Link. He needed an editor.
Author Archives: jgordon
To reform Twitter kill viral.
Link. High on “moral outrage”. But there is no money in sobriety.
“In its 15-year run, MiniBooNE has registered a few hundred more electron neutrinos than expected.”
Link. Smart money bets no sterile neutrino. Smart money is boring.
Some iPhone XS users report poor Wi-Fi and LTE performance
Link. No rush
14 “features” of Mojave.
Link. Wow. That is so … boring.
“Haptic Touch is Apple’s fancy designation for touching and holding your finger on the display”
Link. Hope 3D touch dies.
“Windows 95 was 30Mb. Today we have web pages heavier than that”
Link. A classic rant, but needs repeating every few years. My only explanation is that our business models reward waste.
“we all misattribute the causes of our mental states, for example, attributing our irritability to something someone said, when in fact it’s because we’re hungry, tired”
Link. This is more important than you think.
“in Books, a book can appear in multiple collections”
Link. Can’t manage books from High Sierra.
“Many people are having issues activating phones purchased from Apple and activated through existing Verizon accounts.”
Link. Reminds me of ancient imessage activation problem. It is worse in ios 12 on my test phone.
Stross on moon landing: “nobody in the 1950s thought to call the hero of a two-fisted space engineering story “Armstrong”
Link. True.
Do You Answer the Phone?
Link. This is a problem in healthcare now. I never pickup. 90% of my voice calls are scams.
“focus on demand management clearly reveals that the US will suffer from Trump’s tariffs, while China can avoid any adverse effects.”
Link. Watch the bets smart money makes. How do we bet on China to win?
Insights into life with government support
We are not the 1%. Maybe the 4%? Relatively wealthy. Lots of degrees. Decades of education. Resources.
So we shouldn’t know much about life with government support. We have children with cognitive disadvantages though, so we do. They live in the government support world (in large part because, fairly soon, we will be dead).
Among the things we have learned:
- There is an immense amount of paperwork to complete — and it never ends.
- Critical paperwork constantly gets lost. Perhaps a 25% loss rate? This part surprises.
- Every time someone exploits a weakness a new rule is glued on, the system gets more brittle, and error rates rise.
- Nobody knows how it all works. There are numerous conflicting models of the system but they are all incomplete and inconsistent.
This has a lot in common with American health care (though the paper loss rate is worse). The root causes may be similar, we Americans seem to be unusually good at creating large scale dysfunctional systems.
Perhaps one of our Celestials will fund a research program into why we do so badly.
A global finance take on the Great Recession.
Link. The consequences are still unfolding.
“the pool of “Federalist Society approved judges who also think the president is essentially unaccountable… is rather thin”.”
Link. Clarence Thomas will be relieved.
The Decision Matrix: Urgent, Important, Reversible
Link. Adds a dimension to Eisenhower.
NYT summarizes Russia’s Trump play: “This operation was to show the Americans — that you bastards are just as screwed up as the rest of us,”
Link. Putin couldn’t have done it without Murdoch’s help.
XS batteries: “both of these batteries are still limited to 500 charge cycles.”
Link. We need to replace iPhone batteries every 2 years.
Apple OS user guides
Link. They are really good.
Use smart categories in Numbers.
Link. Numbers works well for lists. Does it scale?
“Mojave’s Continuity Camera feature, which enables you to take a photo or scan a document with your iPhone or iPad and have it appear instantaneously in a document on your Mac.”
Link. Useful
The iPhone XS and Its Camera
Link. Core of Gruber’s review without the effusiveness.
CrossFit 59 – personal note.
Link. Still not boring.
Amazon Fire TV Recast OTA DVR $230.
Link. Wanted this for years. No subscription. Will buy.
“Echo Input costs $35, the same as a Chromecast Audio.”
Link. Apple doesn’t have a product in this space
“40,000 different bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals.”
Link. Airborne things we live in, breathe in. Not counting viruses.
“why Ron Wyden seems almost amazingly well-informed on very technical computer security matters”
Link. Dems have the best staff.
Fake science: “Simple environmental cues can help people lose weight and eat healthier, without the need for rigorous dieting and intense exercise.”
Link. Guy was a fraud. I’d never heard that false meme though. Wonder what impact it had beyond usual Oprah nonsense.
The Apprentice: Trump and Putin
Link. I underestimated Putin.
MDMA: “an animal whose brain evolved completely independently from our own reacts behaviorally in the same way that we do to a drug”
Link. Extreme conservation.
“Facebook is worried that banning white separatist groups would negatively impact other separatist movements around the world like black separatist groups”
Link. China is interesting to contemplate
A CEO’s take on Zuckerberg.
Link. A useful persoective.
NYT explores right wing slander machine in Kavanaugh case.
Link. All the usual scum.
“playlist of music that iTunes shows as “No Longer Available,” which currently contains 674 items”
Link. Don’t get attached to virtual things.
Restore iPhone with many apps is a big probem now
Link. Connectivity lags.
“tap that microphone icon on the keyboard and say “Tab key,” iOS will insert a tab for you.”
Link.
“Apple is actually being fairly consistent with the size of the price tag it wants to see on its base-level [new] iPhone”
Link. Wonder how much China drives the big jump at the top
Activity tracker like iPhone or Apple Watch now mandatory for John Hancock life insurance.
Link. This is bad. Incidentally, works for walking, bad for CrossFit.
Must read: “Commercial paper is a specialized form of extremely low-risk, short-term bonds”
Link. History aside this is important. I had no idea.
Ticketmaster Complicit in Ticket Scalping.
Link. Immense profit goes to the ruthless.
Beyond the scooter wars.
Link. “The complete street perceives the street as a space where different transportation modes can coexist: not only cars, but also buses, and lanes for trams, bicycles and scooters” And pedestrians. It will be a hell of a fight.
Apple Manage Devices / Associated Devices is still kind of broken
Link. Apple has two inconsistent databases for managing device DRM.
DRM in 2005 – “Palladium” and “RetinaLock ™”.
Link. Interesting to see how this played out. Thanks to streaming RetinaLock is closer than ever.
iOS 12 Family Sharing: Purchase Sharing supports changing Apple ID and UI could support future multiple Apple IDs.
Link. It’s not a fix for Apple’s 10 year Apple ID/DRM fiasco but it’s the hint of a beginning of a fix.
iCloud calendar invitations have been broken for five years (2016)
Link. I need to test this again in 2019. Doubt it’s fixed though. Very hard bug to describe.
iOS 12 Parental Controls / Restrictions / Screen Time: Parental Controls (Passcode restricted) is not always compatible with “Share Across Devices”
Link. Apple should hire me.
iOS 12: It’s now possible to remove/change Restriction / Screen Time passcode without removing restrictions
Link. This is a big help for parents. Changing passcode used to require redoing restriction configuration.
iPhone X case … Moment lens?
Link. I’ll need a new case. Should it be one that mounts a lens?
“The iPhone XS is so good at balancing light, it’s actually quite difficult to create a silhouette”
Link. XR is good value for photographers, XS is an expensive lens addition. Not unthinkable though.