Month: November 2022

Don’t Look Away | NextDraft

Don’t Look Away | NextDraft:

The recent acts of public antisemitism and antidemocratic leanings are examples of how this stuff spreads and movements go from the edges to the mainstream. For a great review, watch Ken Burns latest series, America and the Holocaust. Parts of it will feel remarkably familiar. And here’s a take from Michelle Goldberg in the NYT (Gift Article): Antisemitism’s March Into the Mainstream. “For most of my adult life, antisemites — with exceptions like Pat Buchanan and Mel Gibson — have lacked status in America. The most virulent antisemites tended to hate Jews from below, blaming them for their own failures and disappointments. Now, however, anti-Jewish bigotry, or at least tacit approval of anti-Jewish bigotry, is coming from people with serious power: the leader of a major political party, a famous pop star, and the world’s richest man.”

[Thee are not simple times. More than don’t look away. Be an advocate for love, tolerance, and peace.]

How Antisemitism Gained a Foothold in the GOP

How Antisemitism Gained a Foothold in the GOP:

If antisemites were too marginal to pose any danger, it would be easy enough for the party to cut them off. (If you want to know what it looks like when Republicans decide to really throw somebody out of their party, look at their treatment of Liz Cheney.) Instead, they vacillate. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declined to comment on Gosar’s attendance at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s conference. McCarthy has likewise promised to restore Greene’s committee privileges if Republicans regain the majority.

[It is infuriating that “win at all cost” is the only abiding theme for the GOP. They really do not care about anything else. Certainly not my life. Pffft.]

The Incentivized Waste of Free Returns and the Gutting of Alexa

The Incentivized Waste of Free Returns — Pixel Envy:

The supposedly efficient marketplace has produced a system where the cost of production has decreased so much — through deliberately seeking the lowest-wage factory workers and taking a hands-off approach to their safety — that it is trivial for some retailers to discard huge amounts of merchandise from returns and overstock. The incentives are all backwards.

Also:

Amazon Is Gutting Alexa:

It seems none of these predictions has fully panned out. There are many people who will continue ordering groceries with curb-side pickup, buy everything online with the understanding anything unwanted can simply be sent back, and maybe some people will yell at their speaker to send them a new box of Dutch Blitz after a particularly aggressive board game night. Most people probably will not. We will mostly continue to click “Add to Cart” and shop in stores near where we live. We should make cities more accessible and less car-centric because that helps our communities far more than pressing a button near your laundry machine to have more detergent shipped to you.

[It can be hard to tell when something isn’t working and when the tech isn’t good enough, and when new horrifying habits are enabled. But I feel like part of that difficulty is momentum.]

Collaborating away

Collaborating away:

Ideas like the shower. Ideas like our pillows. Ideas like commutes. Ideas like walks. Ideas like the morning, or late nights. Ideas like daydreams. Ideas like you doing something else so they can surprise you.

Ideas aren’t contained. They aren’t located. They don’t reside. They’re nomadic.

They aren’t something you control — they bubble up, they arise. You don’t get to have them when you want. They come to you.

[Yesss!]

Leave them the hell alone

Best Work Stories: David – 2022 – cord Insights:

All the good, great ideas we’re going to come up with, they’re not going to just flow into the work right away. They have to wait until it’s time to decide again. That level of tying your hand behind your backs in some ways, not being able to react on every gut instinct of urgency when you get a new idea of you hear a new idea, is a way to fuse responsibility with a reservedness. That responsibility doesn’t mean just being hyperactive all the time, that these things actually go hand-in-hand. The best thing, and I still struggle with this from time to time, the best thing you can do for your team that you’re responsible for is to leave them the hell alone. I like to be left alone a lot of the time. So you can combine those things and say like, “Do you know what? I’m going to step in with responsibility, be part of setting it in direction.” And once the direction is set, leave the people to simply travel that direction and then spend the time between checkpoints getting bored, getting creative, coming up with my own damn stuff to do.

[It’s a really big problem in so many places…]

MailMate

MailMate:

MailMate is an IMAP email client for macOS featuring extensive keyboard control, Markdown integrated email composition, advanced search conditions and drill-down search links, equally advanced smart mailboxes, automatic signature handling, cryptographic encryption/signing (OpenPGP and S/MIME), tagging, multiple notification methods, alternative message viewer layouts including a widescreen layout, flexible integration with third party applications, and much more.

[I’m not currently using it… but thinking of goiing back to it.]

Why I’m thankful for Universal Control on my Mac and iPad | Macworld

Why I’m thankful for Universal Control on my Mac and iPad:

Then came the magic moment. I took a screenshot on the iPad, and the floating screenshot rectangle appeared on the iPad screen. You can tap this floating rectangle to instantly open the screenshot editor, allowing you to make changes, delete it, save it, or copy it to the clipboard. Or you can swipe the floating rectangle away, and the image will just be saved to your Photo library.

[Yeah. I dig it too.]

Thread Grows Your Home’s Capabilities, Not Its Clutter > Thread Group

THREAD GROWS YOUR HOME’S CAPABILITIES, NOT ITS CLUTTER > Thread Group:

A Thread Border Router is a device that joins a Thread network to the rest of your network, and allows messages to flow between them. That may mean it looks like a bridge or a hub when we draw one in a diagram, but with two important differences:
 
The first is that Border Routers don’t need to read, modify, or translate the messages that go through them. It simply forwards the message from devices on one side of the network, to their destination on the other side. That means that a Border Router is a generic part of the network — a Thread Border Router from any vendor can perform this function and route messages for any brand of Wi-Fi or Thread devices you might have.
 
The second — and the reason Thread doesn’t add to your smart home clutter — is that Thread Border Routers, particularly those for consumer applications, are usually built into other devices. Devices you may already own or want to get, like smart speakers, smart home displays, Wi-Fi routers, and yes even those smart home hubs you might have. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, and others have already announced they’ll be turning on Thread Border Routers in many of their existing products with the launch of Matter. That means tens of millions of homes will be ready for Thread devices, and users can start taking advantage of the new capabilities their smart homes and devices offer, without needing another little white box under the cabinet.

[Well, that’s the promise anyway. Let’s see how this goes, shall we?]

MarsEdit 5 Public Beta – Red Sweater Blog @redsweater @danielpunkass

MarsEdit 5 Public Beta – Red Sweater Blog:

I’m excited to share that MarsEdit 5, the next major upgrade to the desktop Mac blog editing app, will be officially released in about two weeks! I am still tying up some loose ends but I want to share an early peek with any users who want to give some of the new features a look

[For me… a must have. I’ve been blogging in MarsEdit for a loooong time. Allez! @redsweater @danielpunkass]