tech on Tales from the Bitface

Little Lost Machine

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:43:23 +0000

A little while ago, which turns out to have been June 2024, I microposted saying I ought to write about my thoughts on the current state of what people like to call AI. LLM-based prediction machines, some might say. Then about a year later I briefly wrote again about my negative reaction to the whole idea.

But I didn’t go into detail. And I’m still not going to; at least not today. I have several thousand words of attempted essays, if that’s not a tautology¹, wherein I try to understand my own thoughts and feelings.

And time passes. And the development of the things is lightning fast. It’s a moving target that annoys me.

Still, I do have thoughts. And feelings. And the best way to understand them is to write about them. And the best way to write about them is publicly. Maybe. So I’m going to try writing about them here. A series of short posts around that theme. This is the first.

Maybe I’ll give them their own category, though I have too many categories as it is. I discovered it’s hard to search my blog for ‘AI’. Micro.blog’s search is good, but that’s just such a common set of letters. Weirdly, it brought up all my Crucial Tracks entries, as if it was also finding the ‘IA’ in ‘crucial’.

What with ‘essay’ originally meaning ‘attempt’. ↩︎

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:52:40 +0000

I still don’t understand why AI gives me such a visceral negative reaction.

The intellectual reasons for concern are well known.

But right now, I just wish apps would stop adding AI and trying to tell me it’s great. I’m looking at you Raycast, but you’re just the most recent culprit.

This Site Now Has a Dark Theme

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 14:54:05 +0000

As you’ll have noticed if you’re looking at this post on a device set to dark mode, I’ve added a dark theme. At the moment it’s just automatic: if your device is set to dark you get the dark mode, if light, you’ll see it as it has been for the last year and a half. I might add an option switch at some point.

Let me know if anything looks weird.

Adventures in Mac Repairs

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 17:20:00 +0000

I have a 15-inch MacBook Pro from 2017. It’s in perfect working order, except the battery was past its best. ‘Service recommended,’ it always said when I checked. But it was fine, I could get a couple of hours out of it, and I rarely use the computer away from somewhere I can plug in. Especially this last couple of years.

But the screen had developed a problem. There were marks on it that I couldn’t remove. They were kind of hard to photograph, but you can see them here:

MacBook screen with delamination marks

I discovered there was a known defect in models of that era called ‘screen delamination.’ The top layer of the screen’s coating was becoming detached from the underlying one.

People had solutions, which involved careful cleaning with various solvents or mild abrasives: isopropyl alcohol, or, I don’t know, toothpaste, maybe.¹

Inevitably, the whole affair has a ‘gate’ name: Staingate. Perhaps less inevitably, but unsurprisingly since it’s a manufacturing defect, Apple have long since acknowledged the problem and offered a free repair programme. As long as your machine was no more than four years old.

I discovered these facts back in the summer. Dug out my receipt. I bought the laptop four years and four days ago. Damn!

At the time I was deep in working towards my dissertation, so I wasn’t going to spend any more time on it. In September, though, I thought it would be worth contacting Apple support and seeing what could be done. I couldn’t get a Genius Bar appointment, but I could take it to an Apple Authorised Service Provider called MR in Shoreditch. They had a look at it and said, yes it’s the delamination thing, you’re outside the free programme, we can fix it: 800 quid.

Too much. But! they also said that it would be worth taking it in to Apple. They might, depending on who you saw, do it for free anyway.

I was slightly sceptical, and we were getting ready for a trip to Scotland at the time, so I left it. Eventually, though, I booked it into the Genius Bar.

You’re outside the programme, they said. But we’ll fix it under consumer law. No charge.

The Sale of Goods Act (or its successors) for the win again: a laptop screen should last longer than four years.

During the tests they run, the guy noticed that the battery was poorly, and offered a replacement. £199 seems steep, so I said no thanks.

Yesterday I got an email to say it was ready to pick up, so I toddled off to Westfield. The staff member who brought it out to me asked me to wait while she checked something. Came back and said, ‘You know how you rejected the battery replacement? Well it seems they did it anyway. We won’t charge you.’

So that was weird. The work note that came with it said ‘Battery won’t charge at all,’ which was not true when I took it in. But here I am with a good-as-new battery. Well, actually new.

All of this required what they call a ‘Top case replacement.’ ‘Top case with battery,’ in fact, which suggests the battery is in the screen part of the laptop, not the keyboard part, which seems weird.

The big downside – but one that had been prepared for – is that I lost all my stickers. I had heard of this kind of thing happening, so I took photographs.

The stickers on my MacBook

The questions now are how and whether to replace them.

Don’t clean your computer screen with toothpaste. ↩︎

First Line of Defence?

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 21:04:52 +0000

Dave Winer may be a very smart guy, who effectively invented blogging, RSS, and podcasts, but he’s lost his mind in this post:

We are now all complete newbies when it comes to understanding how networks can be used to spread misinformation. We might look back in a few years and realize that our first line of defense was Facebook, Inc. Maybe tearing them down is like the press tearing down HRC in 2016. I don’t trust their judgement on this stuff, do you?

– Dave Winer, Untitled Scripting News post

The first sentence is fair enough, but the second? Facebook is the first line of attack, rather, on our democratic freedoms. See Cambridge Analytica stories, passim. Or if not the first, then the most powerful tool in the armoury of the anti-democratic forces that plague us.

The ‘them’ he refers to is, I think, journalists. Or ‘journalism,’ as a collective entity:

I judge journalism in the aggregate.

In other words, I say “journalism” did this or that.

– Dave Winer, Journalism in the aggregate

One of the main things he does these days is to rail against journalism.

Multiple Points

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 15:28:46 +0000

Just last month I wrote Single Points, about the Fastly CDN outage. This morning many, many sites were down or inaccessible because of an outage at Akamai. A content delivery network again, though they’re saying the outage is caused by ‘edge DNS.’ I’m familiar with DNS, but not the ‘edge’ variant. In fact, I realise it’s capitalised and is the name of an Akamai product or service.

More evidence that the increasing centralisation of internet services is a problem. On the plus side, it was resolved quickly. When a service provider has the kind of major clients we’re talking about here, then that company is going to have to be able to respond quickly and get things back up. If a random small or midlevel company ran all its own server hardware and software, an outage would only inconvenience that company’s customers. But the company would need to have the staff available to sort the problems out. That would be a large and arguably unnecessary overhead.

So I understand the desire to offload responsibilities to a service provider, and the economies of scale that a company specialising in running network services can bring. But I fear it’s only a matter of time before one of these events results in serious damage or even loss of life.

Not that I’m claiming to know what the answer is.

Single Points

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 16:35:07 +0000

I noticed that GitHub was down this morning – or not down, exactly, but its web pages were profoundly broken. I tried different browsers, then jumped on Twitter to see if it was widely reported.

It was. People were saying the problem was Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN). Also that it was affecting other sites. I don’t know when CDNs started being a thing. I think they might have been recommended by some when I was still using WordPress. The idea being that a CDN can host your site’s static assets – images, mainly – while WordPress carries on with the dynamic bits, generating HTML pages on the fly, as it does. The CDN’s scale will mean it can serve those files faster than your little server.

I didn’t bother with them, not having that much traffic. But in the back of my mind there was always the thought, ‘What if the CDN goes down?’ The idea, of course, was that the CDN would be big, multiply-redundant, reliable: it’s not going to go down!

Here’s a CNN report about the outage. It affected a lot more than GitHub, it seems.

So, are CDNs single points of failure? Obviously there’s more than one CDN, but if the failure of any one can disable large chunks of the web, do they put us in a better position?

It's Never Good When a Useful Site Gets Bought

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 17:43:26 +0000

News comes out that Stack Overflow is being bought by something called Prosus. I’ve never heard of them, but they’re ‘a global consumer internet group and one of the largest technology investors in the world,’ to quote their own site.

This doesn’t bode well. Stack Overflow is without doubt the most useful site in the world, at least as far as programming and other technical matters goes. And its sub-sites cover a vast range of interests beyond the technical: use of English for both beginners and experienced people, for example; or science fiction; parenting, martial arts, the great outdoors, and a hundred more.

When a big company buys up a small one, it rarely ends well for the users of the small company’s products or services, or so it seems to me. Yahoo bought Flickr and let it largely wither on the vine.¹ Similarly with Del.icio.us. Google has bought numerous properties and either rolled them into its own products, or abandoned them.

In this case the purchaser is not a technology company itself, but just a holding company. Those ones tend to result in the bought company coming under pressure to make more money. The buyer wants to recover its investment. That tends to end up with the the bought company either selling intrusive advertising space, or selling its customers' data.

It doesn’t have to go that way. Maybe this Prosus will be different. But I can’t help thinking it’s a sad day for mutual help on the web.

It’s much better again now that it’s owned by SmugMug. ↩︎

OffMail

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 17:41:41 +0000

I just got an invite/reminder email about a service called OnMail. I must have signed up to be notified when it became available. Could have been months ago: they apologise for it taking so long.

They should apologise for being bad for the email infrastructure that binds the world together.

I’m exaggerating, but only a bit. Email remains the most important thing on the internet aside from the web. Whenever you sign up for a service, or order something online, you expect to get an email confirmation.¹

Without reliable email, a lot of things would fall apart.

A while back I wrote about Hey, the new email service from Basecamp. There, I was bothered by it not being based on the standard, open protocols that underlie email, at least to the extent that you can’t get your Hey email using a third-party, standard client.

OnMail seems both visually and functionally similar to Hey, and it’s got exactly the same problem.

This trend is bad for email, bad for people who use email. It should be possible to give us the kind of powerful, automated controls over our inboxes that these services offer, without stopping us from using the apps we prefer. It is possible to do that, as companies like SaneBox show.

I do not like this trend.

Oddly, I had this expectation confounded just today, when Birkbeck’s submissions system didn’t send me any confirmations about the pieces that I submitted for assessment. ↩︎

They Don't Call it 'Fastmail' for Nothing

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 13:54:00 +0000

I was opening a ticket with Fastmail (not a problem, just a query), and when I hit ‘Submit,’ the confirmatory email was in my inbox before the next web page finished loading.

It’s a really good service which I highly recommend, and if you were to sign up using the above link, you’d get 10% off your first year. I would get a small kickback too.

Break away from big email!

Wheeling the Reinvention

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 23:51:00 +0000

Dave Winer has ideas:

ideas for rethinking blogs and feeds. I found, as others have, that I need another kind of document to include in my personal CMS other than a story that’s part of the blog. Everything about blogs are set up to be written, then lightly edited, and never touched again. It’s temporal writing. But there are other things that I want to develop over time, keep coming back to, revising. A few years back I started this.how to hold those docs.

– Dave Winer, Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 16:05

He’s talking about what I like to call ‘web pages,’ surely? You don’t need any fancy CMS for those, as Dave of all people should know. And if you want to use such a thing, well, even WordPress has its Posts/Pages distinction.

HEY, Ho, Let's Not Go

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 17:48:04 +0000

This has been sitting around in my drafts folder for about a month, so it’s long past time to get it out there.

HEY (they always capitalise it, which I don’t care for) is a new email service from Basecamp, makers of fine (I’m told) collaboration software for teams. The video walkthrough lasts about half an hour, but/and gives you a good overview of what it’s like.

Hey was also in the news recently over the way Apple was treating it regarding App Store rules. Apple were clearly in the wrong, and things have been sorted out now.

But that’s all another story. I want to talk about Hey, and why I think it is bad for users. Even at the same time that it’s probably good for users. A company, a service, can — like a person — contain multitudes.

The Good

If you watch that video you’ll see that Hey looks like an unusually interesting and capable email client: good for organising mail, getting the unimportant stuff out of your way until you want to look at it, and making the important things highly visible. It’s both powerful at automatically helping the user, and attractive to look at.

The Bad

But it’s built on a proprietary platform. Email’s biggest strength since its invention has been that it was built on open standards. Whether you were using a Unix command-line client at a university in the early days, or Gmail, Outlook, or another IMAP provider today — none of that matters. If you know someone’s email address, you can contact them, and they you. And more importantly for this discussion: if you want to use different email client software, you can.

That’s because email is built on open protocols: SMTP, POP, and IMAP. Not that you have to understand those – or even know about them – to use email, any more than you have to understand an internal combustion engine to drive a car.

More importantly, if you want to change from one email provider to another, you can do so. This is harder than it should be because the culture of people having their own domain never really caught on. All those josmith1989@gmail.com and hazy_harriet@hotmail.com type of addresses could, instead, have been jo@josmith1989.net and harri@hazyharriet.org.

They still could be, in fact. And when they are, then you can change the underlying email provider without anyone other than yourself having to know or care. To take a not-made-up example, martin@devilgate.org used to go by a complex combination of Gmail (for the spam filtering and search) and 5quidhost.co.uk and its eventual purchaser, TSOHost, because that’s what I used for web hosting, as much as anything else. But a few years ago I switched it to Fastmail. No-one I correspond with had to know anything about the change.

But Hey’s email service does not use the open protocols — principally IMAP — that makes all that possible. Instead they have their own proprietary system. If you move your email into Hey’s service, you might not find it too easy to move it out again.

Secondly, right now they don’t support custom domains, so your correspondents will certainly have to know. While josmith@hey.com might be available right now, if they have any success we’ll soon be back to appending birth years or random numbers to the end of common names, just like on Gmail, Hotmail, etc. Though they have said they intend to support custom domains, so there’s scope for a better solution there.

The Alternatives

Andrew Canion had the same thought I did when I watched the video: you can do most of this in MailMate.¹ At least the viewing, the ‘The Feed’ kind of thing. Though he had the added experience of using SaneBox to automatically file and sort your emails.

Andrew also went further than I did: instead of just thinking, ‘I could do that with MailMate,’ he went ahead and did it, and documented the process (with a tiny bit of help from yours truly).

I had heard of SaneBox through its sponsoring of various podcasts, so I was familiar with the idea, but I hadn’t tried it. I’m now trying it out, along with some of Andrew’s suggestions, and it’s altogether a pretty good setup. Now, all that comes into my main inbox — the only things that appear on unread counts, and hence activate icon badges — are actual emails that I want to see. All the newsletters, receipts, confirmations, and other stuff that isn’t spam but that I don’t want appearing in my inbox, and especially in my unread count — those are all there, but tidily away in other mailboxes, where I can deal with them at my leisure.

That said, SaneBox is not free (though it’s cheaper than Hey), and I don’t get that much annoying email. So I don’t think I’ll continue with this exact setup when the free trial ends. But it’s worth knowing that there are good ways — and standards-compliant ways — to achieve similar functionality to Hey’s.

We Built This City on IMAP

What this all shows is that there’s nothing in Hey’s service that you couldn’t create by building on top of IMAP, except the user interface – and that doesn’t have to know about the underlying protocols in any case. It’s possible that is exactly what they have done: implemented it on top of IMAP. In fact, doing anything else would mean giving themselves a lot of extra work, as they would have to effectively reinvent IMAP in any case.

If I were going to build a service like Hey, I’d start with an off-the-shelf IMAP service, probably open source, and build the filtering rules and all that around it.

So I hope that’s what they have done, and that at some point in the future they make their service available to ordinary email clients via IMAP.

And probably plenty of other mail clients. ↩︎

Tip: How to Snooze iPhone Alarms Using Hardware Buttons

Tue, 19 May 2020 09:49:28 +0000

I don’t know whether people know about this iOS feature. I discovered it by accident a year or two back. Before that I used to snooze my alarms by drowsily scrabbling for my phone, prying my eyes open, then trying to tap the correct onscreen button.

Then one morning the alarm was too loud – or it might have been too quiet, I don’t recall – and I tried to change the volume. When I pressed the volume button, the alarm instantly stopped. I thought I had cancelled it by accident, until it rang again the customary nine minutes later.¹

Since then I’ve always snoozed my alarms that way. But nearly every time I do, I think, “Do people know about this feature?” Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen it written down. And I’m going to post this without DuckDucking first, so that the existence of some article in The Verge or somewhere doesn’t spoil my flow.

I had thought that pressing the power button cancelled the alarm, rather than snoozing it, but I just checked, and it also snoozes it. So if you reach out, eyes closed, and press anything on the side of your iPhone, you’ll get another nine minutes.

In the interest of fully informing you, dear reader, I’ve just checked what the Home button does; and it appears that does cancel the alarm. So keep your presses to the sides.

I should note that I still have an iPhone 7. I’ve no reason to believe the behaviour is significantly different on more recent models, but obviously on the 10-series phones (X, XR, XS and the various 11s) you don’t have the Home button, so something different might happen. Let me know if you find out.

Why nine minutes, I’ve always wondered? Presumably ten is just a bit too long, and anything else would be too short. Why isn’t it configurable? Because, I assume, Apple have always been a highly opinionated company. ↩︎

Rational? Twitter, Micro.blog and Social Engagement

Sat, 22 Jun 2019 20:12:35 +0000

I had vaguely seen references to “ratios,” and was aware it was something to do with engagement on Twitter and elsewhere. But I hadn’t understood what exactly people meant by it. Then last night I saw a tweet in which someone said, “I accept I’ve been ratiod.” (Should the verb form rather be “ratioed”? Hard to say. Neither looks quite right.)

A search for understanding led me to this article on Know Your Meme. It tells us:

The Ratio refers to an unofficial Twitter law which states that if the amount of replies to a tweet greatly outnumbers the amount of retweets and likes, then the tweet is bad

and goes into some detail about the origin of the term.

It makes me sad to read that. Imagine an interaction system where, if people reply to something you say, that’s bad. Well, it seems we don’t have to imagine it: we can see it right here on the “social” web.

I like to get replies on Twitter or elsewhere. A reply means, to me, that someone has read what I’ve written, thought about it, and found it worth responding to. I’m aware that I speak from a position of some privilege, in that I’m not in a group that is likely to experience the mass abuse that many do. But something has broken down in our systems of interaction if getting replies mean what you said “is bad.”

I’m far from the first to have made that observation, of course.

But consider Micro.blog, the still-young social network based on blogs that I’ve written abut before. Micro.blog has replies, but it doesn’t even have the concept of likes or retweets/reblogs. If you read a post and want to say something about it — even just that you like it — you have to reply. With words, in human language.

It’s a much friendlier place than Twitter.

This conversation from the last day or two gives a good flavour of the kind of thing you can expect.

If you clicked through that link you’ll have seen that it appears to be — and is — on the blog of the user who made the original post. The responses appear as blog comments. But while every Micro.blog user has a blog, you don’t have to interact with it as a blog if you don’t want to. You can do it all through the Micro.blog app or one of the third-party clients, or just the Micro.blog website, where you can see the same conversation.

Similarly, you can see all my posts here, as well as at their natural home.

It’s well worth a try if you’re looking for a less toxic social-media environment.

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 19:07:47 +0000

I’m not at all sure about this new “Gutenberg” editor they’re adding to WordPress. I’ve installed the plugin version to try it out. Gutenberg is a change to the web-based editor in the WordPress dashboard, not a separate app. I typed up my previous post in MarsEdit, as is my wont, and uploaded it. The Gutenberg plugin imported it nicely and displayed everything as you’d expect. But it turned all my Markdown into HTML.

That’s not what I want, and it’s not how most Markdown-processing plugins — notably WordPress’s own Jetpack — handle Markdown. Instead they keep the source document as Markdown and only convert it to HTML when the page is requested. That’s what using a dynamic CMS means, after all.

It appears that you can get Gutenberg to keep the Markdown as it is, if you type it into what they call a Code Block. So I’ll have to hope that [@danielpunkass](https://micro.blog/danielpunkass) updates MarsEdit to send posts to that kind of block once Gutenberg is the default. Assuming the WordPress API lets you do that, of course.

Radically Interoperable and Universal

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 14:19:08 +0000

In In Praise of Email Dan Cohen writes of how email got things right, long before some of our other ways of interacting online came along and got so many things wrong.

I’ve long thought that email was the killer app of the internet, despite the problems that many people have with it. Those tend to be not inherent in email, but caused by the way we use it.

Here’s one point he makes, in regard to the algorithmic timelines that are ruining Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram:

Although some email systems algorithmically sort email by priority or importance, that is not part of the email system itself. Again, this can be added, or not, by the user, and the default is strictly chronological.

Although my main problem, as I’ve said before, is with some clients that insisting that “chronological” means “newest first.”

Beware of Email Apps Storing Passwords

Fri, 25 May 2018 16:00:43 +0000

Email apps, especially ones that offer advanced services like “send later,” may be storing our usernames and passwords on their servers.

To be clear what that means: if you use Gmail, for example, you put your Google username and password into the app when you set it up. You expect the app to store them securely on your device. But some apps may also be storing that username and password — your keys to all the Google services in this example — on computers owned by the company that makes the app. Computers over which neither you nor Google has any control.

I’m not suggesting that the company I talk about below, or any other, is doing anything nefarious. They need to be able to log in to your mail server in order to send your mail later. But I hadn’t realised until now what that means, and I’m guessing neither will a lot of people. And to my mind they don’t make what they’re doing clear enough.

Worst of all, having passwords stored on unknown servers — at the very least, that’s worrying.

Background

On episode194 of the Connected podcast, Myke Hurley and Federico Viticci were reviewing the latest version of the iOS (and Mac) app Spark. It’s a fine email app, which I was using on my iPhone and iPad. So I was alarmed when they mentioned in passing that mail handled by the app is routed through Readdle’s servers. That didn’t seem likely at first. Spark is an email client. You tell it what servers handle your mail, and it connects to them to receive and send. The servers belonging to the company that makes the app have no business getting involved in that.

I did some digging. Whether or not Myke was right™ about mail going through their servers, the reality turned out to be much worse.

Digging

I tweeted at the Spark account. Here’s what happened:

@SparkMailApp Hi, I was listening to a podcast today on which it was suggested that if I use Spark, then my email is routed through your servers. Is that true?

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 25, 2018

Which podcast said that?

— Terry Blanchard (@terryblanchard) May 25, 2018

The latest episode of Connected, with Myke Hurley and Federico Viticci.

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 25, 2018

The only time Spark servers access your email is to create a push notification (to create sender, subject, and message snippet) The content is cached until the notification is sent, but removed after that.

— Terry Blanchard (@terryblanchard) May 25, 2018

OK, seems fair. Thanks. Probably all a misunderstanding, either by them or me. Just out of interest, is the “send later” feature done on the client?

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 25, 2018

Ah, forgot about that one! We will store it on our server until the send later time, then we send it through your email server and it is removed from our server.

— Terry Blanchard (@terryblanchard) May 25, 2018

OK. Isn’t that a problem, in that you must be storing your users’ mail server credentials on your servers? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t say that in your Ts&Cs.

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 25, 2018

It’s the second item that we mention in our privacy policy. https://t.co/WpQSIDGPgx

— Terry Blanchard (@terryblanchard) May 25, 2018

I had already found their privacy policy:

OAuth login or mail server credentials: Spark requires your credentials to log into your mail system in order to receive, search, compose and send email messages and other communication. Without such access, our Product won’t be able to provide you with the necessary communication experience. In order for you to take full advantage of additional App and Service features, such as “send later”, “sync between devices” and where allowed by Apple – “push notifications” we use Spark Services. Without using these services, none of the features mentioned above will function.

The wording “Spark requires your credentials to log into your mail system in order to receive, search, compose and send email messages” suggests that Spark the app needs to log into your server, which it does. But nothing about that says that your credentials will be stored on their servers.

Further down, in point 4, “How Long Personal Data is Stored For,” in a table that includes “Type of information,” we see (emphasis mine) :

Email address, email content for Spark Services, mail server credentials

So there it is. They do store your username and password on their servers, and they do tell you; though only if you read well into the kind of document that notoriously goes unread.

Final Thoughts

For features like “send later” they need to store the fact that you want to send an email at a specific time, and log in to your server in order to send it. And to be fair, I’m sure they can’t be alone in keeping that kind of data. Lots of clients offer “send later” and similar services, and all of them will have to log in to your mail server to work. So they have to store your credentials on their servers to do it.

And consider, if you use Gmail, that means your username and password not just for Gmail, but for all Google’s services, are now stored on somebody else’s servers. Their security might be great, but how do we know?

The more I think about this, the more concerned I become. Passwords should only be stored in one place: a secure, trusted password manager. But above all, these services need to be much clearer about the fact that they’re storing our passwords.

Faces and Feeds

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 23:23:43 +0000

I think I might have to develop an app for reading Facebook the way I think it should work.

There was an article doing the rounds the other week about how “our minds can be hijacked,” which was all about how terrible social networking is for us. I skimmed part of it, but got annoyed when it seemed to be about rich Silicon Valley entrepreneurs deciding to go “off-grid.” That’s all very well for them, but most of us have to make a living.

More pertinently, since the main target for the attack was Facebook, it annoyed me because I use Facebook to keep in touch with people that I might otherwise not. For that, it can be very good.

And yet… it struck a chord with, me to some degree. I realised that Facebook has increasingly become more of a time sink than a pleasure. Not that I spend vast amounts of time on it each day, but when I do open it up, I often end up spending longer than I’d have wanted to. And not reading updates from friends and family, but following links to articles and quizzes and nonsense, most of which I wish I hadn’t bothered with.

By comparison, a similar length of time spent in my feed reader lets me read blog pieces by people I actively want to hear from, and which I’m generally glad I’ve read.

But they mostly aren’t friends and family.

And then there’s the fact that the Facebook algorithm is tuned to show me what it thinks I should see, not what I want to see. What I want to see is all the updates from my friends, in reverse-chronological order. And that’s all. But there’s no guarantee that it will show me everything everyone posts, and the order is close to random at times.

One way to work round this is to visit people’s individual Facebook pages. You could see all your the posts by all your friends by going to each of their profiles in turn. But that would mean you’d have to keep track of all that: remember who you visited and when, and somehow manage the list of people.

Keeping track of things is what computers are good at. The software should be doing that for us.

So I’m thinking that what I want is an app that will do that for me: that will keep a list of my Facebook friends, and show me all their posts (which of course is what Facebook used to do).

As far as I know, no such app exists. This seems strange and unlikely, but I don’t think Facebook make a public API available for third-party clients, so such an app would have to work by scraping the web pages, which is neither good practice nor much fun.

Of course, what this means is effectively turning Facebook back into a set of RSS feeds — or now, especially as I have some experience with them, a set of JSON Feed feeds. Which would then be usable in all sorts of other places.

Web scraping may be bad and painful; still, I think I want to write this thing. Watch this space.

The Kickstarter Corporate Communication Conundrum

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 21:24:23 +0000

Today I chanced to see an email in which a manager was asking his staff to work for extra hours. Well, ‘asking’ is putting it generously, to be honest. There didn’t seem to be much that was optional about it.

The Kickstarter connection, though: you’ll be familiar with the idea of ‘stretch goals.’ If not, the idea is that the basic target is to make X amount of money, but if we make X + 10%, or whatever, we’ll be able to do these other things. Develop additional features, make the item in more colours, or whatever. My guess is that the term originally comes from sports.

So this email included in the subject the phrase ‘stretch targets.’ Meaning we want you to do more this week/month/whatever, than we originally planned. It was clearly written by someone who thinks that the way to develop software faster is to work your staff to the bone. When in fact that’s much more likely to result in people taking shortcuts and making mistakes.

In this team they’re already working weekends, and now they’re being ‘stretched’ even more. It bodes ill. But perhaps co-opting the language of positive things for something so negative is worse.

Site Moved

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 17:47:41 +0000

This site is now running on a Linux virtual private server (VPS) at Linode. There may be some teething problems from the move, so please let me know if you see anything strange.

Great New Phone; All the Wrong Reasons

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 18:33:40 +0000

My iPhone 6 was getting slow, and its battery was poor. I have been thinking of replacing it. But September is approaching, and Apple will announcing new iPhones (three new ones, according to rumours). So I had more or less set my mind on waiting till then.

That would also be consistent with my iPhone buying history: 3G, 4S, 6… the next in the sequence is 7S.

Friday changed my plans. I was standing at a bus stop on Old Street, just replying to a WhatsApp message. Something touched my hand, and for half a second I thought someone was bumping into me. Then there was a firm grip on my phone and it was gone. Pulled right out of my hand and off down the road on a moped — which must have come across the pavement from behind me.

I should have been more aware. I knew this kind of theft was a thing. We’ve been hearing about them for a few months. But you don’t always think about it, and you never think it’s going to happen to you. And, yes, OK, drink had been taken. But not that much.

The bus arrived a few seconds later, so there was nothing I could do but get on and head home. There was another guy at the stop who witnessed it, and he very kindly set up a hotspot on his phone and let me use it from my iPad. The Find My iPhone app didn’t find it, so the thief had probably turned it off right away. But I was able to request a remote wipe in case it’s ever turned back on, and I got an email from Apple saying all the card details had been removed from Apple Pay.

All of which meant I had to make a trip to the Apple Store on Saturday. And to the Three store, where it was alarmingly easy to get a replacement SIM. I just had to tell them my phone number and give them a payment card. No questions asked. Not even my name and address.

So I now have jet black 256 GB iPhone 7. Which is lovely. I’m late to all the new features, obviously, but here’s a quick rundown:

TouchID: it’s now insanely fast to unlock my phone. Seems like it’s almost before I touch the home button sometimes.
3D Touch: people on podcasts seem to be saying they’ve stopped using this, but I’m loving it. Especially the edge-press for activating the app switcher (a feature which seems to be going away in iOS 11, I hear, so I probably shouldn’t get too used to it).
The haptic feedback generally. Little clicks that tell you when you’ve activated something. Just makes the whole experience much nicer.
The “taptic” home button. When I’ve tried this in the shop before now I wasn’t too sure about it. But a couple of days using it for real and I think maybe I prefer it to the feel of the old real button.

Plus, it’s black. Really, really black.

Even the box was black.

The cables are still white, of course. Which reminds me, I’ve always disliked Apple’s ear buds, and passed all my past ones on to my kids. But I thought I’d give these a try, not least because I wouldn’t mind trying the AirPods if they’re ever in stock anywhere,¹ and they have the same form factor.

And I don’t hate them. I thought I always had trouble getting them to stay in, but that doesn’t seem to be the case now. The main problem is they don’t give enough sound isolation, so you can hear the traffic and people talking even with music or a podcast playing. I’ve always preferred the kind with rubbery tips, which form a seal. But aside from that, these are better than I expected. Which bodes well for AirPods.

Downside: the battery life doesn’t seem dramatically better than my old one, weirdly. For the first couple of days it was busy downloading updates and restoring things (and getting hot), but that should be over now. I’m assuming that I just have to give it a few full cycles till it beds in and the measurement gets more accurate.

And all the things you have to set up again. That’s not the fault of the phone, though, so much as the way it came to me. If had planned this I would have done an encrypted iTunes backup, which would have meant more things were restored to the new phone.

Anyway, that was a lot of words and no links about not very much.

I asked in the shop if they had them in, and of course they didn’t. ↩︎

The Sound of Audio Formats

Wed, 17 May 2017 00:26:21 +0000

Amusing that in the same week that I post a criticism of software patents, the final patents on the MP3 format expired. Some people are characterising this as the “death” of MP3, which is just nuts.

In fact, far from being dead, it can finally come to life, as Marco Arment makes clear.

Software patents: they’re what needs to die.

In other software-and-the-law news, here’s a story about a case of alleged GPL violation coming to court. The judge so far seems to have made a good decision, by stating that the existence of the GPL and the defendant company’s use of the software does mean there was a contract in place.

Spout Rolla

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 23:46:35 +0000

Back in Balloch in 1981, 82 or so we use to play a Pac-Man clone called Spout Rolla. But there are no references to it on the internet, as far as I can tell. So this is my story about it.

Once upon a time a gang of kids — thinking they were adults, but not really — used to go to the pub, and play a game.

The pub was actually the bar of a place called Duck Bay Marina. I see from that link that they now call it “Duck Bay Hotel.” Either way, it was a couple of miles outside Balloch, on the west bank of Loch Lomond.

Why did we go there, when there were pubs in the town? Two reasons, I suspect. One, some of us had driving licences and the chance to use our parents’ cars, so why not? (I wasn’t yet one of them at that point.) And two, it had video games in the foyer.

That had a dual advantage. We could play the games, and those of us who, let’s say, weren’t quite strictly within the parameters of the legal drinking age, could stay out of sight of the staff.

So: usually two machines, as I recall, plus maybe a fruit machine or two. I first played Frogger there. It was the era when arcade games had started to extend beyond shooting things in space to other tests of skill, like crossing rivers on logs.

Spout Rolla was in a similar vein. But it was a clear derivative of — let’s be honest, rip-off of — Pac-Man. I’m not sure I’d actually played Pac-Man at that point, but I must have been aware of it.

The idea was you guided a paint brush moving around a watery maze, painting the maze behind it. Fish would come out and try to catch your brush. If you painted all the maze you got a new screen (which I think might just have been the same maze in different colours, maybe speeded up a bit).

Instead of the power-pills of Pac-Man, there was one part of the maze that had a paint roller in it. If you approached the roller from the right direction, it went with you and you accelerated just for that section. Then you could turn back and roll over the fish that were following you, for extra points. And that was it.

Simpler times, simpler pleasures, I guess. It never made much sense, but we liked it.

Thing is, everything’s on the net today, right? Well, apparently not. When I googled it today, I found two surprising thing. First, that there are no references to “Spout Rolla game” to be found, with or without quotes round the first two words. Second, that Spout Rolla is a place in Scotland, namely a waterfall in Perth and Kinross.¹

Could this possibly be that most unlikely of things (at least before Rockstar Games): a Scottish game?

My son suggested that there would be people my age trying to remember what the game was called. So I tried googling for a description of it: pac-man clone fish paint roller. That search has selected videos, which I didn’t. But I did find a possible explanation.

It seems there was a game called Crush Roller, also known as Make Trax, and the one I remember could be a rebadged version of that. Plus you can play it at that link. As with many games of the time, it’s not as satisfying playing them with arrow keys as it was with a joystick.

So, no, it’s not Scottish, but it could possibly have been rebadged for the Scottish market. Or maybe just that one in Duck Bay, who knows.

The only thing is that, seeing that version, I had forgotten about there being two rollers. I was fairly sure there was only one, but playing it felt familiar, so I guess Crush Roller/Make Trax is it.

Initially the only Wikipedia page for it I could find was in Swedish. But latterly (2019-12-08), I find it’s better known as “Sput Rolla.” According to the “List of waterfalls of Scotland” article, “‘Spout’ is another common word found throughout England and Scotland for particular types of fall though it is usually replaced by ‘sput’ in the formerly Gaelic-speaking parts of the latter.” ↩

Big Mac News

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:11:26 +0000

No, that’s nothing to do with hamburgers. Apple today announced that they’re working on a redesign of the Mac Pro. This is huge news. Not least because many people in the tech blogosphere and podcastosphere¹ have been preparing for its death for some time.

My biggest question: will John Siracusa buy one of the revamped placeholder ones now, or will he wait till “not this year” for the redesigned version?

Of course it’s a word. I just made it up. ↩︎

Stupid Fawning Lapdog Government Apes the US Again

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:53:00 +0000

Our glorious leaders have seen fit to copy Trump and his cronies with banning laptops and tablets on planes — from certain countries. The only possible reason for this madness is to punish people for coming from (or visiting) those countries.

Worse, though: such a ban is only going to:

make things even more confusing and complex at airport security, and
get extended until it covers all flights, everywhere. You wait and see.

Mandatory Options

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 22:32:33 +0000

Where I’m working at the moment we’re using a tool called Splunk for some log file viewing and analysis. I hadn’t come across it, though apparently it’s quite well known.

So wanting to know a bit more about it, I thought I’d have a run through of their tutorial. To do that you have to sign up for an account. That’s fine, it’s free, there’s no obligation. I’ve signed up for plenty of things.

Except… well, look:

Splunk Signup Madness

That little “Yes, I want to receive…” checkbox looks like a fairly standard opt-in. The kind we always opt out of. But look at it. Look at its reddish border. The asterisk. These are fairly standard¹ ways of indicating that a field is mandatory.

A mandatory opt-in checkbox.

A mandatory option.

After grabbing that screenshot I closed the page. How not to get people to sign up.

Though the red is bad UI/UX, because it doesn’t work well for people with colour-blindness. ↩︎

The Return of SonoAir

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 23:29:34 +0000

Back in January I wrote about trying to play podcasts through the Sonos. As you’ll recall¹ I had tried and failed to install AirSonos on my NAS, and was considering trying SonoAir on my Mac.

I did try it, but it never quite worked. The app launched, and found the Sonos network and the speaker. But it didn’t appear as an AirPlay device to my phone. I could make it work in one context: iTunes (on the same Mac) could see it and use it as a functional output device.But that wasn’t much use, as the Sonos already has access to my iTunes library from where it’s backed up on the NAS — and also to Apple Music. So being able to play from iTunes to the Sonos brought nothing new.

The added functionality I was looking for was to be able to play podcasts from Overcast, and switch to the speaker when I’m listening in the kitchen. For that my iPhone or iPad needs to be able to see the speaker.

So it all didn’t look too promising. But I was just having another go, and I noticed that the version on the website is 1.0 (BETA 6.1), while I had BETA 4. A quick download and we’re up and running: it works!

Now I just have to keep my MacBook running at all times. Oh well.

I know, you probably won’t. ↩︎

More Network Nonsense

Sat, 25 Feb 2017 23:55:07 +0000

More trouble with the home network today. We had a smart electricity meter installed a few days ago. Though without the “smart” part, because they couldn’t get a good enough signal down in our basement. You’d think they’d have considered that possibility in designing them, since that’s the kind of place where a lot of people’s meters are. Anyway, I think it was interfering with our powerline connection.

We have a BT HomeHub as our main router and connection out to the fibre. But the wifi was a bit crap up at the top of house. So about a year back I got a couple of powerline connectors and used them to extend the 5GHz network upstairs, using another router that we had accidentally acquired as the other access point.

It worked fine, until just the other day. The first symptom was that the Sonos app couldn’t connect to the speaker. I did some diagnosis, and everything was just weird. We could mostly connect to the outside world without any trouble, but I couldn’t connect to the HomeHub’s web interface by name. Nor, I think, by IP address. And then in one of my experiments I tried a slightly different IP address (one that shouldn’t have existed on our network), and I found myself at… a Sky box.

Now you know my dislike for that bunch. There’s no way I’d let their networking hardware on my LAN, any more than I’d subscribe to their channels. and in any case, just, what?

I wondered if our network could somehow have got crossed with one of the neighbours’. But it seemed so improbable. The neighbouring network would need to be using the same SSID, at the very least.

As you’d imagine, I started taking components out to try to isolate the problem. With just the BT HomeHub in place, things were back to normal. But as soon as I began adding parts, everything went weird.

Eventually I concluded — guessed, really — that the smart meter might be using powerline itself. We’re supposed to get a screen-based device for monitoring usage, and maybe that communicates with the meter over powerline. And the meter could have an embedded sky router? That seems unlikely, but maybe Sky have the contract to do the phoning home for EDF.

Anyway, since the root of the problem seemed to be at least partly to do with IP address conflicts, I decided to factory-reset everything and rebuild with a different IP address range (I’ve never used 172.16.0.0 before). Along with a new wifi SSID and password.

And so far so good. But I’m having trouble getting the second router to route properly via the first, so upstairs is going to be problematic till I can solve that.

All this is doing, of course, is making me wish that we could get Eeros in the UK. A self-configuring mesh network is exactly what we need, and not all this jerry-rigged nonsense.

Mac Wishing

Sat, 25 Feb 2017 00:37:00 +0000

Those times when you’re typing a document at work on a shonky Windows 7 machine, and longing for your Mac, where you’d have professional text-handling tools, like Marked for previewing Markdown.

Not that you can’t preview, as long as you’ve got a decent text editor such as Sublime Text (well, specifically Sublime). But things are just so much easier with Mac tools.

And I speak as one who has never had the opportunity to use the Mac professionally. I’ve used Windows machines at works since about 1993, and before that green-screen 5250 terminals.

One of these days, though.

Wifi Blues

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:43:49 +0000

I didn’t write a post tonight because I spent most of the evening struggling with wifi configuration. And the less said about that, the better.

“Ping” Pong

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 22:53:00 +0000

When the original Unix designers (or, as it turns out, Mike Muuss) chose ping as the name for the command for checking the status of a network host, it was a moment of inspired genius. The word is almost onomatopoeic in its appropriateness.

But nowadays people are pinging each other all over the place: emails, IMs, even phone calls are “pinged” at each other. “I’ll ping you an email,” they say.

The purist in me cringes a little each time I hear it. But it shouldn’t. The word that was so apposite for those early savants is just as suitable today: it communicates a needed concept. And English, of course, is a living, thriving language. So let people get on with it

Just don’t expect me to use it myself.

Criticality Escalation

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 21:56:27 +0000

Part of any kind of bug or problem reporting system is triage: the act of deciding how severe each report is and placing it into the appropriate category.

Common categories in software development are things like “Critical,” “High,” “Medium” and “Low,” for example. They would usually be given associated numeric values: probably 1-4, in this case.

I realise that I mentioned “triage,” which of course means dividing things into three; and then I’ve introduced four levels. That would be quadage, maybe? Tesserage? Anyway, three levels wasn’t enough for people: at some point “High,” “Medium” and “Low” just couldn’t cut it.

But even the terminology is breaking down now. This snippet below is based on values from an actual document written by an actual company, for reporting problems during user acceptance testing (UAT).

Severity	Description
1 – Extremely critical	Critical problem that completely stops testing…
2 – Very critical	Critical problem that prevents some testing…
3 – Critical	Non-critical problem…
4 – Less critical	Minor bug…

Imagine if they used that in hospitals: “The patient’s critical.” “Oh, not too bad, then.”

And I love how the definition of “Critical” is “Non-critical problem…”

A Touching App

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 23:41:23 +0000

I’m typing this in MarsEdit, from Red Sweater Software, which has long been considered the best dedicated blogging client for the Mac. Daniel Jalkut, who is Red Sweater Software, is also one half of the Core Intuition podcast with Manton Reece, who is creating Micro.blog, and running the Kickstarter I wrote about a few days ago.

Anyway, a while ago Jalkut wrote and released a kind of “Touch Bar emulator” app for Macs. It simulates on-screen the Touch Bar of the new MacBooks. I just installed it, and it’s really very cool at giving you an idea of what the Touch Bar is like. Obviously you have to use it with the mouse or trackpad, as it doesn’t actually turn a section of the screen touch sensitive, but you can see what features each application offers when the Touch Bar is present, for example.

The only real downside is that it covers up a piece of screen. But it’s easy to toggle it off and on with a key combination.

All in all, fun and useful; and with a clever name: Touché.

Syndication

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 19:58:28 +0000

Further on owning your own content, I practise what some call POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. One of the elsewheres, as I’ve mentioned before, is Medium.

Medium, though having troubles recently, is in part a platform that other publications can use to build their own sites.

After yesterday’s Politics and Poetry post, I got an email this morning from somebody called Steve Saul, telling me that a new Medium-based publication called EveryVote would like to use my piece.

EveryVote is made by the people who make a site called mycongressionalrep.org, which helps people find and get in touch with their representatives in Congress. A bit like They Work for You over here, I guess, but with a specific stated aim of resisting the Trump regime.

Obviously I’m broadly in favour of their goals, so I had no problem with saying yes to their using my piece. Though it occurs to me that it’s bad professional-writing practice, as they didn’t even suggest payment (and I must admit I didn’t think of it till now). But let’s face it, I’m not a professional writer, even if I’d like to be. And the possibility that more people might come here and read my stuff, or at least read my stuff on Medium, is a genuine one.

“Doing it for the exposure,” to an extent. But not so much, since I had already done it. Anyway, my piece is currently visible on EveryVote

The Strange Case of the Lost Reply

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 22:56:00 +0000

I’ve tried various email clients on iOS, but for quite a while now my favourite has been Dispatch from Clean Shaven Apps. As well as the many integrations and efficient handling of archiving and deleting emails, I like it because it is one of the only apps that lets you order mail in the One True Way.

Which in case you’re wondering is oldest at the top. Newest at the top is fine for blogs and similar news-based things, but it’s not right for anything else. Call me old-fashioned, but that was the default in Eudora and probably in Mutt and Elm and all those too, and it was and remains the best way.

Even Outlook lets you order it oldest-first. Though disturbingly few people take advantage of it.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that today Dispatch let me down. I was typing a reply on my iPad this morning. The reply composition window looks like this:

I did something — I’m not sure what — that made the composition window slide off to the right. Part of it was still visible, so I tried tapping on it. And it disappeared.

There was no prompt, and nothing in my drafts folder. All that I had typed was gone, like tears in rain.

I’ve just been trying to reproduce it, and I can, up to a point: if you slide the compose window to the right it goes off out of the way, like this:

Which is actually quite useful, because it makes the compose window non-modal and lets you interact with your other messages. But somehow something can go wrong, even though I can’t make it happen now.

Not the end of the world. I retyped the mail. But that’s not good enough, Dispatch. You have to be able to trust your email client.

Duck(Duck)ing the User Interface

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 21:10:44 +0000

It must be well over a year now since I switched my main search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo. I changed partly because of concerns over Google’s handling of privacy issues, and partly just to try out the new one.

DuckDuckGo’s results are usually fine, and if you ever can’t find something and you think Google might be better, it’s easy to redirect your search there by adding “!g” at the end. There are other special codes like this, such as “!w” to search Wikipedia.

So it’s all fine. But what I’ve only gradually realised is that I much prefer the Duck’s user interface. And this is for one simple reason: infinite scrolling.

Now, infinite scrolling isn’t always good, and I’m sure it has a negative effect on things like usability and caching, in at least some cases. But on DDG (as I’m sure no-one ever calls it), it makes the whole search experience better.

Because sometimes there are more than ten Interesting hits. Or the interesting ones are long after the tenth. But with Google, you get ten on a page. And then you’ve got to click or touch a link to go to the next ten. And it just feels so old fashioned.

After just a few months on DDG (as we should all start calling it from now on) you can’t go back to Google without feeling a weird interrupt at the end of a page, before you go, “Oh, yeah, gotta click that.”

It’s just an inferior experience.

Surely There's a Better Answer Than That?

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 19:37:10 +0000

For one reason or another we wanted to remind ourselves¹ of the Spanish word for “south.” I like to ask Siri for that kind of thing, because speaking to your phone is just easier than unlocking and typing sometimes. And Siri is not bad. It quite often gets the right answer for this kind of thing.

Not so much there, though.

So it correctly understood my question; but instead of feeding it to Google Translate or another translation service, it sent it to Wolfram Alpha, seemingly. And that came back with intriguing answer that the Spanish for “south” is “about 99027 people.”

Seems like an unwieldy way to specify a compass direction.

I say “remind” because I learned Spanish at school, my beloved is a linguist, and our daughter is learning it, so we knew really. ↩︎

Things That Should be Easy

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 00:30:00 +0000

It ought to be easy to install a software package on Linux. I mean, it usually is. All modern distros ship with package managers, right? So all you should have to do is type (Debian-based example):

sudo apt-get install PACKAGE-NAME

and away you go. Right?

Well, usually. But today, not for me.

I have a NAS box from Western Digital, which is really a little Linux server with a biggish disk drive. Some time ago I replaced the shipped distro with a newer one, but it was so long ago, and it’s been so quiet and reliable that I can’t remember what version, exactly.

So first, there seems to be no way to interrogate it to see what distro it is. I mean, there must be, and this page lists several ways, but none of them work on this box. I mean, uname shows me the kernel version and all that, but not the distro.

Anyway, all that doesn’t really matter. I was only doing it to install Node, and I was only wanting to install Node so that I could run AirSonos. We got a Sonos Play:1 for the kitchen recently, and it’s great, but the one weakness is that it doesn’t support playing from an arbitrary source one your phone, such as, say, your podcast app of choice (Overcast, obvs).

AirSonos is supposed to effectively turn the Sonos into an AirPlay speaker, so you can easily send audio to it from iOS devices. And you want it to be running on a server, so it’s available all the time.

But it turns out that Node does not want to install on my NAS. Either by apt-get, as above, or by downloading the binary and unpacking it. (That installs it, obviously, but it won’t run.)

I’m going to try running SonoAir on my MacBook. That’s a wrapper round AirSonos, and obviously it’ll only work (assuming it does at all) when my MacBook is awake. But life’s too short.

Getting Rid of Offensive Publications in Apple News Widget

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 23:56:23 +0000

This is not a “How To” article, it’s a “How Do I?” one. I’ve been googling (or duckducking) to try to find the answer, but to no avail yet.

Take a look at this screenshot:

Screenshot of Apple News widget.

Note that those “Top Stories” include headlines from the Sun and Sky News. Two publications whose names and words I do not want to see polluting my iPad or iPhone.

But I can’t find any way to get rid of them. The widget details are linked to the Apple News app, and in the app itself you can specify preferences, but it doesn’t seem to affect what appears in the widget.

So if anyone has any idea of how to influence what appears there, please drop me a comment, or tweet me a link or something.

And yes I know I could disable the widget and/or delete the app, but I quite like the idea of it, in principle at least. And yes, I also know that avoiding the views of publications I dislike is only going to increase my own bubble effect. But you’ve got to have standards. I could cope with the Telegraph or even the Times (though I’d prefer not to). But the Sun? Come on.

On the Pronunciation of "X"

Sat, 24 Sep 2016 14:56:23 +0000

Now that the new version of Apple’s PC operating system has launched, some thoughts on something that’s been bugging me for a while.

Apple’s OS was called “OS X” from about 2000 or so. At one time it was “Mac OS X,” then at some point they dropped the “Mac” part. Now, of course, they’re dropping the “X,” (and the capital “M”) and going over to calling it “macOS.”

In the old version, I knew that the “X” was the Roman numeral for 10. It was release 10 of their operating system, so that was fine. But I always pronounced it as the letter “X” in my mind. Not least because, as the version numbers incremented, they were presented like this: 10.2, 10.3, and so on. Or more fully, “Mac OS X 10.2.”

So how were we meant to say that? “Mac Oh Ess ten ten point two”? Surely not. You can see why my internal monologue pronounced it “Oh Ess Ex ten point two”.

And so it was and so I left it. I knew the “X” had originally meant “ten,” but I couldn’t imagine that anyone would still pronounce it that way. Until I started listening to podcasts.

Wherein erudite, knowledgable Apple users such as John Gruber, or the hosts of the Accidental Tech Podcast were clearly heard to talk about “Oh Ess ten.” Though they mostly avoided saying the full, convoluted, Roman and Arabic mix of numbers. I think I did once hear David Sparks on Mac Power Users saying “Oh Ess ten ten point eight” (or whatever minor release number it might have been).

Still, I didn’t let it bother me. It wasn’t doing any harm, after all.

But then people started talking about relative sizes. I think I first noticed it when retina screens were being discussed. If you’re going to provide graphical resources to support both retina and non-retina screens, you have to provide versions of the image files at different resolutions. These are referred to in writing as “1x” and “2x” versions.

Now, it is obvious to me that that isn’t a letter “x” there (even thought that’s what I typed), but a multiplication symbol. More properly rendered as “×”.¹ The idea being that you have the original file, and one at twice the resolution. The multiplication symbol is said as “times.” So we have “one times” and “two times.” Right?

But those pesky podcasts.

Soon they were filled with “one ex” and “two ex.” It was the OS X problem all over again — but this time in reverse!

But I gradually realised I might be wrong in my assessment. Graphics files are complicated beasts, after all. A file suitable for a retina screen doesn’t have twice the pixels needed for an older screen, for example: it has four times as many. There are twice as many on the x-axis and twice as many on the y-axis.

And that’s when I realised that the “x” might refer to the x-axis. Saying a file was “2x” could be shorthand for saying that it had twice as many pixels on both its x- and y-axes.

In which case pronouncing it “two ex” would be right after all. Perhaps the terminology came from developers and designers referring to size of the files.

Except… I have subsequently heard people say other numbers followed by “ex,” when what they clearly meant was a multiplier. Specifically, I heard CGP Grey saying “ten ex” when talking about a tenfold increase in something like YouTube subscribers. And he used to be a maths teacher, so he should really know better.

Can we ever escape from this insidious invasion of “ex” into spaces where “times” belongs? Probably not. But it’s disturbing when otherwise-smart people make themselves sound so ignorant.

(And don’t get me started on the full-stop or period character that splits up those version numbers. Hint: it’s “point”, not “dot.”)

That may or may not look any different from the letter, depending on the typeface you are seeing it in, but it’s a different unicode character. ↩︎

Pokémon Gone

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:57:05 +0000

I am so not a gamer.

Oh, I loved Asteroids back in the day. I solved Monument Valley, and I got on fine with Alto’s Adventure. But I’ve never got more sophisticated modern games. There’s a whole big post about that that I’ll maybe write one day.

But Pokémon Go has lit up the internet for the last week or so, and it sounded kind of fun. So I thought I’d give it a try. Probably more healthy than arguing about the Labour leadership crisis on Facebook, anyway.

I was just out at the shops, and I remembered I had it, and sure enough, there was a wild Golbat outside the local supermarket. You’ve got to throw the pokéball to catch them, right? I’ve seen enough of the TV series with my kids to get that.

But could I catch it? Could I buggery. No matter how many times I flicked up on the screen to send the ball towards it, it just would not connect. I must have tried like fifty times, standing outside the shop like an idiot.

This is why I never get into games. I soon hit upon something frustrating and get bored with them. No doubt I was doing something wrong. I’ll try again, I suppose, but it’s very discouraging.

Oh, and I couldn’t get the name I wanted. “Devilgate” was taken, but so was it along with just about every suffix I could think of, including just random strings of numbers.

Kind of cool to see the pokéball rolling off under the vegetable racks, though.

I Upgraded my MacBook

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 00:26:29 +0000

And it's like having a new machine.

I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro, mid 2010 model. I bought it in about September or October 2010. Which means it’s getting quite long in the tooth. The MacBooks have come on a long way in what they offer since then. Mine had 4GB of memory and a 320 GB hard drive. Nowadays they have solid-state drives by default and start from 16GB of memory, I think.

Thing is, it was still fine in most ways, but it was getting very, very slow. It wasn’t too bad once everything was up and running, but waking it from sleep meant I’d be seeing what Ginger out of The Wildhearts called the “spinning fucking rainbow” (and everyone else calls the beachball) for a long time.

Even when it was up, just switching apps could trigger the slowness. So I was thinking about upgrading. But I figured there was life in the old beast yet. I took inspiration from Jason Snell who writes of upgrading a 2009 model.

According to Apple, the most memory this model can support is 8GB. But according to Other World Computing, this particular model, though no others from around then, can actually take more – up to 16GB.

I went to Crucial, which is noted as the best site for Mac upgrades in the UK (OWC is only in the US). Its tool said it could only take 8GB. But I looked around various forums and decided that there was enough evidence that OWC were right. Plus memory is so cheap these days that the difference in price between 8 and 16 was very small.

So I took a chance and ordered 16GB, plus a 500GB SSD.

Installing the memory was trivially easy. You don’t need more than a small Phillips screwdriver to open the case, and the memory modules themselves pop out and slot in very easily.

But with the two 8GB modules in, it wouldn’t boot up. I just got series of three beeps, repeated every few seconds.

A bit of googling told me that means “bad memory,” essentially.

I tried taking it out an putting it back in, swapping round which module was in which slot, and so on, but to no avail. I put the old memory back just to check that I hadn’t damaged something, and it started up like before.

So it looked like OWC were wrong, and I was restricted to 8GB. I was considering sending the memory back to Crucial and hoping I could get I refund. But then I tried one more thing. One of the new 8GB sticks along with one of the old 2GB ones.

And it booted up, smooth as a cliche.

Of course I tried swapping out one 8GB stick for the other, to check for the possibility that one of them actually was bad. But both of them worked. So it seems that this MacBook can take more than 8GB, but not as much as 16. Which is strange, but never mind.

I’d have to say, though, that the difference in performance wasn’t obvious. But I didn’t spend lot of time with it like that, because I still had the SSD to install. That’s very slightly more involved, needing as it does a Torx screwdriver. But it’s very easy.

Before all that I had made sure my old hard drive was thoroughly backed up, you won’t be surprised to hear.

I booted up in the new configuration and told the Mac to set itself up as a new installation. It downloaded El Capitan over the air and installed away.

There was one slight glitch in this process. Something went wrong with the installation and I started getting a kernel panic on bootup. I don’t quite recall the details now, but I just reformatted the SSD and installed again, and it all went fine.

And the difference… The difference is astonishing. Even with many apps open (I currently have twelve), and a whole stack of tabs in Safari, using it is effortless. Apps switch without the slightest lag. I can start anything up with only a few bounces. I’ve hardly even seen the rainbow.

Even Lightroom, which is the heaviest-weight app I use on here, starts in under ten seconds.

In short, this is the way a computer should be.

Java isn't slow

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 13:43:26 +0000

So if your Java code is doing something easier than processing 6 million events a second, and it’s slow, you can maybe make it faster!

Source: Java isn’t slow

Great piece by Julia Evans on some really fast Java applications. Notably LMAX.

URLs and searching

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 22:58:51 +0000

URL hiding

A while ago, I read a piece called “Improving the URL Bar" (turns out it’s almost a year old, but never mind). I made both mental and Pinboard-based notes of it, because my response to it was, “That’s not improving the URL bar, it’s destroying it."

Reading it again now, I don’t feel quite so strongly; I partly agree with what the author was getting at. But I feel we lose something important as we make URLs less visible. They show something of the hierarchy of a site, its structure — or at least that’s the origin of the path part.

The argument against that of course is that the path part is an implentation detail that doesn’t need to be seen by users, and perhaps more importantly, the whole thing is meaningless at best, confusing at worst to most users.

Well, maybe so. But to those of us who do understand them, hiding them can be confusing, even annoying.Of course you can click in the URL bar, or press Cmd-L or Ctrl-L, to see the whole thing. More usefully, In Safari, which I’m currently using, there’s a preference called “Show full website address”, which overrides the behaviour. So you can have your choice.

Searching

But then there’s this whole thing that we have now, of browsers doing a search when you type something in URL bar; especially (though not exclusively) when it’s not obviously a URL that you’ve typed or pasted.

I don’t like it.

Or I didn’t. I’ve been using Safari since I wiped and reinstalled this Mac because it was getting really slow (successfully, I might add). I decided to keep things as stock as possible (within reason — I wasn’t going to switch back from Lightroom to iPhoto, for example, or from MailMate to Mail.app). And Firefox can sometimes be a bit of a resource hog.

But I spent quite some time trying to find out how to give Safari a separate search bar like FF has (or can have — it may be a plugin, but if so it’s one that I install without thinking). I had muscle memory that went Cmd-T, Cmd-K (or Ctrl-T, Ctrl-T when I’m on Windows) when I want a new tab I’m going to search in. Still have it, actually, because I still use FF on Windows on my work machine.

It turns out that you can’t have that on Safari. You just have to search from the URL bar. So I just got into the habit of doing that. And now I find I do it even on Firefox (you have both options there).

I don’t know; I still feel that the URL bar should be for URLs, and searching should be something else. but it doesn’t offend me like it used to.

Still, the effect is to further blur the distinction between searching for a site and going to a specific site. I see people — even experienced, technically knowledgable people — going to Google’s home page and typing “facebook.com” into the search box. I mean, what?

Oh, and of course if you search from Google’s home page in Chrome, your cursor jumps to the URL bar! Or it did the last time I used Chrome. Which blurs the distinction between site and browser, as well as between site and search.

In the end it doesn’t matter that much — people mostly get where they mean to go — but by making it less than clear what is going on when we navigate around the web, we make it harder for people to understand how it’s all put together, and I think we lose something important in doing so.

Thin

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 17:18:57 +0000

We used to call this “thin clients”; or just a terminal logged on to a server or mainframe. Jason Snell writes of something newish that Adobe and Google are doing with Chromebooks:

This week I got a demo of Photoshop running inside Chrome, and while it was really interesting, some of my assumptions were faulty. It turns out that when Adobe says Photoshop is a “streaming app,” they mean it—it’s much more like screen sharing than native software. Photoshop runs remotely on a Windows-based server, and video of the app’s interface streams to the Chrome browser.

via Six Colors: Adobe streams Photoshop to Chromebooks.

Aye, (Head)Phones

Thu, 29 May 2014 17:49:48 +0000

I’m not in the market for a new pair of headphones. My venerable Sennheiser HD450s are still doing fine for over-the-head use, and the same brand have provided me with a series of earbuds for mobile use. But I tried a pair of Beats by Dre phones in an HMV the other day, just to see what all the fuss was about.

They looked pretty good, felt comfortable, and sounded great. But the price!

Apparently Apple bought Beats more for the streaming service than the phones. That makes sense: if they’d wanted a headphone company they’d have gone for Sennheiser, obviously (and if they cared about earphones in general they wouldn’t have made horrible ones for years).

But you’d think that if they wanted a streaming service, they’d have gone for Spotify, which is surely more established.

So I suspect the truth may include a combination of the two, plus a degree of cool cachet, in what is perhaps a demographic that they don’t currently reach.

Either way, if the next iPhone or Mac comes with a cool pair of phones (unlikely though that may be) I won’t be unhappy.

Weirdest Customer Request?

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:59:55 +0000

This is one of those unpublished posts I told you about. I don't know why it wasn't published (well, except that I hadn't written the last couple of sentences).

A while back I heard the strangest ever request from a customer.

As you might know, I work for a software house.¹ We write financial software for banks. As a thing to talk about it tends to be boring, but it can have interesting challenges.

Anyway, one of our product’s problems, as a web-based app, is that it was written to specifically target the Internet Explorer browser.

I know that seems at best charmingly retro, and at worst appallingly non-standards-compliant, but there are a couple of good-ish reasons. Principally the fact that the original version of the web app was written by contractors who both only knew IE, and were told that our clients only cared about IE. The latter was probably true at the time, and as for the former, well: let’s just say that sometimes people in companies make some stupid decisions, and leave it at that.

Inevitably, and especially as the browser landscape has matured and Apple and Google have come to rule the world, there have been calls to fix things. But there have always been higher-priorities. Getting new features done takes priority over making things work better, sadly.

One of these years we’ll fix it – personally I don’t think it’ll be as difficult as people always think (that fear is another reason why we have resisted doing it).

But what it would really take to force us to sort it out would be if a client demanded it.

If it were going to make or break a sale, we’d be all hands on deck.

So it’s interesting that we got a query a while back wherein a client was concerned about the fact that the app doesn’t work properly in Firefox. This was causing some of their users distress, as FF is their chosen browser. Was this it? Was this the opportunity, at last, driven by customer demand, to bring our app into the late twentieth century?

No.

No, the client had a better idea. They wanted us to to change our app such that it would detect that the user was running something other than IE…

… and prompt them to use IE instead.

Oh dear.

(We didn’t agree to their request.)

Incidentally, why “house”, I wonder? By association with “publishing house”, obviously, but why are those “houses”? I’m reminded of a discussion I had on a software mailing list in the nineties regarding the American tendency (then, if not now) for referring to a “shop”, meaning a programming entity, including an old-school IT department within a company. ↩︎

Google is Buying Sparrow, but not Updating the Apps

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:39:59 +0000

Google buys Sparrow, current apps will not get any new features | The Verge.

This is annoying. The only thing that was stopping me from making Sparrow my default mail client on my iPhone was the fact that it doesn’t do rotation to landscape mode yet. Now it looks like it never will.

It’s rarely good in the long run when big software companies hoover up small ones, it seems to me.

Tip: using Pandoc to create truly standalone HTML files

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 23:25:55 +0000

If you’re using the excellent Pandoc to convert between different document formats, and you:

want your final output to be in HTML;
want the HTML to be styled with CSS;
and want the HTML document to be truly standalone;

then read on.

The most common approach with Pandoc is, I think, to write in Markdown, and then convert the output to RTF, PDF or HTML. There are all sorts of more advanced options too; but here we are only concerned with HTML.

The pandoc command has an option which allows you to style the resulting HTML with CSS. Example 3 in the User’s Guide shows how you do this, with the -c option. The example also uses the -s option, which means that we are creating a standalone HTML document, as distinct from a fragment that is to be embedded in another document. The full command is:

pandoc -s -S --toc -c pandoc.css -A footer.html README -o example3.html

If you inspect the generated HTML file after running this, you will see it contains a line like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="pandoc.css" type="text/css">

That links to the CSS stylesheet, keeping the formatting information separate from the content. Very good practice if you’re publishing a document on the web.

But what about that “standalone” idea that you expressed with the -s option? What that does is make sure that the HTML is a complete document, beginning with a DOCTYPE tag, an tag, and so on. But if, for example, you have to email the document you just created, or upload it to your company’s document store, then things fall apart. When your reader opens it, they’ll see what you wrote, all right; but it won’t be styled the way you wanted it. Because that pandoc.css file with the styling is back on your machine, in the same directory as the original Markdown file.

What you really want is to use embedded CSS; you want the content of pandoc.css to be included along with the prose you wrote in your HTML file.

Luckily HTML supports that, and Pandoc provides a way to make it all happen: the -H option, or using its long form, –include-in-header=FILE

First you’ll have to make sure that your pandoc.css file¹ starts and ends with HTML