Posts in "notes"

There Are Still Reasons to Limit Your Kids' Screen Time

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Maybe so. But Orden and Przbylski are not telling us it’s fine to allow our teens to disappear into their phones. “Asking whether technology influences well-being is way too broad—it’s like asking whether sugar causes depression,” Orben says. “Reading a book on your Kindle, playing sudoku on your iPad, and spending eight hours a day on Snapchat are not the same. But it’s important for scientists to speak up and say we don’t actually understand this yet.”

Don’t fear the regex

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Although I do often write short programs for text munging, I typically resort to that only if the problem requires more than just large-scale text editing or if I expect to be repeating the process several times. And even then, I usually start out by playing around in BBEdit to see what searches, replacements, and rearrangements need to be done. It’s a convenient environment for getting immediate feedback on each transformation step.

I did this just yesterday setting up the tags for the new site layout. BBEdit is the kind of tool that makes difficult things easier and impossible things possible.

Foldimate’s laundry-folding machine actually works now - The Verge

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I clipped in my Verge T-shirt to the machine, which pulled in the shirt and produced a neatly folded shirt in about five seconds. Foldimate says that you can fold an entire load of laundry in about five minutes, which includes collared shirts, pants, and medium-sized towels.

I’ve been wanting a machine like this for years. All they need now is the attachment that lets you throw all the clothes from your dryer straight into the Foldimate. The gifs in the Verge article don’t do the machine justice like this YouTube video does.

The machine still looks like a prototype to me, and the sounds that it makes while running make me think that there’s a lot of moving parts in there that could break. We’ll see how it’s going in five years or so.

Did Hell Freeze Over? My Republican Dad Is Voting for a Democrat - The New York Times

Link

Montana has the highest suicide rate in the United States. For starters, there’s the random geographical bad luck that the altitude of the state’s six most populous cities exceeds 3,000 feet, the elevation at which blood oxygen levels go down and suicide stats go way up. Along with seven Indian reservations and agriculture being a leading industry — farmers and natives are more likely to end their own lives than other Americans — veterans make up about 10 percent of the state’s population. According to the new Veterans Affairs secretary, Robert Wilkie, every day, 22 American vets kill themselves.

Breaking my self-imposed “no politics” hiatus because this article is so fantastic. Being a native Montanan myself, I appreciate almost every line, but that opening paragraph hits hard.

And also that those hippies in Missoula will occasionally waste an entire afternoon outdoors without killing any food.

I can tell you first-hand, this is absolutely true.

NetNewsWire Comes Home

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After some years spent traveling the world, NetNewsWire is now back where it started! It’s my app again.

This is great news, I’m really happy for Brent and one of my all time favorite apps. NetNewsWire was one of the first apps I ever used on a Mac, and I’m glad it’s going to get new life as an open source labor of love.

One Computing Device

I like to think about the future. I’m an optimist, so in my mind, the future looks pretty great, more “Meet the Robinsons” and less “Bladerunner”.

While Apple is busy making “memojis” and other ridiculous features no one asked for, Samsung released a phone that actually looks like what I want. It just doesn’t run iOS. This is the first time I recall seriously being drawn to an Android device as my next phone. The Samsung Galaxy Note9 looks like the embodiment of what I’ve been expecting computers to become for several years now, I’ve just been waiting for the hardware to be powerful enough to do what I want it to do.

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Samsung DeX gives you what you want from a PC experience: a big screen, a full-size keyboard and a mouse. Just connect your phone into an external display to use apps, review documents, and watch videos on a PC-like interface.

How to manage your windows like a pro in macOS | iMore

Mikah Sargent:

Working with a lot of windows on macOS? Here are the tips and tricks you need to know to help keep your workspace neat, tidy, and within click’s reach!

I enjoy articles like these that dig into what the Mac can do without any third-party apps. I almost always find something new that I didn’t know about before.

Why Apple’s education strategy is not based on reality

Bradley Chambers:

Who’s anyone? Which teacher has time to make custom books for his or her class? One of the things I’ve become concerned about is the number of items we tend to keep adding to a teacher’s plate. They have to manage a classroom of 15–30 kids, understand all of the material they teach, learn all of the systems their school uses, handle discipline issues, grade papers, and help students learn.

When do we start to take things off of a teacher’s plates? When do we give them more hours in the day? Whatever Apple envisioned in 2012, it’s clear that did not play out.

Chambers works in education, and has been paying close attention to the market for years. He knows what he’s talking about, and his main point is that Apple hasn’t made a good enough value proposition for schools to wean them away from Google.

The optimist in me would like to think that Apple’s system would work, but people who actually work in the field are saying otherwise.

Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

Michael Flarup:

See, I was recently commissioned to come up with a redesign of the calendar and note-taking app Opus One and I was excited to share this particular bit of work— not only because I really liked how it came out, but because it represented the sort of work I have always loved doing: Themed UI carefully crafted to create a memorable experience through textures, lighting and dimensionality. A UI that is fun, takes cues from the real world for context and aims to be delightful, simply for the sake of invoking a feeling in the user.

In other words; a skeuomorphic design.

I think this looks great, and the concept is in keeping with how I think of my devices as “digital notebooks”. The clean iOS 7 style is fine, but I do think that both macOS and iOS have lost some of the whimsical touches that made Apple design stand out. Like the wormhole background in Time Machine. Completely unnecessary, but it always made me smile.

I’m not sure Opus One is an app that I personally need, but if more design like this started making it’s way back into iOS, I’d be all right with that.