The first deepfake I saw was Bill Hader doing Arnold Schwarzenegger and I will admit to thinking for a moment that my mind was playing tricks on me… that I was seeing Arnold’s face because Hader’s impression was so convincing. An Ars writer makes one himself:
I created my own deepfake—it took two weeks and cost $552 | Ars Technica
Why do people give their pets–and their babies–human voices–aka ventriloquating?
Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, did a small study on what she calls “talking the dog” in 2004. She had family members record everything they said to one another for a week, and found that when they ventriloquated (a technical term) for their dogs, they seemed to do so for one or more of several reasons: “effecting a frame shift to a humorous key, buffering criticism, delivering praise, teaching values, resolving potential conflict, and creating a family identity that includes the dogs as family members.”
James Parker of The Atlantic on Middle Age:
The middle-aged person is not an idiot. Middle age is when you can throw your back out watching Netflix. The middle-aged person is being consumed by life, and knows it. Feed the flame—that’s the invitation. Go up brightly.
Serious Eats’ Daniel Gritzer on rediscovering the joy of a Chinese cleaver:
I am, or at least I had been, well aware of the virtues of the Chinese cleaver because I had used one aevery day for several months while working in a French restaurant about fifteen years ago. I loved that knife, but over time, I reached for it less and less as new knives entered my life… I’ve spent so much time in recent years debating the relative merits of Japanese and Western knives, which tends to be where the conversation is focused among knife enthusiasts in the United States, that I’d forgotten this third option and just how rightly it belongs in the running.
I bought one from amazon for like 12 bucks and use it all the time.
A quick update to my Die Hard post: a segment of one of my very favorite podcasts, Upgraded, featured a discussion of Die Hard. Jason and Myke mentioned the hilarious translations of the title into other languages:
Via The Loop , “The Problem with Relying on Wirecutter Reviews”:
In truth, if you’re an expert on any single category, such as camera lenses, the “best” pick on these sites is likely to be something you disagree with. The top pick is the choice that’s better for a wide audience, but it might not be the absolute best possible product — because the highest-performing one is too expensive or complicated to use.
The optimal way to approach recommendation sites is simple: If you need a product, like a printer, and don’t have strong opinions on it or want to avoid overspending on a potential lemon, buy the top choice. It’s almost certainly been tested more than any of us could feasibly do on our own, and you’ll save hours of research. But if you are an expert about a device and the pick isn’t what you’d go for, that’s okay! The recommendation probably wasn’t really targeted at you anyway.
This nicely sums out how car enthusiasts feel about Consumer Reports.
Ben Brooks on going iPad only:
Drawing to Excel — you name it. There used to be limitations with what you could do on an iPad — but those limitations are melting away, the last vestige being iOS developers looking longingly at a better. These are the people you hear from most, because they are the most likely to write a blog about it, while the rest of the world just switches to an iPad without making a thing out of it (burn).
Excel is not even close to feature parity, so i think it’s a bad example in this case. His larger point resonates, though–with some notable exceptions, I’ve been nearly IPad exclusive at work since iPadOS came out.
I’ve long considered Die Hard a guilty pleasure. Considering it’s the Christmas Season, I was happy to introduce my younger son to the film today (since it is arguably a Christmas Movie. Coincidentally, the movie was featured on “The Movies that Made Us” on Netflix. Some fascinating reveals:
Rayaki in Cherry Hill, NJ
My first blush with iPadOS’s mouse support left me underwhelmed. Using a Magic Mouse, I was able to click and otherwise emulate a finger, but one absent feature in particular–support for scrolling in apps like Safari–left me uninterested in using a mouse with my iPad.
A little reading, however, led me to discover that mice with scroll wheels–notably Logitech mice–scroll as you might expect. I tried a leftover USB mouse from my son’s computer, and low and behold! Scrolling!
I picked up a Logitech Anywhere MX 2 today and set up the mouse. I must report that in addition to scrolling working, the ability to program each button to complete a number of useful features makes the mouse even more intriguing.
I set up the mouse to support click/tap with button one; button two activates the menu; other buttons will snap a screen shot, open the app switcher, and even summon the dock. This list action blew me away; I had hovered over the bottom of the screen a number of times looking for the Dock to pop up, but this is possibly even more interesting than standard macOS behavior.
One small detail bothered me, however: leaving Assitive Touch turned on when not using the mouse leaves the small menu button, semi-transparent as it is, on the screen at all times. I don’t like that one bit.
But Shortcuts to the rescue! I quickly made two shortcuts: Mouse On and Mouse Off. One turns Assstive Touch on, the other off. I keep these sorted near the top of my shortcuts, and keep Shortcuts pinned to my home screen.
Make two great martinis:
Stir3 this for at least a minute and then strain into two martini or coupe glasses. You’ll get about 205 ml per drink.
1 Bombay Dry (not Sapphire) is my go-to gin. Tanquery is better; there’s a bit more nose to it, so it’s warmer and softer at the same time. As for the other big name, Beefeater is also delicious. There are a number of other, more expensive gins that you can experiment with. I wouldn’t go much higher in proof with this classic, but Plymouth, Bulldog, and Hendricks are all excellent.
2 Ignore exhortations to leave out vermouth. Swishing it in the glass and pouring it out, glancing at the bottle… all cute but glib. Add vermouth; 6:1 gin:vermouth is a good place to start.
3 Stir, don’t shake. You don’t need a bar spoon but stirring will teach you the correct way to agitate the drink. Shaking makes the drink too watery and cloudy.
Deiter Bohn, reviewing iPadOS:
I’m weirdly proud of Apple for having the courage to present power users with that difficulty curve spike. Apple used to be so worried that people would get lost that it kept the iPad working like a big iPhone for a really long time. Now, it’s not afraid to just make things complicated and assume people who need it will figure it out.
That sure sounds like a computer to me.
This is a disappointment; the mouse has a number of programmable features within the OS, but because it’s considered an “assistive” affordance, the device interprets clicks as touches that your finger would make. I think I could make the buttons work, but the lack of scrolling makes the device kinda pointless. That’s right: you have to click and drag to scroll in a Safari window. This is where the iPad as laptop replacement hits a pain point: If I had to choose between pointing and mousing for long periods of time while working at a desk, I’d choose mousing.
While I don’t care for dark mode on the Mac, I really like it on iOS. I could (but don’t) leave it on all day on the iPhone. I similarly have it automatically switch on my iPad. I find the dark theme is appropriate for when I used my iPad most (at home, in the evening), and especially if I’m reading in bed before I nod off.
I tried the cut/copy/paste gestures but haven’t used them on iPad. If I’m really doing some writing, I have a keyboard. And I know how to use it.
Slide over mode is as good as I’d hoped… I love having a carousel of apps available right on the side of the screen, or tucked away off screen. I can pull out the stack, make notes in Drafts, check Slack, check Twitterrific, and then slide the stack back off screen. It’s evolutionary and iterative in the best way.
Still not really usable for me. It’s the navigation. One day, far in the future, the only people using traditional computers will be spreadsheet jockeys.
I really like having the Today view on my home screen. Rigth now, it’s weather, Files, upcoming events, and Shortcuts. I want to use Shortcuts more but I don’t know if it’s gonna happen.
A few thoughts after watching a quick recap of the Surface Event:
I have started to collect some usage notes on iPadOS for a later post, but I will say that I like having the Files widget pinned to my Today view on the home screen. I used to make smart folders in the Finder with the intention of reviewing them each morning to see where I left off the day before. Files pinned to Today puts it front and center.