The only thing more boring than quitting things is writing about quitting things. Yet, here I am. One year ago, on the morning after the 2016 U.S. election, I stopped using Twitter. I stopped posting and I stopped reading Twitter. I also stopped thinking of Twitter as a benign advertising company. The months since that decision have only proven my suspicions to be correct. Twitter may be a company, but it’s a company made by people with dubious intentions.

I generally walk around confident in my data hoarding. I have software to watch my back and, short of a massive solar flare, I don’t worry about the safety of my stash. Here’s what my system looked like three months ago. I have a Synology NAS with 16 TB of storage.1 Hazel runs on my Mac to sweep away photos, videos, and downloads. I have Backblaze backing up my Mac. Every six months I refresh a drive that contains just my family photos, financial documents, and home videos.

Rego is one of my favorite location apps for iOS. If you are unfamiliar with Rego, it’s kind of like Foursquare but private and with more utility. I use it to plan vacations, road trips, and hiking. I even used it to plan house hunting by dropping markers on the map for addresses to visit. Then while I’m out and about I can take a photo, add it to my rego map and add some info in case I want to return to the location.

Give me a keyboard and I will give you 10 problems with it. I love a good keyboard but I can also type equally bad on just about any keyboard. I’m not a speed writer. I touch type about 50% of the time but I still look at the keyboard often. I don’t use the correct hand posture but I do use a consistent finger placement. So with all of those caveats out of the way, here’s my review of the new Brydge keyboard for iPad (and an accidental review of the Apple Smart Keyboard Cover).

RSS is still my favorite way to gather and read new ideas on the internet. For me it avoids the echo-chamber of Twitter. The feeds I subscribe to are diverse. Some are noisy and some publish only a few times a month. The topics range from technology and politics to economics and art. A good feed reader can make all the difference though. A good RSS reader turns all of these feeds into an orderly and easy to read portal.

This new Adobe suite seems like a pretty great deal, considering that it includes 1 TB of storage with sync. For “a limited time” the photography bundle plus storage is $15 per month. Compare that with Apple’s iCloud storage options which is $10 per month for 2 TB. I know it’s not a direct comparison and that iCloud comes with apps too but I think Apple’s pricing is still too high for what you get.

To search the content of more than one site at time, DuckDuckGo provides the site operator which can contain more than one domain. To search both Macdrifter and Hobosigns I created this Workflow for iOS. Prepending a search phrase with “site:macdrifter.com OR site:hobosigns.macdrifter.com” does the trick with a DDG search. Sites can even be across different TLDs. So, if you want to search 5 or 6 sites at once, consider a canned DDG cross site search.

Quoted in The Verge US-CERT has become aware of several key management vulnerabilities in the 4-way handshake of the Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) security protocol. The impact of exploiting these vulnerabilities includes decryption, packet replay, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection, and others. Note that as protocol-level issues, most or all correct implementations of the standard will be affected. The CERT/CC and the reporting researcher KU Leuven, will be publicly disclosing these vulnerabilities on 16 October 2017.

It took me a while to realize I could mark a folder in DEVONthink To Go as a favorite in the iOS Files app. This makes it very easy to quickly browse to content in the Files app which might be the best way to edit a file in DEVONthink. After adding DEVONthink as a source in the Files app, browse to a the level above the folder you want to add.

I still don’t really understand some of the iOS settings but one, in particular, has always baffled me: Spotlight.1 By default, every app installed automatically gets indexed by Spotlight. That’s not always great for search results. I find that many of my spotlight searches are contaminated by results from things I don’t want to see. Through trial and error, I think I figured out the consequences of Spotlight settings. I could be wrong, but this is what I observe.