Month: December 2019

Funding Special Education

Christina A. Samuels, writing for Education Week:

And then, there’s the money. Congress never funded the IDEA for the full amount that was authorized when the law was first signed. At that time, Congress estimated that it cost states twice as much to educate a student with disabilities as it does to educate a general education student, and the law authorizes the federal government to give up to 40 percent of that excess cost to states.

Congress has never come close to that mark; its $12.3 billion contribution in fiscal 2018 is more like 15 percent of the excess cost.

Those of use in special education as a profession cite this as a burden in conversation. New Jersey provides additional funding for special education but assumes that classified (eligible) students would never exceed about 14% of enrolled students. That’s just not true of so many districts.

Special Education Is Broken

K-Cups Take a Beating

Albert Burneko:

Of course, at any level even slightly more holistic than pure individualism, the Keurig looks quite different. The machine itself is exponentially more sophisticated and wasteful than even a commercial espresso maker, expensive to make and involving rare-earth computing materials and so forth. A box of plastic single-serving grounds containers (“K-Cups”) multiplies the packaging of a simple bag of coffee beans many times over. And then, to produce a quantity of coffee equivalent to that produced by, say, a single iteration of a drip coffeemaker’s brewing cycle, it must power through its much more mechanically elaborate brewing cycle over and over again, consuming electricity all the while, during which time it is of no use to anyone but the one person who will drink that serving of coffee. The farther back you pull from the immediate experience of one libertarian end-user unconcerned with anything beyond his own immediate experience, the worse it looks: For the individual, the Keurig has some claim to convenience and ease and efficiency; for, say, an office, or a household, it dramatically slows down and complicates the process of preparing coffee for everybody who wants some; for human society, it is a wasteful inefficiency; pound-for-pound, for terrestrial life as a global organism, if you are silly and sentimental enough to still entertain the idea of such a thing, it is an outrage.

On a related note, the NYT points out the high cost of coffee pods. We currently pay about 17 USD for a pound of La Colombe’s very good coffee.

How Not To Make Coffee

A Fake Somebody: The Talented Mr. Ripley

Nick Shager, The Daily Beast, considering the The Talented Mr. Ripley 20 years later:

That The Talented Mr. Ripley didn’t net any Oscars may simply speak to the uniquely bountiful excellence of that cinematic year. Still, two decades later, one also suspects it may have had something to do with its bone-deep bleakness about human nature, the viability of justice, and man’s capacity to change—a pessimism that’s all the more chilling for being wrapped up in a such a rapturously enchanting package.

Worth a read; the cast and their performances are top notch, and the scenery is gorgeous. It’s a great film, to this day.

Why ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ Still Sizzles 20 Years Later

The “Gizmo” in Gizmodo is for Gizmo

Emily Lipstein, writing for Gizmodo:

The iPad is pretty good—and it could be a lot better if I could get over the identity whiplash I get every time I use it. My biggest problem is that while it’s leaning hard towards being a laptop, Apple’s indecisions about its other qualities keep dragging it back into this murky grey area that doesn’t make it the perfect substitute that Apple’s marketing wants it to be. This isn’t about the OS or the keyboard. It’s almost entirely an apps problem.

The biggest (and worst) way that this rears its head is how the iPad, upon setup, downloads all of the apps that have ever been in your iCloud—even if they’re not iPadOS compatible. After deleting all of the superfluous apps that I don’t use anymore (here’s looking at you, flashlight app from 2009), I was left with many of the ones I use on my phone like Google Drive/Docs/etc (ones that seemed obvious that I’d be using on the iPad), but also ones that I use all the time, but absolutely suck on the iPad, like Co-Star and Venmo.

Lipstein gets the target market for the device (people who don’t really need a computer), but this seems like a weird stumble for someone in the tech industry. I set my iPads up as new devices, and deal with some installation inconvenience up front, for precisely the reason that I don’t consider the two devices to be the same. I certainly share some apps across iPhone and iPad (and Mac, for that matter), but others I don’t.

The iPad’s Identity Crisis

Boxing Day

Via Shawn King:

Indeed, Boxing Day is now a major shopping event in many countries that observe the holiday; it’s kind of like Black Friday, except after Christmas instead of Thanksgiving. (This fact seems especially bizarre once you note that Britain and Canada also recognize Black Friday, and on the same day as the US, despite celebrating Thanksgiving in a totally different month or not at all.)

Boxing Day, explained

More Skywalker

The latest episode of The Incomparable podcast looks at Rise of the Skywalker scene by scene, and it’s a great listen–especially if you, like me, are a little gaga just *seeing* a Star Wars movie in a theater. Perhaps most importantly, they discuss at length the issue with Abrams’ retreat from Rian Johnson’s Rey origin re-evaluation in *The Last Jedi*: that she doesn’t really have one. Johnson introduced the plot twist in the series that anyone–anyone–can become a Jedi. There’s no dynasty. Hence the nameless servant boy at the end of Last Jedi, who uses his nascent Force power to summon his broom as the Millennium Falcon roars overhead.

Abrams, of course, backed away from this populist version of Force sensitivity, at least as it came to express itself in Rey. Her lineage, it turns out, is the reason for her power.

Melissa Leon of The Daily Beast also makes some cogent points about the plot:

Even apart from the anti-climax of Rey’s lineage loophole, truly, nothing about this Palpatine story works. First he sends Kylo to kill Rey. But when that doesn’t work and she shows up at his evil lair instead, he explains that, actually, this was his plan all along. Then he lays out the same catch–22 he bamboozled Luke with 36 years ago: If Rey kills him, he wins. And this time, he says, his spirit will transfer into her and all the past Sith will live on through her.

Finally, Rey mercifully just shuts Palpatine up and kills him. And nothing happens. All of that spirit-transfer stuff was made up, I guess?

Finn’s potential Force sensitivity and Janna’s secret origins—strangely teased in the film’s last few minutes—nag away at these characters’ closure.)

Finn’s own Force sensitivity opens the possibility of further adventures in the franchise. But as the gang on Incomparable observed, the connection to Episodes IV through VI were severed with Rise of the Skywalker.

Rey’s Parents and How ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Surrendered to Sexist Trolls

Essential Mac Software 2019

Feedbin/NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire came back on the indie software scene first as Evergreen, until Black Pixel returned the name of the app to its original creator, Brent Simmons. NNW was always my favorite RSS reader. It was standalone for a while, but then Brent released it with Feedbin support. So it was bye-bye Feed Wrangler (which was cheap but slow, at least for me) and hello (again) Feedbin. What’s more, there’s an iOS app in beta as I write this.

Agenda

Agenda is a note-taking app. You don’t really need another application for taking notes, I know. But Agenda has some hooks that will, well, hook you. Agenda’s prime feature is the ability to attach a note to a calendar event, a link for which inserts itself into the notes field of the calendar. It supports Markdown, syncing with Reminders, and archiving projects. The developers add new features regularly, which your annual subscription, should you choose to subscribe, funds. There’s a free tier as well.

MarsEdit

I moved from Tumblr to WordPress last year, and decided to purchase my favorite blogging software for the Mac from a long time ago. I don’t write as much as I’d hoped, but I’m happy to be able to write (and post) from MarsEdit when I’m in front of my Mac. (Drafts, generally, is where I write most these days.)

PDF Pen

I’ve had a license for this app Ford years but never realized how often I need it. I don’t need it for much but it’s invaluable when I do.

Acorn/Pixelmator/Pixelmator Pro

I have all three of these… There are selection tools that work better in Acorn (instant alpha)than Pixelmator, while outlining a shape is easier in Pixelmator for me. I don’t edit photos much, but I like having these highly capable and affordable apps on my Mac.

Wifi Signal

Moving my computer to the back porch, and playing some bandwith-hungry games, revealed to me the attenuation that my WiFi signal was suffering lo these many years. Apple doesn’t provide a quick and easy way to tell what the quality of your signal is (unless option-clicking the WiFi menubar widget and interpreting signal to noise ratios), which is where Wifi Signal comes in. This menubar app shows you a cell-phone-style five-bar icon, and clicking on the icon reveals a qualitative rating (Excellent, Good, Poor, etc) as well as other info (like the SSID of your access point). WiFi Signal’s basic functionality is worth the price, and additional features are there when you need them.

DayOne

Journaling gives you a place to drop your thoughts and ideas when publishing them on a blog or social media site isn’t necessary. I like to add entries to DayOne to share some thoughts with a familiar, future reader–me. Instagram integration shows you what you found salient enough to capture in the past as well. It’s a great way to see where you were at specific points in time.

Drafts

Almost everything I write starts in Drafts. I don’t have to have a place in mind for an idea or consider the best application for the job: I just open Drafts and start writing. Is it another inbox to process? Yeah. But it’s Drafts on the Mac! You get actions from iOS–with sync, no less. You can get fussy with tags and turn Drafts into a capable digital junk drawer… and if you don’t fancy mixing PDFs and text and web pages, then there’s no reason not to.

Transmit

I have to hop between multiple google drive accounts and there’s no better way to do this than Transmit. It doesn’t act exactly like the Finder but it’s pretty close for an FTP client. It’s a Mac app through and through, from one of the very best and oldest Mac developers out there.

Keep It

Since making (some semblance) of peace that Yojimbo was never going to be ported to iOS (I know, there was a version that supported one-way sync to the app on iPad), I’ve tried EverNote, Bear, and went in big with DEVONThink. Keep It succeeds Together and KIT, and actually precedes Yojimbo. It feels and acts more familiar to me than DEVON. It’s a digital junk drawer, which supports notes, PDFs, images, and links, and you can tag and file to suit your needs. I love it.

Microsoft Edge

I like Safari, and I would use it exclusively were it as extensively tested by software developers as it should be. But Chrome is the new Internet Explorer, so you have to keep a copy of Chrome on your device to deal with some websites. And the new Chrome is… Microsoft Edge. I know… it’s a crazy world. If you, like me, need to make frequent use of Gsuite on the Mac, you need a Chromium-based browser. And Edge is a good one.

Last Year’s List

My list from last year remains fairly untouched, with one exception: I haven’t needed Scrivener for any projects and so I’m not really using it. MailMate still rules my email usage, although for work only; I like Spark from Readdle for everything else. And 1Password remains quite possible the most used app ever.

iPad: Gadget of the Decade

Harry McCracken nominates the iPad as Gadget of the Decade:

A lot of what keeps me partial to the iPad is the same stuff I liked back in 2011. iPad apps tend to have fresher interfaces and less cruft than ones written for older operating systems, letting me focus more of my attention on the work at hand. I spend less time on the drudgery of maintaining a computer, such as rummaging around for files and performing software updates.

It’s also helped that Apple’s vision of where the iPad should go has largely synced up with mine. With its big screen, potent processor, and Pencil stylus, the current iPad Pro is pretty much the powerful, versatile iPad I was dreaming about nearly a decade ago. And by renaming the iPad version of iOS as iPadOS, Apple has doubled down on its commitment to building features designed with iPad power users in mind, such as iPadOS 13’s desktop-class Safari browser.

Like Steven Sinofsky, who has leaned into iPad to replace his computer, and Federico Viticci, who has chronicled his whole-hearted adoption of iOS as his full-time computing platform, McCracken has been an earnest contributor in documenting what Tim Cook has called Apple’s “clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.” It’s certainly playing a long game, but Apple’s estimation of the iPad as the future of computing seems more accurate than ever.

Why Apple’s iPad is my personal gadget of the decade

Why Do Car Manufacturers Put the Fuel Access Door on the Left or Right Side (or, That Way Madness Lies)

The average household has 1.88 cars. This means that you are faced, sometimes if not always, with filling up two gas tanks. On which side is your fuel door? And once you’ve answered that question, answer this one: why that side? Because you’ve asked yourself that question many, many times.

Explanations run the gamut of utilitarian and functional:

My dealer told me that all Subarus have their gas intake on the passenger side for safety. In case you run out of gas and have to fill up with a tank on the side of the road you’ll have your car as a barrier between you and the traffic.

This is very smart. It also suggests that American cars would inevitably have their tanks on the passenger side. Which, of course, they don’t. In fact, the obvious solution was to put the filler in the middle of the car’s rear:

Once the cheapest, most convenient solution, the middle, was made illegal, everything became a nightmare of relativism and equally rational justifications. Both sides have their advantages and disadvantages, and we’re left, wandering, alone, confused.

The truth, though, is that there are simultaneously many reasons why your car’s fuel filler is on the side it’s on and there’s also as many reasons why it could be on the other side. There is no one answer, and anyone who attempts to find one is on a path that only leads to madness.

Why Some Cars Have Gas Tank Fillers On The Left Or The Right (Jalopnik)

Rise of the Skywalker: Reviews

Owen Gleiberman, Variety:

“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” might just brush the bad-faith squabbling away. It’s the ninth and final chapter of the saga that Lucas started, and though it’s likely to be a record-shattering hit, I can’t predict for sure if “the fans” will embrace it. (The very notion that “Star Wars” fans are a definable demographic is, in a way, outmoded.) What I can say is that “The Rise of Skywalker” is, to me, the most elegant, emotionally rounded, and gratifying “Star Wars” adventure since the glory days of “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.”

‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’: Film Review

Sam Adams, Slate, sees Rise of the Skywalker as an apology to fans angry about Rian Johnson’s treatment of the franchise in The Last Jedi:

The Rise of Skywalker gives people what they go to Star Wars for, but that’s all it does—and worse, all it sets out to do. It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal.

The Rise of Skywalker Is So Bad It Actually Makes the Trilogy Worse

Matt Goldberg, Collider:

He got away with it before with the charming-yet-safe The Force Awakens, but with The Rise of Skywalker, his weaknesses get the better of him resulting in a film with poor plotting, shallow character development, and underwhelming revelations.

I don’t hate The Rise of Skywalker as much as I’m consistently disappointed by it. There are the occasional bright spots like what the film does with the character of Leia (the late Carrie Fisher) as well as a couple other nice surprises, but even here, it feels like Abrams doesn’t want to challenge his audiences as much as provide a constant stream of fan service.

‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Review: What a Piece of Junk

AO Scott, NY Times:

If I had to come up with a definitive ranking of all the “Star Wars” episodes — leaving out sidebars like the animated “Clone Wars,” the young Han Solo movie and the latest “Mandalorian” Baby Yoda memes — the result could only be a nine-way tie for fourth place…“The Rise of Skywalker” isn’t a great “Star Wars” movie, but that may be because there is no such thing.

‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Review: Revolution No. 9

More Spark

Peter Wells discusses one of Spark’s features:

But the killer feature for me is the way Spark tackles signing PDFs. Spark will open email to mark up in Readdle’s PDF Expert (which is free for basic editing), and when you’ve scribbled, the PDF is attached to a reply email to the sender. This is such basic, obvious behaviour, but no other email client on iOS behaves that way. Most force you to save the PDF to the Files app, then jump back to the email and reply there, or send a new, completely out of context email.

I wrote about Spark recently and didn’t discuss the feature, as I just found it myself while fiddling with the app during a meeting (ahem). Spark is free unless you use the collaboration features, but I’d happily pay for the app.

Spark offers a better way to email

Menantico Blues

A colleague at work turned me on to “Menantico Blues,” which is an indie (very indie) film about a large area of land adjacent to where I grew up. From the Audubon Society:

Like many of the sites along this trail route, the nearly 300-acre Menantico WMA can be enjoyed either by car, on foot or by canoe or kayak. The Menantico River and Ponds are part of the federally designated Wild and Scenic Maurice River watershed, and it’s easy to see why. These pristine waterways provide essential habitat for numerous federal and state endangered and threatened species from birds to fish and plants. The network of freshwater ponds is the result of extensive sand mining that still takes place in many of the bayshore’s rural communities. These sand-wash ponds are common throughout the Bayshore Region and provide important habitat for wildlife and recreational opportunities for people.

South Jersey Adventures posts a cheeky review of the area, complete with some photos representative of the area. I spent countless hours there as a child riding bikes, hiking, and later as an adult, running, hiking, and biking. The article also recalls the heretofore-unknown-to-me story of Mike Newell, who reputedly drowned himself with the help of two friends as part of an occult ritual:

The question would have been ludicrous until about two weeks ago, when Patrick Michael (Mike) Newell, a 20‐ year‐old Vineland glass‐fac tory worker, was found drowned in a sand‐pit pond in nearby Millville. His hands and feet had been bound with adhesive tape…The Newell youth belonged to a “Satan worshipers sect” and felt he had to die violently in order to be put in charge of “40 leagues of demons.” He urged the two friends to bind him, which they did, performed a “Satanic ritual” and then had them push him into the pond.

The film itself features beautiful shots of Menantico, and some of the drone footage is spectacular.

Mentantico Blues (Vimeo)

Spark

I’ve written several times about my particular email setup; I currently use MailMate on the Mac, but I am able to use other applications, even Apple’s Mail, to achieve it. A quick recap:

  • a smart folder for emails received today, addressed only to me
  • a similar folder for all emails received today
  • a smart folder for emails received yesterday, addressed only to me
  • a clone of this folder for all emails received yesterday

I work out of these four smart folders, rather than my inbox, and try, to the degree possible, not to let anything fall outside of these four folders without being archived or sent to OmniFocus.

The problem is iOS; there’s nothing like Mail.app or MailMate on iPhone or iPad. I don’t care that much about iPhone; I don’t consider the iPhone to be a device where I’m going to do much more than reply to an emergent email for which I’ve gotten a notification.

I have used and like Mail very much on iOS. The attention another application, AirMail, received, however, always had me trying it out, and eventually I tried Spark too. Spark makes the cut as being the closest to a desktop app for me, with the features I rely on to make email manageable.

Smart Folders

Both Airmail and Spark have offered savable searches, but Spark in its most recent versions has improved their saved searches (Smart Folders, in Spark speak). One of the most useful improvements that separated Spark from Airmail for me was the immediate updating of the search results. In AirMail, for example, archiving a message from my “Today in Inbox” saved search would not obscure or “move” the message until I left the smart folder and returned to it. With the most recent release of Spark, Smart Folders work just as they should (and how I expected them to work coming from Mail and MailMate).


Integration

My only hang up using Spark is that it uses its own URL scheme (readdle-spark://…) rather than mail://, which is the scheme that MailMate and Mail both use. In practice, this only matters when you’re sharing URLs between apps. In my use case, sending an email to OmniFocus is something I frequently do; if it is added on my Mac, the URL for the message follows the mail:// scheme. This results in Mail on iOS being opened if I click on a link. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but requires that both Spark and Mail be configured for the same accounts on both your iPad and Mac.

Of course, you can’t specify a default email client on iOS, which produces the jarring experience of Mail opening up when you expect Spark from time to time. That needs to be fixed posthaste.