291 ml

Make two great martinis:

  1. Pour 250 ml of gin1 in a pitcher.
  2. Add as much ice as you can.
  3. Add dry vermouth 2 (Noilly Prat is good if you can get it) until you’re at 291 ml.
  4. Shake in some Fee Brothers Gin Barrel-Aged Orange Bitters

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.

Joker

Saw Joker yesterday with the family, and we all agreed it was really good.

A couple of pain points in the plot for me:

  • having the Wayne family going out for a movie on the night when everyone else seemed to be expecting major social upheaval, leading to, well you know what.
  • the unlikelihood that the Arthur’s bad stand-up footage would have been shown on the Murray Franklin show… having video recording equipment handy in that day and age? Someone just happened to have a suitcase-sized VHS recorded with them at the bar?

Quibbles aside, the movie was gritty, showcasing a simulacrum of seedy New York City in the 70s. A series of events unfold that allow an already unhinged person to realize that he is capable of a kind of violence that makes him feel powerful, after a long life of powerlessness.

The first scene–where Joker defends himself from yet another pummeling where’s he’s literally kicked while he’s down–by shooting his assailants is, despite the consequent investigation, empowering to Joker. Even this moment was thrust upon him in a way: the gun was given to him by a well-meaning, if otherwise cowardly, co-worker after Joker suffers a beating at the hands of some bullying teens. So much of what leads to him becoming Joker are matters of happenstance: not situations that he chose, but rather found himself in.

My initial impression, reinforced by the revelation that Sophie Dumond was not, in fact, cultivating a relationship with Arthur, was that much of what Arthur was experiencing was a delusion: he would remain convinced of Thomas Wayne’s parentage, never having an opportunity to find out otherwise; he would believe he had been featured on the Murray Franklin show, but never truly was; he had a conversation wherein he was invited onto the Murray Franklin show, but never truly was. In the way that his relationship with Sophie was wholly imagined, I thought that his motivations and inducements would be, as well.

Despite some of these points being a little to on the nose for my taste, I did love how Arthur-cum-Joker embraced, organically, the power of spectacle to showcase his brand of terror and chaos. He realizes, in a moment of lucidity, that he was brought on to the Murray Franklin show to be made fun of, and rather than use his own suicide to shock the audience, he turns to a shocking display of TV violence. As the movie closes, he revels in bringing chaos to a world that was cruel to him. He is suddenly welcomed, surrounded by a flock… and crowned the Clown Prince of Crime.

It was really well done.

iPadOS’s Complexity Curve

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.

Link

My Favorite Eggs

Inspired by the succinct and fun Top Four by Tiffany and Marco Arment, I offer here my top four egg preparations:

  1. Scrambled
  2. Fried Over Easy
  3. Quiche or Fritatta
  4. Omelette

A few notes:

I generally follow the Gordon Ramsay egg scramble method, which is very different from the hard scramble you find in most restaurants and homes in the US. I like a hard scramble just fine, but eggs prepared this way are a real treat.

I try to make a classic French omelette, and one of my favorite tutorials is by Jacques Pepin. He describes both the classic omelette and the country or dinner omelette in this video.

iPadOS First Impressions

Mouse Support

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.

Dark mode

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.

Text gestures

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

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.

Google Sheets in Safari

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.

Today View and Widgets + New grid home screen with widgets

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.

Microsoft’s Surface 2019 Event

A few thoughts after watching a quick recap of the Surface Event:

  • The Surface Neo looks great… until they show the keyboard flip up. That keyboard laying on half of a glass slate, with the WonderBar? Wonderbar? The demo where clicking a link in an email opens a browser window on the second screen? Pretty slick.
  • Seems like such a small room!
  • Panos Panay seems like an intense guy.
  • Microsoft using Android… this really is a different Microsoft. Making their own hardware was quite a leap, their Office support for other operating systems was an evolution… and now, selling hardware running something other than windows? Wow.
  • Surface Earbuds look utterly ridiculous.
  • The Surface Pro was already an enviable device… I suspect the larger model is still not lap friendly, though. The latest IPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard Cover, by contrast, is perfectly usable in the lap. (iPadOS’s mouse support, a welcome new feature, still falls way behind.)
  • Nice job calling out the power of the Ice Lake processors in comparison to the MacBook Air’s proc in the Surface Laptop. I still wouldn’t want one, though.

Boss Email

Via Audacious Fox:

Let’s call this “boss email.” It’s defined by nearly immediate — but short and terse — replies. The classic two-word email. For underlings, it can be inscrutable. Is that an angry “thanks” or a grateful “thanks”? Does “please update me” imply impatience with you? Boss email can be the workplace equivalent of getting a “k” text reply from a Tinder date.

I do this quite a bit, but it depends upon the circumstance: Do I have comfortable supervisory relationship with this person? Is this a peer who won’t read into perfunctory replies? Then yes. And sometimes, I realize that really busy people don’t want to read a paragraph, and appreciate an abridged version. In that case? Also yes.

Link

MG Siegler On The MacBook ARM

MG Siegler on the MacBook’s premature retirement:

But also likely true is that Apple is closing in on their first ARM-based MacBook. The big question is: what will be the first machine to get Apple’s own chip? The current thinking has been the MacBook.² So perhaps this is just the MacBook going away for a bit, in order to be reborn as the first ARM Mac!

I love this line of conjecture. My current computer provided by work is a MacBook m3, and while I don’t love its power or battery life, it is astonishingly small (and that’s very useful for me in my current position). It is, in fact, smaller than the iPad Pro 12” in the Smart Keyboard Folio. It simply doesn’t feel as powerful. But an ARM chip like what’s in the iPad Pro running the MacBook? That would be a great device.

The MacBook Error

John Gruber On Jony Ive Leaving Apple

Interesting take on Jony Ive’s departure by John Gruber:

This may be good news. Ive is, to state the obvious, preternaturally talented. But in the post-Jobs era, with all of Apple design, hardware and software, under his control, we’ve seen the software design decline and the hardware go wonky. I don’t know the inside the story, but it certainly seems like a good bet that MacBook keyboard fiasco we’re still in the midst of is the direct result of Jony Ive’s obsession with device thinness and minimalism. Today’s MacBooks are worse computers but more beautiful devices than the ones they replaced. Is that directly attributable to Jony Ive? With these keyboards in particular, I believe the answer is yes.

Jony Ive is Leaving Apple

John Gruber On Jony Ive Leaving Apple

Interesting take on Jony Ive’s departure by John Gruber:

This may be good news. Ive is, to state the obvious, preternaturally talented. But in the post-Jobs era, with all of Apple design, hardware and software, under his control, we’ve seen the software design decline and the hardware go wonky. I don’t know the inside the story, but it certainly seems like a good bet that MacBook keyboard fiasco we’re still in the midst of is the direct result of Jony Ive’s obsession with device thinness and minimalism. Today’s MacBooks are worse computers but more beautiful devices than the ones they replaced. Is that directly attributable to Jony Ive? With these keyboards in particular, I believe the answer is yes.

Jony Ive is Leaving Apple

Brett Terpstra’s 20 Apps

Brett Terpstra:

Every time I realize how much an app affects my workflow I want to hug it, so this is my big thank you to 20 apps on my system right now that make my life better every day. None of them run in my Dock — most of them are in the menu bar, some are completely background tasks on my machine where it’s easy to forget that they’re an integral part of my workflow. I see you, apps.

Good list of utilities here. So many of my most essential applications are on this list.

https://brettterpstra.com/2019/06/19/the-top–20-apps-not-in-my-dock/