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!

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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.

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Advertising is dead. Please flush on your way out…


Ads are almost literally everywhere.

It is rare, but every once in a while I presume to speak for everyone. It’s not like this is breaking news or a controversial hot-take, either. No need to sit down or get a stiff drink:

Nobody, but NOBODY likes advertisements… except ad people.

When I was working IT at Saatchi & Saatchi LA back in the mid-2000’s, Toyota was paying them tens of millions a year to make a handful of splashy national ads. Sure, they were epic, for ads, but all that money floated a five story building bursting with 500 worker bees that would pump out a half dozen ads a year.

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I don't like my mechanical keyboard


The Keychron K5 SE Low-Profile Mechanical Keyboard is anything but low profile. It’s also a clicky, sloppy, error-prone mess for a writer who taught himself to touch type using his own system.

CLACK CLACK CLACK… TIKTIKTIKTIKTIK… CLACK CLACK… TIKTIKTIK… AUUUUUUGGGHHHH!!!

Tap tap, goes my Keychron K5 SE. It takes nigh on nothing to press a key, an advantage I’m sure is prized by gamers more rabid and entrenched than myself, but when I’m writing I’m forced to BACKSPACE to repair something that was rendered illegible every third or fourth word. So, I’m typing this review on my Dell tablet PC with a typecover-style input device, and my typing accuracy rockets back up to normal levels.

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It’s time to open source MacOS 9: An Open Letter to Tim Cook

The now legendary 
Mac OS 9 desktop, a refinement of what came before and the influence for today’s macOS releases. Even to this day, untold thousands, likely tens of thousands, classic Mac OS machines are being used & loved, traded & developed for. [SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons]

Dear Tim,

How’ve you been? Good, I hope. I’ve been watching Apple’s events and your production quality is just top notch. Serious kudos to your production team. Gotta love those drone shots and slick transitions :) I’ve also been tracking the transition to Apple Silicon and I’ve been impressed. I got myself an M1 Mini that I’ve very pleased with, so much so I bought one for my wife.

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