Eraser and Bluffer-in-Chief

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.

The Return of Barack Obama

App Switching in macOS

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.

Finder: Command-Tab

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

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

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:

  • Invoke LaunchBar
  • Type Command-R
  • From the resulting list of active applications, you can:
    • double-click
    • arrow down/up and press enter
    • type the name of the application and type enter

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

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).

Keyboard Maestro's Application Palette

MacWorld on the Convergence

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

My Own Private Distancing Setup, Updated

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:

F0473584 DF44 43E0 B110 D2B4AACE4183

I’ve had this desk for over 20 years and am happy to be able to keep it. I really like the whole rig.

Schizophrenia Today

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.

Apple Buys Dark Sky

MacRumors reports that Apple bought Dark Sky. This has to be great news for the developers. I remember finally springing for the app after hearing good things about it; we were on a family vacation in Ocean City, NJ, and sitting in the car parked a few blocks from their famous boardwalk while rain poured down in buckets.

We were just about to head back to the beach house we were staying at when I opened the App Store and purchased Dark Sky. It reported that the rain would stop in something precise, like seven minutes.

And it did, indeed, stop raining. We waited and clambered out of the car, and enjoyed a great afternoon, as they say, on the boards.

More iPadOS Cursor

Ryan Cristoffel, writing for MacStories:

Rather than simply copying the Mac’s own cursor implementation, Apple has designed something new for iPadOS. Beyond the simple aesthetic change of the cursor being a circle on iPad rather than a pointer, iPadOS’ cursor also adapts to different types of content: when hovering over an app icon on the Home screen, the cursor doesn’t actually sit above the icon, rather it merges with the icon such that the visual circle disappears, and your movement of the cursor is reflected in the icon itself moving around. Similarly, in the case of certain other UI elements the cursor merges with those elements while hovering over them.

Apple Releases iOS and iPadOS 13.4 with iPad Cursor Support and Keyboard Improvements, iCloud Drive Shared Folders, and More

Getting to R-Naught

Andy Slavitt, on what we should be doing to suppress COVID–19:

Right now the smartest people I talk to want us to push R0 (“R-naught is term that indicates how contagious an infectious disease is) to zero, be able to contract trace, install thermal indicators, develop reliable anti-body testing, and put fever tents in the right place. Armchair experts and economic hacks feel different.

Medium

My Own Private Social Distancing Setup

I was watching A live tour of how Basecamp uses Basecamp to run Basecamp and I thought it would be fun to write about how I have moved my work setup home.

Just in case you’re living under a rock, the United States (and in my specific case, New Jersey) has been under a kind of lockdown due to the novel coronavirus that causes COVID–19. My particular school district has been close for over and week, and inclusive of our spring break, will be closed for a month.

My district issue laptop is a 12“ MacBook Adorable. It’s a fine machine for running around, but I don’t really use it in the office that way (I have it connected to a 27” Dell with an iKBC Poker II mechanical keyboard.

At home:

  • 2018 Mac mini, 3 GHz i5 6-core
  • Samsung U32J59x Display 31.5-inch (3840 x 2160)
  • Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (in Space Gray)
  • Logitech G602 Wireless Mouse
  • Tanberg PrecisionHD webcam
  • Insignia NS-PAUBMD8 USB microphone
  • Samsung T5 SSD for Time Machine Backups

My Home Setup

Suppression Tactics

Following up on my post about Tomas Pueyo’s “The Hammer and the Dance,” here’s more on the measures that separate successful suppression from what we’re doing here in the United States:

What really turned the tide in Wuhan was a shift after Feb. 2 to a more aggressive and systematic quarantine regime whereby suspected or mild cases—and even healthy close contacts of confirmed cases—were sent to makeshift hospitals and temporary quarantine centers.

The tactics required turning hundreds of hotels, schools and other places into quarantine centers, as well as building two new hospitals and creating 14 temporary ones in public buildings. It also underscored the importance of coronavirus testing capacity, which local authorities say was expanded from 200 tests a day in late January to 7,000 daily by mid-February.

The West Is Misinterpreting Wuhan’s Coronavirus Progress—and Drawing the Wrong Lessons

Cursor Two-Point-Oh

Jason Snell on iPadOS 13.4’s cursor implementation:

Apple didn’t just copy Mac cursor support and paste it into iPadOS with version 13.4. This is a careful, considered set of additions that rethink what a cursor should look like. And apparently it should look like an adorable round sticky color-changing blob.

The Assistive Touch feature was a mere preview. It took a new device and ten more years to rev the cursor. And it’s so very welcome.

In praise of the iPadOS 13.4 cursor

Using OmniOutliner to Manage Projects Phases

I use OmniFocus every day, throughout each day.I use the Today perspective to see what calendar events and task need my attention each morning. I liberally chuck bits into my inbox for later processing. I review weekly.

But OmniOutliner is a bit different. It’s not built for near-instant input. It’s a powerful application whose features can be overlooked. In my use, it competes most directly with spreadsheet applications, but there are some valid reasons to prefer it over, say, Google Sheets. This year, I found one of my favorite use cases for OmniOutliner.

“Managing phases” is a fairly fancy description for what this OmniOutliner document accomplishes for me, but it provides an elegant solution. The specifics of its purpose is to help me track where I am in observing staff members (mostly teachers). New Jersey adopted a law requiring that school districts complete observations using specific, purpose-built tools.

What’s more, I like using OmniOutliner so much I find it a treat to update my progress.

Short or Long Preconference Observation Post-Conference
Short not required 20 minutes minimum required
Long required 40 minutes minimum required

Table 1: Anatomy of an Observation

So an observation is not truly binary (done or not done), but rather moves through a series of smaller actions towards completion. For example, with a short observation, the classroom observation itself is one of three things: unscheduled, scheduled, or completed. Similarly, the post-conference–meet with the staff member–is either unscheduled, scheduled, or completed.

OmniFocus can be an effective tool for managing observations, especially because due dates and timelines are associated with some of the tasks. I found the vertically oriented nature of projects, however, not useful for seeing a larger view of where I am in the process. OmniOutliner’s filters, however, and I think a visual will help here, are the perfect tool.

In OmniOutliner, I created a document with seven (7) columns:

Done(checkbox) Teacher Name School Long or Short PreConference Observation Post-Conference
Jane Doe High School Long completed completed completed
John Doe Middle School Long scheduled scheduled unscheduled

Table 2: Observation Phases

Figure 1: All Observations

A long list of observations in varied states of completion is not terribly useful. But by harnessing the power of OmniOutliner’s filters, I am able to see precisely what I need to see to move the whole endeavor ahead, increment by increment–and no more. This is the true power of OmniOutliner in this application.

One useful filter is to show me what observations I have at each school. This cuts my view down from around 50 projects1 to a dozen or fewer. For reasons of efficiency, I will try to plan as much as I can while I am in one building, observing teachers period by period, for example, and then likewise conducting post conferences during their preparatory (or “prep”) period.

Figure 2: Observations at VMS

Another filter will show me how many actual classroom observations I have to complete that would be considered “short,” meaning I can just show up and not necessarily stay for the full period (although often I will). These I can schedule back-to-back, or I can schedule a bunch in one day because they are shorter. Finally, because timelines are involved, I will often filter my observations by post-conferences remaining; once I’ve completed an observation, a timeline begins and I have a certain number of days to complete the follow-up meeting. Filtering by observations that have been completed–but where the post-conference has not been even scheduled–helps me focus and keep me in compliance with the timelines. There are more filters that I use regularly, but you get the idea.

Figure 3: Short Observations

Of course, obscuring observations that I’ve already completed when planning is unquestionably useful. To this end, I created one that only shows lines with an unchecked status box.

Figure 4: Observations Remaining

OmniOutliner lives on all of my devices: my Mac, which I usually keep in the office, my iPad, which is what a carry with me when I leave the office, my phone, my Mac at home… the application is everywhere I need it to be. And with Omni’s move to support iCloud in addition to OmniPresence, it’s in the file system where I want it to be.


1 A project in David Allen’s Getting Things Done is anything that requires more than one action to complete. A teacher observation is, by that definition, a project; to wit: schedule observation, observe teacher, schedule post-conference, complete post conference, wait for signature, email secretary re completion.

Note: I used a fake name generator for the sake of confidentiality.

The Hammer and the Dance

Tomas Pueyo does a technical but clear explanation of the current, most aggressive planning regarding how the US–and the world–should deal with COVID–19. The conversation has turned to the relative merits and limitations of mitigation strategies vs suppression, which has found clear explication in the UK’s Imperial College Report. Regarding China’s response, he notes:

This graph shows the new cases in the entire Hubei region (60 million people) every day since 1/23. Within 2 weeks, the country was starting to get back to work. Within ~5 weeks it was completely under control. And within 7 weeks the new diagnostics was just a trickle. Let’s remember this was the worst region in China.

The fallacy I’m seeing propagated online is that we’re doing the same thing that China did and now their problem is over… so in three weeks, we’ll be clear here in the US. That’s not the case at all.

The suppression strategies that have worked in Asian countries include more than asking people to stay home and testing sick people. Suppression involves quarantine of the sick (at the very least, home quarantine, but other countries have instituted far stricter measures of this). It involves contact tracing.

And in truth, it’s expected that suppression strategies–which are designed to reduce the spread of the virus–won’t result in any kind of herd immunity. As such, until an effective vaccine can be crafted, suppression strategies will have to be reinstituted when the virus re-emerges. Which it likely will, if the Spanish Flu of 1918 is any guide:

The first pandemic influenza wave appeared in the spring of 1918, followed in rapid succession by much more fatal second and third waves in the fall and winter of 1918–1919, respectively.

Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance – Tomas Pueyo – Medium

Dear Leader

Jennifer Senior, writing for the New York Times, on the sham of Trump’s press conferences:

But telling the media that they’re peddling fake news is straight from the playbook of the political gangsters of the last century. So many of Trump’s moves are.

Having each of his cabinet members fulsomely thank him for his leadership and congratulate him for his “farsightedness” before each of their remarks: Check. Making sure each one stays on a message, even if that message has nothing to do with his or her purview: Check.

Leans totalitarian to me.

Call Trump’s News Conferences What They Are: Propaganda