This Buzz lightyear toy was on the kitchen table today, the result of  cleaning up the basement, where a rather large cache of toys–spanning my children’s multiple periods of interest, from Imaginext to Transformers–lie in storage.

I grew up in a memorable age of toys. Star Wars. He-Man. Transformers. The rebirth of GI Joe.

In the 80s, cartoons often were used to market toys (for much more on this, see The Toys that Made Us. So you might find a toy in a store, and then watch a cartoon that contains the character; or you might watch a cartoon, and then step into a store and find toys based on the story. But there were a number of interesting toy lines, and cartoons to give them a backstory and context.

Buzz Lightyear and the characters from Toy Story were different, though. In that franchise, the toys had their own lives–as toys–despite the story provided to market them. One of the most joyful plot arcs in the original movie is watching Buzz go from believing the story about his purpose–to protect us from the evil Zurg–to being one of a number of Andy’s precious toys.

So I find this Buzz Lightyear toy a little mind bending. It’s a recreation of an animated character–who was a toy. Who found out he was a toy. After thinking he wasn’t a toy. It’s like a house of mirrors.

I was happy when my kids got them. I wanted to know what it would be like to play with a Buzz Lightyear. Because of how he was portrayed in the film, you could almost feel the joints clicking in your hands, and see the points of articulation. But to hold one, push the buttons, flip the visor up?

It was a brilliant and satisfying realization–a confirmation of the film’s animation.

Dahlia Lithwick, writing for Slate on the give-me-liberty-in-the-form-of-not-wearing-a-mask-or-give-me-death crowd:

Just as some dissenters resoundingly fail to understand that the First Amendment doesn’t give them the right to be heard and seen by everyone at all times, or to say whatever they wish without consequences, some appear to believe that their right to perform their freedom, up to and including with weapons of war, is constitutionally limitless. Right now, the right to breathe unobstructed into everyone in your path is, in its way, a weapon. And wanting the world to see your face unobstructed as you do so feels like a damaged idea of freedom. Historically, masks were preferred by mobs who wanted to do violence unrecognized. Now the masks impair the performance of violence, and the credit and fame that go with it.

Refusing to Wear a Mask Is a Uniquely American Pathology

Matt Birchler:

Apple included some new versions of their Pride watch face in watchOS 6.2.5, and I had to take the opportunity to make a few wallpapers using the color scheme and design of these new faces. We’re still a few weeks from official Pride month, but I figured you’d be okay having them a little early.

I keep a photo album in Photos expressly for wallpaper (formerly desktop images, as any Mac oldhead will tell you), and it is chock full of Birchlers.

Pride Wallpapers 2020

I bought my first digital camera in the late 1990s. It was an Olympus and I believe it took pictures at 640 x 480. I subsequently replaced it with another Olympus digital, but I don’t remember much about it outside of the fact that everything was better, speed and quality.

As soon as Apple announced iPhoto, I started piling my stash into the application (as opposed to a folder full of photos in the Finder that I managed myself). I have updated my Mac incrementally, year by year, and of course moved my photo library along from Mac to Mac.

My first photo in my Photos library is from early 2000. It’s a screenshot of my Earthlink settings for Mac OS X Public Beta in the Internet Connect application.

Now? I have 20,000+ photos. I take as many as I like on my iPhone and the photos show up there. I manually add photos from my Olympus E-PL5 mirrorless camera as well.

I like to load up Photos and browse; sometimes I’m looking for something, but often I’m just nosing about. What do I see?

• Bicycles
• Kids
• Cats
• Dogs
• Food… lots of food
• Things I’ve tried to repair: Car parts. Lawn mowers.
• Did I mention food?
• Vacations in Ocean City, NJ; NYC; Vermont; Washington, DC; Disney World
• Fishing trips
• Model rockets
• Our swimming pool
• Computers, Keyboard, and iPads
• Inside jokes
• Cars, owned or lusted after
• First days of school
• Graduations and celebrations
• Holidays
• Toys

In short?

A life.

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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