This Is My Last

Jeff Jarvis: The irony is that in a zealous effort to protect the distinctiveness — the sanctity — of human text, the authorities and the technologists deprecate what makes text human. ~ Link: Words Matter. Damnit., by Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine

Time for some links, time for some reading pleasures: Every Novel Is Boring—Until It Isn’t, by Emma Adler, Public Books G.P.S. and the Lost Art of Getting Lost, by Shayla Love, New Yorker How Mandarin Became Standard Chinese, by Jingyu, Old North Whale

I enjoy coding, programming, scripting, or whatever you want to call it. I enjoy figuring out what I want my computer to do for me, and figuring out how to make my computer do what I want my computer to do for me. As part of the bargain for work work, though, I also have to figure out how to tell people how to code. These are not the most enjoyable part of what I do. Not every software project can be a one-person thing, and not every software project need to be a one-person thing. I do share…

Life is beautiful. Life is filled with little bits of joy and comfort, and grief and sadness. Life is about memories. And also hope. Life is short enough that Death is not far from the mind. Life is long enough that Death can be far from the mind, at least for a while. Life is beautiful. ~ Just finished reading: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, by Ben Reeves. Love this novel about life.

There are men who are lonely. But, according to Nick Keppler in this Slate article, "there is one group that is drastically lonelier than everyone else:" poor people. One reason: people with low-paying jobs have little or no co-workers, or little or no long-term co-workers. ~ Link: America’s Loneliness Trap, by Nick Keppler, Slate

I do follow channels in YouTube via RSS feeds, and when new videos arrive at my RSS reader, I will decide whether to sideload them into my podcast player or my bookmarking app for viewing later. Here are other options you can employ that doesn't involve YouTube's algorithms. ~ Link: How to Experience YouTube With No Algorithm, by Lou Plummer, Amerpie

After the serious missteps two years ago, it certainly seems to me that Apple is figuring what to do with AI. (On the other hand, what we want from everyone's AI is still far from clear.) ~ Link: Apple Trains Its Own AI Model for China Market With Alibaba's Support, Sources Say, by Reuters

D. J. Taylor: The editor was a symbol of this growing suspicion that every book a firm published had to be as good as it could possibly be, and that pains were worth taking over a promising work by a raw talent that might need knocking into shape before it could be placed in hard covers and sent out to the reviewers. ~ Link: Wielding the Blue Pencil, by D. J. Taylor, Portico

I have decided to use Apple Notes to log stuff in my life, with the promise from Apple that, firstly Apple Notes sync across my iPhone and my Mac, and secondly, I can manipulate notes using Shortcuts. I've created a new Shortcut on my iPhone that asks for a line of text input, and the Shortcut will then append the current timestamp and that line of text into an existing note. This is working fine, as far as I can tell, on my iPhone. However, every night, when I reach home and open up the Notes…

It's mid-week, and we are halfway to the weekend. Do you have some time to do some reading? The Doulas Who Help Us Die, by Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker The Soviets Drilled the Deepest Hole Ever, by Charles Digges, Nautilus Why Are Rivers So Mathematical?, by Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine

I am not sure how universal this is, but when we get older, do we all focus more on the age of death of people we read in the news? Do we silently calculate -- if the reported age is older than our current age -- how many more years before we hit that same age? And if the reported age is younger, do we congratulate ourselves for having outlived that particular person, or do we think we may now drop dead anytime? Of course, I have to also read a book that is about death -- many deaths and their…

MacBook Neo uses iPhone chips instead of the regular M series chips, so as to lower the price. And now there are rumors Apple is considering screen-less wearables for your wrists (or fingers) that brings Health and Fitness ecosystem to those who don't want a watch from Apple, but presumably can also sell at a lower cost than the regular Apple Watches. Of course, all these plans to capture customers that are more price-sensitive may be hindered by the sky high costs of memory chips. Apple has…

"Wild, irresponsible, arrogant, defiant." ~ Link: To Write As If No One Will See What You’ve Written: Why the Short Story Won’t Go Away, by Jess Row, Literary Hub

If you are the kind of person who think it is pretty cool to write some Shortcuts or shell script or AppleScript, and pipe the output to a widget running on your iPhone, Mr Adam Engst has a software recommendation just for you. ~ Link: TerminalWidget Turns Scripted Output into Visual Widgets, by Adam Engst, TidBITS

The original iMac may well be the best looking computer ever made. And an entire Wall of iMacs with its rainbow of colors may well be the best looking wall of computers. (Note: Apple will probably prefer you call it a Wall of iMac computers.) ~ Link: The Apple Museum Is An Ode to a Company That Doesn’t Exist Any More, by Anthony Nelzin-Santos, Z1NZ0L1N

I do, and I have heard that too many kunckle cracking will bring about arthritis at old age. I am old -- though not that old -- but I don't have arthritis (touch wood) yet. And I am glad to read that "[the amount and duration of knuckle cracking over someone's lifetime had no effect on their osteoarthritis risk](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260807-should-i-stop-cracking-my-knuckles", My grip strength is not great though; but I probably attribute that to being weaker physically, not…

I just realize I am living under a rock for quite a while, at least with respect to books, because I am not aware of the biggest book of the year, and I have to go find out what does the word 'trad-wife' mean. ~ Link: How Caro Claire Burke Wrote the Biggest Book of the Year, by Rachel Syme, New Yorker

There is an update to yesterday's post: Apple Is Not Doing Enough for Its App Stores. Apple's reviewers did do their job accurately. Sorry for the link.

Do you have a little bit more time today to sit down and read? Here are a few links for you… Blithe Denial: On Devyn Defoe’s "Burnside" and Douglas Coupland’s "Generation X", by Lara Treisman, Cleveland Review of Books On Radical Preservation, by Anastasia Berg and Jon Baskin, The Point Australia Is the Planet's Extinction Hotspot, But One Animal Offers a Glimmer of Hope, by Tiffanie Turnbull, BBC On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle, by Stuck in a Book … or you can also save up the…

Between bad apps that try to scam customers, and good apps that are rejected for seemingly wrong reasons, shouldn't Apple deploy more and better reviewers to their App Store to justify their high margins? ~ Links: Browsers have standards, the App Store has judgment, by Terry Godier App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

First, there was the issue with Hide My Email exposing your actual email. Now, we discover that Apple's iCloud Private Relay may not be private sometimes. Not a good couple of months if you are relying on Apple to protect your anonymity. ~ Link: Apple's iCloud Private Relay Isn't Really That Private by CybersecKyle.

I don't need any of what I write here to survive after I leave this world. Nevertheless, I am not expecting but still happy that this blog platform may be staying around for quite a while, as promised by the platform creator: "Bear won't shut down. Period." (If you can afford it, and you also want to write in a public space, go subscribe and create a blog or two.) But, if you do want what you write to survive as long as possible after you die, here are some thoughts from Mike Harley on how to…

The Guardian is reporting that more and more venues -- from restaurants to theaters -- are banning Meta glasses. Is Apple working on its camera-equipped version? Can Apple uphold its privacy principles, or will the company protect only the wearer, not the videoed? ~ Link: Restaurants, Pubs and Theatres Ban Meta’s ‘Spy Glasses’ Over Privacy Fears, by Helena Horton, The Guardian

There are suggestions to not use iPhone as an alarm clock. Not because of anything inherently wrong with the alarm clock functions on an iPhone, but because if you have an iPhone next to you on your bed, you will inevitably use your iPhone to doomscroll instead of sleeping. Fortunately for me, I don’t do doomscrolling (I think). So, I do use my iPhone as an alarm clock. I like that I can set multiple alarms and give them names. I like that the alarms can be programmed to repeat at certain days…

Thumbs up if you like a book, or a movie, or a podcast, or any work of art. Tell me why. And that's is all I need to decide if I also want to read a book, watch a movie, or listen to a podcast. I agree with Thea Lim in this artilce in The Walrus: there is no need to compare a work of art with any other work of art and tell me which is better than which. ~ Link: Abolish the Top Ten Books List, by Thea Lim, The Walrus

Hey, it's time yet again for a roundup of reading pleasures… Why My 85-Year-Old Friend Has Devoted the Last Years of Her Life to Reading the Ancient Classics, by Seth Kaplan, Literary Hub Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?, by Aaron Horwath, Noema How Golden Is Silence, Actually?, by Anthony Lane, New Yorker

Suffering is something I thought about throughout my life. Certainly, it's not only me: all the religion in this world have some thoughts about suffering, for a start. But personally, I didn't classify suffering by their usefulness, so this is something new to me. I probably have to ponder a lot more, because I don't find it easy to classify all the suffering I have in my head by their usefulness. (Thank goodness, except for the lousy eyeballs that I think I am born with, I don't have much…

Here are more links for your bedtime or whatever-time reading pleasure… not that I want link-blog-like posts to be a regular feature here… but looks like I'm doing it… happy reading! The Accidental Architect of the Internet’s Brain, by Carson Griffith, New Yorker McDonald's McCrescent, by The Retroist What if Freud Was Right?, by Scott Stossel, The Atlantic I Was a Farmers Market Failure, by Ashlie D. Stevens, Salon :-)

Most Mac users will, surely, be familiar with the “Drag the App icon into your Applications folder” window when ‘installing’ a new Mac app. Here’s a wonderful curation of these windows, collected by Marcin Wichary in the Unsung site. Enjoy!

It’s almost time that one will have to stop using Intel-based Mac apps. The macOS release in fall of 2027 will not be able to run them. And for most of us, we can only delay moving to latest releases of macOS for only so long. So, take a read of Glenn Fleishman‘s excellent overview on what we will need to get ready. And while you are doing some reading, why not also read Adam Engst’s review of the excellent macOS backup tool SuperDuper?