Qatar has the very sad distinction to be the first country each year to overshoot their share of Earth resources.

It’s been years and I still don’t understand why macOS updates mess with Apache config and you have to manually put it back the way it was. Never mind that we can talk to our devices and send spacecrafts into space.

Mark Carney’s piece is right on for me but this particular bit has been on my mind:

[T]o put the market into service of humanity and once again have society’s values drive value.

Has society ever had a say in what has value? I’m not a historian but it seems to me that value is historically defined by those in power. Today that includes businesses. I think we are at a unique time where more of us want the people to decide what has value. Far from a done deal though. Those in power won’t give that up easily.

I was just reading Gruber’s Apple report card. His D grade for the Apple TV is about right. It really feels like they don’t have a team assigned to this product. I don’t get it. They introduced this OS years ago with game support and it seemed like it was the beginning of finally putting their weight behind this thing. But no, they just let it languish there and the UX is still frustrating.

Mark Carney, commenting on countries needing to step up:

[A]sk not what the climate is doing to your country, but what your country can do for the climate.

The whole range anxiety thing pertaining to electric cars is weird. How is that different from a long trip with a gas car wondering if you’re going to make it to the next gas station?

I heard from a recruiter today for a job “with 100 fortune of Canada”. Also no punctuation. And yes, I am a language snob. But if your job requires communication skills, why does this happen all the time?

English is my second language too so I feel entitled to complain about it. Words matter.

This enumeration is spot on and I worry about their erosion in the last few years, not just in the US:

What is at stake in America today is […] also about the authority of facts and evidence and history and science, that no one has the right to override those things for personal gain.

From an opinion piece by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian today.

If it wasn’t already obvious, it is now painfully clear that the United States have lost the moral high ground when lecturing other countries about democracy.

I just finished re-reading Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. I had forgotten how good the short story is, and how much of it was used almost verbatim in the movie. Such genius. 👌🏻

Everybody’s doing a conclusion to this year from hell so here’s mine. What happened in 2020? It’s like I didn’t do anything. Didn’t travel, didn’t have drinks with friends, didn’t go to any weddings, didn’t attend any memorable concert, didn’t see any great movie, didn’t go to the gym, didn’t go to any climate march, didn’t, didn’t, didn’t. I have no memories. 2020 is a memory hole. So there.

Maybe once it’s all over and the frustration has subsided, I can look back and actually remember the things I did do.

What a waste of focus and attention this Brexit saga has been. The time and mental energy people have had to put into this would have been much better used advancing climate and social issues. Seriously.

It came up a couple times recently that junior developers can do the easy stuff, “like the UI”. I’ve seen that happen often and I couldn’t disagree more.

UI is the integration of all sub-layers and it’s hard to do it well. It’s also the area that is the most nuanced and that most affects the users’ perception of your app.

Don’t put cheap money on your UI. Do it right.

The people named to work on climate under the new (i.e. sane) U.S. presidency look like a promising team.

When I was young, I used to wonder how factories could keep producing stuff day after day after day and no one seemed to be worried about it. The word “unsustainable” wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time. Now I keep thinking “anthropocene” and that our parent’s generation had no concept of human beings having the capacity to shape a planet.

Now human-made stuff outweighs the Earth’s biomass. Think about that.

Anybody remembers Quicksilver? qsapp.com! That used to be the first thing I would install on a new Mac. Anyway, I was subscribed to the RSS feed at blog.qsapp.com. But a couple weeks ago someone started posting photos there. This somehow points to Tumblr now, whereas qsapp.com is still the old app. What the wizardry?

So now we can buy Apple AirPods for the price we used to pay for an iPhone. I find comfort in knowing I’m not the target audience.

That $3500 CAD MacBook Pro though, before tax? I am the target audience. Geeze.

A bipartisan deal to shut down the Danish oil industry that is binding for future governments? It’s nice to see adults starting to act the way children have been asking them to.

“Revenge bedtime procrastination”? Hell yeah:

[When] people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late-night hours.

Via Kottke.org

Mike Monteiro, in a greatly written piece about privilege and discomfort:

To grow up white and male, within a system that is designed specifically for you to succeed, and yet not succeed… Well, that’s embarrassing, and Trump was giving those white males an out.

So much insight in the whole thing. Highly recommended read.

Every time I click that “I never signed up for this mailing list” option when unsubscribing, I think the correct phrasing should be “Don’t be coy. You signed me up without asking, you fuckers.”

The two RSS reader apps I’ve been using forever have either lagged in updates (ReadKit) or gone subscription (Unread).

Being a developer, I certainly think there are cases where monthly payments make sense (and I pay for some things that way), but a “reader” app that shows content from other sources is not it.

As a replacement solution, last week I purchased Reeder for macOS and iOS. So far I’m very happy with the polish and delightful details. Very well done.

It’s interesting, not necessarily in a good way, that so many people are willing to call out Clump’s lies now that the wind is blowing the other way.

Most news organizations were “reporting” his lies without challenge or even identifying them as such. But now, Fox News? Republicans? Twitter and Facebook? Hello, where were you the last four years.

I just donated money to Wikimedia as I do every year. This one is such a no brainer. I benefit immensely from the ability to look up all manner of things on Wikipedia. We all do.

I know I’ve said it before but let me indulge. Kottke.org is the best blog on Earth and you’re missing out if you’re not following it. I’ve been reading it for about 20 years and am happily renewing my subscription. So many things I’ve come to be aware of in my life happened via Kottke. The Internet can seem like a lot of crap sometimes, but Jason consistently finds the gems that make it interesting, alive and personal.

More Playdate news. It’s such a cool idea. I can’t tell whether I’m more excited about the thing itself or about the fact that the Panic folks are behind it. Love these guys!

About software development, a friend of mine used to say that after a while everything old is new again. We constantly invent new programming languages, frameworks and paradigms, but very little of it allows apps to do things that truly couldn’t be done before.

I’m comparing mobile apps I built 8 years ago with apps I built recently. Different languages, different tools, different APIs, but could the core of today’s apps be built with the tech from 8 years ago? Absolutely.

Software development tends to be regarded as an engineering practice. But something dear to me is that it’s also creative work. Writing words, creating entities, giving them behaviour and meaning, that is very much what an author does when writing fiction. It’s an art and a craft. That’s personally why I like doing it.

This engineering vs art duality is not recognized nearly enough. Computers talk in zeros and ones, but writing code is far from an exact science.

An awful advice I read recently for software developers was to write blog posts and articles, because it positions you as an authority. You write about it, you’re an authority on the matter. See how easy it is?

If you think you’re concerned about the products and devices that access and use your life’s data, you’re probably not concerned enough.