Month: December 2021

The Betty White Timeline of Human History

The Betty White Timeline of Human History:

It can be difficult to wrap our minds around just how short recorded human history is — 5500 years is not actually all that long of a time period. In this Twitter thread, Jelena Woehr suggests that we use the unit of Betty White’s lifetime (99 years and counting) as a tool to probe the temporal relationships of important events in the evolution of humans and society.

Y’all, it’s only been about 16 really old people since the fall of Rome.

Shakespeare died four very long-lived grandparents ago?!

It’s been less than two Betty Whites since the Emancipation Proclamation?!?!

[I love this!]

Source: kottke.org

Joe Manchin Has Wrecked the Biden Presidency—Perhaps He’ll Also Liberate It | The New Yorker

Joe Manchin Has Wrecked the Biden Presidency—Perhaps He’ll Also Liberate It | The New Yorker:

If you’re the President, there’s no need to prove to Manchin that you’re going to be “tough on spending,” so why not call off your plan to start collecting student debts again? Why not use every power still at your disposal to do what you can for the country while you’ve got some power? Acting boldly carries risks. With the Senate split fifty-fifty, if you give Manchin reason to switch parties you lose your ability to appoint more judges, for instance; the power that comes with even a tenuous majority is very real. But using executive authority—and boldly—may be the only way that Biden will get anything done, as long as Manchin (and, perhaps, Kyrsten Sinema) block effective legislative action, alongside a solid phalanx of fifty Republicans. Points to Biden for trying, but, at some point, even in Washington, no really does mean no, and you need to move on as best you can.

[What a mess. 🤦‍♂️]

A Keyboard Maestro Plugin for Apple Shortcuts | ThoughtAsylum

A Keyboard Maestro Plugin for Apple Shortcuts | ThoughtAsylum:

With the public release of macOS Monterey, I have been trying out a few ways of interacting with Shortcuts from a number of automation tools. Shortcuts can be triggered on macOS using AppleScript or shell script, both of which are relatively easy to do with the Swiss Army knife of Mac automation, Keyboard Maestro. However, I thought it would be fun to create a convenience plugin to make it even easier to integrate Keyboard Maestro with Shortcuts.

[Great stuff!]

5 Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Job – Accidentally in Code

5 Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Job – Accidentally in Code:

Regardless, your current job is just a moment in your overall career, and it’s worth thinking critically about whether it’s serving your longer term career goals. So, here are five reasons why you might want to think about quitting.

[I’m not suggesting that you quit your job. I’m suggesting that you consider what’s important to you, and whether your life, as currently set up, is serving those goals and desires. If so, cool. If not… start taking the steps that will get you where you want to go. This is, after all, your responsibility.]

How to bring back multi-touch gestures after it crashes without reboot?

macos – How to bring back multi-touch gestures after it crashes without reboot?:

By my experience, multi-touch crashes on a per-app basis. I could quit the app and relaunch it, and gestures would be back.

Apparently, sleeping the display and then waking up the system again will bring back crippled gesture. You can click button to do that, or just close the lid, or use terminal:

pmset displaysleepnow; sleep 5; caffeinate -u -t 1

After one second of black screen, gestures are back.

[Worked for me, although I have a screen sleep corner, so easy enough. I hope Apple fixes this, it’s become a little too routine.]

Why Daytona is a game-changer

Why Daytona is a game-changer:

I laughed out loud when the result came back. Yes, that’s exactly what I was looking for. It wasn’t in a place a user would have looked, and Google never would have found it.

The point is this — it’s past time to take responsibility for finding the stuff we write, and if we do it well, and Daytona does, all of a sudden blogging works so much better, and the incentive to write stuff, to document, to narrate our work, to index everything you can, makes total sense.

[I’ve built a number of apps that integrated search. Each time I had the same thought. Relying on the Big Search Engines is *so* much worse than doing it yourself. Kudos to Dave for making this happen for his stuff.]

Source: Scripting News