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My thanks to Steve Snider for pointing out my dopey mistake of calling out the wrong canal. Geography, eh? ↩︎
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.
Johnny•Decimal
Johnny•Decimal: A system to organise projects:
There are a couple of core concepts, and they’re so simple you’ll wonder why you haven’t thought of them before.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that all of this is free, and it’s possible to implement it without any additional tools.
I was introduced to the Johnny Decimal filing system by @jack. I’m going to give a go with my own computer document filing. As organised as I think I am, I certainly struggle to find digital files on a more regular basis than I would like.
Calendar Hero
It sits on your Desktop, below all of your other windows, and…shows your weekly calendar. It highlights the current day, the current hour of that day, and shows a countdown until your next event.
That’s it. That’s all I want.
This is terrific for somebody like me who is guided through life by his calendar.
MailTrackerBlocker for Mail on macOS
Block tracking pixels in macOS Mail.app with MailTrackerBlocker for Mail on macOS:
I generally use MailMate which has pixel blocking built-in, or Fastmail apps which also block tracking. But it’s good to have an option for Apple Mail as well.
🔗 Link Post: “A New Board Game: {macro}Dungeon - //Jason Burk”
Jason Burk writing for Burk.io:
“Players can advance in boring one increment moves or strategically build macro sets that can contain up to 5 moves allowing you to jump ahead of the competition.”
My friend Jason has designed and produced a genuine, actual board game that you can buy. He’s invested a lot of time and effort into this.
International shipping is currently a bit expensive, but if you live in the United States, I encourage you to make a purchase.
2020 Retrospective
What are the rules about linking to my own post on another website I own?
Andrew Canion - 2020 Retrospective:
For me, the narrative that 2020 was a complete write-off is not fair. A lot happened in 2020 and much of it has been positive and transformational.
More Evidence Against Trickle-Down Economic Theory
Keeping tax low for rich does not boost economy:
From the Department of the Blinding Obvious, which has been consistently challenged by the Department of Vested Interests, comes a new paper demonstrating that Trickle-Down Economics… wait for it… doesn’t work!
Major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality but do not have any significant effect on economic growth or unemployment, according to new research by LSE and King’s College London.Researchers say governments seeking to restore public finances following the COVID-19 crisis should therefore not be concerned about the economic consequences of higher taxes on the rich.
The foundation of an effective and fair progressive tax system is one upon which successful nation’s can build. Trickle-down economics can be expressed another way as ‘hollow-out economics’.
Via: Kottke.org: 50 Years of Trickle-Down Economics Didn’t Work
🔗 Link Post: “Daring Fireball: Ecosia Is Now a Default Search Engine Option for Safari”
John Gruber writing for Daring Fireball:
“I actually hadn’t heard of Ecosia before, but their story is interesting enough that I’m giving them a shot.”
If Gruber listened to Hemispheric Views he would have heard about Ecosia on Episode 2 back on 24 September.
Don’t be like Gruber. Subscribe now!
Chrome is Bad
Short story: Google Chrome installs something called Keystone on your computer, which nefariously hides itself from Activity Monitor and makes your whole computer slow even when Chrome isn’t running. Deleting Chrome and Keystone makes your computer way, way faster, all the time.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Chrome. Reading this was enough to convince me to uninstall it for good.
This website has been published by Loren Brichter, who authored Tweetie way back when. I trust the guy.
Kakistocratic Nepotism
Biden’s next move after Trump’s COVID-19 hospitalization - Axios:
But with Trump in quarantine for the foreseeable future, the campaign is now relying on members of the first family — Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka, and Eric and Lara Trump — to carry the torch as part of a new “Operation MAGA” campaign…
Cool, that should go well then.
YouTube-dl
My youtube-dl Setup - //Jason Burk:
There is a utility called youtube-dl that you may or may not have seen mentioned online. Here is a rundown of how I am now using it to manage all my YouTube videos I want to watch
Thanks to Jason @Burk for the write-up on how to create an offline YouTube library. I’ve now implemented it myself. Good stuff.
🔗 Link Post: “How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole”
Anne Helen Petersen writing for Wired:
The first part of this story describes a day of vacuous hell to me. I don’t know how people function that way, but I know many do. Reading the first part of this article makes me happy I’m older.
Later, we get this gem:
“When you “shoot off a few emails” on a Sunday afternoon, for example, you might convince yourself you’re just getting on top of things for the week ahead—which might feel true. But what you’re really doing is giving work access to be everywhere you are. And once allowed in, it spreads without your permission: to the dinner table, the couch, the kid’s soccer game, the grocery store, the car, the family vacation.”
It’s so true. Work can wait. It might feel it can’t, but actually, it can. Cut out the social media waste during work days and there is plenty of working time within regular hours.
Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably
Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably:
Microsoft put a server farm at the bottom of the sea and let it run for a few years.
The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference. If the analysis proves this correct, the team may be able to translate the findings to land datacenters.
Or will it means data centres are plonked all over the oceans?
“Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” Cutler said.
“I have an economic model that says if I lose so many servers per unit of time, I’m at least at parity with land,” he added. “We are considerably better than that.”
Worth following the link to read more detail and see some images of the subsea vessel.
International Mac Nerds
Martin Feld, Jason Burk and I recorded a ‘pilot episode’ of a podcast idea we had been germinating.
Martin has been kind enough to host the episode on his site.
Govt urged to ditch COVIDSafe for GApple
Govt urged to ditch COVIDSafe for GApple - InnovationAus:
recently released testing data revealing that upon launch, COVIDSafe logged encounters 25 per cent or less between locked iPhones. After a series of updates and improvements, this figure is now between 25 to 50 per cent.
A switch to using the official tracing architecture within the Android/iOS platforms seems a sensible move to me.
Marked 2 as teleprompter
Marked 2 as teleprompter, revisited - BrettTerpstra.com:
Once you have the theme, you can start prompting just by hitting the ‘s’ key in a Marked preview. That will start autoscroll at the slowest speed. Use left and right arrows to speed up/slow down the scroll speed. (You can also click and drag on the meter that appears in the lower left of the screen.) That’s all there is to it.
So this is amazing. Love it.
🔗 Link Post: “Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown | Free to read | Financial Times”
Edward Luce writing for The Financial Times:
“Other scientists have taken note of Bright’s fate. During the Ebola outbreak in 2014, when Obama’s administration sent 3,000 US military personnel to Africa to fight the epidemic, the CDC held a daily briefing about the state of progress. It has not held one since early March. Scientists across Washington are terrified of saying anything that contradicts Trump.
“The way to keep your job is to out-loyal everyone else, which means you have to tolerate quackery,” says Anthony Scaramucci, an estranged former Trump adviser, who was briefly his White House head of communications. “You have to flatter him in public and flatter him in private. Above all, you must never make him feel ignorant.””
This brilliant long read article details how the US has essentially become a failed state, led by a megalomaniacal madman.
🔗 Link Post: “Daring Fireball: Financial Times Reports the Obvious: Trump Resisted Testing ‘Too Many People’ Lest the Results Spook the Stock Market”
John Gruber writing for Daring Fireball:
“The problem isn’t testing, the problem is sick people, and testing is a way to get a handle on the problem. Trump’s stance is like telling your girlfriend not to take a pregnancy test because you don’t want a baby.”
What a great line.
My wife and our kids were featured in a newspaper article over the weekend as part of Mother’s Day.
🔗 Link Post: “Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families”
“Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families — the easiest way to add a layer of protection to your home network and protect it from malware and adult content. "
I used Cloudflare DNS in the past, but more recently have been using OpenDNS to block non-kid-safe content but its relatively slow. Now I’m moving back to Cloudflare.
🔗 Link Post: “Donald Trump Is a Menace to Public Health”
The entire article is certainly worth reading. It was hard to pick out excerpts because it’s all so well written.
Adam Serwer writing for The Atlantic:
Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee.
Democracy can be thought of as a garden; if you don’t tend to it, it doesn’t take long to be overtaken by the weeds of alternative, less-preferred civic models.
“Trumpist media outlets, by contrast, have created a bubble of unreality where nothing but the most effusive praise of Trump is acceptable, where anyone who disagrees with or criticizes the president is part of a grand conspiracy to destroy him, and where the only facts that exist are those that reflect well on the president.”
Having denied that the coronavirus was a major issue for months, the president sought to recast himself as an oracle, and conservative media followed suit, shifting their tone from downplaying the severity of the pandemic to praising the heroic efforts of the president to address it.
I’m old fashioned in that I like my news to give me the news, not an opinion. Right-wing media is out of control - pretending to be news but actually delivering propaganda.
The president is a relentless scammer at heart, and even during a pandemic he will attempt to get what he wants while providing as little as possible in return, as though he were trying to save cash by stiffing a contractor.
This pretty much nails it. Everything is for personal gain; not for the collective good. In Trump’s world, everything is a zero-sum game.
🔗 Link Post: “Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve” - Washington Post”
Harry Stevens writing for Washington Post:
If the number of cases were to continue to double every three days, there would be about a hundred million cases in the United States by May.
That is math, not prophecy.
The simulation diagrams in this story provide the best example of how social distancing can be beneficial.