Yesterday I ended my day with a feeling of amused frustration. I received a new iPhone Xs as part of the Apple upgrade program.1 I’ve used this plan in the past and I’ve been happy with the results. I had no reason to suspect I’d end up in a long term relationship with Apple support. The phone failed to complete authorization with Verizon. It rejected my PIN until my authorization was locked.

I love this Netflix blog post about how they use Jupyter notebooks. I’m not an programmer but I do play one at work and I’m partial to using notebooks when I explore. Part of my day job is to develop the system architecture for a long term engineering effort. I fire up a notebook and start playing with AWS micro services. My notes end up with the various cases I test, some notes, some sample data and results.

I’ll admit, I’m terrible at rote memorization. I always have been, which is weird for someone that became a chemist. Often chemistry is approached by pre-med students as another flashcard topic, and this definitely works for many people. If you are someone that uses flashcards then this Anki system looks very good. There are apps for the Mac and for iOS. Anki has an interesting plain text format that also has quite a bit of power.

From Engadget As far as the games that are (or will be) allowed, the plan is for developers of games with violent or sexual content to write their own description that includes context of how the material appears. I may be wrong, but I think Valve will regret this model. It’s built on a principle of having no principles and that’s a hard sell for many parents. I’d never give my kid access to a system like that.

With iOS 12 right around the corner, I’m feeling a little let down by the variety and power of “shelf” apps on iOS 11. Apple provided us with a new model to move data between apps and it was a great start. One of my favorite features of drag and drop was support for accessing the deeper content types of an object. Within the first month of iOS 11 I had six different apps for stashing little objects.

As a college student in the 90’s I was relieved to get a computer. When I finished college all of my documents fit on about three floppy disks. I think school today requires a bit more knowledge management and I can’t recommend the Devontech products enough. Get 40% off during their back-to-school sale. There’s a lot of software you may still need but DEVONthink is the glue that keeps all of my information organized and easily found.

That didn’t take long. Yesterday I shared my Mastodon address as an alternative to following a ghost on Twitter. Within hours I got a link (by email) explaining some weirdness connecting with people I knew on other instances of Mastodon. In what can only be called a “double turns-out”, Mastodon instances can be changed in ways to not be part of the federated group. So, I guess centralized might be the only way to have a unified communication channel.

Just go read these articles by Joe: Social Technical-Debt First Time Tooter, Long Time Tweeter I’m skeptical that anyting can or should replace Twitter. I don’t think we are ready for this type of interaction but I’d love to be wrong. I miss a lot of my friends on Twitter after almost two years away from it. I can be found @macdrifter@counter.social. I chose Counter.Social because a few of my friends were there.

Drafts for Mac Status Update: What can Drafts for Mac do? The initial version of Drafts for Mac will support most of the same draft capture, editing and organization features of Drafts 5 on iOS and all drafts, tags, workspaces, versions, etc. will sync between versions. The editor will support themes and all the same editing features, syntax highlighting and more. True to its core, there will be quick-capture tools to easily popup up a window and start typing to start on all your text snippets and notes in Drafts as easily on Mac as you do on iOS.

What was delivered to the Sun Sentinel by the district had black redaction bars covering two-thirds of the document. Unfortunately, the redactions were merely cosmetic. Anyone with a copy of the PDF could select the “redacted” text in the PDF and paste it into a text editor to see what was supposed to have been withheld. People, please learn how to work with PDFs. It’s a 25 year old technology that is now the gold standard for information archiving.