editorial
I'm done with Microsoft Windows
As of May 31st, 2024 when Microsoft announced Windows Recall, I have a single physical machine, and no virtual machines, with any version of Windows installed and that will not be changing as long as Microsoft remains on the path they're forged for themselves. The one machine which has Windows 10 is a Dell Venue 8 Pro which needs a dongle to install another operating system, and I need to find the dongle. Once I find the dongle, Windows is gone, gone, gone. Why would I go through so much trouble getting rid of Windows?
Apple's Notes cannot be exported, and that's wrong...
Ok, this is annoying. Apple Notes is a wonderfully capable notes app that allows you to bulk import all manner of rich text file formats, even entire Evernote exports, and organize them the way you like... with one exception. If you want to stop using Notes, you have to leave everything you created in Notes behind, or export them one by one.
How J.J. Abrams broke Star Trek
Star Trek: The Next Generation 30th Anniversary Print by Dusty Abell, Copyright © 2017, Roddenberry Entertainment Inc. Reprinted with permission. All Rights Reserved. Dusty Abell is a comic artist who has pencilled countless comic books, is an illustrator, and has been involved in the animation industry as a character designer since 2000. He has worked on productions such as Batman: Return of the Caped Crusader, Batman vs. Two-Face, Young Justice, Mike Tyson Mysteries, King of the Hill, The Official Handbook of the Invincible Universe for Robert Kirkman, the creator of The Walking Dead, and many, many others.
The first Star Trek television show, known colloquially as The Original Series, ran from 1966 to 1969. The series, produced by Paramount Television and both commissioned by and broadcast on NBC, had its moments with episodes that broke critical new ground, like the first inter-racial kisses in Season 1’s introduction to Khan Noonien-Singh, “Space Seed,” and the more frequently cited kiss between Kirk and Uhura in Season 3 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.”
Medium's stats are broken, so I left...
This is my stats page. This is not helpful.
Much like today’s other causes of cultural constipation such as race relations, government, cold medications, etc., etc., ad nauseam, the page you see above appears functional, but is not.
Sure, you can click on things and you can see numbers and charts, but none of it is functional to the point where you can derive real, usable data regarding any of the indicated data points.
Take the chart above for example. The Views chart only shows you how many articles were “viewed”, but not which articles. It’s just a number. The Claps indicate how many times the Clap button was clicked, but not by how many users. You need to click the number of claps (as seen in the image below. Yes, it’s that tiny, gray thing at the bottom right corner of the screenshot.) on the article stats page to see that information. Pointing at the clap icon unnecessarily informs you are unable to clap your own article. Just make it all open the list of clappers, Medium, or put the data on the stats page. Astonishingly, readers are allowed to Clap as many times as they like, so those 10 claps for the first Mac OS piece are from two people. TWO!
Apple's Butterfly keyboard tragedy & potential e-waste disaster
Without official unit sales numbers from Apple, we have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of these machines are in the wild.
I am a life-long fan of Apple. Born in ‘68, I grew up in the thick of the consumer electronics and personal computer boom of the late 70's. Keeping to myself at times, loudly evangelistic at others, a shame-free Mac Ex-pat, reluctant Windows user for a decade, and always the staunch critic, my fandom runs deep. From my early experiences with Apple ][e machines, to all of the Macs I’ve had since, and arriving at now with the two Mac Minis on my desk, one an M1 and the other a last-gen Intel model, I have had my most satisfying and productive years on Macs.
Fortunate for me that I missed Apple’s Butterfly Keyboard era, then.