Link. Nobody wants the wisdom of the mad king.
Tag Archives: pinboard
Capitol police got no threat warnings from FBI and others.
Link. Oddly written, as though NYT is trying to protect FBI. This is clearly a colossal failure.
“The Mailbox Search menu command in Apple’s Mail app claims to use ‘natural language search’, which is one of the most infuriating interfaces”
Link. “Spotlight in macOS 11 needs redesign from scratch.”
Prevent Keyless Car Theft (carjacking)
Link. “Putting your keys in a signal blocking pouch will stop any thieves from being able to amplify the signal used in relay theft.” I miss simple and inexpensive mechanical keys.
Wisconsin and Minnesota had different approaches to combatting COVID. So why are their death rates so similar? | MinnPost
Link. When I look the per capita incidence in MN was significantly lower. Odd.
Kasparov on managing Putin: target the mob.
Link. Block the money laundering that saved Trump in 90s.
“The chief difference between the U.S. and countries that lost their grip on democracy, he concluded, was that America’s decentralized election system couldn’t be rigged in one fell swoop.”
Link. This is an extraordinary story in multiple ways. “ Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million”
Supply chain: consumer electronics blocks auto production.
Link. By June everything will be in short supply. Except home exercise equipment. That will be cheap.
Deloitte screwed up America’s vaccine program.
Link. “Deloitte has a long history of making malfunctioning things for state and federal governments ” Federal procurement is broken.
Spotlight search – failing a simple test.
Link. No search in Notes or Mail and RTF files may not be correctly indexed.
Foxconn: “the company’s internship concept is a complete sham”
Link. Apple knows.
CalDigit’s new USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ‘Element Hub’ adds 7 ports to your MacBook – 9to5Mac
Link. I want to read reviews. I’d connect this to my ancient T2 Hub with my Firewire 400/800 cables.
M1 Mac mini in the cloud now available for 12 cents/hour
Link. I need to play with this.
“the incredible year OpenStreetMap is having, largely because of enormous investment from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Mapbox (FAAMm).”
Link. Google’s bicycle maps have degraded over past 3 years. An early sign of weakness.
Facebook Groups: “70% of the top 100 most active US Civic Groups are considered non-recommendable for issues such as hate, misinfo, bullying and harassment,”
Link. Facebook may be less ethical than Oracle.
macOS 11.2.
Link. Still testing to see if the spontaneous restart crash is better.
“longer delays in a two-dose regime can make things better, make them worse, or not make much difference, and the only way to be sure is to go out and get the clinical data.”
Link.
AstraZeneca vaccine “vaccine could cut transmission by nearly two-thirds.”
Link. Expected but still great news.
The GOP Civil War That Doesn’t Exist
Link. Contra NYT the GOP is very united behind Trumpism.
“short-selling bans don’t seem very likely to make a difference one way or another”
Link. As best we can tell short selling doesn’t alter economic efficiency much.
At least some former Thomas clerks believe election “stolen”
Link. Insanity is very widespread.
“Mr. Trump gained support with Latino voters compared to 2016 while his support among Black voters was essentially unchanged.”
Link. It was white men who shifted, not white women! College?
Off the rails: Inside the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency – Axios
Link. I think Trump became a Cultist. They sucked him in.
“offering the first day of new appointments to people in ZIP codes with the highest rates of infection and death from the virus”
Link. A reasonable experiment. Federal subsidy for phone bank scheduling would also help.
Rt: Effective Reproduction Number – “we believe other metrics are now a better way to track the virus”
Link. I wonder what happened.
The shattered government bureaucracy.
Link. Decades of GOP assault, then Trump. Where do we go from here?
NYT 77 Days: “encompassing story of a more coordinated campaign.”
Link. The mob was aimed.
Getting photos from iPhone to Lightroom, Aperture and other non-Photos products.
Link. I treat iCloud Photos as a queue.
“As the months went on, the claims she was seeing grew more outlandish. There were slickly produced videos of cannibalism and Satanism within the Democratic Party.”
Link. Who made those videos?
Trump dispenses with unnecessary impeachment lawyers.
Link. The GOP has promised acquittal.
“changes are probably very close to the best that could’ve been done given the need for backwards compatibility, and they should have a significant impact on the security of iMessage and the platform as a whole”
Link. Google’s Project Zero reviews new iMessage security features.
“Red Summer is the period from late winter through early autumn of 1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots took place in more than three dozen cities across the United States”
Link. “… there is reflected the note of pride that the Negro has found himself. that he has ‘fought back’…” Just learned of this.
Taiwan is a civilization
Link. “Taiwan’s rivers contained detectable amounts of the drug MDMA”. I spent a month in Taipei and Puli in 1981.
“Ripoff Report offered “arbitration services,” which cost up to $2,000, to get rid of “substantially false” information.”
Link. A business model based on extortion.
Fact-Checking Biden’s First Week.
Link. No surprise — he’s well within the range of an above average president with good intentions.
Historical perspective: the filibuster must die.
Link. Kill it now.
“You might not consider all of your weak ties friends, at least in the common use of the word, but they’re often people with whom you’re friendly”
Link. English needs a word here.
With GOP support Trump admin blocked investigation of violent right extremists.
Link. “Justice Department officials began shifting federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents from investigations into violent white supremacists to focus on cases involving rioters or anarchists, including those who might be associated with the antifa movement”
“Fitness+ is an okay start, but really needs a lot of work… mostly support of third party devices like bike sensors.”
Link. Feels half-assed.
Tsai grades Apple 2020.
Link. macOS continues to deteriorate. He finds Rosetta 2 less reliable than 1. My most trusted Apple guru.
Fermi paradox: the expanding bubble solution.
Link. With some mixed-in Bayesian priors, but requires some heroic coincidences to work. The best explanation is still that advanced tech cultures don’t travel.
MN Bike Trail Navigator: Winter Fatbiking Tips for a Better Ride
Link. Essential reference. A sport made for a changing climate. MN is the epicenter.
“ now a wealth of evidence that the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine did not work against Covid. And yet there are still 179 clinical trials with 169,370 patients in which at least some are receiving the drugs”
Link. Never ever vote GOP.
Spotlight – “A few years ago, it seemed to search everything (apart from system files), but now it can’t even find your Mail messages, and the whole data for apps like Notes are invisible to it.”
Link. “mdutil -E / erases the indexes on your startup volume”
“Big Sur has dumbed down the Finder’s Search window … there’s no way of saving a default search window, so each use has to be built from scratch”
Link. WTF Apple.
“When I spot-checked what a couple dozen apps claim about privacy in the App Store, I found more than a dozen that were either misleading or flat-out inaccurate”
Link. Apple is not entirely honest.
“Skylum did not provide a way to open a Luminar 4 catalog in Luminar AI, making it impossible to smoothly transition from Luminar 4 (to be discontinued) to Luminar AI.”
Link. Great Avalanche has a fix, but who the hell would buy Skylum products?
“Aira’s creators aim to put charging surfaces everywhere: built into furniture, integrated into vehicle cabins, fused onto coffee shop counters, and so on.”
Link.
Why federal grants may set rural broadband in some areas of Minnesota back for years
Link. Federal contracting rules mandate disastrous choices. They break government.
Robinhood “… exist to allow hedge funds to make money by giving them access to what Robinhood customers are buying and selling a fraction of a second in advance.”
Link. “Free”