Very excited today to see that what the Newton was essentially capable of twenty years ago is finally coming to iPad. I don’t mean that in a snarky way; it wasn’t a priority until recently, and that’s OK. But right down to drawing shapes that snap to scalable graphics, I recognized features of the Newton OS notes app. For demo purposes, I would always show people how that worked on my MessagePad 2100. Here’s a cool demo.
Month: June 2020
Father’s Day BBQ
If you, like me, plan to spend Father’s Day (or the day prior to it) applying the forces of smoke and heat to make something delicious, the Virtual Weber Bullet is invaluable. I’m using the Minion Method to cook some spareribs today. I don’t do gas or pellets.
Interview with LaunchBar’s Creator, Norbert Heger
Speaking of LaunchBar, Take Control’s Take Control of LaunchBar mentions an interview with Objective Development’s Norbert Heger, but the link is no longer accurate. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, though, you can read it here
Summerfest 2020 and Take Control Books
SummerFest 2020 is happening and you can grab Take Control books at a 30% discount. I bought Take Control of TextExpander[1] and Take Control of LaunchBar for seven bucks apiece.
Both are terrific apps that I feel I use daily, but lack an appreciation for the full feature set.
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This ebook doesn’t cover version 6, but according to the publisher, “nearly everything in the book is still applicable to newer versions as well.” ↩
Things That Go Bump
The iPhone 4 was introduced alongside Apple’s first official phone case: the bumper case. Rather than wrap their phones in a plastic coffin, Apple saw fit to design a case that would provide drop protection around the edges without spoiling the device’s visual asesthetic. The demand for these cases was such that they were hard to get after the device launched (although Antennagate found them giving them away to any aggrieved party who asked for one).
I was able to score one early after the 4’s launch because I knew someone who worked at an Apple retail score. That case provided effective coverage until the rubber gap that allowed the bumper to stretch to fit the phone started to lose its elasticity, and the case no longer fit snugly.
Apple never made another bumper case. Starting with the 6 Plus, I have wrapped my phones with Apple’s own leather cases. Despite my affection for these leather cases, I’ve always fondly remembered the bumper case.
My newest phone, the green 11 Pro Max, has a back worth looking at. The red leather case I bought when I got the phone provided a peek at the green color between the lenses, but otherwise you have to pry the case off to enjoy the frosted glass and sage green backing. Every other phone I’ve had has been black or space gray: they looked good, but it was all shades of gray. The green on the Pro Max, on the other hand, is really nice on the eyes.
My son asked for a bumper case that we saw on amazon for his XR, and I’ve admired the minimal wrap every time I’ve seen it. So here’s my 11 Pro Max, with a matching green bumper case.
In the bumper, the device feels minimal and sleek, without feeling dangerously naked. It weights 10 grams less than the leather case, so the phone drops from 250 to 240 grams in the bumper. On the other hand, there are edges where the Apple case was smooth and rounded. So while the phone feels smaller, it doesn’t feel better. It looks great, though.
There is somethig to be said for Apple’s leather cases: ‘Busage. They look fine out of the package, but they age well. I’ve never once retrired an apple leather case without a note of regret, because it was this thing that traveled a journey with me, and bore the scars to prove it.
Trump’s Golf Expense
SV Date, writing for HuffPo back in February:
And because Trump insists on playing at courses he owns, the cost to taxpayers has been nearly four times as high as it was for Obama. More than two-thirds of Trump’s golf outings involve seven-figure trips aboard Air Force One, mainly to Florida and New Jersey, but also to Los Angeles, Ireland and Scotland. Obama, in contrast, played most of his golf on courses at military bases within a short drive of the White House.
The cost equates to 334 years of the annual salary Trump brags he doesn’t take.
Trump’s 29th Trip To Mar-a-Lago Brings Golf Tab To 334 Years Of Presidential Salary
My Own Private Teleprompter
Mad scientist Brett Terpstra on his excellent Marked application as a teleprompter:
Once you have the theme, you can start prompting just by hitting the ‘s’ key in a Marked preview. That will start autoscroll at the slowest speed. Use left and right arrows to speed up/slow down the scroll speed. (You can also click and drag on the meter that appears in the lower left of the screen.) That’s all there is to it.
If you’ve ever made the jump from writing a how-to to recording one, you know how hard it is to narrate what you’re doing on screen. Marked is a neat tool but this is just next-level cool.
The Best Camera is the One in Your Pocket
I wrote before about the 20k photos I have in Photos (and more accurately, on some servers somewhere in iCloud). I’ve been trying to clean up my collection, mostly organized using a mix of albums and smart albums. I noticed that I had been in the habit of making smart albums for each phone I had: iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, etc. I added my last two phones as smart albums and took a look at the totals. So here’s the big picture:
| iPhone 3G | iPhone 4 | iPhone 5 | iPhone 6 | iPhone 7 | iPhone 10 | iPhone 11 Pro Max | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Photos | 972 | 1780 | 2048 | 1974 | 1802 | 2122 | 838 | 11536 |
| Videos | 0 | 268 | 135 | 27 | 57 | 47 | 17 | 551 |
| Months in Service | 10 | 23 | 24 | 23 | 23 | 19 | 6 | 128 |
The big picture is that I take about a thousand pictures a year. Because I tend to keep my phones for about two years, that’s around 2k pictures a year. My first iPhone was an exception: I only took about 1000 pictures in the time that I had it. I don’t remember being especially judicious with it. Apple must have added the device information to the photo metadata at some point in the iPhone 3G’s lifetime, because the earliest pictures include “Apple iPhone” in the file metadata, while “iPhone 3G” doesn’t show up until mid-September of 2009.
My shutterbugging reached a peak with the iPhone 5, then dipped a bit again until the X came out. You can say that each phone offered a greatly improved camera, but the X really blew me away. Until I got the 11, of course.
And the 11 is interesting to look at. I’ve only had it for about a quarter of the life that I typically keep an iPhone, but I’ve already taken 800 photos. Assuming that I keep up that pace, I will be adding about 2400 photos over the lifespan of the device.
Videos are a different story, and here the data surprised me. I was apparently smitten with the ability to take video with the iPhone 4 (I took video because I could), but my interest waned to a nadir of 27 with the iPhone 6 Plus, and leveled out to about 50 per device ever since. In terms of file space, though, video accounts for around 20 GB of my Photos library; this represents about a third of my 60 GB library.
There are photos and videos from other sources, too. I was adding pictures to my iPhoto library for almost nine years before I got an iPhone. And since April of 2013, I’ve taken over 5,000 photos with an Olympus E-PL5 mirrorless camera, which I still take with me when it’s feasible (I blame Shawn Blanc’s review for inspiring the purchase). It’s hard to believe it’s seven years old and still takes amazing pictures (thanks in no small part to a pricey but Panasonic Lumix F1.7 prime lens, with which I’ve taken over 2000 photos).
By Crom… It’s Conan!
About two weeks ago, Super 7’s Conan the Barbarian action figure arrived after a long wait. I ordered it in March of 2019, about one year before the coronavirus shut the country down. A number of production issues delayed his delivery, but Super 7 communicated with customers to keep everyone updated.
The short take? It’s a great piece. But first, a little background.
When I was a kid, and pretty young, too, I saw a Mego Conan on a peg at a store in nearby Deptford, NJ, and asked my parents if I could have it. After some negotiation, I ended up choosing a Jaws tabletop game, which was a fun kind of sudden-death game that the whole family could play. But the Conan always stuck in my mind. I had great memories of other Mego figures: Thor, Falcon, Batman and Robin, Iron Man, and Superman, to name a few. But I never saw that Conan again during my childhood.
Unlike many other Marvel characters, there was never to be another iteration of Conan[1]. Mego Superman and Batman gave way to the awesome Super Powers collection. Mattel introduced the Secret Wars collection around the same time. Both lines introduced interesting characters beyond the usual suspects.
But Conan? No one was making Conan figures. The Mego figure stood alone in the recesses of my mind.
Fast forward a couple of decades: I did finally treat myself to a Conan figure: a Toy Biz figure from a two-pack we happened upon at a local toy show. (My kids got bit hard by the love of plastic at an early age, which is no surprise–I haven’t always said yes when they asked to buy a toy, but I surely gave many more nods than shakes. We discovered toy shows, and I always saved whatever money I had for the boys, the only exceptions being this Conan and a punisher figure, before the Hasbro reboot of marvel legends.) And there was Vikor, too, the Viking from the North from the He-Man line, who was a thinly disguised Conan, complete with chains and everything.
When the Super 7 announcement came out, I didn’t have to think hard on whether or not to order the figure.
And in a moment of synchronicity (synchromicity), I found a collection of Conan stories for the Kindle. For a mere 99 cents.
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There was a Hasbro line of figures that appeared while I was in high school, with a pull-cord in the back of the figure that seemed antiquated even at the time. I’m not counting them just because. 10-year-old He-Man figures were done better. ↩
Federico Viticci’s Use of Contexts in OmniFocus
Federico Viticci describes his use of Perspectives in OmniFocus to group his work by tags. Ignoring the perspectives themselves, it’s an interesting application of tags in OmniFocus that would surely make a GTD purist turn away in horror.
Viticci uses dates and a combination of tags, a feature not added to OmniFocus until version three, and one which was eschewed by the developers. Prior to version three, they weren’t called “tags” even–they were, in strict GTD parlance, “contexts.” You got one context per action item. No more.
Trying to glean a bit from his screenshots, it seems to me his use of projects are more like areas of responsibility (eg “Podcasts”). For this, I would be inclined to use folders. A project would be a specific episode of a podcast, with the corresponding tasks that are required to enact the goal–in this case, posting the episode. As in GTD, a project is something that takes more than one step. And to the degree possible, a project’s name should specify the desired outcome.
His use of emoji in contexts is clever as a visual cue for reviewing your tasks. I found that using font symbols in Things to differentiate “Areas” (like OmniFocus’s folders) was helpful in the same way.
Similarly, using a tag to help you separate areas of responsibility can certainly help you focus by grouping related tasks (and obscuring others). One of the key reasons I preferred Things for a time was the ability to tag actions not just with contexts, but with another bit of data. For example, anything that I might have to submit for school board approval was usually a task I tagged with the @writing tag, but I would also tag it with “Board Agenda.” The action itself wasn’t part of a project dedicated to that month’s agenda, but seeking approval was an important step in completing the project. At a particular time of the month, it was necessary that I was able to see items that had to be submitted to the board secretary. Multiple tags were the best way to get this done, and it was not a true context in GTD.
But OmniFocus has always been flexible, and version three the most flexible to date. You don’t have to be a GTD practitioner to get value out of it. The truth is, so much of what a context once meant–@phone, @computer, @online–is irrelevant now: you can often do any number of tasks no matter where you are (even working from home). This is an interesting take from a recognized power user.
“This Latest Remarkable Hour of Trump’s Presidency”
The Washington Post crafted a video showing the events leading up to Donald Trump’s photo-op outside of St. John’s church.
Drawing on footage captured from dozens of cameras, as well as police radio communications and other records, The Washington Post reconstructed the events of this latest remarkable hour of Trump’s presidency, including of the roles of the agencies involved and the tactics and weaponry they used.
Amazing.