people are interested in the FPS I’m able to get.

That’s not a simple question to answer as it depends on your setup. So I’ll do my best to test the most common scenarios people will have and give you an idea of the kind of numbers you should expect to see.

The simple answer is: it plenty good enough to play vanilla Minecraft at high enough FPS, and for the most part, you shouldn’t notice any lack of smoothness in your gameplay.

First, a little about my setup that I used to perform these tests.
I have the M1 Mac mini with...