Tom Maxwell on inputmag.com:
There’s a new investor note out today from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo which says that Apple is planning to revise the 13-inch MacBook Pro later this year. The laptop would be bumped up to a 14.1-inch display with mini-LED technology and also see Apple replace the much-derided butterfly keyboard with a scissor switch Magic Keyboard.
Been holding on to my work 2015 MBP for this one.
snippetsRiccardo Mori on morrick.me:
What we’ll see in Mac OS 10.16 is probably going to be the proverbial moment of truth.
I so hope this is the case. Catalina has been an indifferent release for me — but mainly because I took extra steps last year to quit geeky shortcuts I was using. Which is bad news if you aren’t getting anything in return for the “sacrifices”.
snippetsLaurens Cerulus on politico.eu:
The use of Signal was mainly recommended for communications between staff and people outside the institution. The move to use the application shows that the Commission is working on improving its security policies.
I’m curious of what does the EU use for chats internally. I see an overlap on this going forward: if Signal is more secure than Slack/Teams/whatever… doesn’t internal communications now become the weakest link?
Internal systems do have the additional layer of controlling those that have accounts, but I struggle with my team to keep communications on official channels — I’m sure it’s a common case.
What I’d love would be a federated system akin to Mastodon, where we could run an instance of Signal and control users with accounts on it.
snippetsJohn Siracusa on hypercritical.co:
SwitchGlass adds a dedicated application switcher to your Mac in the form of a floating window that shows an icon for each running app.
I purchased his previous mini-app (Front and Center) as a way to support him — but this one I do see using. Why?:
And knowing John’s OCD, he sweated all the speed and design details.
snippetsJason Fried on hey.com:
With HEY, we’ve done just that. It’s a redo, a rethink, a simplified, potent reintroduction of email. A fresh start, the way it should be. For web, iOS, and Android.
Color me excited.
snippetsMike Rockwell, on initialcharge.net:
I use Things and have it setup to only show badges for items with a deadline. And I only add deadlines to a few tasks each week.
Great tip, just switched to this setting.
snippetsWe think Opera collapses on its own worsening financials, with that timeline accelerating significantly if Google bans its lending apps or if its Chairman/CEO continues to draw cash out of the business through questionable related-party deals.
They basically pivoted into a very shady mobile lending business. So sad to read.
Although, on the investor.opera.com you are greeted with this:
The Company is aware of and has carefully reviewed the report published by the short seller on January 16, 2020. The Company believes that the report contains numerous errors, unsubstantiated statements, and misleading conclusions and interpretations regarding the business of and events relating to the Company.
Oh, drama.
Update: Arjan from Opera writes:
That’s because it’s not true: this is an attempt to drive down the stock price and make money from short selling (successfully). Many screenshots in this report are fake, and numbers are manipulated or made up. More will come later. Keep checking sources.
— Arjan van Leeuwen (@avl7771) January 18, 2020
Sounds like there’s something fishy on the reporting. Shouldn’t have posted without reading more.
snippetsSam Henri Gold presents applearchive.org:
Dedicated to the unsung studio designers, copywriters, producers, ADs, CDs, and everyone else who creates wonderful things. 
This is amazing. Already blew past by bedtime hour browsing through the 2000’s.
snippetsSian Cain, on theguardian.com:
In a letter filed this week in federal court in New York, Audible’s attorneys, writing on behalf of both sides, announced that the parties had resolved their disputes and expected to submit the settlement documents by 21 January. No other details were provided.
Doesn’t sound like the feature is coming anytime soon.
snippetsGreat message by Andrew Duckworth:
However you do it. It’s vital to share. And share what you’re working on before you “solve it”.
The earlier you share an issue or idea the more room you have to ask the right questions and get answers you can handle.
This is the sort of quote that lies at the intersection of productivity and creativity. I’m keeping this one around.
snippetsVery thought provoking essay by paulgraham.com:
What I didn’t notice, because they tend to be much quieter, were all the great moments parents had with kids. People don’t talk about these much — the magic is hard to put into words, and all other parents know about them anyway
With a a few hard punches:
I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious.
And a closing slap in in the face:
[…] The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.
This one inspired me to revisit a few drafts and put something together.
snippets
Enjoyed this book from the first page. The world it creates incorporates magic incantations with coding, and the results works perfectly for me. The characters are good, and the story is very well timed. It’s the beginning of a series, and I’ll be back without a doubt.
Catalin Cimpanu on zdnet.com:
Song said the exposed database — an Elasticsearch system — was not a production system; however, the server was storing valid user data.
Elasticsearch is a really powerful tool, but it loves data. The more the merrier. If you designed a safe(ish) production environment and change management process for it — then things should be ok. But dev environments usually have more relaxed rules - which is ok, they also have less less data to work with - which is a pain to test, which usually leads to “lets just copy prod data for a test” - which becomes the weakest link in your security chain without you realizing it.
Song confirmed that the leaky server exposed details such as the email addresses customers used to create Wyze accounts, nicknames users assigned to their Wyze security cameras, WiFi network SSID identifiers, and, for 24,000 users, Alexa tokens to connect Wyze devices to Alexa devices.
As a big Wyze user: dammit.
snippetsDenise Grady on nytimes.com:
A lifelong swimmer leapt into deep water near his lakeside home, and was horrified to find himself completely unable to swim. Had his wife not rescued him, he might have drowned.He had recently received an electronic brain implant to control tremors and other symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and somehow the signals from the device had knocked out his ability to coordinate his arms and legs for swimming.
What the heck? Just one initial study, but interesting to see where the research leads.
Enrico Campidoglio on his blog megakemp.com:
[…] git pull isn’t actually a core command per se, but rather a combination of two other commands: git fetch and git merge; the former downloads any missing commits from a remote repository, while the latter merges them into your current branch.
Very educational post, and great recommendation. I’ve been bouncing off the article here in the office, and even if you don’t go ahead with his reco, the discussions started have been useful.
w46Done
tidbits
Some books are hard to put down, this one was hard to abandon. It took me most of 2019 to read it, and although it’s long (~600 pages), the slowness was mostly because some of the ideas had to be digested.
The Wizard and the Prophet was a strange book for me. It’s the typical show-off book to causally mention you’re reading, but I struggled with it silently. It’s surprisingly, or even purposely, not an opinionated book. Even though it deals with many of topics I’d argue loudly with my uncle. It’s a extremely factual book, with the only preaching it hints at being: to always look for some unseen impact in all the simplifications that are required to arrive at these facts.
Above all it’s a calming book. It has a soft cadence that would make me read, stop, think, and picture many of the ideas. Lastly at least for me, it’s a humbling book. Many concepts that I attributed to recent fads, or corporate marketing are shown to have origins decades, and even centuries, in the past. It shows people that died not being rich, even though their work has improved my life even more than a smartphone or an app even could.
I can’t recommended it enough. I even bought a copy for my uncle — not to argue, but because I’m curious if given the facts, we can have a more intelligent argument.
Ryan Hanson on medium.com:
With Catalina, Apple made some incremental updates to macOS’s built in window management, including the addition of default menu items for tiling windows left and right in the “Window” menu for an application. Interestingly enough, we can actually configure keyboard shortcuts for these menu items directly within macOS.
It didn’t even occur to me to configure with the default keyboard shortcuts functionality. Giving it a try this week in with a slight modification:
WM Shortcuts
This way I can have both the full Window style and also the simpler move to side of same screen mode.
Dave Teare, founder on blog.1password.com:
Accel will be investing USD$200 million for a minority stake in 1Password. Along with the investment — their largest initial investment in their 35-year history — Accel brings the experience and expertise we need to grow further and faster.
Hmmm… color me worried. While it’s not a marketing filled PR post, it’s a bit light on details. The one thing that jumped at me was:
Security is a process, not a product. 1Password already has the most modern security design, and Accel will help us take our processes, protections, and research to the next level.
Ok, I buy this. Just like anti-virus apps evolved from static definitions to behavior analysis, I can totally see how the next step in the _password maintaining _toolset is something that requires a lot of investment.
I’ve been a 1Password user for 11 years: it’s the first app I install on any new devices (Mac or iOS) and my trusted app given it’s function.
I’m totally along for the ride, and trust their love for the product. But still, it worries me.
Rui Carmo on taoofmac.com:
This oddly shaped, unwieldy chunk of purple plastic (which is around 6cm to a side, if you’re wondering) has been on my office desk for nearly twenty years now, and despite it being fundamentally useless (it doesn’t even make for a good paperweight) I keep it as a daily reminder of how dogma and preconceived notions can turn well-meaning engineering into a massive iceberg of technical debt.
Great story from the dinosaur days of the web on telco infrastructure design and implementation.
Press Release on apple.com:
The new Magic Keyboard also features a physical Escape key and an inverted-“T” arrangement for the arrow keys, along with Touch Bar and Touch ID, for a keyboard that delivers the best typing experience ever on a Mac notebook.
Great, now I just have to wait for this keyboard to trickle down to the 13in or the MacBook Air. Maybe looking at an aligning of planets next year of new keyboard with ARM processor.
In a major victory for privacy rights, a federal court in Boston today ruled that the government’s suspicionless searches of international travelers’ smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry violate the Fourth Amendment.
This will go back and forth, but I hope this interpretation holds. It feels very un-American to have your devices searched at the airport.
Jason Fried on m.signalvnoise.com:
Basecamp Personal includes 3 projects, 20 users, and a gig of storage space. So kick off a couple projects, invite some friends, family, teammates, or volunteers.
At some point I organized everything on Backpack, the predecessor to Basecamp. Their tools are very opinionated on design and functionality — but if they work for you, they’re extremely well designed.
CJ Chilvers, on www.cjchilvers.com:
Every morning, set aside some time to start your day by writing in a stream-of-conscience way. No editing. No censoring. Just keep the pen moving (pen and paper tend to work better for this).
Did this for a while earlier in the year and it felt very cleansing(?) . This time around I’ll try to do some habit stacking ../../kb/Habit Systems for before I grab my iPhone.
Rosalie Chan, on businessinsider.com:
Candice Ciresi, GitLab’s director of risk and global compliance, has resigned after less than six months on the job, apparently saying that the $2.75 billion startup is “engaging in discriminatory and retaliatory behavior.”
Mostly a post to self, but this has to be a very uncomfortable situation with Gitlab. Almost all compliance issues that the enforcing bodies investigate result from disgruntled employees — when the whistleblower is the actual compliance director, I can’t imagine the headache.
Warner Crocker on medium.com:
Each device had a different note count. The MacBook had three copies of the same note, two in the proper folder, one not. The iPad Pro had only the copy that had been Air Dropped. The iPhone Pro had two copies. Edits made to another note on the MacBook earlier in the morning had not synced to either of the two other devices.
I didn’t have time to blog about this, but I’m suffering this right now. By signing out of iCloud on the iPad mini I managed to get the critical Notes I needed for a work trip this week — but there’s 6 notes on the iPhone are not synching:
Notes Sync Fail
I think his closing says it best:
Look I get it. These are big complex systems and sometimes things need to be worked out. So, I’ll grant some leeway for that. But I also get this. Apple has more resources at its disposal than most other companies and it needs to figure this stuff out. It should be embarrassing, but apparently it isn’t embarrassing enough to martial enough of those resources to fix iCloud, which is a system that Apple is relying on more and more as the backbone for services that connect these devices.
I don’t want to rethink my Notes setup. But I have work to do.
Malcolm Owen, on appleinsider.com:
Displaying at a 4K resolution of 3,840 by 2,160 pixels at 60Hz, the LCD screen has a contrast ratio of 1,300:1 and a typical brightness of 250 nits.
With 163.2PPI, it’s not good for retina. Still better — and cheaper — to get an iMac 27in 5K.
Apple please, release a 5K iMac monitor without the Mac! Or at least with target mode or sometime.
Michael Shafer, on mozzafiller.com:
The bottom line is Spotify’s search is insanely good, the mobile/desktop apps are better and more tightly integrated, and it does a better job at suggesting new music I like. I’m going to miss feeling like I’m actually curating my own private music collection, but it turns out I value those other things more in a music streaming service.
Interesting details given todays news that Spotify Adds More Users Than Expected.
I didn’t renew my latest Apple Music subscription last week, it just doesn’t offer a better experience that Spotify in most areas.
Emma Turpin on blog.google:
To kick it off, we created five helpful and even playful digital wellbeing experimental apps. Each experiment centers around a different behavior, offering small ways to help improve your digital wellbeing and find a balance that feels right for you.
Details on each on the Digital Wellbeing Experiments site. They all look very interesting, and I’d try most if available for iOS. Overall this seems like a great initiative.
Markus Stange on the Mozilla Gfx Team Blog:
In Firefox 70 we changed how pixels get to the screen on macOS. This allows us to do less work per frame when only small parts of the screen change. As a result, Firefox 70 drastically reduces the power usage during browsing.
It now uses Core Animation, and it seems to show significant improvements.
The post is also very detailed on what uses Core Animation means, which was almost over my head.
Raymond Wong, on inverse.com:
Does the two-port situation ruin the Surface Laptop 3? No. But it means Microsoft’s largest notebook is just two ports shy of being the perfect 15-inch laptop.
This is an issue with many flagship laptops nowadays. But other than that, it appears to have great performance with excellent battery life.
At $1,699.00, you get an extremely solid work machine.
5typos.net