Ben Rhodes, writing for the Atlantic, on Donald Trump’s dangerous motivation behind his recent action in Iran:

Barack Obama did achieve a deal good enough to prevent his successor from having to go to war with Iran. But now, despite all that work, a de facto state of war exists between the United States and Iran. To keep his promise to kill an achievement of Obama’s, Donald Trump has been willing to break his promise to get us out of wars in the Middle East. In doing so, he has tragically proven Obama right: The choice all along was between the Iran Deal or an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program and some form of war.

Instead of governance, we’re getting rampant egomania.

An Extraordinarily Dangerous Moment

OmniFocus provides a place to document each and every commitment you’ve made; every phone call, errand, conversation, or information to process can be captured so you don’t spend precious cognitive power remembering what you need to do. In this regard, OmniFocus is not different from a notebook, text file, or spreadsheet–you can capture input any way you like. OmniFocus does, however, provide a singular interpretation of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, allowing the user to assign tags (contexts), projects, start and due dates, and other affordances (such as flags).

Every decision you make uses psychic energy. The true power of OmniFocus is its ability to help you hide what you don’t need to do. If you’re a busy person, you have 100+ items, some of which have dependencies that preclude your getting them done at any given moment. Time is finite, so how do you decide what to do each day?

Staring at a list of all of your remaining or available tasks is not conducive to getting things done. Neither, for that matter, is reviewing everything in OmniFocus each morning; there’s a Review feature in OmniFocus, and you should use it–but in GTD, the review is weekly, not daily. There’s a reason for this: the review is good bit of work.

The review is a place to consider each project and associated tasks. This is the time to see what is due soon, to check your hard landscape (calendar), and possibly even clear out other inboxes you’ve decided to use–physical or otherwise. And it’s not something you can likely squeeze into every morning.

The Evolution of Context

One of the tenets of GTD is organizing your work by contexts: that is, you put phone calls on a list of phone calls you have to make, so that when you’re at your desk, you can make those calls. Likewise, you might put anything that you could only do at your computer on a “computer” list. But things have changed. You don’t need to wait to be in the office to make phone calls or use a computer; you likely have much of that with you at any given time. Internet connections are almost ubiquitous. Your cell phone might have a more powerful processor than your aging desktop.

All of this is to say that contexts are less salient than they once were, at least in some cases, and OmniFocus reflects this evolution by dropping contexts as a feature (and a name) and replacing them with tags. Tags in OmniFocus work just like contexts, with the exception that you can assign multiple tags to an action–long a bone of contention for many users. Location-based tags can still be very meaningful, as can tags associated with specific people that you many not always be able to speak with.

An example from my personal use: I work in a public school district and frequent five school buildings. I use a tag for each of those buildings to allow me to see what, if any, business I can take care of while I’m in that particular school. Likewise, I have tags for each important person I may need to talk to while I’m there. An action that I need to talk with a certain building principal, for example, might be tagged with the school, the principal’s name, and even @phone.

What Should I Be Doing Right Now?

You can live out of your inbox, but it’s no way to advance your long-term projects. Doing so is a great way to have actions with due dates sneak up on you. Instead, you can harness OmniFocus to help winnow down the list of what you can work on to what you intend to get done. It allows you to take a week-long view, launching from your last review, and then narrow your focus to each day.

Again: You can’t look at your entire list of available actions every day. And with contexts being more nebulous than ever before, you need some other way to organize your work. This particular setup helps me focus:

1. During the weekly review, flag any tasks that I would like to complete by the end of the week.
2. Make sure that I see anything “Due Soon,” which I have set to within the next 2 days. (I believe the default is 5 days.)
3. Tag actions that I want to complete today with the tag “Today.”

OF Status	Available	Flagged	Today	Due Soon
Description	any task not on hold, deferred, or waiting on another action	any flagged task	any task tagged “Today”	any task with a due date in the next 2 days1
Priority	lowest	this week	high	red alert

Note that “Today” is lower in priority than “Due Soon.” Actions tagged “Today” are things you intend to complete today, but you may have more time. You can renegotiate these items each day, depending upon emergent circumstances. Items with a due date, by contrast, really should be due on the date that you gave yourself. Arbitrarily assigning due dates that don’t correspond to external needs is bad juju and will gum up your GTD system.

Get Perspective(s)

You can spend most of your week between two or three perspectives, dipping into your Inbox to process as necessary.

Today: Your Today perspective should show you any actions that are due soon, and tagged “Today.”
Due/Flagged: A second perspective, which I call “Due/Flagged,” shows any actions that are due soon and/or flagged. You can just show flagged actions in another perspective if you like, since there’s overlap between the two.

I generally will work out of the Today perspective, and check Due/Flagged multiple times a week, if not daily.

---

¹This is user-configurable; you can set “due soon” to mean however many days prior to the actual due date you like.

David Ruddock, writing for Android Police:

But this “solution” has basically become an insult to Chrome’s users, forcing them to live inside a half-baked Android environment using apps that were almost exclusively designed for 6" touchscreens, and which exist in a containerized state that effectively firewalls them from much of the Chrome operating system. As a result, file handling is a nightmare, with only a very limited number of folders accessible to those applications, and the task of finding them from inside those apps a labyrinthine exercise no one should have to endure in 2019. This isn’t a tenable state of affairs—it’s computing barbarism as far as I’m concerned. And yet, I’ve seen zero evidence that the Chrome team intends to fix it. It’s just how it is.

GSuite allows users to have immediate access to all of their files, and the collaboration features are excellent. It’s not otherwise something users look forward to using. And Chromebooks are the same: they’re useful for a number of tasks, but unsatisfying for many users. Education loves them because they’re cheap and easy to manage.

Chrome OS has stalled out

Via MacSparky: Brydge has announced a keyboard for iPad with a built-in trackpad. It will of course use Assistive Touch in iPadOS to provide input support. Apple’s own Smart Connector makes for a keyboard experience that precludes the user from thinking about charging, while Brydge requires Bluetooth and separate charging. Despite this disadvantage, this is going to be a great addition.

Brydge Pro+ | iPad Pro Keyboard | Brydge Technologies

Constance Grady, writing for Vox, on why ebooks aren’t cheaper than dead tree editions:

And because ebooks are often more expensive than Amazon’s heavily discounted print books, traditional publishing’s ebook sales seem to have fallen off — and Amazon is more dominant than ever in the print book market. “It’s so much cheaper,” says Friedman.

In this new market, high ebook prices make it harder than ever for young authors in particular to survive. “The split has really hurt debut novelists,” says Friedman. “It’s hard to ask readers to take a chance on someone unproven at that high price point, and since the ebook market does lean towards fiction, it’s hurting the new people.”

Despite the Department of Justice’s actions to stop Apple and the big publishers from attempting to establish an agency model, the agency model is, in fact, exactly what is functioning in the ebook market now. So while Amazon can offer deep discounts on print books, sellers can set the prices for ebooks.

The 2010s were supposed to bring the ebook revolution. It never quite came.

My youngest son and I went out on our umpteenth phô lunch today, and as always, I wondered about established protocol. I’d like to follow the cultural norms, but there’s nothing worse than a food snob. I took to the internet to collect some of the wisdom about how to eat phô.

Sauces

There’s often sriracha, plum sauce, fish sauce, and red chili sauce. I dosed my first few bowls of phô with red chili sauce just because I like spicy food. According to Matt Rodbard, however, you should try the broth first:

As mentioned, when the broth is good, it’s something to be savored. So to blast it with these sweet and spicy flavors, before giving it a chance, is sort of criminal. My condiment policy with phô is similar to my condiment policy with hamburgers. The best don’t need it.

Loving Phô, dedicated to all things phô, agrees:

Phô lovers judge the bowl of phô served to them in a restaurant by sipping the broth first without putting in any seasoning or garnishing.

I see many people (mostly non-Viet and younger Viet generation) dumping in sriracha and/or hoisin sauce into their phô as the bowls arrive at the table. My question is, don’t they wonder how the broth tastes? Is it good or is it not good phô broth? If it’s not good phô broth then maybe they should try a better place.

Tri Vo, however, thinks the sauces might be a welcome addition for those who are expecting a more robust flavor from their phô; like the Guinness in the US, it’s not the same:

But if you live in the United States, it’s unlikely you’re going to get anything remotely close to perfection, even from a Vietnamese-owned business. Not to mention, ethnic food in the United States has the tendency to be a little blander, so it can adapt to a variety of palettes and tastes. Adding Sriracha and hoisin sauce can make the already bland soup feel more like home, more like what it should be.

And one vlogger’s attempt at Columbusing phô led to a raft of comments that suggest the sauce issue isn’t settled even in the motherland.

This video shows my favorite technique: a little sauce in a condiment bowl, and you can drag meat or noodles inside.

The Mechanics

At the table, there is a spoon, as well as chopsticks. My question was, do I use the spoon to drink the broth and the chopsticks to pick out the noodles and meat? Or is the spoon for Americans who don’t chopstick?

Happily, it’s just fine to hoist the bowl up to your face after you eat the noodles and drink it. The spoon is there to help agitate and incorporate the ingredients, as well as to let you enjoy enjoy some broth before you’ve eaten the other stuff. First We Feast shows how you can use the spoon in concert with your chopsticks to get a nice bite of many ingredients at once. Thrillist, however, notes that you should move the noodles to your spoon using the chopsticks, and eat from the spoon.

In the end, though, perhaps Scott Berkun’s advice is the best of all:

It’s no surprise all the experts have their laws, rules and traditions to which i say hooey. Traditions are great to try at least once, but you should always remember every tradition we have was invented by someone who tried something different than what had been done before:

Binge-watched The Morning Show over the holiday break. Like Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker, I had heard that the critics were–ahem–critical, but that viewers were generally positive. Like Star Wars, I thought it was a good watch. Some reviews:

Lucy Mangan, The *Guardian*:

Aniston is flawless – wholly convincing as a woman both broken by and rightfully raging at Mitch’s betrayal, a force to be reckoned with and a person who has had it up to here with a lifetime of negotiating other people’s whims, needs and prejudices. Everyone else – especially Billy Crudup as the network suit playing seven-dimensional chess with everyone – matches her point for point. The script has depth and endless torque and the whole thing is an exhilarating rush that makes room for nuance, thought and – though it’s definitely a drama – humour.

The Morning Show review – Jennifer Aniston returns in a masterwork for the #MeToo era

Jen Chaney, *Vulture*:

There’s a strong sense of momentum and controlled chaos in The Morning Show that engages from the jump…once you get drawn into the center of all this swirling activity, you wind up wanting to stay.

The Morning Show Wants You to Watch

Robert Lloyd, LA *Times*:

It’s more like a Manhattan “Game of Thrones,” really, in which various forms of subtle, even polite skulduggery, backstabbing and under-bus-throwing are enacted and discussed, with a lot of attention paid to power and gender dynamics in the workplace. Characters fight to “control the narrative.” “I just need to be able to control the narrative so I’m not written out of it,” says Alex, who wants to keep her show. “Controlling narrative is more powerful than you can imagine,” Mitch will say many episodes later, as he tries to turn things to his advantage. (There is not much in the way of noble sacrifice.)

Review: Watch ‘The Morning Show’ to the end. It’s better than you’ve heard

Jason Snell, writing for MacWorld on what Apple may introduce in 2020:

If I ran the zoo, though, I’d consider beefing up iPadOS’s cursor support and building a new iPadOS device—let’s call it iBook, because I’m in charge now and won’t be denied—with attached keyboard and trackpad. An iOS laptop. All the pieces are in place. I’d love to see it—but alas, I don’t really think it will. 2020 is a weird-sounding year, but an iOS laptop is too weird even for 2020.

I think the mouse and keyboard support is likely: the ability for users to buy an iPad and some accessories and have all of their computing needs met. We’re not far from that now.

2020 iOS Predictions: iPad Pro and so many iPhones

Via Six Colors, David Sparks considers the iPad to be Apple’s device of the decade:

Throughout the decade, Apple continued to push forward on hardware and (to a lesser extent) software. The currently shipping iPad Pro has some fantastic hardware, and I’m convinced the tablet platform is here to stay.

And it’s no accident: Apple sees the iPad as the computing platform of the future.

Apple Device Of the Decade: the iPad

Iron Fists and Kung-Fu Kicks on Netflix is an interesting documentary on the rise of the Kung-Fu movie. One of the most fascinating sections highlights the relationship between the genre’s signature kicks and physical stunts and the dance moves that came to be known as breakdancing.

Related from FactFile:

The Rock Steady Crew such as Kenneth Gabbert and Richard Colon state that breakdancing is influenced by Kung Fu movies and James Brown.

Iron Fists and Kung-Fu Kicks on Netflix

A bit more info on my post from yesterday on special education funding:

Special Education is unique in the State budget in that it falls under both the Adequacy Budget calculation and Categorical Aid. In addressing special education, the school funding law sought to discourage over-classification by districts. Consequently, Special Education Aid is not dependent on the number of special education students a district has. Instead, it is assumed that 14.78 percent of every district’s student population is classified as special education, with an additional 1.72 percent needing speech therapy.

Thing is, the 14% rate doesn’t reflect reality: NJ classified nearly 18% of its students in 2017.

School Finance 101: Special Education

The latest episode of The Incomparable podcast looks at Rise of the Skywalker scene by scene, and it’s a great listen–especially if you, like me, are a little gaga just *seeing* a Star Wars movie in a theater. Perhaps most importantly, they discuss at length the issue with Abrams’ retreat from Rian Johnson’s Rey origin re-evaluation in *The Last Jedi*: that she doesn’t really have one. Johnson introduced the plot twist in the series that anyone–anyone–can become a Jedi. There’s no dynasty. Hence the nameless servant boy at the end of Last Jedi, who uses his nascent Force power to summon his broom as the Millennium Falcon roars overhead.

Abrams, of course, backed away from this populist version of Force sensitivity, at least as it came to express itself in Rey. Her lineage, it turns out, is the reason for her power.

Melissa Leon of The Daily Beast also makes some cogent points about the plot:

Even apart from the anti-climax of Rey’s lineage loophole, truly, nothing about this Palpatine story works. First he sends Kylo to kill Rey. But when that doesn’t work and she shows up at his evil lair instead, he explains that, actually, this was his plan all along. Then he lays out the same catch–22 he bamboozled Luke with 36 years ago: If Rey kills him, he wins. And this time, he says, his spirit will transfer into her and all the past Sith will live on through her.

Finally, Rey mercifully just shuts Palpatine up and kills him. And nothing happens. All of that spirit-transfer stuff was made up, I guess?

Finn’s potential Force sensitivity and Janna’s secret origins—strangely teased in the film’s last few minutes—nag away at these characters’ closure.)

Finn’s own Force sensitivity opens the possibility of further adventures in the franchise. But as the gang on Incomparable observed, the connection to Episodes IV through VI were severed with Rise of the Skywalker.

Rey’s Parents and How ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Surrendered to Sexist Trolls

Feedbin/NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire came back on the indie software scene first as Evergreen, until Black Pixel returned the name of the app to its original creator, Brent Simmons. NNW was always my favorite RSS reader. It was standalone for a while, but then Brent released it with Feedbin support. So it was bye-bye Feed Wrangler (which was cheap but slow, at least for me) and hello (again) Feedbin. What’s more, there’s an iOS app in beta as I write this.

Agenda

Agenda is a note-taking app. You don’t really need another application for taking notes, I know. But Agenda has some hooks that will, well, hook you. Agenda’s prime feature is the ability to attach a note to a calendar event, a link for which inserts itself into the notes field of the calendar. It supports Markdown, syncing with Reminders, and archiving projects. The developers add new features regularly, which your annual subscription, should you choose to subscribe, funds. There’s a free tier as well.

MarsEdit

I moved from Tumblr to WordPress last year, and decided to purchase my favorite blogging software for the Mac from a long time ago. I don’t write as much as I’d hoped, but I’m happy to be able to write (and post) from MarsEdit when I’m in front of my Mac. (Drafts, generally, is where I write most these days.)

PDF Pen

I’ve had a license for this app Ford years but never realized how often I need it. I don’t need it for much but it’s invaluable when I do.

Acorn/Pixelmator/Pixelmator Pro

I have all three of these… There are selection tools that work better in Acorn (instant alpha)than Pixelmator, while outlining a shape is easier in Pixelmator for me. I don’t edit photos much, but I like having these highly capable and affordable apps on my Mac.

Wifi Signal

Moving my computer to the back porch, and playing some bandwith-hungry games, revealed to me the attenuation that my WiFi signal was suffering lo these many years. Apple doesn’t provide a quick and easy way to tell what the quality of your signal is (unless option-clicking the WiFi menubar widget and interpreting signal to noise ratios), which is where Wifi Signal comes in. This menubar app shows you a cell-phone-style five-bar icon, and clicking on the icon reveals a qualitative rating (Excellent, Good, Poor, etc) as well as other info (like the SSID of your access point). WiFi Signal’s basic functionality is worth the price, and additional features are there when you need them.

DayOne

Journaling gives you a place to drop your thoughts and ideas when publishing them on a blog or social media site isn’t necessary. I like to add entries to DayOne to share some thoughts with a familiar, future reader–me. Instagram integration shows you what you found salient enough to capture in the past as well. It’s a great way to see where you were at specific points in time.

Drafts

Almost everything I write starts in Drafts. I don’t have to have a place in mind for an idea or consider the best application for the job: I just open Drafts and start writing. Is it another inbox to process? Yeah. But it’s Drafts on the Mac! You get actions from iOS–with sync, no less. You can get fussy with tags and turn Drafts into a capable digital junk drawer… and if you don’t fancy mixing PDFs and text and web pages, then there’s no reason not to.

Transmit

I have to hop between multiple google drive accounts and there’s no better way to do this than Transmit. It doesn’t act exactly like the Finder but it’s pretty close for an FTP client. It’s a Mac app through and through, from one of the very best and oldest Mac developers out there.

Keep It

Since making (some semblance) of peace that Yojimbo was never going to be ported to iOS (I know, there was a version that supported one-way sync to the app on iPad), I’ve tried EverNote, Bear, and went in big with DEVONThink. Keep It succeeds Together and KIT, and actually precedes Yojimbo. It feels and acts more familiar to me than DEVON. It’s a digital junk drawer, which supports notes, PDFs, images, and links, and you can tag and file to suit your needs. I love it.

Microsoft Edge

I like Safari, and I would use it exclusively were it as extensively tested by software developers as it should be. But Chrome is the new Internet Explorer, so you have to keep a copy of Chrome on your device to deal with some websites. And the new Chrome is… Microsoft Edge. I know… it’s a crazy world. If you, like me, need to make frequent use of Gsuite on the Mac, you need a Chromium-based browser. And Edge is a good one.

Last Year’s List

My list from last year remains fairly untouched, with one exception: I haven’t needed Scrivener for any projects and so I’m not really using it. MailMate still rules my email usage, although for work only; I like Spark from Readdle for everything else. And 1Password remains quite possible the most used app ever.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety:

“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” might just brush the bad-faith squabbling away. It’s the ninth and final chapter of the saga that Lucas started, and though it’s likely to be a record-shattering hit, I can’t predict for sure if “the fans” will embrace it. (The very notion that “Star Wars” fans are a definable demographic is, in a way, outmoded.) What I can say is that “The Rise of Skywalker” is, to me, the most elegant, emotionally rounded, and gratifying “Star Wars” adventure since the glory days of “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.”

‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’: Film Review

Sam Adams, Slate, sees Rise of the Skywalker as an apology to fans angry about Rian Johnson’s treatment of the franchise in The Last Jedi:

The Rise of Skywalker gives people what they go to Star Wars for, but that’s all it does—and worse, all it sets out to do. It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal.

The Rise of Skywalker Is So Bad It Actually Makes the Trilogy Worse

Matt Goldberg, Collider:

He got away with it before with the charming-yet-safe The Force Awakens, but with The Rise of Skywalker, his weaknesses get the better of him resulting in a film with poor plotting, shallow character development, and underwhelming revelations.

I don’t hate The Rise of Skywalker as much as I’m consistently disappointed by it. There are the occasional bright spots like what the film does with the character of Leia (the late Carrie Fisher) as well as a couple other nice surprises, but even here, it feels like Abrams doesn’t want to challenge his audiences as much as provide a constant stream of fan service.

‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Review: What a Piece of Junk

AO Scott, NY Times:

If I had to come up with a definitive ranking of all the “Star Wars” episodes — leaving out sidebars like the animated “Clone Wars,” the young Han Solo movie and the latest “Mandalorian” Baby Yoda memes — the result could only be a nine-way tie for fourth place…“The Rise of Skywalker” isn’t a great “Star Wars” movie, but that may be because there is no such thing.

‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Review: Revolution No. 9

I’ve written several times about my particular email setup; I currently use MailMate on the Mac, but I am able to use other applications, even Apple’s Mail, to achieve it. A quick recap:

• a smart folder for emails received today, addressed only to me
• a similar folder for all emails received today
• a smart folder for emails received yesterday, addressed only to me
• a clone of this folder for all emails received yesterday

I work out of these four smart folders, rather than my inbox, and try, to the degree possible, not to let anything fall outside of these four folders without being archived or sent to OmniFocus.

The problem is iOS; there’s nothing like Mail.app or MailMate on iPhone or iPad. I don’t care that much about iPhone; I don’t consider the iPhone to be a device where I’m going to do much more than reply to an emergent email for which I’ve gotten a notification.

I have used and like Mail very much on iOS. The attention another application, AirMail, received, however, always had me trying it out, and eventually I tried Spark too. Spark makes the cut as being the closest to a desktop app for me, with the features I rely on to make email manageable.

Smart Folders

Both Airmail and Spark have offered savable searches, but Spark in its most recent versions has improved their saved searches (Smart Folders, in Spark speak). One of the most useful improvements that separated Spark from Airmail for me was the immediate updating of the search results. In AirMail, for example, archiving a message from my “Today in Inbox” saved search would not obscure or “move” the message until I left the smart folder and returned to it. With the most recent release of Spark, Smart Folders work just as they should (and how I expected them to work coming from Mail and MailMate).

Integration

My only hang up using Spark is that it uses its own URL scheme (readdle-spark://…) rather than mail://, which is the scheme that MailMate and Mail both use. In practice, this only matters when you’re sharing URLs between apps. In my use case, sending an email to OmniFocus is something I frequently do; if it is added on my Mac, the URL for the message follows the mail:// scheme. This results in Mail on iOS being opened if I click on a link. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but requires that both Spark and Mail be configured for the same accounts on both your iPad and Mac.

Of course, you can’t specify a default email client on iOS, which produces the jarring experience of Mail opening up when you expect Spark from time to time. That needs to be fixed posthaste.