The NYT. Talking Points. If you don’t pay you are not a resistor. Tweets don’t count. 

Finally got to see the “cheap” MacBook Pro. 

Really is amazing detail on that screen … if I use it like my iPhone. 8″ away. 

Otherwise it just looks like my Air. 

Old eyes are inexpensive. 

A new job is Microsoft-only with a very restricted computing environment. That led me to try the old version of OneNote used there. 

I kind of like it. Now I’m trying the Mac and iOS versions with OneDrive. 

I’m glad there’s life left in Microsoft. We need them. 

That is the consensus of dedicated user-researchers:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/30943847?ac_cid=tw123456#30943847

There can be a lot of El Cap library prep to do first. Some of this may be old Aperture version data defects that El Cap tolerates but Sierra doesn’t (likely some Sierra bugs there too). 

So it should be possible to use Aperture through at least 2019. Maybe Photos.app will scale by then. 

Given white tribalism and the T precedent. Not to sabotage, but to screen out the next Trump. Vote Dem in election. 

Eligible non-voters plus anyone who didn’t vote HRC. Apologies to rest of humanity.

Facebook and fake news built a world of lies for vulnerable minds.

It is times like this that determine the future. Times to  unite and hold ground against long odds so we may rebuild and return.

All progress has required this strength.

We need to understand what we are.

What am I missing?

I’m back on Outlook. I know that beast well enough that I’m ok with the reversion. I have 3 folders: Inbox, Sent and Archive. I keep Inbox and Sent empty (I use message flags); emails that I want to organize by project I put in the file system as .msg files.

I had to recreate my quick access toolbar. It is, of course, different for every bit of Outlook.Here’s the one for email authoring. I stuck Matrix in there because that’s just so weird. “Do Not Save” is my favorite.

The ads I was shown on my visit today (first ever, feeling sick now):

Whether he wins or loses we have experienced the political equivalent of a plane crashing into a nuclear power plant. 

This wasn’t thought possible. We had a System.

The System didn’t work. We need to learn why. We could lose everything.  

Currency stamped with Trumper propaganda. 

Wish humans were less predictable. 

Not the apps I use most often. I launch those from Spotlight. It’s the rarely used apps I forget that I own.

My new fed job requires a validated history of all I’ve done. But I am old; I predate the net. Parts of my life are shrouded in mystery…

Pretty sure they don’t now. Wonder when the last book was sold.

SMB getting closer to full AFP functionality.

This is disappointing. I’d read that clicking a calendar feed link in iOS 10 Safari would add the feed to iOS calendars. When I tried it just showed the events and offered to write them into my calendar. Which is the iOS 9 behavior.

We still have to add the feed by copy/paste into calendar settings.

Bummer.

Extra value, no charge. Nice. 

Affordable rental, quality keeps improving. I like it. Between Office 365 and Apple switching us from Aperture to Lightroom it’s never been easier to switch from macOS to Windows.

Hmm. Given the state and direction of Mac updates maybe Apple is trying to tell us something…

Dear NYT, are you in a coma? We finally get decent journalism on the Clinton email f*up and the story is published on Medium and written by Ken Crossland ” … a writer and comedian from New York City”.

I thought Google Sites was definitively dead, but I recently created one for one of my Google Apps (legacy of free times!) accounts. It’s gotten quite a bit of work in the past few years.

On the other hand, it’s not hard to find egregious bugs. Like broken image links.

Weird to watch it vanish in real time. I think iCloud has an undocumented limit on the number of email addresses that can be reliably associated with a Contact.

Update: I think this is a bug related to El Capitan’s inclusion of email taken from mail.app correspondence and a timing bug related to dsyfunctional Contacts.app sync. I turned off the former.

Back to Outlook again at workplace. I’m ok with that. Using 3 mailboxes now. Archive, Inbox, Sent. Inbox and Sent are empty, emails needing follow up are flagged in archives. I work the flags by date together with tasks. I mostly keep Sent email in my Archives. 

Emails that need folder organization go into file system along with docs and URLs. IE same; don’t try to organize URLs there. Keep in file system. 

Quite fond of this. 

My Facebook stream includes a relative’s shares from sites alleging bizarre Obama-Clinton conspiracies. 

Google can’t identify their funding. Searches find only similar sites that link to one another. They are hermetically sealed. 

My media sources present evidence that some of these sites are at least partly supplied through Russian social attack infrastructure. Russia, a country now in the throes of war hysteria. 

Direct funding is probably unnecessary. If the sites sell ads, Russia’s professional trolls can supply clicks.

Our times have gone beyond merely interesting. 

If I were, say, Bill Gates, I would be reconsidering the mission of my Foundations.

We are cursed with useless variation in mature software. Justify budgets? Accounting necessity? Need to learn to love maintenance mode. 

Slight frame curvature, screen shattered on mild drop. Apple replaced phone, charged for new battery. Seemed routine?

Scales.

Francis is used to managing crazed dictators.

The day the base chose Palin we should have seen Trump.

Stop hacking Apple; write some internal Human Interface Guidelines for Siri.

After a support call yesterday I received an email telling me I’d authorized paperless billing. Of course I hadn’t …

Most of the Mac blogs I read are down on Siri this week.

Weirdly I’ve gotten used to things that mostly work. I do “remind me” 5-10 times a day, ask the time, date, temperature, find things in settings, do math “Graph x^2+5x+3”, delete all my alarms, etc.

Siri works best for phone control and phone actions. I’m frustrated when I use my Android phone because Google Now is lousy at that stuff (but great at answering natural language questions about the world).

Siri is lousy at most of the things Apple advertises though, and the periodic zone-outs are truly irritating.

1. Non-college employment demand is weak.
2. White racism is concentrated in a single political party.

I bought my MacBook Air 7,2 13″ in mid-2015. It is the best computer I’ve ever owned. No contest.

Today, while playing with etreCheck (great donationware app), I discovered my Mac had a manual. Turns out every Mac has a manual — available for download at support.apple.com/en_US/manuals.

Actually, mine has two manuals, a very brief “Quick Start” PDF and a longer “Essentials” PDF. (I didn’t see an iBooks version).

Scanning Essentials I relearned the Split Screen feature. Which I’d forgotten about. Handy feature, if a bit obscure.

Some poor writer put these manuals together. They’re really well done and worth reading, especially if you’ve been using a Mac for eons.

In my case was an old Open Office file; they used zip containers. Change to .zip, unarchive, inspect contents.

Is it a phone flaw? A battery defect? One supplier? Fraud or mistake? What?

Murdoch’s WSJ holds back on endorsement. Tapes leak that basically show Trump is Trump — but this time the roof falls in. Pence vanishes from Trump campaign site, WSJ claims Priebus and GOP dump Donald.

Too fast. Feels like some powerful people in GOP saw an opportunity …

I think the first US-Russian cyberwar just started.

At least Trump humiliates the right people. 

They both use simple and largely untrue models that assume rational actors.

It complains of a sync error with mobile — but we have mobile sync disabled. Offers to replace our data with null data from mobile. Misspells “conflict”.

Wonder where development was outsourced to after the private equity owners fired the dev team.

… think about all the hacks required because air and food share the mouth and pharynx.

Maybe we go over a cliff. Maybe we pull back. Either way, this one moment should not be forgotten.

It’s in the photo repository I plan to pass on to the children and grandchildren. Because this happened.

SciAm this month had a depressing (paywalled) article on attitude of senior scientists towards juniors who communicate, have families, basically do anything except monkish devotions prior to tenure.

A reason to kill tenure.

Google’s recent app announcements are Android only. iOS often gets same features, but significantly later. Apple’s declining market share has consequences.

I was thinking today of this article. Sadly SciAm’s paywall is strong, but the description works. I recall it as novel but not surprising. MIT Media Lab was big then. 

Today Apple’s iPhone 7 headphone adapter has an embedded operating system. I’m sure it’s been hacked. 

I don’t think the ’91 issue considered the security issues of ubiquitous computing. That would have been truly prescient. 

There is nothing in Markoff’s article about protecting jobs.