I am dead now.
Author Archives → thall
“There’s no technical reason an iPad can’t replace your laptop, only political.”
I mean, goddam, that's a perfect way to phrase it.
That tweet by William Herold was in response to this one by Peter Steinberger lamenting about Apple removing iDos from the iOS App Store.
“An operating system is something that shouldn’t be treated as an ‘app’”
Lovely piece about habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation from Riccardo Mori. I'm not sure which part to quote, so just go read the whole thing instead.
“The pain is part of the price.”
Vin Sculley in the Los Angeles Times:
"I would say that I’m healing to reality, and I will try to do the best that I can for as long as I have."
"... I have been so grateful for the life that I’ve had. My relationship was as good as it could possibly be. The pain is part of the price."
"I don’t feel like I really have done anything except I’ve lived a long time."
The Title
This is something I’ve long intuited based on my own web browsing habits but never really put into words. When I stop and think about it, modern web browsers drive me crazy by limiting tabs to a maximum width because that width is almost never enough to show the full page title.
Well, except one web browser: Safari.
If Safari on macOS Monterey is heading in a similar direction where web page titles are going to be even more truncated, that’s going to make me sad. I guess we should do something about it.
Continue readingMeetingBuddy
A few weeks ago I built a niche little app idea dubbed MeetingBuddy. You choose a target app from a pre-defined list (or pick any app on your Mac) and a time interval and MeetingBuddy starts screenshotting that app’s windows.
Each recording session goes into its own folder where all of the screenshots are organized by date. But! while this is all going on, MeetingBuddy is also OCR-ing any text found in the screenshots and storing that alongside each image in a sidecar file.
You end up with a folder of recordings for each session. Images and their corresponding text contents.
Why is this useful? Honestly, I’m not exactly sure that it is just yet. But here’s what I’ve been using it for.
Continue readingFive Links For 2021-07-15
Need some good vibes tonight. For no other reason than that, here are five short videos that bring me joy.
My three favorite Letterman musical performances:
The funniest scene in movie history. (I'd argue the best ever.)
“My best tricks from 2020 (so far)”
iOS Linen Texture
I occasionally go through days or even weeks when I need to intently focus on a hard problem. I don't know what separates those periods from my usual work, but for years I've found that setting my normally bright and photo-centric wallpaper to something neutral, calm, and non-distracting helps get me into the right frame of mind. It doesn't help me focus, but it points me in the right direction to get started towards that state.
Anyway, for years, whenever I need that "boring" wallpaper, I have two standards I reach for:
- Tiger's default aqua wallpaper (scaled to fill)
- iOS 4's linen texture (tiled)
I'm so happy to find another like-minded linen lover who's collected the texture into ready-to-go sizes for all of your devices.
Myst Concept for Apple II Hi-Res mode
This rethinking of how Myst may have looked on Apple II ticks so many boxes from my childhood.
I should start some sort of crowd-funding to sponsor my midlife-crisis
The whole Twitter account from @deater78 is a delight.