Coyote Cartography
Archive About Also on Micro.blog
  • While I didn’t technically get AirPods Pro for Christmas, I got a check which just about covers them, so: the trick is just finding a store that still has them in stock!

    → 2:39 PM, Dec 31
  • A silver lining of a layover in Phoenix: one of the best coffee shops you can find at any airport, Cartel Coffee.

    → 10:09 PM, Dec 29
  • Thinking more about it, I really want a plain text editor with Scrivener’s organization and final output tools, BBEdit’s editing capability, and the nice editing appearance of iA Writer or Ulysses. Apparently nobody else does!

    → 11:01 PM, Dec 27
  • Wrestling with the thought of going back to using, you know, a word processor to write stories. Not Scrivener, not plain text this and that, just…a word processor. (Specifically, Nisus Writer Pro.)

    → 8:06 PM, Dec 27
  • It seems like 2020 or 2021 will be the year either I move back to Florida to be with my elderly mother, or move her out to California and find…somewhere we can afford.

    → 1:20 PM, Dec 27
  • The Tampa Bay food scene—including coffee and beer—has really taken off over the last five years. Assuming I do end up back here, it’s nice that it’ll feel like a cool place to (re)discover.

    → 4:38 PM, Dec 26
  • I’m finding myself wobbling between MultiMarkdown Composer and iA Writer on the Mac. I suspect if BBEdit’s syntax highlighting scheme could show italics and bold, I’d just be using it, though.

    → 8:14 PM, Dec 23
  • Using the infotainment/nav system in my mom’s Subaru makes me appreciate the one in my Honda Insight much more.

    → 4:04 PM, Dec 18
  • Hanging out at the Brass Tap in Wesley Chapel, Florida, which became my go-to beer bar in this area a few years ago. The outdoor mall it’s in is clearly struggling, though, which makes me a bit nervous for them.

    → 7:30 PM, Dec 16
  • As much as I appreciate Away luggage supporting all the tech podcasts, “carry a charger in your suitcase because airports never have outlets” hasn’t been true for several years, has it? Every airport I go to has rows of seats and desks with outlets everywhere.

    → 3:04 PM, Dec 14
  • My favorite web typography curmudgeon contemplates the Brave web browser, pinpointing my own reservations about its “ads but virtuous” business model. practicaltypography.com/the-cowar…

    → 6:52 PM, Dec 12
  • Coming to the decision point for an upcoming two-week trip: iPad-only, MacBook-only, or take both? The last two years I’ve done iPad-only and I’m sure I could do it again. But frustration with iOS and its apps has rekindled my love of the Mac recently.

    → 3:06 PM, Dec 12
  • I have accidentally found a mysterious alleyway Mexican place in Sacramento that has Cafe de Olla on the menu, a drink I referenced in Kismet that I haven’t actually had in 20 years.

    → 11:13 PM, Dec 7
  • Affinity Publisher probably isn’t a true InDesign competitor yet if you need truly serious desktop publishing power, but for $35 it looks and feels surprisingly capable.

    → 3:09 PM, Dec 7
  • Scheduling a Lyft ahead of time for an airport ride at 4am on Saturday the 14th. I’m hoping this works!

    → 4:16 AM, Dec 7
  • Firefox seems to log me out of web sites constantly and breaks functionality of several sites in weird and inconsistent ways. I’ve tried tweaking every privacy/security setting I can find in it and Privacy Badger, but nothing helps. I may be back to Safari shortly.

    → 12:20 AM, Dec 7
  • I don’t really have a bucket list, but I suspect if I did, tonight’s dinner at the French Laundry would cross one item off.

    → 1:45 AM, Dec 5
  • The best thing about Firefox for me is likely EFF’s Privacy Badger—I’m not interested in ad blocking, I’m interested in invasive tracker blocking. (Although in practice blocking the latter blocks an awful lot of the former.)

    → 12:39 PM, Dec 3
  • I’m finding myself going back to MultiMarkdown Composer as my prose writing app of choice. Frankly, I suspect if BBEdit could use italics and bold for syntax highlighting the way some other editors do, I’d stick with it for stories, too.

    → 2:28 PM, Nov 29
  • Update: I have ordered the TV. Now I can spend days wondering if it was a mistake! (I do this after every purchase much over $50.)

    → 3:18 AM, Nov 26
  • Considering finally pulling the trigger on a new television, which would be the first one I’ve bought since… 2007 or 2008? I still love my Pioneer plasma, but it’s 42", 720p, and the video landscape has changed a lot.

    → 9:11 PM, Nov 25
  • “For All Mankind” causes my receiver to show “Object” where it’d normally show channels, like “3/2.1” for 3 front, 2 rear, 1 sub. It’s Dolby Atmos! But I only have five speakers.

    → 11:32 PM, Nov 24
  • So, I can’t pull up the find and replace panel on iOS iA Writer unless predictive text is enabled. It’s a tiny bug, but there are so many damn tiny iOS bugs, misfeatures and infelicities compared to macOS, and it’s just not trending better.

    → 6:16 PM, Nov 23
  • I checked the sound level of typing on the MacBook Pro’s butterfly keyboard and on a mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Clear switches; the latter was only louder by about 3 decibels on average.

    → 9:20 PM, Nov 22
  • My biggest challenge with Firefox is years of launching/switching to the browser by typing Cmd-Space S for “Safari”. I did just discover the checkboxes for “title bar” and “drag space,” though. (For right now: drag space,, Arc theme.)

    → 2:47 PM, Nov 22
  • After yet another instance of opening a Scrivener project and having it freak out about “file conflicts” that should have been easily resolvable—but which it provides no tools to even do a manual diff on—I’m going to think more on plain text solutions.

    → 12:34 PM, Nov 22
  • For the first time in many years, I’m going to try running Firefox as my default browser. As much as I generally love Safari, new versions have seriously nerfed extensions, and I think I’d prefer to be running EFF’s Privacy Badger rather than an ad blocker. (We’ll see.)

    → 2:57 PM, Nov 20
  • Phil Schiller’s comments that “we’re both advancing the butterfly keyboard, and we’re creating this new Magic Keyboard for our Pro notebooks” make me a little nervous.

    → 12:16 AM, Nov 14
  • Assuming the new(ish) Apple laptop keyboard shows up on the MacBook Air in its next revision, that may be enough to keep me happy. I’m going to have to upgrade my current 13" MBP to Catalina and see if it drives me crazy, though.

    → 2:00 PM, Nov 13
  • The conference center I’m camped out at (my Secret Remote Office™) has free wifi that gets 207 Mbps down and 42 Mbps up. I’m pretty sure that’s better than either my home or my actual workplace. (Possibly combined.)

    → 4:08 PM, Nov 7
  • My local McDonald’s has gone through a massive interior design update to be brighter, more open, light wood flooring, funky design touches. No booths anywhere now. I’m not sure, but I think I hate it.

    → 12:45 PM, Nov 6
  • While it’s already a few days into November, I think I’m going to commit to participating in #NaNoWriNoMo (National Not Writing a Novel Month).

    → 10:25 PM, Nov 5
  • A fair number of commenters on Hacker News are just really humorless gits, aren’t they?

    → 5:35 PM, Nov 4
  • We are being introduced to the potential magic of the Instant Pot™ tonight.

    → 12:01 AM, Nov 4
  • Hopes for Apple products in 2020: (a) a terrific MacBook Air update with a new, reliable keyboard; (b) an update to macOS Catalina that has the bugs ironed out. Even so, I’m eyeing a Dell XPS 13 dual booting Windows 10 and Linux way harder than I’d expected I ever would.

    → 1:37 PM, Nov 2
  • Sort of ironic that I’m hitting a “I have to take a brief break from writing” moment just at the start of NaNoWriMo, but I’m sure I’ll get going again—probably before the end of the month.

    → 6:21 PM, Nov 1
  • While I have never attended WWDC, I feel like Samsung’s dev conference is giving me the fundamental experience of the boxed lunch.

    → 2:34 PM, Oct 30
  • Wandering through one of the few places that my iPhone really sticks out oddly: the Samsung Developer Conference.

    → 12:35 PM, Oct 29
  • Am I doing something wrong, or is it just potluck whether a “slideover” app in iOS 13 can be given keyboard focus with a Bluetooth keyboard? Sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn’t.

    → 8:30 PM, Oct 24
  • So guessing at this point the chances of an October event from Apple are pretty minimal.

    → 8:10 PM, Oct 22
  • MacOS Catalina is the first release I can think of, possibly ever, where the quirks—both intentional and unintentional—have made me say “nah, I’m good without upgrading.”

    → 12:48 PM, Oct 19
  • Sometimes my “office view” is very pleasant on remote-work Thursdays.

    → 5:57 PM, Oct 17
  • Notes from the Road

    For a while about a decade ago, I was doing tech blogging; I never rose to “A-list blogger” level, but I probably hit B-list for a couple years, based on who was linking to me and the “yeah, I think I’ve heard of Coyote Tracks” comments from bigger names. I used to joke that while you weren’t reading me, people you were reading were reading me. I never figured out how to monetize those eyeballs, as they say, I suspect because I worried I wasn’t big enough to go after any real ad networks. The blog did lead to my tech writing job at RethinkDB and a middle-age shift into that career path, though, so in a way it paid off handsomely.

    But I’d been “blogging” since 1998, even though nobody had that term back then. My first try was for some kind of online column, as I recall, just personal essays; I doubt anyone read it, and I didn’t keep up with it. For a decade or so after that, though, I kept a journal called Coyote Cartography, the name I resurrected for this blog.

    That started up while I still lived in Florida, where I’d taken to driving long distances for no reason other than to do it. I used to joke about practicing “driving zen” instead of walking zen, but it wasn’t entirely a joke. I did a lot of thinking when I drove, and once I got out of traffic and found myself on relatively rural roads, it brought a measure of peace.

    I kept doing that occasionally after I moved to California, at least for a while. Occasionally, I’d write up wherever I’d ended up and post it in the journal with the title “Notes from the Road.”

    Geography makes it harder than I’d expected to drive out of the San Francisco Bay area and get somewhere new and interesting than it is to drive out of the Tampa Bay area and get somewhere new and interesting. Also, I’m old enough now that driving ten hours for no particular reason can be more tiring than relaxing. Over the last few years, it’s been rare for me to go much farther than Sacramento, even as I’ve had the resources to take “staycations” as a way of recharging. (Those staycations tend to be in the Sacramento area, as I’ve come to love it despite its brutal dry heat summers—and also, I confess, because the hotels there are so much cheaper than anywhere near San Francisco.)

    But a couple weeks ago, I’d started to feel unaccountably melancholy and maudlin, a kind of free-floating mild depression I’d become familiar with off and on. In the past, I’ve self-medicated with St. Johns Wort, which I suspect may be as much placebo as anything else; while I’ve grown to like beer, wine and spirits more now than I did when I lived in Florida two decades ago, that’s a dangerous road to go down. So I decided to take to the literal road, heading back to Big Sur for the first time in years. Last weekend, I ended up in Modesto after a slightly too late start, so I didn’t see much of Modesto. (I don’t know if there’s anything to see there, but sometimes overlooked towns can surprise you.)

    And, as I type this, I’m in Ukiah, at Black Oak Coffee Roasters.

    Ukiah is the largest city in Mendocino County, which is still only about 17,000 people. Like a lot of Mendocino, there’s a mix of old school agriculture and hipster counterculture around the town. This is a coffee shop you’re going to go into and find great local-roasted coffee and people working on laptops; it’s not going to be abuzz with conversations about social media startups. It feels kinda Bay Area in a good way, but also feels fully of its place.

    San Francisco insists it’s “northern California,” but a glance at the map tells you it’s clearly in the middle. This is northern California, and it’s a noticably different pace. You start feeling it at the northern edge of the Bay Area, in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa and Healdsburg, although those are still close enough to San Francisco to make everything just a little more fraught in both good and bad ways. Going north of Healdsburg requires effort. It rewards you, as long as you like the kind of place Ukiah is. I do, which I’d almost forgotten. It all came back instantly when I turned down its main street. (There is a Main Street, but the real main street is State Street, one block over.) It’s the sort of town I’d love to live in, if only I could install a teleporter. For one, my job isn’t keen on full-time remote employees. For another, as solitary as I can be, I’m not antisocial—I’m bad at being social, but that’s not the same thing. I wouldn’t want literally all of my friends to be a day trip away.

    The last time I was in Ukiah, at least a decade ago, I was at this coffee shop, too. But back then it was called the Coffee Critic. Apparently they went under back in 2010 or 2011, and two locals—one of whom had been a head roaster for both Ritual Coffee and Counter Culture Coffee, two pretty big names in the snooty coffee world—bought the shop. They’re doing light roasts in that “third wave” style, but also doing dark roasts, blends, crazy flavors for lattes and mochas, all to fit in to the local market.

    Frankly, this is too far from home to be out this far on a Sunday at a quarter to five; it’s a three-hour haul back. But because of that time, now that I’m here I’m going to find some place for dinner. Ideally I’ll have enough time to walk around, too, and won’t get back deathly late.

    I’d planned to get out and do some writing today; I don’t know if that’s going to happen. Other than, of course, this. But maybe that’s okay.

    → 7:54 PM, Oct 13
  • Finally unsubscribing from Medium’s weekly digest rather than deleting it each week after muttering at the inexplicable choices it makes. “Here’s an article from two years ago whining about a JavaScript framework!” Awesome. Thanks.

    → 4:05 PM, Oct 4
  • One of the employees at the DMV is wearing a “RUN DMV” t-shirt.

    → 12:44 PM, Oct 3
  • I played around with Operator Mono, Hoefler & Co.’s $199+ font for coding, and—it’s fine? But the best font for coding/writing I’ve found is free: iA Writer Mono, a close relative of IBM Plex Mono. It has distinct personality without Operator’s excessive hipster quirkiness.

    → 1:28 PM, Oct 2
  • I was asked, “what’s the name for the kind of government on the Ring,” referring to a location in my novel, and—I’m not sure I have an answer. Sort of democratic socialist libertarian collectivist…?

    → 9:06 PM, Sep 30
  • To our great surprise, Chevy’s runs credit cards at the table—and now takes Apple Pay.

    → 11:10 PM, Sep 28
  • Visiting one of the last remaining Chevy’s in the SF Bay Area. These were everywhere when I moved out here in 2002; now I think there are only two left.

    → 9:58 PM, Sep 28
  • Now going two-for-two in attempting to order from Jet, giving up, and going back to Amazon. This time Jet had what I wanted, at least, but kept hanging at checkout.

    → 11:41 AM, Sep 27
  • As I restlessly try virtually every monospaced font there is for terminal, coding and prose, I’m reminded that Menlo, for all of its system-defaultness, is actually pretty good.

    → 1:48 PM, Sep 23
  • Chewing on a very first world problem: Southwest’s tickets from San Jose to Tampa are so unusually expensive around Christmastime this year that it’s only ~$150 more to jump to a first class fare on American. (Although probably ~$300 less to do American economy.)

    → 8:28 PM, Sep 22
  • Suspecting the execs at Regus have been watching the WeWork saga over the last few months and thinking, “You know, maybe being the old boring standby is an advantage.”

    → 12:45 PM, Sep 20
  • Ubuntu users, how do you deal with the “system restart required” message on login for servers? If I restart my server every time I see this, I will be lucky to ever have an uptime longer than two weeks.

    → 1:25 AM, Sep 17
  • I occasionally have a perverse desire to set up my next Linux server(s) using Slackware. More likely to either stick with Ubuntu or switch to Debian, but…

    → 5:16 PM, Sep 16
  • If you have more than a half-dozen items, a staffed checkout lane at a grocery store is almost always faster than the self-service lane, and always much friendlier.

    → 7:37 PM, Sep 15
  • I always feel oddly guilty when I go to an ostensibly authentic family-owned Mexican place and think “the tortilla chips here aren’t as good as Chili’s.” (The chips at Chili’s are usually way better than you probably think.)

    → 10:58 PM, Sep 11
  • Hot take: “See” may be set to remind us that “high concept” can be so high it leaves all grounding behind.

    → 1:26 PM, Sep 10
  • You know how when you get to a neat hipster brewery but decide it’s too crowded and you shouldn’t drink anyway, drive a little more, realize you’re on a mountain road with no turnarounds for 15 miles, and end up at a coffee shop hours from home? No? Uh, me neither.

    → 7:03 PM, Sep 8
  • The Sons of Liberty Alehouse in San Leandro has won my affection by having a cocktail on the menu named “One Star Yelp Review.” (Although I’m having a shandy with housemade lemonade.)

    → 4:00 PM, Sep 7
  • I’m a little put out that Rails 6 doesn’t support scrypt as an option for has_secure_password, only bcrypt. Rolling my own user model shouldn’t be difficult, but this seems like an odd lapse in a 2019 release.

    → 1:37 AM, Sep 6
  • Back on the iPad, using the Brydge Keyboard again, too. While I’m liking it more after my time away, I’m immediately reminded of some things that annoyed me about it. But someone else might love it, and I should probably find it a good home. Hmm.

    → 3:32 PM, Sep 3
  • I’m looking forward to my TouchType iPad keyboard case arriving, but I’m also suspecting that if the MacBook Air gets a revision next year with a new keyboard, I’ll be first in line.

    → 4:53 PM, Sep 2
  • NetNewsWire 5 is almost too minimalistic an RSS reader for me (I love my font controls, thank you), but it’s so fast it’s hard to believe.

    → 9:00 PM, Aug 29
  • Now that I’m back to using my 13″ MBP daily, I’ve got to admit that (looks around) (lowers voice) the keyboard is…okay. I’ll never love it, but it’s okay! I’m obsessive about keeping keyboards clean, though, which likely helps its reliability.

    → 12:44 AM, Aug 29
  • I’m really looking forward to Raise Hell: the Life and Times of Molly Ivins, even though I’m pretty sure it’s going to make me sad. She was such a great writer.

    → 6:05 PM, Aug 28
  • San Francisco’s KFOG is finally going off the air, after having its heart ripped out a few years back. When I moved here circa 2002, KFOG was a rare exception to the rule that commercial radio was a wasteland. Now there’s KOZT in Mendocino, maybe, and…?

    → 1:55 PM, Aug 27
  • There’s a delightfully dingy local craft brewery tap room in the middle of Palo Alto’s tony University Avenue now. It’s quiet, dark, barebones, a place this neighborhood—which, I admit, I still love in spite of my latent disaffection with bougie-ness—sorely needed.

    → 6:18 PM, Aug 25
  • How to tell the café is in Palo Alto: finding the correct wifi network among the 51 that show up in the menu.

    → 5:06 PM, Aug 25
  • Also, a note re: the mocking of “how to clean your Apple Card”: as someone who carried a (nearly) all-white Simple debit card for years, keeping it from immediately looking like crap was almost impossible. This is only an “Apple problem” in that they chose to make it white.

    → 2:39 PM, Aug 23
  • There are many things that I like about Hacker News as a community, but the prevalence of “making points with humor and sarcasm is illogical, bleep bloop” types is not one of them.

    → 2:29 PM, Aug 23
  • A closed Korean restaurant across from my office has become a pizza place, but they haven’t gotten the new sign yet. Next on the checklist:

    → 1:46 PM, Aug 23
  • In SF for Relay FM’s 5th anniversary show, which gives me enough time for a drink at the city’s most fun bar, Pagan Idol. Maybe two drinks.

    → 9:03 PM, Aug 22
  • Okay, despite its quirks and close-but-not-perfect Mac compatibility, after just a week the Vortex Race 3 has become far and away my favorite keyboard with Cherry switches. (And, yes, MX Clears are definitely the right call for me.)

    → 11:36 AM, Aug 21
  • I admit I’m slightly tempted by the Apple Card in order to get the 3% cash back on Apple purchases, and I make enough purchases via Apple Pay for the 2% rate to potentially be meaningful. So, hmm.

    → 4:00 PM, Aug 20
  • Even though I don’t use it anymore, I’m sad that Bitbucket is dropping Mercurial support: originally, BB was to Mercurial what GitHub was to Git. But Git won, less because of technology than mindshare: first Linux cheerleading, then GitHub’s unlimited free public repos.

    → 1:34 PM, Aug 20
  • I’ve long been good enough with Vim to add plugins, but I think I’ve finally gotten good enough with Vim to start removing them.

    → 2:20 PM, Aug 18
  • The Prolific Oven, a small chain of great bakeries in Silicon Valley for nearly 40 years, is closing. I haven’t been to one in a couple years, but it makes me sad. sf.eater.com/2019/8/16…

    → 12:56 PM, Aug 16
  • As I’m experimenting with using my MacBook more again, I’m switching caps lock back to control—I’d made this change years ago, then changed back because the iPad doesn’t allow key remapping. It took me a year to unlearn “caps lock = ctrl”; how long will it take to relearn it?

    → 5:00 PM, Aug 14
  • Hey, CSS gurus: My blog at micro.coyotetracks.org is supposed to load fonts from coyotetracks.org and does on Safari, but not Firefox. I’m sure this is some kind of cross-domain security thing; is this something I can fix by messing with the headers?

    → 7:49 PM, Aug 12
  • The iPad needs more focus on the little things

    I’ve been using an iPad Pro instead of a laptop for going on two years now, and have definitely spent more time on it than I have on my personal Mac during that time. Name a major writing app on the iPad and I’ve almost certainly not just tried it but given it a serious spin. We’re talking an 80,000-word novel in Scrivener; short stories, multi-part novellas and blog posts in Ulysses; a screenplay in Slugline; random bits and bobs in Drafts. I’ve made cover art on the iPad. I’ve created shortcuts for arcane conversion and batch processing. I am not an iOS guru, but I don’t think I’m overselling myself if I say I’m a power user. One could argue that the iPad has become my main computer, too. (Maybe “had”? I’ll come back to that.)

    It’s always been hard to explain why the Mac works “better” in some subjective way than a Windows PC. It’s not one huge thing; it’s the sum of small, seemingly inconsequential things that add up to a nicer experience. The iPad often feels that way compared to the Mac (or PC), because so many big ticket items—document management, windowing, security—have been radically rethought for the better in iOS.

    The problem is the little ticket items, if you will. To get into that, I need to talk about writing on the iPad.

    It’s become received wisdom among a certain set that the iPad is great for long-form writing. Here’s tech pundit turned novelist Matt Gemmell back in 2016 talking about using iOS Scrivener for writing novels (he later switched to Ulysses). MacStories' editor Federico Viticci, who calls his iPad his “main computer," literally wrote a book called Writing on the iPad. Podcaster and writer/blogger Jason Snell has blogged about his setup, which he’s been using in some form or another since 2014.

    The problem—for me, but I would argue I am not a unique, special snowflake among writers—isn’t the writing, it’s the editing.

    Editing is what you do after the first draft. Rewrite paragraphs. Move text around. Run a spell check. Change words across the entire document, or even multiple documents. Look at the first part and the last part of the story (or article or whatever) together to make sure you’re staying consistent and not contradicting yourself.

    And the iPad is just not good at that stuff.

    Let me show you. On the Mac, the arrow keys behave the same way in every editing app, and the modifier keys (nearly) always behave the same way, too. On the iPad, though, it’s not merely that behavior isn’t consistent app to app—it’s that most editors get at least one basic operation just bonkers wrong. Tap the up arrow repeatedly, and at some point the cursor jumps to the start of the line. Option-up jumps to the start of a paragraph and stops rather than continuing to move up. Option-down moves with weird hitches. On the Mac, Shift with any movement operation performs the same operation but selects the text; on the iPad, that’s usually true, but not a given. I’ve seen at least one app that doesn’t let you use up and down arrows when holding down Shift, and several that don’t handle Shift with another modifier key, like Option or Command.

    What in blue blazes is going on? Mac apps are built on the crufty and old AppKit framework, while iOS apps are built on the shiny and new UIKit. And that’s the problem. UIKit’s shiny and new text components suck lemon-flavored poop balls. AppKit may be uglier, but it’s simply more powerful. iPad developers are on their own to implement things Mac developers get for free, and, the results are…not great.

    Okay, the arrow keys are quirky. But come on, you can live with that. But what about running spell check?

    I don’t mean “check as you type.” I want to turn off the red squiggly lines when writing first drafts, and check the document for spelling errors after writing. For each possible misspelling, I can skip that one instance, ignore the word for the rest of that review, or add the word to the dictionary. I can turn on grammar checking, which isn’t great but catches duplicate words, and once in a blue moon catches an actual grammar mistake.

    But on the iPad, it’s “check as you type” or nothing—and literally only check as you type. If you open a document full of Lorem ipsum, it will be blissfully, stupidly squiggle-free. There’s no way to ignore words or add words to the dictionary. (The Mac lets you do that even in check-as-you-type mode by right-clicking a word.) What if I’m writing an article of a few thousand words full of technical terms? How about my 110,000-word science fiction novel Kismet, with invented city names and in-world jargon like “totemic” and “cisform?”

    Some of my complaints have fixes in iOS 13. Touch (but not keyboard) text selection is getting overhauled; apps can run in multiple windows once compiled against the iOS 13 SDK, which should address both “see two places in the same document at once” and “let me have a notes document and the main document open in the same app at once.” But the final editing that I’m going to go through with this blog post—a spell check and a pass through Marked with its keyword highlighting turned on—that needs a Mac. You use Marked by having the same file open in both it and your editor simultaneously; I’m not sure that’s even possible in iOS.

    Look, I love that the iPad is rethinking so many big things about the computing experience. And I get the pushback about how the iPad is not a “laptop replacement” in the sense of letting you do what you did on your laptop the same way you’ve always done it. What I’m talking about here are little ways in which the iPad is not different than the Mac, but objectively worse.

    And here’s the thing: despite the common wisdom that iOS is wired and macOS is tired, I’m using iA Writer right now on the Mac and it’s just as good as it is on the iPad—and I can do all those Mac-only things like use Marked with it. What are the iPad-only things I can do with it that don’t have Mac equivalents? There’s no share sheet, but there’s an export command—and to open it simultaneously in Marked, I just dragged the document icon in the title bar to the Marked icon. The iOS counterpart would be “tap the share icon, tap ‘Share…’, tap ‘Marked’ if it existed.” I don’t have Shortcuts, but I have the Services menu and Automator. And AppleScript. And Keyboard Maestro. The Mac turns out to be pretty good at this application interoperability thing, huh.

    “Yeah, but the iPad is young, and you need to cut it some slack.” For how long? The iPad is nearly a decade old, and iOS is even older. I’m not asking why we can’t still can’t sideload even signed and notarized apps, or install non-toy development environments, or even just make Chrome our default browser. All those things are good questions, questions that, if the iPad is truly the future of computing, Apple needs to deal with. But I’m just asking why I can’t add a word to the system dictionary. I’m asking why, when I connect a Bluetooth keyboard, I can’t expect consistent behavior from the fucking arrow keys.

    It’s nice that Apple focuses on big moments of wonder and delight on iOS—but in truth, the Mac can still be pretty wonderful and delightful, too. I’m happy I let myself be surprised at how nice using an iPad as a main computing device can be. But I suspect some of the more partisan iPad users would be surprised at how nice using a Mac is if they let themselves. I love how those big-picture Computing Experiences are being rethought on the iPad, but it’s past time for iOS to go after the prosaic bits and bobs that the Mac had nailed before the turn of the century.

    Don’t get me wrong: I’m not giving up my iPad. Who knows what iPadOS 14 will bring? But in the meantime, I confess I’m watching what happens with the next MacBook Air revision pretty closely.

    → 11:36 AM, Aug 12
  • Yesterday was the first day “in the field” using my neglected MacBook Pro in probably a year and a half. I hate to say it, iPad friends, but it was kind of refreshing.

    → 2:38 PM, Aug 11
  • I was considering going back to my MacBook for the day’s outing, after more than a year of being exclusively iPad for portable computing, but there is a lot of stuff to update on this Mac if I try that. Yikes.

    → 1:54 PM, Aug 10
  • One of my Tommy Bahama shirts has ripped in the wash after just a few years. I’m ordering replacement shirts from Reyn Spooner, which (a) makes great deisgns, (b) uses a seemingly indestructible polyester-cotton blend, and (c) is actually Hawaiian.

    → 12:53 PM, Aug 10
  • Apparently most of Morgan Hill (California) is without internet right now, which I am learning because I am working remotely from a brewery in downtown.

    → 8:37 PM, Aug 8
  • I preferred the “old” software upgrade model to the subscription model, but when you do the math the cost is often—not always, but often—similar. Having said that, PDF Expert’s new $50/yr subscription price seems on the high side for us non-corporate users.

    → 1:02 PM, Aug 7
  • Despite my impressions with the key tester-slash-fidget toy that I have, I really prefer Cherry MX clear switches to browns. I kinda want to send the Race 3 back to repair its \ key and say “actually, send me a version with clears and charge me the difference.”

    → 9:39 PM, Aug 5
  • After 24 hrs with the Race 3 keyboard:

    • I like these MX Browns, but may still like Clears more
    • Love the size
    • Very few “Mac-compatible” mechanical keyboards truly act like Mac keyboards, and this is not one of them
    • The Matias Mini is ugly, but I think it may come out on top
    → 3:58 AM, Aug 3
  • So further experiments with the Race 3 keyboard: (1) what passes for a manual gives the wrong directions on switching it into Mac mode; (2) Mac mode is mostly pointless; (3) the newer firmware has a slightly better Mac mode, but you need Windows to install it. 🙃

    → 11:33 AM, Aug 2
  • Playing with a new 75% mechanical keyboard, the Vortex Race 3. While there are definitely things about it I like, there’s also a lot of “hey, this is going to take some getting used to.” I’ll see how it shakes out.

    → 1:06 AM, Aug 2
  • So far, my experiences with Fountain-based screenwriting apps on both iOS and macOS can be summed up with: I want to learn enough Swift to write my own competing app. Yikes, folks. Yikes.

    → 9:37 PM, Aug 1
  • I wish I’d known MechanicalKeyboards.com used FedEx SmartPost instead of normal FedEx; I’d have paid extra to avoid it. My order was ~50 miles away on Sunday…and today went the opposite direction to be re-send by US mail. SmartPost is just so very stupid.

    → 8:57 PM, Jul 30
  • The more I hear about macOS Catalina’s new security model, the more I am tempted to check out Linux as a desktop OS.

    → 1:09 PM, Jul 30
  • All of the tech types that I follow on blogs and podcasts have decided the Apple Watch just isn’t all that, while I’m continually poking at mine and going “hey, this thing is actually pretty neat.”

    → 2:28 PM, Jul 29
  • Update: I have ordered the chair. 💸

    → 7:17 PM, Jul 26
  • I’ve wanted a new, high-quality office chair for years, but it is really tough to get myself to pull the trigger on one.

    → 5:38 PM, Jul 26
  • Finding myself wondering what an IndieWeb “Patreon for one” CMS would look like if it were built from scratch (rather than assembled from WordPress plugins).

    → 3:52 PM, Jul 25
  • Multi-file project based editing, plain text file formats, solid syncing between Mac/PC and iOS: pick any two. (Prose editing capability on the iPad as good as BBEdit on the Mac or, for that matter, WordStar on CP/M: pick any zero.)

    → 12:09 AM, Jul 24
  • Finding myself make a bullet list of my ideal “project-based writing app,” i.e., like Scrivener but with some of the features I wish it had. I wish apps like iA Writer & Ulysses would step up their search-and-replace game in particular (grep, multi-file search, etc.).

    → 4:24 PM, Jul 18
  • Ben Brooks' melancholy “The Gray I Know” strikes a chord. I love the SF Bay Area, but if all else was equal (it isn’t), I’d rather be in Sacramento: less techbro-y, very lively, certainly cheaper, even a little funkier.

    → 1:49 PM, Jul 17
  • Going back and looking at my old tech blog a bit. (1) I started it earlier than I remembered. (2) I was convinced I’d missed the boat on being a “pro blogger,” but now I think if I’d been better at self-promotion and a little more driven in seeking revenue…

    → 6:57 PM, Jul 16
  • I’d love to see Apple funding podcasts not by making them exclusive, but by taking advantage of a little-known existing mechanism for this very purpose called “advertising.”

    → 4:51 PM, Jul 16
  • I’m trying IGG’s Banktivity 7 as a replacement for Mint. It looks just as capable and more powerful—but if I want to connect it to all my financial accounts with “Direct Access,” gosh do the fees add up. 💸

    → 10:05 PM, Jul 15
  • To date I haven’t been able to find a single Markdown-based writing app that will export a DOCX or RTF in proper manuscript format, either novel or short story (which are ever-so-slightly different).

    → 11:23 AM, Jul 15
  • My love of @SluglineApp seems increasingly more theory than practice, mostly based on the way it never seems to remember settings. If only the Mac had some way to save them! Maybe we could call those “Preferences.”

    → 1:06 PM, Jul 14
  • Finally deleted my Mint account rather than letting it limp along, mostly unused, connections to financial accounts broken (and in some cases unfixable). It was a great idea way back when, though. Maybe there’s a program that runs locally that does similar automatic tracking?

    → 12:51 PM, Jul 14
  • The (now gone) pizza of doom.

    → 12:25 AM, Jul 14
  • I don’t know how authentic this is as “Detroit style,” but I like the look regardless.

    → 11:41 PM, Jul 13
  • Every so often I have the nagging suspicion that I should have just gotten Apple’s own keyboard for the iPad, as expensive as it is.

    → 11:39 PM, Jul 12
  • My switch away from Simple as my primary bank is now (mostly) complete. Yes, I’m going back to my big corporate bank, but over the last few years Simple developed big corp bureaucracy without the silver lining of big corp features. Not a great combo.

    → 11:33 AM, Jul 12
  • Review: Brydge 12.9″ Keyboard Pro

    promotional photograph of the Brydge Keyboard Pro with an iPad Pro

    I take my 12.9″ iPad Pro to the office every weekday, where I sneak in writing during lunch breaks. On weekends, some weeknights, and even the occasional work-from-home Thursday it travels to coffee shops and microbreweries around San Francisco Bay. For the past couple of years, when I’ve traveled the iPad has been my sole computer. I may use it more than I use my iMac.

    So when Brydge announced they were making their keyboard for the new iPad Pros, I jumped. It’s beloved of (some) heavy iPad users. Mine came at the end of May, and I’ve been using it for over a month now. I absolutely see why people like it.

    To my surprise, though, I’m not a convert.

    Let me be clear: if you want “laptop running iOS,” there’s a lot to recommend it. Unlike most iPad keyboard solutions, you can set it in your lap. You can adjust the “screen” to any viewing angle. It’s terrific. This is stuff I miss when I just pair the iPad with the Magic Keyboard.

    The Brydge keyboard itself is about as thick as the keyboard part of a MacBook Pro. So thin! Well…actually, no. That was the first (literally) big problem. The MBP just has a screen on top of it, but the Brydge has an iPad. The “BrydgeBook” they form together is thicker and weighs more than a 13″ MacBook Pro, let alone a MacBook Air. If you carry this thing around with you, you notice the weight penalty.1

    The iPad clips to the Brydge with little rubber clamps that act as hinges. It’s a clever design, but they grip the iPad so tightly it’s difficult to get the iPad out quickly and even harder to get it back in and lined up just so. Maybe I’d get better at this with practice, but I’ve been practicing for over a month. I also worry about the stress this puts on the iPad’s corners and sides; “opening the lid” means gripping one edge of the iPad and lifting it up, rotating the hinges—which take a lot of force to move, as they need to be tight enough to hold the weight of the iPad up at an angle—by using the iPad as a lever.

    But I still haven’t talked about the keyboard part of the keyboard, have I? I like the real inverted “T” for the arrow keys and the dedicated home button; I don’t like the dedicated Siri key. The keys themselves feel a little mushy yet a little too resistant at the same time. Maybe it’s the stiffness, maybe it’s the gumminess, maybe it’s the way the keyboard itself is recessed more deeply than other laptops, but I miss letters more often on the Brydge than on any keyboard I recall using in years.

    I don’t want to make it sound like it’s a bad keyboard. It’s not. I just don’t like it as much as the Magic Keyboard, or the older Apple bluetooth keyboard, which has some of the same gumminness, at least when compared to the Magic Keyboard, but less resistance. I don’t even like it as much as the polarizing “butterfly” keyboard (talking just about key feel, mind you, not reliability).

    Before getting the Brydge, I thought “If you want a MacBook, just get a MacBook” was a dumb criticism. Now I’m not so sure. A BrydgeBook is the only way to get a laptop that runs iOS (er, iPadOS), and if that alone is enough to get you to buy it, I totally understand! But it’s a bulky, heavy laptop with a so-so keyboard, and opening and closing its “lid” puts stress on your iPad in ways it almost certainly wasn’t designed to handle. If what you truly want is a laptop, and you’re not wedded to iOS, look at the 2019 MacBook Air. If what you truly want is iOS, and you’re not wedded to the specific things you get with a laptop that you don’t with any other iPad keyboard solution, well…think twice about the Brydge.

    My previous—and now again current—travel setup is the iPad in the non-keyboard Smart Folio cover and a Magic Keyboard in Waterfield Design’s slip case, toted around in a Tom Bihn café bag. The BrydgeBook is way faster to pull out and start using, and I can use it in my lap rather than needing table space or a lap desk (which I use in the living room). But my iPad retains its essential iPad-ness. I don’t have to take the keyboard out at all. I can leave the keyboard where it is and pick up the iPad instantly. It feels true to the iPad’s intent. And If I bring my Compass Pro, I can stand the iPad up in portrait mode, which turns out to be pretty damn cool for writing sprints.

    And I have what I consider to be the best travel keyboard ever made.

    I have a Touchtype Pro case on order, which—may or may not be my ideal. I’m not sure yet. It’ll solve some issues with the Brydge for me (giving me my beloved Magic Keyboard) while creating other ones (even more weight). When it arrives, I’ll give it a month, too.

    I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my Brydge. While they do have a return policy, it’s not the most generous one out there, and I’m past my own return window anyway. I may come back to it later and give it a second round. If it continues to not stick, I’ll try to sell it; as I noted, a lot of people love it, and my lack of enthusiasm doesn’t mean it might not be perfect for someone else.


    1. I know some argue that if you want portability you want the 11″ iPad Pro, because the 12.9″ is just so much of a gosh darn huge monster it’s crazy anyone would carry it with them. I just disagree. The 12.9″ iPad Pro is close in size to the old 11″ MacBook Air and noticeably lighter, even when paired with some (non-Brydge) keyboards. And you get a lot of benefit from that extra screen real-estate. ↩︎

    → 10:43 AM, Jul 12
  • Working on a review of the Brydge Keyboard after living with it for about a month. This picture may suggest a subtle spoiler.

    → 6:22 PM, Jul 11
  • This article on the death of New Coke is just amazing writing, and more relevant than you might think.

    → 11:50 PM, Jul 9
  • With the update of the MacBook Air today, we can assume a new keyboard this year isn’t gonna happen. And the Pro line is really doubling down on the Touch Bar, isn’t it?

    → 11:40 AM, Jul 9
  • Giving Firefox a serious try as a main browser, mostly to use the EFF’s Privacy Badger. So far it’s…fine? But its tabs are even weirder non-standard messes than Chrome’s are.

    → 8:23 PM, Jul 8
  • I’ve been waffling on this for a while, but I’ve become a member of Longreads, one of the best sources for longform reporting and interest articles on the web—not only links to other sites, but increasingly their own original features.

    → 2:37 PM, Jul 8
  • Just noticed one of the servers here is wearing a Canon EOS 60D neck strap as a belt. I kind of love that.

    → 9:22 PM, Jul 6
  • Sometimes microbreweries are great places to camp out and write. This particular one, on this particular day, is not, even though the ESB I’m finishing up is on point.

    → 6:24 PM, Jul 6
  • One of my favorite essays in science fiction is John Kessel’s “Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality.” I seem to have just spent an hour converting it to Markdown, because both the HTML-ized versions I’ve seen are kind of awful.

    → 9:25 PM, Jul 5
  • Comfortable enough with my fork of the LJ downloading tool and the LJ XML-to-Day One importer to share: github.com/chipotle/…

    → 12:41 PM, Jul 4
  • Found two Ruby scripts to grab old LIveJournal entries and then import them into Day One. But they could both use some work. (Which I’m giving them, I hope.)

    → 12:41 AM, Jul 3
  • Keeping a journal I can go back and reread is both a blessing and a curse; I was pretty depressed through most of 2017, apparently.

    → 11:14 AM, Jul 2
  • Told that today is “National Mai Tai Day.” I’m dubious, but here’s a mai tai. This is the first one I’ve made at home in at least a year; it’s pretty good, though!

    → 9:25 PM, Jun 30
  • I dearly love Soulver, but I may just buy version 3 while it’s on sale this month…and not use it. Syncing with iOS is a requirement for me, not a nice-to-have.

    → 1:11 AM, Jun 29
  • If I ever launch one of the web services I keep thinking of, it’ll have Google Nothing. No Google Fonts, no Google Analytics, no Google ReCAPTCHA, no “Sign in with Google.” No. Fie. Out. Away with you.

    → 3:44 PM, Jun 28
  • My NAD HP50 headphones seem to be kind of falling apart, so I took the opportunity to get Master & Dynamic MH40s at a really good price. Still trying to decide what I think of them. (They’re prettier than the HP50s, but that’s a low bar.)

    → 1:25 PM, Jun 28
  • So iOS 13 will not have a way to add arbitrary fonts; apps have to declare all their fonts at App Store submission time, because security? I sure hope this doesn’t break AnyFont’s profile-based font installation: it remains the only way to do what it does.

    → 11:36 AM, Jun 28
  • Medium just brought up a JavaScript alert prompt asking me if I really wanted to close its tab when I hit ⌘W. It’s amazing how far out of its way that site goes to make its once-great reading experience miserable now. (Sadly, the prompt had no “kill with fire” button.)

    → 3:55 PM, Jun 27
  • I’m actually cautiously optimistic about scripting languages being removed from macOS’s default install: if they become developer packages, they may start being updated much more regularly, and installation will be mostly painless. We’ll see.

    → 4:01 PM, Jun 26
  • Switching back to the Magic Keyboard after being all in on the Brydge Keyboard for three weeks or so as a test. There are many things I like about the Brydge…but this is immediately just a nicer keyboard to type on. It’s kind of frustrating.

    → 11:03 PM, Jun 25
  • Making my way through the Pragmatic Studio’s course on Rails 6. I’m not sure what I’m actually going to use this for yet, other than staving off the feeling of my development skills stagnating.

    → 9:34 PM, Jun 23
  • I’m becoming more aware of little tiny hiccups in my work flow that iPadOS will solve. I’m not crazy enough to install it before the public beta, and should probably hold out for the actual stable release, but…

    → 6:45 PM, Jun 22
  • You know, I would still pay a probably stupid premium for a tenkeyless Magic Keyboard in gray/black rather than silver/white.

    → 5:59 PM, Jun 22
  • A hyperbolic expression of frustration—

    Adobe: we’re bringing full Photoshop to the iPad!
    Luma: we already have our multitrack 4K video editor for it!
    Literature & Latte: stop asking us to make Scrivener better on the iPad, it’s just so underpowered, you guys

    → 3:12 PM, Jun 22
  • My moment of wry amusement for the day: being reminded that Ars Technica’s article taxonomy includes “Google kills product”. arstechnica.com/series/go…

    → 3:51 PM, Jun 21
  • Google Meet won’t run in Safari on the Mac. But if I launch it from MailPlane, it works fine—even though MailPlane is just wrapping a Safari web view. Why, it’s like Google is arbitrarily blocking the actual Safari browser to force you to use Chrome! Surely not. 🤔

    → 1:37 PM, Jun 20
  • While I’m not sure “The Dark Side of Dark Mode” convinces me dark mode is evil, it’s convinced me to stop my experiment with it for now. (But am I the only one that wishes “Night Shift” let you specify a day and a night temperature by number? I want D65 day, D50 night.)

    → 10:50 PM, Jun 19
  • I may have hit my “subscription fatigue” point: I’m using Unread as an RSS reader on the iPhone, and Fiery Feeds on the iPad ($10/yr). Unread is switching to a $20/yr subscription model, and…yikes. Add what I’m paying for Feedbin syncing, and that’s just past my comfort level.

    → 3:50 PM, Jun 18
  • Props to the Buckhorn Steakhouse in Winters, California, the most reasonably-priced and least pretentious aged prime steakhouse I’ve ever come across.

    → 11:05 PM, Jun 15
  • “In iPadOS Apple has finally dropped all pretense of living in a post-PC world where file servers and thumb drives have been replaced by rainbows and butterflies.” sixcolors.com/post/2019…

    → 1:06 PM, Jun 14
  • Semi-controversial programming take: Ruby is actually a great scripting language.

    → 12:29 AM, Jun 11
  • After a week with the Brydge keyboard for my 12.9" iPad, two contradictory thoughts: (1) I love its feel and “laptopiness”; (2) I miss the flexibility and relative weight of the iPad + Magic Keyboard combo. Stll not sure which one will win out.

    → 3:46 PM, Jun 10
  • Finding myself balking at paying Dropbox’s price hike to $120/yr, made more painful by their change a few months ago to only sync a max of 3 devices on the free plan. That latter change seems actively punitive.

    → 10:22 PM, Jun 9
  • Wrote an OmniOutliner to Fountain/Markdown export script that can either save to the clipboard or to a file. I feel like I’ve leveled up in AppleScript right before it becomes completely irrelevant!

    → 5:06 PM, Jun 8
  • I love the idea of the JavaScript automation system throughout OmniGroup apps, but (at least from this tech writer’s perspective) the documentation is…let’s say “sparse.” Sparse is a good word.

    → 1:01 PM, Jun 7
  • Continuing my semi-secret “breweries with wifi > coffee shops with wifi” crusade. I should really get here to Hapa’s more often. (If you are a WWDC attendee, I’d tell you to join me, but it’s about a mile and a half away from the convention center.)

    → 7:50 PM, Jun 6
  • One thing that was widely predicted and speculated on about macOS “Catalina” was Shortcuts, but there’s no hint that it’s actually coming to the Mac yet, is there?

    → 6:01 PM, Jun 6
  • I’ll be on my way to Haberdasher soon. This is not an official WWDC event at Haberdasher, it’s just me showing up at the bar, but if you show up also, I may see you there!

    → 8:07 PM, Jun 4
  • It seems actively cruel to our Windows-using comrades to publish all these “iTunes is dead!” articles while burying the not-so-minor detail that it is only going away on macOS.

    → 7:50 PM, Jun 4
  • I am a little worried that the Brydge Keyboard might bend the iPad Pro: you have to open the “laptop” it makes by lifting the lid from one long edge, and the hinges on the opposite long edge are really stiff.

    → 5:58 PM, Jun 4
  • For folks at/around WWDC who didn’t get a “Talk Show Live” ticket: I’ll be hanging around Haberdasher by 6pm tonight, wearing a Daring Fireball T-Shirt (and yes, I do look like like my avatar icon).

    → 11:29 AM, Jun 4
  • The iOS 13 font improvements are neat, but I hope there’s a way to install any font, not just ones downloaded through the App Store. Most of the fonts I’ve installed through the hacky means needed on iOS currently are (legally) free.

    → 8:03 PM, Jun 3
  • A decade ago the Mac Pro started at $2499. Today’s redesign starts at $5999. Given its target market—what the SGI Indigo line targeted a quarter century ago—that’s fine, but there’s a hell of a gap there that seems weird to leave entirely unfilled.

    → 7:38 PM, Jun 3
  • My suspicion is that in the long run the biggest announcement of this WWDC will prove to be SwiftUI. Also, interesting that guidelines for Catalyst/Marzipan are literally “Get a Head Start on Your Native Mac App”: this is very much not positioned as “iOS is now macOS woo!”.

    → 6:16 PM, Jun 3
  • Not so hot take: kvetching about how expensive the highest-end Apple products are is silly; a $6000 workstation is not aimed at a big audience. Kvetch about how expensive the lowest-end Apple products are.

    → 3:13 PM, Jun 3
  • I kind of want to write an OmniOutliner plugin that will export to Fountain screenplay outline format, making notes into synopses, but I have to decide if I’m really up for the challenge.

    → 5:31 PM, Jun 2
  • Also: it is ever so ironic that the Brydge keyboard plus the 12.9" iPad Pro makes a thicker and heavier laptop than a 13" Macbook Pro.

    → 1:52 AM, Jun 2
  • I think I like the Brydge keyboard after a few minutes, but the recessed keyboard is going to take a little to get used to…as is the lack of an escape key. Yes, I do use it on iOS, thank you.

    → 1:47 AM, Jun 2
  • Okay, consider it definitely set: the “Not Going to the Talk Show Live” hangout at Haberdasher, Tuesday at 6pm!

    → 9:30 PM, May 31
  • Considering an informal “I didn’t get Talk Show Live tickets, either” meetup at Haberdasher on Tuesday at WWDC.

    → 1:50 PM, May 31
  • I got my seemingly busted Cherry MX “clear” keyboard working again when I discovered one of its DIP switches was between its two positions. Yay! Unfortunately it may encourage me to buy a Vortex Race 3 if I’m not careful.

    → 1:11 AM, May 31
  • And there’s the notice from FedEx which says, in effect, “Did we say delivered today? Ha ha, silly us, we mean Saturday.”

    → 1:13 PM, May 30
  • Waiting on my Brydge Keyboard. FedEx tells me it’s scheduled for delivery today, but also tells me that it arrived in Bloomington, CA—about 400 miles away—an hour ago.

    → 12:27 PM, May 30
  • Sitting at the kitchen counter at The Kitchen. This is dinner theater in the truest sense.

    → 10:56 PM, May 25
  • Dinner at The Kitchen started with gourmet lemon basil Otter Pops.

    → 10:36 PM, May 25
  • Through a bit of perseverance and luck, I’ve gotten a reservation at The Kitchen in Sacramento for a Memorial Day weekend around that area I’m taking with my mom.

    → 9:50 PM, May 22
  • Sort of curious why Ruby on Rails has seemingly lost so much mindshare over the last five-ish years. I genuinely hear more buzz about PHP these days. (Perversely, I’m kind of interested in Ruby again.)

    → 3:41 PM, May 21
  • Had the shocking realization that I’d have preferred to pay for a, say, $39/year subscription to OmniOutliner Pro that unlocked both Mac and iOS versions than to upgrade both for $50 and $25 respectively.

    → 12:51 PM, May 21
  • Random (but not angry) thoughts on 'Game of Thrones'

    (This will have spoilers for previously-aired episodes. Avert your eyes if you care.)

    “Everyone hates this final season!”

    I’ve noticed. Entitled nerd rage has been a thing over the last few years.

    “Oh, come on. Benioff & Weiss [the show’s creators] are terrible hacks!”

    Are they? They not only story-edited your favorite episodes, but they wrote most of the episodes that fans and critics both love. “Battle of the Bastards” (the second to last episode of season six), “Hardhome” (the third to last episode of season five), and “The Rains of Castamere” (the infamous “Red Wedding” episode, second to last of season three)—all written by Those Guys.

    “Okay, but the show ran got terrible when they ran out of George R.R. Martin’s books!”

    Are you sure? The show started blending in original work as early as season five, and had just about fully parted ways by season six. You can make the argument it was better in earlier seasons, but there were terrific episodes in later seasons that didn’t have much in the way of blueprints from the novels.

    “You’re not saying you like where this is all going, are you?”

    I like what I think they’re trying to do, I just don’t think they’re doing it well.

    They’ve said that they knew the “story beats”—the major plot points—of the final season as far back as season three. As shocked as people seemed to be by Daenerys’s tyrant turn, she’s had a cruel streak for as long as she’s been a major character, sometimes pulled back from villainy only by the counsel of others. Cersei says in the first season, “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die,” but most of what we’ve seen since then—culminating with Dany’s tragic arc into supervillainy—suggests that, to borrow a line from another story, the only winning move is not to play. If there’s an overriding theme to this epic, it’s more old-fashioned than it lets on: a lust for power corrupts. (This is arguably why the Night King turned out not to be the Final Boss: he wasn’t playing the game of thrones, after all. Thematically, the final battles must involve those that are.)

    “If you’re not blaming the show ‘not doing it well’ on the writing, what are you blaming it on?”

    Oh, it’s the writing. It’s not the major story beats, it’s the banana crazypants pacing. The show has jettisoned years of magnificent character work to become a dragon-themed roller coaster, all because the creators decided they had to wrap things up in “70–75 hours” total.

    And so, so many of the things fans and critics have been bitching about might have worked with more breathing room. No weird time compression between events! Time to develop Dany’s descent into madness beyond a weird voiceover montage in the “previously on…” segment! No pressure to have characters make stupid decisions just to get them in position for the next plot event! No shoving critical plot and character moments off-camera! Explaining why the hell Jaime spent six seasons on a long redemption arc only to apparently throw it away because “Sorry, I just remembered I’m still awful after all!”

    (Actually, I don’t think that last one is explainable.)

    The most maddening thing is that I’ve never found an explanation for why they made the choice to race toward the ending as fast as possible. Would have making seasons seven and eight both 10 episodes, for 80 hours total, truly have been that onerous?

    “So can they stick the landing in spite of all this? Where does it go from here?”

    I don’t know, and a few seasons ago that would have been exciting. This season it fills me with sigh. I expect them to go for a “you didn’t see that coming!” note, and I expect it to be something that’s defensible based on the arc of the entire series—but no, I don’t think they can stick the landing.

    “Any predictions?”

    Dany on the throne. Arya enters. Jon enters. Dany rises. Greyworm rises. Arya draws a sword. Jon draws a sword. Greyworm readies his spear. Cut to black. Credits.

    → 10:58 PM, May 17
  • Digging back into web frameworks out of idle curiosity. Rails is better than I remember, because Ruby is better than I remember. Meanwhile, PHP has reinvented itself by combining what I don’t like about Java with what I don’t like about Node.

    → 3:43 PM, May 17
  • Moving back to Florida has varied for me between “abstract future” and “likely.” After bad medical news for my mom which has the potential to become a double-whammy, though, it’s feeling less abstract.

    → 7:37 PM, May 16
  • I have to admit, working from a park where there’s rarely much more noise than wind rustling through leaves is nice. (Second only to walking through the park rather than working.)

    → 6:49 PM, May 9
  • Biggest downside to the software keyboard on the iPad: it’s way more likely to make me look drunk even when I haven’t had a drop to drink. (Especially in an SSH window. As much as we make fun of autocorrect, trust me, you miss it when it isn’t enabled.)

    → 9:34 PM, May 7
  • Weird: the bar downstairs from the office is doing a “Tiki Tuesday,” but all the drinks today are featuring the very non-tiki Jägermeister Manifest. Weirder: the one I’m having is pretty good.

    → 8:43 PM, May 7
  • Me: it’d sure be nice if Simple, my online bank, improved their bill-paying service to accept ebills. Simple: Great news! We’re terminating our bill-paying service! Me: You know, I still have a Bank of America account…

    → 3:00 PM, May 7
  • I can’t help but wonder if the Starbucks cup on last night’s GoT wasn’t a deliberate joke that the filmmakers didn’t expect to get dragged for. I mean, it could certainly be an accident, but it’d have to have gone unnoticed by multiple sets of eyes, right?

    → 6:34 PM, May 6
  • The first three episodes of Game of Thrones' new season reminded me why I love the show when it’s firing on all cylinders, a virtual Greatest Hits collection; the more I think on it, though, the more last night’s episode felt like a Greatest Misses collection.

    → 11:24 AM, May 6
  • Hmm. I like Reeder 4, but when it comes down to it, I think I like the “web app” version of Feedbin better on the Mac and iPad and Unread better on the iPhone.

    → 11:36 AM, May 3
  • As I’ve moved to the iPad full-time as my “laptop,” I’m waiting for my Brydge Keyboard at the end of May and the TouchType Pro case (which integrates the Magic Keyboard) in August, so I can have them FIGHT TO THE DEATH. Er, so I can compare their utility to me.

    → 9:22 PM, May 2
  • It’s not that working from coffee shops is bad, it’s just that working from microbreweries is better.

    → 9:09 PM, May 2
  • Realm, a database company I did brief time at, is being acquired by MongoDB for $39M—after raising $40M from VCs, giving away their database and trying to monetize their syncing service. Possible lesson: database syncing is a feature, not a product.

    → 9:42 PM, Apr 29
  • I was pretty sure Alan Parsons had retired from the studio, but he dropped a new album on Friday featuring Jason Mraz, Lou Gramm, and Steve Hackett (of Genesis, not tech podcast, fame). 🎵

    → 5:05 PM, Apr 29
  • After using Day One in fits and starts since I bought it a few years ago, toward the start of this year I decided I’d try to journal weekly, every Sunday—and while I didn’t manage to make the habit stick in January, I’ve managed every Sunday from February 17th on. Hopefully it’ll keep sticking.

    → 8:43 PM, Apr 28
  • This obituary for Gene Wolfe is one of the most brilliant, weirdly sweet articles I’ve read online in years. www.theringer.com/2019/4/25…

    → 4:21 PM, Apr 26
  • I’m going to have to put together my “Local’s Guide to downtown San Jose for WWDC” if I can, but here’s one secret: Haberdasher—which may be one of the best bars in the whole SF Bay Area—is right by the convention center. If you’re not looking for it, you may miss it.

    → 9:23 PM, Apr 25
  • After a long time of letting my Kindle Voyage lie around unloved, I’m rediscovering its joys, including sending long web articles to it via Instapaper.

    → 2:27 PM, Apr 24
  • Crazy idea: what if the next macOS has the Shortcuts app—and that app includes Automator actions?

    → 11:55 AM, Apr 24
  • It’s so much easier to say “anyone who disagrees with me must be ignorant or malevolent” than it is to say “maybe I was wrong, and I’m going to consider what others have told me.”

    → 8:52 PM, Apr 21
  • Having a cilantro-heavy salsa which I like. This doesn’t sound unusual, but I am one of the folks for whom cilantro usually tastes like soap. I don’t know what they did, but 👌

    → 11:11 PM, Apr 20
  • I can’t guarantee my drink is more fun than yours, but it’s fun.

    → 10:07 PM, Apr 20
  • It occurs to me that I might be seriously overthinking my todo list needs, and that Apple Notes might actually cover them. 🤔

    → 1:03 PM, Apr 20
  • I like Discovery, yet I can’t help but hope there’s going to be a new Star Trek series following the pre-Kirk Enterprise, starring Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, and the too-underused Rebecca Romijn. 🖖

    → 1:06 AM, Apr 20
  • I think I should go back to plain paper task tracking again, a la TaskPaper, but I wish there was an iOS client for that which worked like my brain did. Taskmator seems to make it unnecessarily complicated compared to, you know, editing text. Which is…supposed to be the point.

    → 6:05 PM, Apr 19
  • I’m always nervous about using my Kindle Voyage without a case, yet it feels so much better without one.

    → 8:15 PM, Apr 18
  • I should be working on either Office Stuff or Personal Stuff, but I think I am going to have this beer and read Deep Work for a while instead. It’s not as much that my brain needs a break as it needs a different kind of focus.

    → 7:25 PM, Apr 18
  • I’m debating whether to hold out for the Brydge Keyboard, or break down and buy Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio. The former looks awesome and will shave a few ounces from my daily travel bag; the latter shaves off nearly a pound, though.

    → 1:02 PM, Apr 18
  • The system-wide dark mode on Mojave is becoming usable now that more apps (and even web sites!) are starting to support it.

    → 1:49 AM, Apr 18
  • Going back to my Code Keyboard with Cherry MX Green switches for a bit to see if my brain and fingers still work with this. It’s a lot quieter than I remember, at the least.

    → 1:00 AM, Apr 18
  • chalkboard sign reading "Game of Scones: breakfast is coming"
    → 8:12 PM, Apr 14
  • Despite not being fully sold on iA Writer, I’ve bought it on Mac and iOS, because it has a lot of Ulysses' organization strengths while still just being pure Markdown files in regular folders. It also works gracefully with @ttscoff’s Marked 2 in a way Ulysses doesn’t.

    → 5:59 PM, Apr 13
  • Medium thinks it's a brand

    There’s a lot of reasons people are down on Medium, Ev Williams' ongoing whatever-the-hell-it-is. It’s a platform! It’s a publication! It’s a platform for publications! It’s a clean, clutter-free reading experience, except for all the clutter!

    There have been a few great stories written about this; my favorites are reporter Laura Hazard Owen’s “The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium” and acerbic typographer Matthew Butterick’s “The Billionaire’s Typewriter.” (He occasionally updates this, most recently linking to Owen’s article.) Butterick critiques Medium’s design from an ethical standpoint, which turns out to be bang on point with Medium’s ultimate underlying problem:

    Medium thinks it’s a brand.

    What most bothers me when I click on a Medium link these days isn’t the increasingly dispiriting design (nothing says “great reading experience” like fixed-position bars at the top of and bottom of the window imploring you to sign in and/or pay money and/or download the app). No, that annoyance has been eclipsed by watching ever more articles on Medium go behind a paywall. You can only read three “premium” articles for free a month, just like The New Yorker, like The Wall Street Journal, like The Atlantic.

    And indeed, when you go to Medium’s upsell page, they’re pushing articles written by the sorts of authors you’d expect to see in a New Yorker issue: Roxane Gay, Dave Eggers, even Margaret Atwood, and namedropping publications that offer a selection of “curated” articles on Medium.

    So, their value proposition is:

    • Publications you’ve heard of also publish their stuff on our site, like they do on Apple News! Think of us like a Readers' Digest for hipsters. (Some of this content may be original, but a glance at Medium’s page for New York magazine shows that the only difference is that everything they put up on their own site for free is behind a paywall on Medium. Which, to be fair, is fucking brilliant if they can get away with it.)
    • Authors you’ve heard of published what may or may not be original content on Medium at least once! This piece from Margaret Atwood is from 2017, and she wrote a couple other things here in 2015, but it’s Margaret Goddamn Atwood, people!
    • By paying us, you get access to a whole world of other content from people you’ve never heard of, “curated” through the editorial mechanism of those authors clicking a checkbox saying “put this behind a paywall and let the checks roll in, please!”

    Butterick asks what he dubs “the $132 million question”:

    Who’s going to pay $50 every year for this? People dissatisfied with the unlimited free clickbait available elsewhere? Gulls, rubes, and saps? Dogs with credit cards?

    While the aspiration to become the premier literary journal of our time by aggregating blog posts seems relatively new, this belief in its own essential brandness, its brandosity, forms Medium’s original sin. If you have a Medium account, your “front page” when you sign in isn’t a list of new articles from people you follow, like a Tumblr dashboard or, heaven forbid, an RSS reader. Goodness, no! Instead, it’s a Netflix landing page: articles they want to push at you, articles popular across the network, articles “recommended” based on your history.

    The design changes over the years, but the fundamental notion that you go to Medium™ to read Medium™ Stories remains. What makes a story a Medium™ Story? Who the hell knows? Medium™ surely doesn’t. They can’t. They have no control over their own content. Can you imagine Automattic deciding that because dozens of well-known authors run blogs on WordPress.com, they should charge $50 a year for access to blogs hosted on it? Hey, you can get three free reads a month to get a sense of what the WordPress editorial voice is like! This is essentially what Medium is doing, except that you get only one theme and don’t get to give your blog a title. (There was a point you could create a “publication” on Medium, which meant “give your blog a title,” but that’s gone, along with the ability to use custom domains. Remember: Medium thinks it’s a brand.)

    In what’s probably their thirteenth or fourteenth pivot at this point, Medium has brought back the idea of edited “magazines” with staff writers hosted there. They’ve done this before and the results were, what’s a good word, ruinous, but Owens quotes Ev Williams’s statement to Bloomberg in December 2018: “We are going to significantly increase our investment in original editorial in the next year, and we are absolutely not going to pull the football away this time, Charlie Brown.”

    I don’t know. Maybe there’s something I’m missing. If you’re paying for Medium, I’m genuinely curious why, and if you think you’re getting value out of it. Also, I’d like to know if you’re a Golden Retriever with an Amex.

    → 12:40 PM, Apr 13
  • I’m not 100% sure I’ll use the new Touchtype Pro iPad Case, but I’m backing it early just in case (no pun intended). The original one was great.

    → 12:16 PM, Apr 11
  • I really like Ben Thompson’s observation that in addition to “free as in speech” and “free as in beer,” we should consider “free as in puppy”: while you’re getting something for free, the long-term cost is substantial.

    → 3:52 PM, Apr 10
  • All my work on getting Luna Display running is mostly so I can use Dramatica Story Expert—a program I usually use a few weeks a year at most—from my iPad when I’m sitting in the living room.

    → 11:14 AM, Apr 10
  • Sort of solving my problems with the Luna Display and the iMac by moving the Luna to an older Mac mini. (Now I am aware how relatively slow that Mac mini is again, but there’s really only a couple programs I want to run this way, so…?)

    → 1:11 AM, Apr 10
  • A new little coffee stand opened inside the skateboard shop right by the Hammer Theater in San Jose. Given that they opened two weeks before Social Policy closed, maybe we are subject to a Law of Conservation of Coffee.

    → 6:18 PM, Apr 8
  • WWDC semi-favorite coffeehouse Social Policy has closed. I suspected they were in trouble when I noticed them cutting their hours back substantially last fall, but hoped I was wrong.

    → 12:28 PM, Apr 8
  • …also, every scene with Tig Notaro in Star Trek is a multi-universal treasure. 🖖

    → 10:22 PM, Apr 5
  • I continue to like Star Trek: Discovery despite its flaws. The dialogue is uneven; the characters and relationship arcs are solid, but plots too often fall apart when analyzed; the overall acting ensemble, though? They might just be the best ever in sci-fi TV.

    → 10:14 PM, Apr 5
  • I’m…dubious about iA Writer’s custom fonts, so I’ve downloaded them to see if I really like them for writing.

    → 12:27 PM, Apr 5
  • One day I will stop subtly tweaking the styling on my web site. Today is not that day.

    → 2:07 AM, Apr 4
  • The most significant advancement in air travel in the last few decades is the airport wine bar. Okay, maybe not—but they tend to be quiet, relaxing, and offer interesting wine flights. (And beer and soda, usually, of course.)

    → 4:19 PM, Apr 1
  • Dallas is considerably colder today than Santa Clara. I’m not sure whether this will dissuade me from making today an “explore the city” day, but it won’t help.

    → 10:28 AM, Mar 31
  • Ah! Good news, in a weird way: the (third-party) watch band broke in a way I didn’t think was possible and the watch fell off, fortunately in a recoverable place.

    → 12:56 PM, Mar 30
  • Someone stole my Apple Watch off my wrist while I was having breakfast.

    → 12:30 PM, Mar 30
  • I think this will be a delicious mistake.

    → 9:02 PM, Mar 27
  • I’m not sure I’m interested in Apple’s TV+ service in more than an “industry-watcher” kind of way, but a lot of the hot takes seem so by-the-numbers performatively cynical. Yes, it’ll be $999/month, only run on the Apple Watch, Tim Cook punched your kitten, yes yes yes.

    → 10:26 PM, Mar 25
  • Importing some old posts. I’m still proud of “Bubbles, Baseball, and Mr. Marsh,” written after listening to a post-2016 election podcast by @gruber and @hotdogsladies, although it got no attention on Medium.

    → 3:45 PM, Mar 23
  • The coolest thing about the American health care system is being asked for a credit card when you’re lying in the ER. (I am not lying in the ER, but I am by someone who is.)

    → 10:34 PM, Mar 22
  • So, apparently Luna Display not only can’t wake up my iMac, it won’t work if the iMac’s internal monitor is turned off. This makes me Extremely Unhappy, given my use case was “sit in the living room and use the Mac from the iPad.”

    → 12:37 AM, Mar 22
  • The business park I camp out in for remote working occasionally is especially photogenic today.

    → 6:00 PM, Mar 21
  • Confession: I kind of like “smooth jazz,” even though I recognize there are actually only three smooth jazz songs:

    1. The one with the sax
    2. The one with the drum machine
    3. The one with the sax and the drum machine
    → 1:12 PM, Mar 21
  • Me: How can I share images in various places to Slack on iOS? I’ll drag them to Gladys, then drop them on Slack! Slack: [creates “file://” link in message window] Me: Um. Okay, I’ll share the images to Slack from Gladys! Slack: [uploads"file://" link as a text file] Me: 😑

    → 9:31 PM, Mar 20
  • Unfollowed a lot of folks on Twitter using the weirdly delightful Tokimeki Unfollow. Maybe I will actually bother to read my timeline there more now…

    → 10:43 PM, Mar 19
  • “Medium Seeks Partners to Launch New Publications": What could possibly go wrong this time?

    → 8:09 PM, Mar 19
  • My server migration from Arch Linux to Ubuntu is finished. I love Arch in theory, but it went from “fiddly and exasperating” to “flaming poop balls” for me after they dropped official 32-bit support. (My Linode was old enough it was from the days 32-bit was recommended!)

    → 3:41 PM, Mar 17
  • Finally booting oh-my-zsh out of my zsh configuration, as I don’t really use its ten thousand features and plugins—I just need to duplicate a few favorites.

    → 3:03 PM, Mar 16
  • I’m having a Belgian-style strong ale at Eight Bridges Brewing in Livermore, brewed with cocoa nibs and raspberry puree. It’s honeslty more “strong ale” than “chocolate raspberry,” but it’s really interesting.

    → 9:25 PM, Mar 14
  • Blast & Brew, a competitor in the “build your own quick-fired pizza” space, has re-opened with full table service and a checklist for your pizza like The Counter’s for their burgers. Interesting.

    → 3:10 PM, Mar 14
  • Continuing to be annoyed that screenwriting apps I have access to insist on Courier or Courier Prime as their “typewriter” typeface. Yes, industry standard, blah blah—if it’s gonna be a PDF, let me use Triplicate, dammit. Most people won’t even be able to tell, but I will.

    → 10:59 AM, Mar 12
  • The weather forecast for the next week is sunny and increasingly warm, and I am so ready for temperatures in the high 70s.

    → 2:55 PM, Mar 10
  • Amoxicillin for the win. I hope. (Yes, yesterday I crossed the threshold where sinusitis can be reasonably assumed to be bacterial rather than viral. It is just as fun as it sounds!)

    → 9:11 PM, Mar 7
  • My good price on the car has been offset by being talked into an extended warranty because I was caught unprepared in spite of myself. Sigh. Checking if I can quietly cancel it without penalty.

    → 6:38 PM, Mar 2
  • I haven’t been this quickly and thoroughly hammered down by a cold in years. I’m not sure I can focus enough to even watch stupdi things on Netflix, let alone work from home.

    → 1:58 PM, Feb 26
  • After six months working on a Scrivener project regularly on both a Mac and an iPad: Scrivener’s syncing engine is the worst I have ever seen in production. Automatic syncing on Mac but manual on iOS (!), constant imaginary “conflicts,” no UI for manual resolution. Ugh!

    → 12:01 PM, Feb 25
  • Trying a Tom Bihn “minimal” wallet after decades of being a wallet maximalist. This will take some getting used to.

    → 3:49 PM, Feb 23
  • It’s become common wisdom that the iOS app ecosystem is wired and the macOS one is tired, but how many great iOS productivity apps have equally great macOS counterparts? How many started on the Mac, and/or have more features on the Mac? (N.B.: writing this on an iPad.)

    → 8:50 PM, Feb 21
  • Now that I am seriously moving toward replacing my car, I am getting maudlin about it, despite never being all that attached to this one.

    → 12:58 PM, Feb 20
  • The more people insist that real writers use Microsoft Word, the more my resolve to never use Microsoft Word hardens. (I have not owned a copy since Office 2000, and that only because it came with the last PC I bought.)

    → 2:43 PM, Feb 19
  • Long-term project: convincing people that the past tense of “sync” should be “sunc.”

    → 2:26 AM, Feb 17
  • I don’t expect great coffee from Starbucks, but I expect passable wifi. This is the first I’ve been to in a long time that (a) made a “cappuccino” so bad it’s just ten ounces of coarse foam on top of an espresso shot, and (b) has wifi so terrible I had to tether to my phone.

    → 8:14 PM, Feb 16
  • I am having a grilled cheese and crispy spam sandwich and I am not all that sorry about it

    → 10:13 PM, Feb 15
  • Raining off and on all day until I drove out of the SF Bay Area to blue skies. This feels more symbolic than it probably really is.

    → 8:47 PM, Feb 14
  • It’s been about a month and I still don’t recognize the new Slack icon as “Slack” when I go to look for it on my phone or iPad.

    → 12:42 PM, Feb 14
  • I’ve stuck with BBEdit for technical writing and general text wrangling (ahem), but for coding I’ve been pretty capricious. I think I’m (re-)settling on Sublime Text 3, though.

    → 4:43 PM, Feb 13
  • For the ones and ones of you who miss the original Coyote Tracks blog and would like a “just the articles” RSS feed like I used to have: now there is one! micro.coyotetracks.org/categorie…

    → 11:47 AM, Feb 13
  • Switching my “savings account” auto-contribution from a Capital One 360 account to a Betterment Smart Saver account. This feels scarier than it probably is; I’ll try it for a few months and see if I’m comfortable with it.

    → 12:29 PM, Feb 12
  • Oh, hey. With Micro.blog’s new categories support, I think I can restore the RSS feed for “just long posts only” by making a category for them. (@manton, there aren’t automatic feeds created for status posts vs. regular posts, are there?)

    → 5:02 PM, Feb 11
  • I am bad at self promotion, but it occurs to me to mention my weird animal-people magic realism short story “Saguaros” is eligible for an Ursa Major Award nomination.

    → 12:38 PM, Feb 11
  • Second beer of this visit: a double IPA beer called a “Michael Duble.” I presume it is brewed with stubbly but handsome hops with a smooth jazz influence.

    → 9:48 PM, Feb 10
  • Interesting approach.

    Sign reading 'Come in and try what one Yelper described as the WORST cut and color they have EVER experienced!'
    → 8:02 PM, Feb 10
  • Me: I wonder why I don’t get much done on weekends Also me: why don’t I drive along the top of the Santa Cruz Mountains looking for snow, oh, why not go on to Half Moon Bay and down the PCH while I’m in the area

    → 7:28 PM, Feb 10
  • Saving for a special occasion, although the occasion will likely be “it is time to have some fine rum.”

    → 10:25 PM, Feb 9
  • "roses are red / mornings are hard / i suck at poetry / COFFEE!"
    → 6:26 PM, Feb 7
  • Hopefully I’m just being pessimistic, but I suspect Spotify’s acquisition of Gimlet Media will prove to be a bad outcome for all concerned, including “podcasting as a whole.”

    → 3:29 PM, Feb 6
  • So, Dan Olson has an interesting thread on Patreon’s realization that they’re going to have to make a lot more money to make back their VC investment. Dan’s reading of Patreon CEO Jack Comte’s “Patreon needs to build new businesses, services and revenue line to be sustainable” is “we need to tack more junk on”; this may indeed be what happens, but I’m not sure it’s entirely what they mean. I actually wrote about this over a year ago (apologies for the link to the Medium version, but I don’t seem to have it anywhere else currently, which I’ll have to fix when I can):

    To earn that $450M valuation Patreon has, they’re going to have to double revenue every year for the next four or five. Wouldn’t a great way for them to start making serious bank be to start landing creators who can get a few hundred thousand patrons instead of just a few thousand?

    As of this writing (December 2017), just six creators have more than 10,000 patrons. The top of the “long tail” curve Patreon has just isn’t that far above the bottom. This is the part of Patreon’s business that I suspect investors are most keen on changing. It’s great that Patreon can get Amanda Palmer now, but they’re going to need to get Imagine Dragons. I don’t mean “the next” Imagine Dragons, either. I mean an existing artist who can bring a bazillion fans with them.

    And to do that, going after Financially Successful Creators™ as they’ve defined it now isn’t good enough. They can’t just go after people they think Patreon can bring to the next level. They’re going to have to go after people who are already making six- or even seven-figure incomes from their art. They have to be able to say, hey, if you take a chance on us, we can give you the same income with fewer middlemen.

    I wrote that in response to Patreon’s quickly-rolled-back fee structure change, and since they rolled it back virtually the hour that I published the article, I think my conclusion kind of got buried. But you know what? I still think I was right.

    Dan Olson may be right that Patreon is going to feel obligated to junk things up for “little” creators (and patrons) in order to extract more money out of them, but the way companies like Slack and Dropbox have thrived is by focusing on the enterprise space and being kind of…let’s say “lackadaisical” about supporting mere consumers. It’s just that, as I wrote, the big value unicorn in Patreon’s space isn’t General Electric. It’s Beyoncé. I don’t think Patreon is necessarily going to eat itself, in Olson’s words–but creators with just a few dozen, or even “just” a few thousand, patrons may not be ones Patreon is structured to serve much longer.

    → 5:48 PM, Feb 5
  • Snow on the mountains around San Jose! Yes, this is an unusual occurrence—it’s rare to get more than one or two snowfalls a year, and sometimes there’s none at all. Hopefully it’ll stick long enough for me to be able to sneak in a (daylight) visit on Thursday.

    → 2:15 PM, Feb 5
  • A digression about Facebook

    Around this time last year, I was contacted by a recruiter from Facebook wanting me to apply for a technical writing position there. We talked for a little bit, I got the job information; it sounded pretty interesting, and the folks I know here in Silicon Valley who work for FB generally love it. They take care of their employees as much as modern tech companies do, and that’s not meant as a slight; while FB is more prone to the “constant frat party vibe woo” stereotype than possibly any other company as large as it is, they pay incredibly well, and have generous benefits with respect to bonuses, vacation, insurance, and retirement. And, at this point, I’d been out of work for a few months; part of that was by choice, in that I didn’t start looking for new work right after being laid off from Realm in September of 2017, but I’d just had a couple dispiriting rejections after trying to get back into the workforce and was feeling a little desperate.

    But…I didn’t feel good about working for Facebook.

    This is not about politics, per se; it’s about the way Facebook aggregates, synthesizes, and applies data. It is not an exaggeration to say that they’re the biggest intelligence-gathering organization in the world. We willingly tell them who our friends are and what groups we belong to; they can infer information we didn’t explicitly offer, based on who our friends associate with and what groups they belong with. They know what ads you’ve clicked on, even ones that aren’t on Facebook, since they supply advertising networks to other web sites and increasingly run free wifi at coffee shops and other businesses (just log into your Facebook account to connect). They know what you’ve searched for on Facebook, but they kind of know what you’ve searched for anywhere else, because they served you ads based on the search keywords you used and, hey, you’re logged into Facebook, so it’s you, welcome back! They know things you don’t tell your friends, or at least don’t tell all of them. They probably know if you’re gay, even if you’re still in the closet. They know you’re a science fiction fan, or a Golden State Warriors fan. They know you’re a furry. They also know you’re an alcoholic, or that you have a gambling problem, or that you have an STD. You’ve never explicitly told them any of those things, sure, but they’ve designed their platform to be one giant automated private investigation service…all in the service of giving you better, more targeted ads.

    They’d tell you that their mission isn’t just to serve you ads, of course, it’s to “connect the world.” But that makes it a little worse in some ways, doesn’t it? That gives them a philosophical backing for their ends-justify-the-means mentality. Isn’t connection good? Does that end not justify virtually any mean? Can’t any problems just be written off as collateral damage?

    Well, no. No, they can’t. Again, this isn’t about politics, per se, but on a meta level, it kind of is: Facebook wants us engaged, and we get engaged by clickbait. We’re engaged when we’re outraged. We’re engaged when we see which of our so-called friends are so very, very wrong about whatever’s got us fired up. Facebook has “connected” us with people we probably didn’t really need to stay in contact with beyond the occasional Christmas card. We think we’re expanding our social circle tenfold, but too often we’re fraying it, click after click.

    So I called the recruiter back and said that I couldn’t pursue the position.

    Nothing that happened since then has made me feel that was a bad call. Every month seems to bring a new story about Facebook’s essentially unethical behavior. And it is hard to overstate how much reach and power Facebook has in our economy and our society right now; the claims critics made just a year or two ago that seemed bombastic and ridiculous keep being proven right. It’s frankly not a good, healthy place to be, either as an employee or a customer.

    So far I’ve avoided deleting my Facebook account, because there are still people who I will literally only hear from if I remember to check FB (which I increasingly do not, for the record). It is so woven into the fabric of hundreds of millions of lives that the notion that someone you care about is not seeing your Facebook posts seems almost absurd. But I’m not checking very often, and I don’t expect that to change. It’s not impossible that 2019 will see me deleting the account entirely.

    → 12:54 PM, Feb 5
  • I feel like this fortune cookie is reproaching me for something, but I’m not sure what

    Fortune reading 'Attend to Business today. leave that street-side flower alone.'
    → 11:23 PM, Feb 2
  • I’m not sure if I’m really healthier now that I have the Apple Watch—it’s honestly way too early to make that call—but it sure encourages me to pay more attention to activity and exercise.

    → 10:58 PM, Jan 31
  • Around this time last year, a Facebook recruiter approached me for an interesting-sounding technical writing position. I wrestled for a week before emailing back to break it off; I didn’t feel good about the company. Nothing since then has made me regret that call.

    → 1:05 PM, Jan 31
  • I was always pretty sure Crab Rangoon, that staple of pupu platters, was an American invention–and it may be not only American, but from tiki bars: there’s evidence that it first appeared on the menu of Trader Vic’s.

    → 3:25 PM, Jan 30
  • Extremely lukewarm take: there are a lot of watch faces for the Apple Watch that are perfectly fine, but no watch faces that are genuinely great.

    → 4:44 PM, Jan 28
  • Aaaaand I have already ordered a new band and a stand for the watch. This goes well with my resolution of seriously reducing clutter and stuff in my life! Somehow.

    → 3:51 AM, Jan 27
  • It is possible that I have finally broken down and bought an Apple Watch.

    → 6:37 PM, Jan 26
  • Today, Linea on the iPad replaced OmniGraffle on the iPad for me. Yes, I was doing a pretty informal flowchart, but still, it was kind of awesome.

    → 9:05 PM, Jan 24
  • Trying a FitBag pouch for my iPhone XR rather than a case—Apple’s clear case is very good, but I’ve always preferred going caseless. But this is such a big, glass phone, so…

    → 12:40 PM, Jan 24
  • I can no longer recognize the Slack icon.

    → 11:12 PM, Jan 17
  • Updating my presentation on typography for Further Confusion. I should probably make a more generic article version of this sometime.

    → 8:53 PM, Jan 11
  • Finishing more tweaks to Coyote Tracks. Still not going full monochrome, but it’s pared down to “ink color and alternate” in classic print style, and brings back my old tagline (“if you are drinking to forget, please pay in advance”).

    → 12:34 PM, Jan 10
  • Marc Andreessen says for everyone who doesn’t live in a really interesting place like Silicon Valley, environments in VR will inherently be much more interesting than AR. Unicorn-level AR startup idea: an app that digitally erases Marc Andreessen

    → 5:33 PM, Jan 7
  • I’ve made my animal-people magic realism short story “Saguaros,” from the ROAR 9 anthology, available on my (brand new) web site.

    → 10:39 PM, Jan 6
  • Making progress again on my “pure HTML” web site revamp, using BBEdit template/site management, CodeKit (for SCSS), and MultiMarkdown-to-HTML services. It’s weirdly refreshing to work this way.

    → 8:31 PM, Jan 6
  • While I continue to be inconstant with respect to monospaced coding/terminal fonts, my prose writing font may always be Triplicate Poly, which has the virtues of iA Writer’s duo/quadspace fonts but is a beautiful serif. practicaltypography.com/triplicat…

    → 12:12 AM, Jan 4
  • Hm. Replacing all four brake pads, two rotors, a serpentine belt (all original equipment on a car with 140K miles), and an air filter today, with warnings about rear shocks needing to be looked at soon. 💸 Or maybe I should just get a new car. 🚘

    → 3:18 PM, Jan 3
  • Both of my third-party $12 clear iPhone XR cases visibly darkened/discolored in less than two months apiece. Starting to wonder if the reason the official Apple clear case costs $40 is not merely “because Apple.”

    → 9:04 PM, Jan 2
  • The more I use San Francisco Mono as a coding/console typeface, the more I like it.

    → 3:25 PM, Jan 2
  • I’m always reminded of how pretty Florida can really be when I come back to visit. Most people think of beaches or Disney World; I think of increasingly urbane/hipster Tampa Bay neighborhoods, or the low rolling hills and endless lakes around Clermont and Mt. Dora.

    → 11:23 AM, Jan 1
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