fitzroy

My recent/related iOS hack is screenshotting difficult-to-select text in sites and apps. Live Text immediately performs OCR on the screenshot and the text can then be copied/pasted.

To paraphrase Tolstoy: Bad CGI is all alike; every bad practical effect is bad in its own way.

I had a laser iridotomy a few weeks ago for "narrow angles". Other than feeling like you're in a staring contest with Locutus of Borg, it was quick and painless.

Joseph Goebbels and the Amazing Technicolor Dream-Blimp

Both proud and embarrassed to say I've had 150+ open Safari tabs persisting across three Mac laptops and five years of OS updates.

The dead driver, his slumped body having fallen toward an "Accept" button on the car's touch screen just as an offer to drive for Uber appeared, now makes $200,000 / year going non-stop without bathroom or sleep breaks.

I wonder if a motivator would be requiring push-to-talk from those people. Better yet: disallowing any beautification filters.

I'm curious to know how much the reaction to the second or subsequent jabs correlates to antibody/immunity level. I had no reaction to the first jab and a 12-hour flu-like reaction to the second jab the next day (both Moderna).

NOT having a similar reaction to a third booster would be concerning, but I wonder how much the reaction actually correlates with protection for shots beyond the first.

What is the point of setting up a hardware or Google Authenticator-type 2FA solution when most companies will fallback to SMS? Is there a way to prevent the SMS fallback (last I checked it was 'No' for most sites except maybe Google if I remember, and then you still had to go in and manually delete it)?

Does a master list exist of companies that don't use SMS, or allow the user to exclude it? Otherwise it seems like most 2FA is just opening up a much easier attack vector (social engineering a phone number port) vs guessing a long, random, unique password. A password manager with browser plugin (or iCloud Keychain) mostly solves the phishing issue if you stop a second to think on the rare occasions when you need to manually copy/paste because of a weird subdomain or partner domain.

I've been 'about to' set up 2FA for over a decade now, but it always seems like a bad idea.

Edit: Also, who's to say customer service agents won't/don't fallback to sending an SMS reset code even if the account supposedly requires a dongle or app for 2FA.

Apropos of nothing, these photos remind me of trying to join a "club" for the video game Pitfall (on Atari) which required sending proof of a 20,000 score by mailing them a Polaroid of your TV screen.

EDIT: Wow! I guess it's a known thing (glad I didn't imagine it): https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/10/26/a...

A sequel is coming to Apple Arcade:

https://blog.iconfactory.com/2021/04/frenzic-overtime-coming...

If you’re interested in this stuff, the book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell is an entertaining and insightful book (from 1983, so a bit dated in parts but well worth it). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...

Also, perhaps, difficult to come by:

"...Though the company removed cocaine from the carbonated concoction over 100 years ago, coca leaves are actually still used to flavor Coke. The soda brand has an exemption with the government allowing them to import coca leaves into a decocanization plant in New Jersey where cocaine is removed so the leaves can be used in Coca-Cola for their natural flavors."

https://www.foodandwine.com/drinks/55-million-worth-cocaine-...

Wait until Apple realizes that "Final Cut Pro" seems to promote irreversible self harm for profit.

Is there a class of "noble" APIs that are completely non-reactive and just timeout?

This seems to be a hastily-written 'summary', complete with misattributed photos, of a much better long form piece from a couple years ago.

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winner...

Apple Releases Unaugmented Reality Headset

Analysts criticize lack of ports, launch titles, developer support.

I've keep pitching friends on the idea of "Infinite Text" (Infinite Jest, one sentence at a time in text messages).

Also, Tolstoy's 'War 'n Pieces'.

That said, a page/day via email and using public domain works seem like a better compromise.

Almost everything digital in audio seems to have been a decade or two ahead of video (non-linear editing, lossless/uncompressed quality, digital synthesis of elements, distribution, etc), primarily due to the bandwidth and processing power requirements being much greater for video.

So I'm curious how, with regard to deepfake technology, video seems to be well ahead of audio. Is audio deep fake technology simply less interesting to people? Are listeners far more sensitive to voice not being perfect? Is the human input just a lot less helpful in modeling the output with voice vs video (where the initial human input is only slightly more helpful than just synthesizing from text-to-speech)?

2021: Apple TV+ Pro

"No Bake Apple and Sweet Potato Pie" ... "bake in a 375º oven"

Have to say, I'm a bit disappointed with this recipe.

Thanks, just found it here in Chrome: chrome://settings/content/cookies

I've mostly switched back to Safari ...so I look forward to getting this option in a decade or so.

In all seriousness, this would naturally fit into the new Safari "Websites" permissions in Settings. Right now cookies, databases, HSTS policy, and local storage are still in the old "Manage Website Data..." window, which would seem redundant now.

Instead of asking for each site, just allow first-party cookies and delete them by default when the last tab of that domain is closed. The user should be able to favorite cookies to keep indefinitely, with the rest being cleared on a user-defined schedule (onTabClose, 1 hour, 24 hours, 1 week, etc). There was a free Safari extension called Safari Cookies that handled the favoriting but it stopped working several years ago. https://sweetpproductions.com/safaricookies/index.htm

I'm surprised this isn't a standard feature built into browsers. Seems like it would be obvious to have a level of granularity between accept all first-party cookies and accept none.

Edit: to clarify, I don't think setting cookies is the issue (and not worth the UX hassle to ask everytime); the issue is storing the cookies for longer than the interaction persists. To me, it's analogous to someone remembering who you are during a conversation vs adding you to their rolodex and storing that info indefinitely.

For anyone looking for a place to stay, I just wanted to recommend this place we stayed in late August (sorry about the Hotels.com link): https://www.hotels.com/ho679197/105-a-townhouse-hotel-reykja...

It was about half the price of other places at the time. I was fully prepared to be disappointed, but it was excellent — and had a full kitchen, which helped because food in Iceland is insanely expensive ($20 for an 'authentic' Icelandic hot dog at an outdoor stand is real ). Groceries were only(!) about 20% more than New York (still high, but not unreasonable for a remote island).

Also, I think Iceland is missing an oppertunity to export high-quality room-darkening blinds. Vampire-approved.

I got hit with the "not enough space" endless reboot loop during installation. Booting into Recovery Mode and reverting to a previous local Time Machine backup fixed everything in about 5 minutes. However, discovering that 5 minute fix took about 24 hours hours of frustration and command line experimentation. I didn't even know Mojave created local snapshots.

Then I hit the "configuring macOS" forever bug after the second install attempt (just force reboot).

I think both of these installer bugs have been addressed in the recent supplemental update to 10.15.0 for any downloads going forward. Despite all these issues, things have been fine actually running Catalina, but I'd wait a few point releases if I did it again. The whole thing 'feels' very fragile, for lack of a better word — mostly due to the online conversation about it.

I'm definitely leaving my home theater Mac Mini on 10.14 for the foreseeable future after reading about the HDMI issues.

Three factors of security:

Something you have.

Something you are.

Something you nose.

New Dark Forest theory: The universe is teeming with alien civilizations that have survived The Great Filter ...but they all built Dyson spheres around their respective stars to harness the maximum amount of energy for mining cryptocurrency.

Now they pass the time counting their money until their stars burn out.

That's a pretty funny/clever hack (took me a minute to figure out you're Zooming with yourself). You can also try AirServer (similar to Reflector). There's a free trial. https://www.airserver.com

I use it mainly for audio streaming from my phone to my MacMini / Stereo, and sometimes to play Alto's Adventure on a projector.

Or, if your Mac is compatible, just try Sidecar. There's a hack to make it work on older Macs, but I think officially it's tied to the ones that have hardware HEVC/h.265 support. http://osxdaily.com/2019/10/11/sidecar-compatible-mac-ipad-l...

I've bought Scrivener twice now and have never actually used it — but it's so beautifully made. I just want it to still be here when I finally get around to it.

Agreed. I've started taking the M15 SBS in the last month and it would be great except the driver has to honk and weave around vehicles stopped in the bus lane on almost every block.