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).
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.
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.
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?
Prescott Vanmeyer III, aka unemployedwineguy, tries Everclear:
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.
Via Boing Boing, a walk of shame and summary of the charges agains the seditionists who attacked the Capitol in Washington DC on January 6th, 2021.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Paul Krugman, arguing that direct Federal intervention this year not only worked, but proved the wrong-headedness of Reaganism:
All this big-government intervention worked. Despite a lockdown that temporarily eliminated 22 million jobs, poverty actually fell while the assistance lasted.
And there was no visible downside. As I’ve already suggested, there was no indication that helping the unemployed deterred workers from taking jobs when they became available. Most notably, the employment surge from April to July, in which nine million Americans went back to work, took place while enhanced benefits were still in effect.
Nor did huge government borrowing have the dire consequences deficit scolds always predict. Interest rates stayed low, while inflation remained quiescent.
Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors, about the most important Mac ever:
And then there’s the iMac’s final legacy—the lowercase letter ‘i’. It was such a hit that Apple began sticking it in front of every product it made. Some of them survive to this day. But does the i in the iPad, iPhone, and iPod really stand for ‘Internet?’
Of course not. It stands for iMac. The product that saved Apple.
Alex Pareene, writing for the New Republic, makes a modest stimulus proposal–buy Americans an electric scooter:
A nation of electric moped-owners would not just change their own behavior; they’d become a constituency for changing all of our transportation options and our built environment itself. Most people don’t need massive vehicles for the majority of their travel. Throughout the rest of the world, most people manage to get by with lighter and smaller vehicles than the ones Americans use. Many Americans are purchasing larger and larger SUVs and trucks because they feel safer, but the main thing they feel safer from is other people in larger and larger SUVs and trucks. Low-speed, light-weight scooters will pose much less of a threat to children and pedestrians, and if their use is widespread, their users should come to realize the benefits of further restricting the use of heavy automobiles in urban and even suburban settings.
Even if you had a car, you could make do with one of these for a lot of your jaunts about town.
Via Boing Boing, a study find that psychopaths love Trummpian autocrats and endorse racist views:
The researchers found that heightened interpersonal and affective psychopathic traits were positively associated with social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism, which in turn were linked to increased anti-immigrant attitudes towards Middle-Eastern refugees and distrust of minorities.
On a related note, NPR took a fascinating look at the Hare Psychopathology Checklist, and it’s (mis)use in determining sentencing and parole requests. Like many tests of psychological constructs, the creator of the test saw it become something beyond the instrument’s intent. Psychopathy is interesting because, like schizophrenia, people use the word casually without knowing what the disorder really entails.
New study links psychopathic tendencies to racial prejudice and right-wing authoritarianism
MotorTrend profiles the Cozy Coupe’s creator, Jim Mariol:
The most clever part was the overall conception: a pedal-car-like experience without the pedals, called a foot-to-floor toy. Something kids too little for pedal cars could also enjoy without excluding older kids who could also fit inside. Mariol was inspired scooting around on a wheeled office chair, using his feet—something within the power of an average little tyke. The design was more than just cute: The roof made it, indeed, cozy and more like a real car than a typical roofless pedal car. And the larger rear wheels and bulkier rear end meant it would be harder to tip over backwards. Add in the long, swoopy door, which of course opens, and you have a primeval car experience, delivered to Little Tikes for consideration in 1979.
I always figured the design was inspired by the Flintstones.
Little Tikes Cozy Coupe: First “Car” for Many Has Roots In Real Car World
Loren Stephens looks ahead to the apps he will be using in the new year. Great inclusions that I use but didn’t discuss in my 2020 post:
PopClip adds an iOS-style edit menu to selected text, with the ability to customize the available actions using PopClip extensions. Brett Terpstra’s PopClip Extensions add to those available by developer PilotMoon. PopClip will format text, shorten URLs, send selected text to a search engine or tweet, create emails, parse events for your favorite calendar, and more.
My use case for Hazel is pretty simple: Hazel moves files and folders on my ~/Desktop into a folder if they sit there too long. I wish I had Hazel for my meatspace desk. My Hazel rules are more complicated than I let on, but not much.
He also uses Keyboard Maestro, which I have purchased and tried to use but I don’t find it terribly useful. iA Writer is a great app, too; I used it as my go-to notes app for a long time, but replaced it with the also-great Bear. I’ve been writing posts for Uncorrected in iA lately, though. It was one of the first text editors to support open-in-place on the iPad, and does not require you to keep everything in an app-specific silo. The style check is useful, and while it looks like a minimalist text editor, it is a powerful writing tool.
