Hog Bay Software’s Jesse Grossjean just released Bike, a “tool for thought.” The title is a great play on Steve Jobs’s “bicycle for the mind” riff. It’s Mac only, like TaskPaper. Grossjean releases thoughtful, Mac-assed Mac apps, and Bike is worth a spin, even if you’re an OmniOuliner or Zavala devotee.
The Griffin PowerMate
Amazing to me that this Griffin PowerMate still works.
It does require another oldie-but-goodie, USB Overdrive, to work, but hey. The build quality is amazing.
Universal Control
Although it’s in beta, Universal Control on macOS Monterey has been working well for me. One of the most delightful touches is how you interact with the setting to control how the Mac conceives of your iPad’s location. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple bakes this feature into the Displays setting in System Preferences.
Here’s my setup in Displays: Mac, attached display (extending the Mac’s display), and the iPad to the right:
Clicking on each device’s tile allows you to drag it into the space you’d like it to occupy relative to the main device:
Each device’s name is shown on hover. Nicely implemented, building on your previous knowledge.
Kid Stuff from a Toy Show
We’ve been attending the ToyShows.org shows for years (since our first show in January of 2011), and now that the pandemic has worn off a bit, we were able to attend today’s show at the Nur Shrine Center in New Castle, Delaware. Some whimsical finds:
The boys don’t really go in for the older toys, but they make for good pics.
The boys at the first show we attended in the winter of 2011
Batman 4DX
We saw The Batman in IMAX, which I am not sure was worth it. 4DX, though, sounds downright silly:
Annoying chair convulsing aside, I’d argue that all the unpleasantly translated movie-to-reality bits from our 4DX The Batman experience were quickly overshadowed by the batmobile scene. Before the batmobile was even on screen, we felt the revving of its engine under our seats, which gradually became more powerful as it slowly teased. Our chairs should have come with safety restraints, because when the car chase finally commenced in earnest, our theater became a Universal Studios roller coaster.
I Accidentally Watched The New Batman Movie In The Worst Way Possible
The Batman
The Light Gives Way to the Dark
In 1989, Michael Keaton’s Batman said onscreen to Jack Nicholson’s Joker, “Ever dance by the devil in the pale moonlight?” Joker’s eyes widened, recognizing a signature line from an earlier time, before his face absorbed a blow from an angry Batman.
Tim Burton’s Batman, and this moment of cinema, was redemption of all of the shit I’d had to watch on television when the not-so-Dark Knight visited my cathode ray tube. Burton and Keaton rescued Batman, in one film, from the ridiculous 60’s Adam West and Super Friends Saturday morning cartoon versions to Matt Reeve’s in The Batman, which I just saw on an IMAX screen.
Batman was ridiculous to me as a child. That’s not entirely fair to say– I loved Batman. I loved the comic books. I used to get month-old comics for cheap with my dad at the Paperback Bookseller and the general store at the Ripicon Mall after a slice. Even clad in gray and blue, the comic book version of Batman was sullen, quiet, violent, and laser-focused on his mission. But on screen, he was ridiculous. I remember hating the Adam West show, wanting it to be something it never would be. The POOF and the PAZOW, the camera angles, the bright colors and direct lighting. It was better than nothing, but I hated it.
The Superfriends cartoon was more of the same. Batman was corny and unbelievable: he pulled all manner of things from his utility belt, a deus ex machinaaround his waist, complete with whatever might be needed at that moment to rescue him and the Super Friends from trouble. In one episode, he announced, “I’ll use the Bat Bazooka.” And from somewhere in the folds of his cape came a giant firearm, the likes of which would have made his moments-ago acrobatics impossible.
And the along came Michael Keaton’s Batman, in the Tim Burton film. Upon hearing that he had been cast for the role, I judged it a betrayal on par with Adam West’s ruination of the character: the long-awaited film casts a funny guy?
But Keaton was awesome. On Burton’s decision:
“A bat is this wild thing. I’d worked with Michael before and so I thought he would be perfect, because he’s got that look in his eye. It’s there in Beetlejuice. It’s like that guy you could see putting on a bat-suit; he does it because he needs to, because he’s not this gigantic, strapping macho man. It’s all about transformation. Then it started to make sense to me. All of a sudden the whole thing clicked, I could see the pointy ears; the image and the psychology all made sense. Taking Michael and making him Batman just underscored the whole split personality thing which is really what I think the movie’s about.”
Batman fans and critics can argue, but the ones worth watching were Burton’s two films, and all three of the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale films. The others are not worth your time.
The World’s Greatest Detective(s)
The Batman is, at its heart, a detective story. We did’n’t need the origin story again, and so were spared it. There were tasteful and useful nods to it, but not once did the film dwell on the Crime Alley shooting that led to the Batman’s origin. Instead, the Wayne legacy takes a monied black eye, when John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone leans in and gives the orphaned Bruce Wayne a possible explanation for the killing. (Turturro, by the way, plays it like Pacino.)
The Batman’s Riddler taps into the zeitgeist; he’s a rabble-rousing conspiracy theorist, one who can, through force of persuasion and words, marshal a Kenosha, Wisconsin-esque militia of acolytes eager to bear–and fire–arms. As he admits himself, the Riddler lacks muscle, using his brains to inspire others to enact his agenda. This Riddler is a modern, timely take, ditching the corny cackle and bright colors for remote terrorism, shared using poorly captured video over a cell connection.
Pattison’s Batman, despite a prescient knowledge of all but one riddle, is classic early-era Frank Miller Batman: driven, able, but inexperienced and fallible. He is well equipped but a damaged recluse. Rather than a focused, single minded vigilantes of means, he is odd, unfamiliar with social interaction, and obsessed. He takes a lot of hits.
There are some cinematographically rivetting shots in The Batman: Batman narrowly escaping the police, grappling vertically up a central staircase while the police converge around the opening. He falters for moment in his escape, almost plunging to his doom before realizing he needs to activate his flight suit. In another scene, the Penguin (Oz, played by a physically transformed Colin Farrell) waddling in anger, having been cuffed at his ankles. I saw The Batman in an IMAX theater, and the appearance of the new Batmobile is announced by rumble that shakes and thumps. (I longed for my 2013 Mustang GT, in the shop for repairs, in that moment.) After a an explosive car chase on a dark and rainy highway, red lights squeezing through the murky dark, Batman swaggers up to Oz, who is suspended upside down in his car. With the grappling gun holster on his leg and the weighty clunk of his boots, he’s a cowboy. Near the finale, after Batman cuts the lights to “do it my way,” he takes down a squad of gunman in the inky dark, the battle illuminated only by bursts of syncopated gunfire.
If the movie has a weak spot, it’s the finale, the final bit of chaos the Riddler has sown. In this, the Batman is again tricked; he is never one step ahead of the Riddler. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody didn’t like the film, especially the ending:
Again avoiding spoilers, the Riddler doesn’t only target individual high-level miscreants in Gotham but decides that the entire city deserves to go down with them. (The possibilities, with its Biblical implications, are endless—and remain untapped.) When his monstrous scheme is unleashed, crowd scenes conjure mass destruction as a plot point, the staggering loss of life as a generic and inchoate jumble.
But otherwise? It’s a great story. Long, but great.
You Don’t Have to Change Your Password Just Because
Glenn Fleishman, writing for TidBITS:
The reason to change a password should relate to an active problem: someone has stolen your password, it’s so weak that someone will crack it any moment now, or you’re notified of a password leak. Otherwise, there’s no reason ever to bother.
Paul Krugman on Gas Prices: “All You Need To Do Is Spend Five Minutes Looking At What’s Happening In The Rest Of The World”
Having been accosted by an interoffice-mail-courier-come-global-oil-trade expert about gas prices being Biden’s fault, I took to Paul Krugman for a rational explainer:
[Republicans] want the public to give Trump credit for low prices in 2020, when demand for oil was low because Covid had the world economy on its back. They want voters to blame environmental concerns, which have blocked the Keystone XL pipeline and might block drilling on public land, for high prices at the pump right now — even though it will take years before these policy changes will have any effect, and that effect will be modest even then.
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, we’re talking about a party that’s in denial about everything from climate change to vaccine effectiveness, so what’s a bit of economic nonsense thrown into the mix? But somehow I find myself shocked all the same. For you don’t need scientific understanding or even rudimentary statistical analysis to see that President Biden can’t possibly be responsible for high U.S. gasoline prices; all you need to do is spend five minutes looking at what’s happening in the rest of the world.
Muppet Theory and Nietzchean Duality
Via Matt Birchler, TIL about Muppet Theory. It is a humorously reductive conception of humankind as falling into one of two types, a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet:
The same thing is true of Muppet Theory, a little-known, poorly understood philosophy that holds that every living human can be classified according to one simple metric: Every one of us is either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet.
Chaos Muppets are out-of-control, emotional, volatile. They tend toward the blue and fuzzy. They make their way through life in a swirling maelstrom of food crumbs, small flaming objects, and the letter C. Cookie Monster, Ernie, Grover, Gonzo, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and—paradigmatically—Animal, are all Chaos Muppets. Zelda Fitzgerald was a Chaos Muppet. So, I must tell you, is Justice Stephen Breyer.
Order Muppets—and I’m thinking about Bert, Scooter, Sam the Eagle, Kermit the Frog, and the blue guy who is perennially harassed by Grover at restaurants (the Order Muppet Everyman)—tend to be neurotic, highly regimented, averse to surprises and may sport monstrously large eyebrows. They sometimes resent the responsibility of the world weighing on their felt shoulders, but they secretly revel in the knowledge that they keep the show running.
Not that he invented it exactly, but German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote at length about a similar dichotomy: the Apollinian and the Dyonisian:
What does Nietzsche mean by DI and AP? The latter is derived from the concept of Apollo, the Greek god of light, who is often said to rule over the realm of the self-conscious, and is thus strongly related to the idea of individuation, through which he provides the world around us with a sensible structure. In contrast we have Dionysus, god of festivals (among other things), ‘centred in extravagant sexual licentiousness’ where ‘the most savage natural instincts were unleashed’ (Nietzsche, 1993, p.147)
The world, to Nietsche, was shaped by the tension between the order and individualism of the Apollinian–whose artistic explication finds itself in sculpture–and the Diononysian–which finds expression in music. Especially in art, the overly controlled rationality of the Apollinian impoverished expression, although the unbidden Dionysian–like too much id and not enough superego, in Freud’s conception–lacked adequate discipline.
The Dionysian and the Apollonian in Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy
My Kobo Forma
The Forma is here, and I have a few comments:
- The Forma is about 15 grams lighter than the Paperwhite; wider-but-thinner form factor makes it feel downright wispy.
- The hardware quality isn’t up to Kindle snuff. The sleep/wake power button barely depresses, while the page-turn buttons wiggle in their seats. Not a deal-breaker though. And hey: page-turn buttons.
- The Kobo interface is simple and accessible, but there’s an inexplicable use of italics in the menus that looks terrible.
- The screen auto-brightness adjustment goes through many shades and levels of brightness before settling in one place. It’s not a show-stopper but it feels half-baked.
- Text on screen looks great.
- Calibre works just fine for installing books; you can de-DRM your Amazon purchases and move them over to your new device.
In all, unless you’re married to the Kindle and Amazon’s ecosystem, the Kobo Forma is a great ereader. I’d snap one up, as the Sage is more expensive and has, to my mind, superfluous features if you don’t want to mark up PDFs on your book reader.
Your Wordle Start Word
Behrouz Bakhtiari, writing on “Towards Data Science:
Based on the results of this study, if used as the first word, the word Aries can correctly identify the existence of approximately 2.07 letters on average and the correct spot of approximately 0.6 letters, on average, will be correctly identified.
Paul Offit on In the Bubble with Andy Slavitt
Andy Slavitt’s excellent “In the Bubble” podcast recently featured noted vaccine expert Paul Offit. Some of Offit’s comments:
- Booster doses give you increased protection from serious illness for 3-4 months
- In children, almost all hospitalizations occur in unvaccinated kids
- “breakthroughs” are not mild cases–mild infections are expected and desirable outcomes compared to the alternative (serious illness)
- you are less likely to suffer serious illness having been infected or vaccinated than you are to experience serious reinfections of the flu
Why Italians Don’t Drink Cappuccino After 11 am
Coffee scholar and gourmand James Hoffman posits a simple explanation for this Italian prohobition–lactose intolerance. There’s a lot of gelato for sale in Italy that casts doubt on this, but it’s an interesting hypothesis. It puts me in mind of one of my favorite explainers, Marvin Harris. I’d try Our Kind if this video whets your whistle for explaining behavior.
Old Stuff I Found in My Pocket
Inbound is a Kobo Forma e-reader. The Forma is not the latest and greatest large-size e-reader from Kobo, but the last generation of this particular size. It’s selling at a better price1 than the e-reader I have been coveting since I purchased a Kindle Paperwhite some five years ago, the Kindle Oasis.
I decided on the Kobo after reading a few articles my Jason Snell, who reads way more books than me. He lauds Kobo’s typography and price, two things that could be improved from the Oasis. It also has better Libby/Overdrive support.
Changing platforms and devices always involves due consideration, and moving from Kindle to Kobo means moving from Instapaper to Pocket.
Instapaper, created by Marco Arment, employed an ingenious service whereby it would send an ebook digest of articles you added to Instapaper to your Kindle. At the time, Amazon’s Whispersync service was a defining feature of the device; this allowed for purchases–and Instapaper downloads–without a costly data plan attached to the Kindle.
Even under new ownership, Instapaper still sends digests to your Kindle , and it’s amazing. In fact, I don’t see a particular reason to use Instapaper outside of it, since most major browsers support a full screen, distraction-free version of the article you’re reading.
To be clear, this feature by itself isn’t enough to make me choose one platform of the other, although it did occur to me–after having ordered the Kobo–that my Instapaper flow would be disrupted. There’s no Instapaper support on Kobo.
But there is Pocket on Kobo.
Pocket is an Instapaper-like read-it-later service. I knew I had tried Pocket out; I reset my password and my saved articles were still there. It was late 2011 when I did. What was I reading?
- Joe Kissell’s review of Nisus Writer Pro 22;
- A bleak, poignant essay by David Rakof about cancer screening and the human interactions that fail to soften the blow of the seriousness of the undertaking;
- Lodging for a friend’s wedding;
- A funny but embarrassing video of a college acquaintance, drunk, who has publicly become both sober and fit;
- an article on fiscal austerity;
- How not to Kill a Cyclist;
- An argument against using test scores to measure teacher effectiveness;
- How to use Launchbar;
- An article about Obama’s popularity;
- children of hoarders;
- and article on ODD
There was more, but they’re all interesting to me, even now.
But that wasn’t my way as a school psychologist; I worked alone, doing my own thing, and my reports were my own. Everyone used the district-issued Windows box, while I carried a Mac around. I have written about this before, using Nisus Writer and even LaTeX to keep things interesting.
I don’t use Nisus at all these days, although I would were I writing psychological evaluation reports.
- minus some notable features, including stylus support on the Kobo, and audiobook support on both the Oasis and Kobo Sage ↩
- I did end up using Nisus Writer Pro for everything important after that review by Kissel. I talked about it the other day with a colleague; we were discussing how some teachers struck out and used Zoom during virtual instruction, while the district uses Google. Meet would be the obvious choice (I can be a company man and toe the line on things, and in the case of virtual instruction, I felt that using the same tool across the organization was the best choice). ↩
Noir Darkens Safari, Just When You Need It
This year’s Upgradies on the Upgrade podcast turned me on to Noir, a 2.99 USD Safari Extension that enables a dark mode view of any website that doesn’t offer one (when your device is in Dark Mode). It’s a cure for bright white websites that blind you when you’re browsing in bed. Worth the purchase, and then some.
This deceptively simple extension offers a host of configurable options, including iCloud sync for settings, the ability to dim images, and a keyboard shortcut for toggling Noir. Mac and iPad/iOS.
