Some years ago, I got the kids into launching Estes Rockets. Below is the Big Bertha, caught in slo-mo on my phone camera:
It’s rated for 500 vertical feet, which isn’t terribly high for these models. Its size and relatively low height allows you to really see the whole flight, notably when the rocket hits its apogee and the parachute pops out. Thousand-foot rockets are a blast (see what I did there?) to launch as well, but you can’t see as much of the flight path.
In “Thoughts on Working from Home,” I mentioned being able to make coffee the way I want. Most days, it’s this:
Thats about 62 grams of beans and 800 grams of water, or a ratio of 13:1 water to coffee. It’s not the only way I make it, but it is the most often.
The Verge, on Microsoft Word now flagging two spaces after a period:
The software giant has started to update Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period (a full stop for you Brits) as an error, and to offer a correction to one space. Microsoft recently started testing this change with the desktop version of Word, offering suggestions through the Editor capabilities of the app.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, delightfully pedantic on the issue:
The two-spaces thing has been a “debate” only in the way that wondering if the earth is round, or if man landed on the moon, or if you should smash up a couple of cherries and orange wedges while mixing an Old Fashioned, have ever been debates. One side has all the experts in agreement; the other side is wrong. Go look at a few professionally-typeset books — every single sentence on every page in every book has one space after the period.
Pas de Merde quotes Nate White, an Englishmen, in his response on Quora about why some British people don’t like Donald Trump:
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.
The rest is worth reading as well.
British Writer Pens The Best Description Of Trump I’ve Read – Pas De Merde
The school district for whom I work has been closed due to the coronavirus/COVID 19 since March 17th. This means that I moved to working from home.
I have always been interested in working from home. I’m very much an introvert, although I do enjoy the social exposure I get at work. I have often said that the people I work with are largely why I like working–I got enough social exposure during the day that I could recluse by night.
I remember attending a conference when I was in graduate school, and a woman I was sitting next to said that she left a job where she worked from home preparing documents (did page layout, for example) for customers–and made more money doing it. As a person who worked doing proof-reading and some page layout while in grad school, I couldn’t understand why someone who did this–and made more money than she did as a school psychologist–would give up what I considered a very desirable job.
(She had the best reason of all–she wanted to make a difference and work with kids).
So these last couple of weeks have been a different experience. Schools, if you’ve never worked for one, place a huge premium on “being there.” For students, we call it “seat time,” and you can lose credit for the school year by missing too many days, or, if you’re younger, courts can fine you for not sending your child. Absent teachers cost money in the form of substitute teachers, and there are clear instructional implications for absences, so again, attendance is a big deal. And for those of us, like me, who provide some level of supervision, being on-site and visible is the difference between being useful and not. When I left my 14-year-long job as a school psychologist for my first job in administration, an assistant principal I worked with advised: “Be visible.”
Visibility is different in this brave new world. I set up meetings via Google Meet to discuss challenges that teachers are having. Our leadership team met with direct service providers (speech therapists, for example) to discuss moving to an online service delivery model. I’ve created tutorials and screencasts to provide assistance for teachers.
Some miscellaneous observations, in no particular order or end of the good/bad spectrum:
Agenda’s most notable feature is the ability to pin a note to a particular date, and most notably, an event on your calendar. (It also inserts a link to the note in the calendar event, so that you can refer to the note from two places: Agenda itself, or your calendar).
An Agenda Note Link in Fantastical
In a meeting, inevitably a task or action will occur to you (or be assigned to you); I think best practice in GTD would be to add it to your task manager (OmniFocus, in my case). If you’re referring to your task manager and reviewing weekly, you won’t miss this commitment or open loop.
The one thing I’ve struggled with is taking notes in meetings and then tossing them into the digital abyss of history. It’s easy to type notes during a meeting and never look at them again. They are there if you ever need them, but a once-over can help you process anything of importance or remind you of something you might not have realized deserved your attention.
To this end, using Agenda’s “Mark New Notes as On the Agenda” preference can create a kind of digital inbox of meeting notes that you can add to your weekly review. This feature, as it says, puts any new note that you create on Agenda’s, ahem, agenda, and you can simply click on the “On the Agenda” menu item in the Overview pane.
Mark New Notes on the Agenda
My practice is to leave all new notes on the Agenda until I’ve performed a weekly review. Simple yet powerful.
This week, still on the agenda
Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have created Rt-Covid–19, a visually rich expression of “a key measure of how fast the virus is growing”:
The metric being tracked here (Rt) represents the effective reproduction rate of the virus calculated for each locale. It lets us estimate how many secondary infections are likely to occur from a single infection in a specific area. Values over 1.0 mean we should expect more cases in that area, values under 1.0 mean we should expect fewer.
I’m not familiar with the validity of the measure, but the visualization is immediately understandable. New Jersey, my home, is on the cusp of “breaking the back of the virus,” as our governor likes to say.
Tim Nahumck echoes a great point made by Jason Snell and Myke Hurley regarding the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro:
Now that I’m working from home for the foreseeable future, I’m using the iPad Pro in a “docked” manner, where it sits off to the right in a stand connected to an external monitor; for input, I use the Logitech K780 keyboard and – new to my home office setup – a Magic Trackpad 2. In this scenario, the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro obviously wouldn’t be used, just like my Smart Keyboard Folio sits below my monitor.
As Jason and Myke said, the Magic Keyboard isn’t for turning your iPad into a desktop workstation. If you want to use your iPad at a desk, get a stand and a keyboard (and maybe a trackpad or mouse). This beast is for turning it into a laptop.
Talmon Joseph Smith, writing for the NY Times about how liberals who grew disillusioned with President Obama welcome his reemergence:
But now we are older, and living through a deadly pandemic with a leader who embodies the antithesis of Mr. Obama’s empathy and rationality. A man who attempts to ignore or erase all realities inconvenient to him and who seeks gain through bluffing when division, his first instinct, fails. Suddenly, an Obama-style civics and the competent, bipartisan-minded technocrats of his administration would be a godsend.
That’s as good a description of our current president as any.
For all of the charms and affordances that come with using iPad and iPadOS, the Mac continues to offer some of the most capable and interesting software available to GUI enthusiasts. This is a love letter from a longtime Mac user to some of the very best software on the Mac for what is a quotidian feature–app switching–but which, to my mind, makes using the Mac a blast.
Typing command-tab is the system default for switching applications in Mac OS X. You hold down the command key and tap the tab key to expose a horizontal list of running applications. Each tap of the tab key will advance a selection to each consecutive application. You can mouse over the palette of applications as well, and spinning your mouse’s scroll wheel. Releasing command-tab will activate the last selected application. Bonus: holding down the shift key moves the selection from right to left.
SwitchGlass is a new application from Internet-famous John Siracusa. John’s book-length reviews of Mac OS X remain legendary, although he decided to stop writing them in 2015.
SwitchGlass resurrects behavior previously found in an application called DragThing, which developer James Thompson retired. There are enough preferences (vertical alignment along the left or right of the screen, size, color and transparency, and more) to satisfy any power user, and it is a focused, delightful app to use.
LaunchBar appears to be a humble launcher application– but there are is a raft of features that delight and add value. One of my favorite features is the application switcher. Unlike SwitchGlass, the menu is only available when invoked:
LaunchBar exposes additional functionality when it’s available. You can at the very least see the application package contents, but in applications like the Finder, you can navigate through the file structure. It’s another example of how deep and powerful LaunchBar’s feature set is.
Keyboard Maestro is a powerful utility that provides you with a number of ways to automate behavior on your mac by typing custom keystrokes. It also provides an app switcher, as well as a list of running applications, called the Applications Palette, a la SwitchGlass.
I like Keyboard Maestro’s palette just fine, but there’s no way to obscure it when you’re not using it. On a large display, this might not matter much, but to my mind it’s always in the way at some point–and there’s no way to toggle its status via keystroke (which seems like a strange oversight for an application whose raison d’etre is automating such things).
Jason Snell, writing for MacWorld about the convergence of tablets and trucks:
Now comes the race toward that elusive sweet spot, the creation of a device that’s the perfect balance—a light touch tablet when you want it to be, a stylus-driven notepad when you want to draw or take notes, a laptop when you want to write or work on a spreadsheet, even a desktop when you want to sit at a desk and use a large screen.
Prior to the release of iPadOS 13, I would have said that Microsoft was ahead of Apple. The Surface Go and Pro offered a more modular tablet experience than Apple’s iPad. But with desktop-class Safari, great display support, and a completely rethought pointing system, iPad is at once a wholly different experience from using a Mac, but almost as capable. Windows on Surface is still very much Windows.
iPad vs. Surface: Apple and Microsoft get closer to convergence | Macworld
I previously shared a pic of my home office, such as it is, since I was spending so much time there what with the social distancing and school closure and all. I was getting some RSI issues in my right elbow/tricep, so I ordered a keyboard tray:
I’ve had this desk for over 20 years and am happy to be able to keep it. I really like the whole rig.
Slate’s Laura Miller interviews Robert Kolker about his book, Hidden Valley Road, which documents the story of the Galvin Family, where six of 10 children developed schizophrenia:
The genetic part of it has been really disappointing. We really thought 20 years ago that as soon as the human genome was sequenced we were going to knock out any number of complicated diseases. We thought we’d just look at the genes of someone who has a disease, see where the problem genes are, fix those genes and be done in time for dinner. That didn’t happen for any number of diseases, including schizophrenia, where they found one gene and then another and then another and now they have over 100. Each of those irregularities they’ve found only add a small probability that you’ll get the illness.
Schizophrenia–often confused with multiple personality disorder–is a chronic condition that exhausts families, resources, and the lives of the afflicted. Things haven’t changed much, either.
Six Brothers With Schizophrenia Fascinated Researchers. A New Book Explores the Family’s Trauma.