Month: January 2021

QAnon is a Maliciously Designed Game

Game designer Reed Berkowitz compares QAnon to game design:

There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality. Away from actual solutions and towards a dangerous psychological rush. It works very well because when you “figure it out yourself” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of the rabbit hole, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects you. Because you were convinced to “connect the dots yourself” you can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived at.

Berkowitz notes that QAnon is propaganda that harnesses the power of super-ordinate goal completion through the use of clues. In well-designed games, players know they’re playing one. Anons, however, don’t. To them, it’s real.

A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon

The Manual’s 10 Best Comedy Films

Connor Sheppard at The Manual lists his top 10 comedy films of all time:

Comedy is, after all, perhaps the most controversial category in film. Don’t believe me? Next time you’re at a party, let it be known throughout the gathering what you consider a good comedy movie or even just your favorite movie on Netflix. Then position your back against the wall (for safety) and prepare to endure an onslaught of aggressive protestation of your choice. People are protective of their brand of humor, man.

I can easily get behind National Lampoon’s Vacation. There are some exclusions that I would cite, notably:

  • MASH
  • Airplane!
  • Young Frankenstein (or maybe Blazing Saddles)

The 10 Undisputed Best Comedy Movies of All Time

Aqueux: Classic OS X Wallpaper for macOS

Hector Simpson took the classic wallpaper from Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and created dynamic wallpaper for your modern Mac.

Ultra high-resolution wallpapers, inspired by an OS X classic — available in several wide-gamut color editions, with easy installation on macOS, and a collection available for mobile devices.

iPad and iPhone Wallpapers are free, but gussying up your Mac will require a $3 purchase for 11 dynamic set (Apple Pay supported, no less).

Aqueux

Glutens are OK

James Hamblin, writing for The Atlantic:

Among people of all ages, she notes, several small studies have now found deterioration in quality of life after the switch. For children especially, imposing a gluten-free diet can be socially isolating. In the journal Pediatrics, kids with celiac disease who attended a week-long gluten-free camp, where every food was gluten free by default, “demonstrated improvement in well-being, self-perception, and emotional outlook”—which seemed to be because the environment “alleviate[d] stress and anxiety around food and social interactions.”

There’s bona fide difference between people who can’t digest gluten and those who adopt the condition to cure unspecified somatic complaints. You can entertain yourself with quackery, but you shouldn’t do that to your kids.

The Harm in Blindly ‘Going Gluten Free’

Trump Worked Hard… at Not Working

Jack Holmes, writing for Esquire:

In what possible way does watching The Fashy Benjamin Button Hour Starring Lou Dobbs prove that someone is working hard at their job as…the President of the United States? There is far too much cable-news viewing going on this country in general, but the idea that anyone is better informed after watching Fox opinion hosts blather for hours each day is absurd. When it’s the president who’s supposedly doing his job by watching, we’re all just sliding off the grid of reality. On a more basic level, though, the fact that the president’s propaganda network feels it necessary to actively make the case that he works at all is not really a great sign.

On Trump’s Last Full Day as President, Fox News Felt Compelled to Make the Case He’s Done the Job at All

How Trump Got In

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing for The Atlantic:

One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to invalidate the will of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to go back where they came from; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “a refugee camp”; of his constant invocations of “the Chinese virus,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are—or should be—on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened—that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.

Trump’s race-baiting was odious enough–it’s that people voted for him at all that most horrifies me.

Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In?

Panic Revives Audion

Panic, purveyors of Mac-assed Mac apps, have dusted off their MP3-player app Audion:

Once upon a time, we made one of the earliest MP3 players for the Mac, Audion. We’ve come to appreciate that Audion captured a special moment in time, and we’ve been trying to preserve its history. Back in March, we revealed that we were working on converting Audion faces to a more modern format so they could be preserved.

Today, we’d like to give you the chance to experience these faces yourself on any Mac running 10.12 or later. We’re releasing a stripped-down version of Audion for modern macOS to view these faces.

I was a SoundJam user myself, but I remember being amazed by the skins you could apply to this app. There’s even a Newton-themed face.

Audion Newton Face

Facing Forward

Bring Back the MacBook

Jason Snell, writing for MacWorld:

As much as I love my M1 MacBook Air, I would drop it in a heartbeat for a 12-inch model that looked like the Retina MacBook. There’s room in the Mac laptop line for a smaller, lighter MacBook. I promise it won’t take up very much space.

Years ago, I recommended a MacBook to a former coworker who found the 11″ Air’s (non-Retina) display hard on the eyes, and I myself was lucky enough to use one for four years through my employer. Its criticisms–the Intel M3 was slow, and the butterfly keyboard was, at the very least, worse than the keyboard that preceded it, and at the worst, broken–is true, but the size was simply amazing. I would pinch it between two fingers when walking to meetings.

The case for a 12-inch MacBook Air

Hook: A Quick Look

A Problem in Search of a Solution

How do you organize data? If you’re working on a project, do you like to keep everything together in a folder in the Finder or Dropbox? If so, what about applications that aren’t document-based? To-do applications are self-contained, with entries in a silo. Notes apps, too. Digital junk drawers, like Yojimbo, Keep It, and DEVONThink, keep their files sorted in their own internal storage systems as well; you don’t save their files across the file system.

If you use specialized apps like these, you have likely struggled with this folder-based organization. In order to find a reasonable solution, you have either tried to make one app the clearinghouse for all of the information, or you use search.

Hook’s Solution and an Illustration

Hook by CogSci looks to solve this problem with Hook. Hook links files together. Hook’s interface is sparse; it’s a utility in the true sense of the word, reminiscent of LaunchBar or Alfred in its presentation.

So here’s an example: each year, I have to prepare budgets for each special education program by school. The final product is a one-page printed spreadsheet, which I give to the accountant at a meeting.

Getting from last year’s categorical budget–the printed spreadsheet–requires a number of pieces of information: last year’s budget, for example, a sheet with projections for how many students I think will be in each program and each grade, notes (usually taken in Drafts of Agenda) from meetings, and emails. It’s a project, in the GTD sense of the word.

As an OmniFocus user, I always create a budget project with a deferred start date (We don’t work on them until about this time of the year, right after Christmas), but there are always notes and considerations that I add to the project, which begin once I’m completing the upcoming school year’s budget (while I was preparing the 20-21 budget, I started thinking of things that I would need to remember for the 21-22 budget).

Without relying on Hook, I could link to support materials in OmniFocus by creating an action item with a note that contains a URL to a Google Sheet, for example–and that might be the right way to manage one of the steps in the project, if it is, in fact, an action item. But having a to-do item exhorting me to review an email that I don’t need to act on isn’t productive.

With Hook, though, I can select the project in OmniFocus and invoke Hook; I am treated to a window with the name of the project, and below it, all of the “hooks” associated with the project: Drafts notes, emails, URLs to Google Drive files, etc. Action items go into OmniFocus, and support files are linked to the project via Hook. I can be promiscuous with my application use, because as long as Hook can get a link to the data, I can attach it to this central point of focus. In the picture below, you can see how Hook shows three support files: an email, Drafts document, and a link to a Google Sheet that I will need to update.

Having a central point of reference to which all of your Hooked links are connected is a key part of using the application. You can’t, for example, grab three files and link them to each other, and then have other files linked to this ersatz collection later on. That’s a strength or weakness depending upon your intended use case. To this end, Hook enables the user to connect to a central hub (for example, a text file or TaskPaper file, or even to select something such as a new OmniFocus project or a folder in Finder. The developer describes exactly this on Hook’s website.

Sync

Users with multiple Macs can take advantage of Hook’s sync feature. You point the app to a folder that both installations of Hook watch (iCloud or Dropbox, for example) and your links will work across devices.

License

CogSci Apps is following a model like Agenda, where buying Hook is a one-time transaction, but releases with new features after one year will cost you. Theses “Updates Licenses,” though, don’t cost as much as the first full license you purchase.