link
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My thanks to Steve Snider for pointing out my dopey mistake of calling out the wrong canal. Geography, eh? ↩︎
Guest Appearance: Throwback Hoops Episode 46
I was welcomed as a guest on the podcast/YouTube show “Throwback Hoops” Episode 46 to talk Australian basketball. We covered women’s world, cup, NBL Round 1, and gave our predictions for the league’s awards. 🏀 🎙
Like You – A Mindfulness Podcast for Kids
If you have kids, you and they might enjoy the wonderful Like You – A Mindfulness Podcast for Kids. I’ve been a Patreon supporter for almost as long as Noah Glenn has been producing it. My kids fall asleep listening to Noah almost every night.
Like You is a mindfulness podcast for kids. We use breathing, affirmations, music, and imagination to explore feelings, relieve anxiety, encourage self-esteem, and grow empathy, all while having fun!
Noah is basically another member of our family at this point.
3D Impression of Tokyo's Subway System
This 3D Version of Tokyo's Subway System Looks Like a Labyrinth of Roller Coasters:
…by creating a 3D model of Tokyo’s tangled subway system, one which has brightly colored tubes swooping up and down, running over and around each other like the tracks of one of the craziest roller coasters ever.
I’ve appreciated the scheduling efficiency of the Tokyo subway system in the past, but this 3D impression of how all the lines interact is something else.
macOS Content Caching Fails to Propogate Security Updates
Last Week on My Mac: Security updates are down again – The Eclectic Light Company:
Howard Oakley is doing an amazing job at diagnosing and bringing to light (pardon the pun) issues involving macOS Content Caching Server:
Over the last three months, of the nine security updates to XProtect pushed by Apple, only one has been delivered and installed correctly through my Monterey Content Caching server, that on 4 August. The other eight security updates to XProtect and its new companion XProtect ‘Remediator’ all downloaded correctly from my local server, but then failed to install.
After reviewing Howard’s articles on the topic, and using his impressive apps to identify whether I had an issue, I discovered that all three of my Macs behind a Mac mini server running content caching had failed to receive critical security updates. I’ve now disabled the caching server. If it can’t be trusted to deliver security updates it doesn’t matter how much internet bandwidth I can save, nor how much faster I can update machines. Security is more important than that.
Apple needs to do better. Maybe they need to rewrite the Content Caching Server in Swift? 🥁
Logging into Agenda.app with Shortcuts
I’ve been getting back into Agenda as a work diary and daily tracker.
The app is brought to a new level of usefulness thanks to the ingenuity of Shortcuts developer Scotty Jackson.
This is all about my Rapid Log Shortcut, for use with the Agenda app … and my Agenda Daily Log Shortcut. The basic conceit of this Shortcut is that it appends provided input to note in Agenda.
Scotty works wonders with Shortcuts. This is a new version of his Rapid Logger that ties in with his also new Daily Log shortcut.
Check them out, they’re excellent examples of the power of Shortcuts as a programming application.
Console Games are Fun; Mobile Ones Aren't
Matt Birchler writing on his blog makes a succinct point.
Mobile games are a shit industry with shit companies making shit games that don’t exist to entertain, they exist to extract as much money as possible from a few whales who will spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
Fun is not the point.
Matt nails it. This is why I enjoy playing games on Xbox and Switch, and get nothing from mobile gaming.
Great Writing About a Not Great President
Maureen Dowd: Donald Trump, American Monster
Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.
Maureen Dowd truly is a great writer. I would love to be able to craft words in such a way.
— Link to this article found via Rob Fahrni
Can we Have Some Modern Software as Well?
Riccardo Mori really nailed it with his latest post, Raw power alone is not enough where he talks about how Apple has left its software to wither, while it has been busy beefing up its hardware offering. The article is full of juicy content, but I’ve pulled out the parts that resonated with me:
Without innovation in software, all we’re doing with these new powerful machines is essentially the same we were doing 20 years ago on PowerPC G4 and G5 computers, but faster and more conveniently.
…
So, again, we have absurdly powerful machines like the Mac Studio and soon we’ll have the even more mind-boggling Apple silicon Mac Pro, and what kind of software will they run? A handful of professional apps which hopefully will take advantage of these machines’ capabilities to make the same things professional Macs did twenty years ago, ten years ago, but better and faster.
…
This is the personal beef I have with tech innovation today, which I feel still revolving around the concept of ‘reinventing the wheel and making it spin faster’.
I’ve had a number of generations of Apple hardware pass through my hands, but I essentially work in the same way, with a few small workflow changes around the edges. I don’t do video, but I would love some revolutionary ways to leverage all the power of the M-series chips.
Software today still comes with much more friction than it should have, given the context of general technological advancement that has happened for the past 40 years or so.
…
Without innovation in software, all we’re doing with these new powerful machines is essentially the same we were doing 20 years ago on PowerPC G4 and G5 computers, but faster and more conveniently.
None of Apple’s software (or much software across the industry) has become easier. Actually, much of it has become harder as a result of either feature-bloat leading to design complexity, or fashionable UI changes making things less discernible, HIG be damned.
I would love for their to be some great workflow/project-management software that was integral with macOS. I don’t want to have to jump out to some third-party web service, or use a mishmash of Hook, OmniFocus, Finder and Devonthink to manage project files. Finder is too small-minded with the combination of apps and services and files. But Apple doesn’t seem to care about innovating in any of the hard spaces, or creating new interaction models for existing hardware.
I don’t make video, but I’m a professional user of a Mac. I’d like some thought given to my workflows too.
Can we have a Blog-only Search Engine?
Search Engines and SEO Spam - Initial Charge:
What I think I want is a search engine that only gave me results from small, independent weblogs.
More often than not I just want to find information from a normal person that’s writing about something because they care deeply about it. And that’s very difficult to find in search engines today.
I want the same thing that Mike Rockwell at Initial Charge wants: a search engine focused on nerds who blog about stuff they love. Topics could be far and wide: sport, IT, doll collecting… I don’t care about the topic, but I want to be able to find stuff only from people who are passionate about the topic - not trying to sell something.
Facebook’s Role in Capitol Attacks
Instead of using technology and starting to flag downright criminal behavior, the company hums, and haws. They don’t need an oversight committee — they need a moral compass.
Am I being silly to suggest that Facebook and Purdue Pharma have much in common?
Deleting Social Media
Colin Devroe is quitting social media:
I also spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling tweets, clicking links, reading threads, and darting between subjects like a kitten chasing a laser.
I love this analogy.
I think the cumulative effect on my brain since 2006 has been that my ability to focus has been effected. Not that I can’t focus. I can sit down and get into flow on a programming project more often than not. But when I’m still, when I’m idle, when I feel like I could be bored at any moment I grab my phone and scroll through Twitter which sends my mind into overdrive on a million topics, timelines, thoughts, and emotions.
I don’t think this is good for the human brain. I know it isn’t good for my brain.
My only social media now is Twitter, and that is curated to deliver NBL basketball and little else. I deleted Facebook and Instagram ages ago, and do not miss it.
Focus is a superpower. Best not to give it away easily.
Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew - The New York Times
Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew - The New York Times:
But Facebook’s research tells a clear story, and it’s not a happy one. Its younger users are flocking to Snapchat and TikTok, and its older users are posting anti-vaccine memes and arguing about politics. Some Facebook products are actively shrinking, while others are merely making their users angry or self-conscious.
It’s hard to feel sorry for Facebook.
Actually, I don’t feel sorry for them at all.
YNAB LaunchBar Actions
I’m a huge YNAB fan and a LaunchBar user. I often get jealous of Alfred users because the system of “workflows” in Alfred seems to have caught on better than LaunchBar’s “Actions”.
Righting that wrong has appeared @ptujec on Github. He has a number of LaunchBar Actions, notably two built for YNAB.
I found a bug in the script, raised an issue on Github and it’s already been fixed. Thanks!
My wife will be jumping off a building in November!
The WA Minister for Mines & Petroleum; Energy; Corrective Services was kind enough to draw attention to this fact in Parliament today:
It’s all for a good cause though. Hannah is participating in the Central Park Plunge 2021 in support of Guide Dogs WA.
If you’d like to support the effort, this is Hannah’s fundraising page.
OmniFocus vs. Things
I’m thinking about a transition from OmniFocus to Things. I’ve used OF since launch, so this is no trivial matter.
This line from a post by micro.blog user @40Tech resonates:
OmniFocus almost begs you to add projects and contexts.
I never seem to gain value from contexts/tags, but I add them every time, because nature abhors a vacuum.
My main area of doubt is templating. I’ve got a nice Drafts template built that populates a standardised OmniFocus project. Does Things offer any form of similar automation?
BBEdit 14.0
I barely scratch the surface with my use of BBEdit. I’m not a coder. I use it for a bit of Markdown text editing (when I’m not using one of the other myriad Markdown apps I own) and for doing other small pieces of text manipulation.
So when I saw that v14 was released, I figured I could skip the upgrade. Reading through the features, I was sure I could skip the upgrade.
Then I read this tidbit from Jason Snell at Six Colo(u)rs:
But there are some new Markdown features, regardless! Dragging an HTML file or an image into BBEdit will now generate appropriately formatted Markdown. Markdown footnotes are now properly syntax colored, for those monsters who put footnotes in their Markdown.
Also, a new feature that I inspired makes its debut: BBEdit now lets you attach a script in order to provide control over the text generated when you drop an image file into a BBEdit editing view. In short, I have modified the AppleScript script that I use to upload images to Six Colors so that if I drag an image into my story in BBEdit, the image is automatically resized, uploaded, and the proper HTML is inserted at that point in the document. (It’s magical.)
Hmm, so I might have to upgrade after all.
🔗 Link Post: “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?”
“From this vantage, “Office Space,” the Gen-X slacker paean that came out 20 years ago next month, feels like science fiction from a distant realm. It’s almost impossible to imagine a startup worker bee of today confessing, as protagonist Peter Gibbons does: “It’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I just don’t care.” Workplace indifference just doesn’t have a socially acceptable hashtag. "
Office Space was my North Star. How am I so old?
Three Things Today | tyler.io
Three Things Today | tyler.io:
So what is Three Things? Well, it’s a calendar that lets you schedule tasks on each day. It’s meant to be excruciatingly pragmatic and realistic about how life works. (At least my life.) It literally will not allow you to schedule more than three tasks per day.
This is a nifty little application. Pick three things. Do them. If you don’t, defer them. That’s about it. I like it.
Hemispheric Views Mentioned in the Wild
What an honour for the podcast Hemispheric Views I create together with Jason and Martin to be included in Michael Camilleri’s podcast queue.
Podcasts I’m Listening To: Spring 2021:
Hemispheric Views: Did we need another three-white-guys-talk-about-Apple podcast? Probably not but the difference here is that two of the hosts are Australian. Andrew Canion, Jason Burk and Martin Feld have a great rapport and listening to a tech podcast with more of an international focus is a refreshing change.
What a thrill to be mentioned!
Give People Space
The Neuroscience of Busyness - Study Hacks - Cal Newport:
You want more out of your employees? Radically reduce their responsibilities, then leave them alone to execute. You want your small business to grow? Focus your attention on a single target, and give yourself the space to do it better.
This sounds right to me.
Changing the Mac HD Icon
Does anyone know where I can get a decent icon file of a MacBook Air (Space Grey)? I want to replace the hard disk icon of Macintosh HD.
I’ve finally been able to get rid of the stupid mechanical disk icon. My Macs don’t even have those sort of hard drives. Now I have nice icons that represent the computer I’m using.
Source: Quick Tip: High quality Mac icons are coming from inside your Mac! – Six Colors
Fixing the Big Sur proxy icon delay globally
I had previously bemoaned the fact that the proxy icon is now hidden behind a hover delay in Big Sur.
Listeners of Hemispheric Views will be aware of my love for the macOS proxy icon.
I am overjoyed to learn that macOS-magic-man Brett Terpstra has found a way to have the proxy icon ready for action without delay. Thank you, sir, for fixing what Apple broke.
🔗 Link Post: "{macro}Dungeon"
“Up to 4 players take turns drawing cards and making movements through one of four caves in an attempt to outpace their competitors on the way to the treasure room.”
This board game has been designed by my friend Jason Burk. It’s on sale today; grab it while you can!
Fastmail
My mate Jason is digging into Fastmail, and liking what he sees.
Fastmail. Who Knew? - //Jason Burk:
Recently after a discussion about email on Episode 023 of Hemispheric Views, I dug into the settings and configuration of Fastmail and I was pleasantly surprised by how much more than a simple host they truly are!
I’ve been again trialling Hey for the past week or so, but I still don’t think it matches the combination of Fastmail & Sanebox.
We're Gonna Need a Bigger Canal
Jamie Thingelstad - Container Ship Queue:
They normally pass 50 ships a day through the canal. With so many backed up, it will be a few days before things get back to normal.
The linked article includes some cool graphical imagery of the shipping impact of the Panama Suez Canal1 being blocked.
It goes to show how fragile our trade system is; and the economic value inherent in the canal.