I’ve owned a MacBook Air for the first time in over a decade since the end of January. I bought an M3 refurbished just before the M4 Airs came out. I needed a laptop for recording my band’s demo. I haven’t had a personal laptop in a while, relying on an iPad on the go and a Mac Mini on my desk (I have a job-issued MacBook Pro, but that lives fully separate from anything personal).

This is my short review.

The M-Series chips really shine, as this MacBook Air is plenty performant for anything I’ve thrown at it, including absolutely fan-less operation of Ableton Live 12, which I’m using routinely with 10-20 tracks, effects/EQs etcs on each of them.

The MacBook Air form factor is remarkable as ever. The 13" is incredibly light and incredibly portable. The keyboard is totally fine, track pad is perfect. I continue to love having Magsafe back. I dislike both Thunderbolt/USB-C ports being on the same side– two is probably enough, but would be better with one on each side of the laptop. Three would be nice, but I haven’t had any occasion where that was necessary.

The most unfortunate thing about the MacBook Air is I’ve spent the last decade using MacBook Pros. And the display on the MacBook Air is noticeably worse. So much so I almost returned the Air– I just have to keep reminding myself what this computer is for. The size, weight, and performance are all perfect for my personal machine, but that screen, especially if it was my only computer or display, is just not what I want.

Still, a refurbished or even slightly on sale MacBook Air feels like a pretty unbeatable value.

Framework laptops are a great idea. I’ve used Linux plenty before and would use it again. Mike Rockwell’s review is a good read, but I was surprised by this:

It doesn’t feel like Apple makes products that are designed for people like me anymore. People who like to tinker and have control over their hardware. People who like to upgrade components in old systems and re-use machines for new projects. People who believe that a computer’s life should span well beyond the manufacturer’s willingness to provide software support.

I’ve owned a Mac of some kind since 2009, and I can’t think of them ever being the right choice for someone who has these needs/requirements. Maybe in an earlier time period, and certainly back when big desktop tower Mac Pros were the norm. But it’s been what, almost 15 years since that was meaningfully the case?

Did Apple change, or did Mike’s requirements change?

This reminds me of all the “software is so much worse” griping and pining for eras like Snow Leopard (once again).

I still find that all the software in my life is more stable and works better while I do more stuff than ever before.

Just goes to show you that we’re not all experiencing the same reality.

About four months ago, I wrote about four issues that are completely unambiguous in today’s politics. The US has totally failed on all four, and have introduced some other areas of failure:

• Respecting the sovereignty of other nations and the sanctity of borders.
• Ensure that people, businesses, and other governments can trust your government to keep its promises and contracts.
• Follow the law, and if the law is ambiguous, challenge the law, and if the courts reject your interpretation, respect that interpretation, and if you so choose, seek to change the law.

There are so many other bullet points I could write. But I’m just sitting here, eating my lunch at my desk, super sad.

I had a sinking feeling when I saw The Product Engineer opened with, “You don’t need Product Managers.”

But then the post ended with bullets about a Product Engineer, and it describes what I’ve been doing for the last decade:

As a starting framework, a Product Engineer:

• Has a deep knowledge of how the product is built. If the product is not yet built, they can scribble how it should work on a whiteboard.
• Able to explain to anyone with the motivation to understand how each product feature works. They are likely more knowledgeable regarding certain feature sets in larger products, but their understanding of the complete product is vast.
• Actively use the product and report bugs when they happen upon them.

…

A Product Engineer:

• Uses the product every day and reports bugs aggressively when they find them.
• Intimately knows how the products work and can explain any feature or inner workings to anyone. When they find a gap in their knowledge, they fill it.
• Have a deep understanding of how users perceive their features and how their changes would affect their perception. They can wear the customer mindset.
• Remember the debates around the most complex decisions and why we chose this path.
• Have living breathing code in the product — right now.
• Can effectively argue with anyone on the team regarding the product. Will defer to their team members when the argument is sound, but they will continue to argue until there is product clarity.
• Communicates well in every direction because they’ve developed professional relationships in all those directions.
• Are aggressively curious and willing to learn anything relevant to the design and development of the product, especially when it’s outside of their area of expertise.

So, if you wondered what I do– that’s it, exactly.

Amazing how all the AI amounts to just doing a search for “gay” and finding Enola Gay or “trans” and finding transgenic, and yet, members of the Fascist Party in Congress still thinks Musk and his crew have big beautiful brains and amazing AI. Don’t worry though, our resident “database kernel developer” has already overheated their computer working with 60,000 rows of super secret data from… usaspending.gov.

This would also be so fucking hilarious and sad if it wasn’t actually leading to the destruction of my country, the rules-based world order, and threatening directly the lives of so many people who were already vulnerable.

I was having some trouble today recording anything using my new Keeley Octa Psi on the fuzz side. It’s just hard to make a Muff cut with anything but lead sounds. But then I realized there was a part of one of our songs that we wanted to add some musical feedback.

I charged that sucker up, activated max feedback, shook the hell out of my hand and guitar to get some vibrato and slide action, and added some haunting reverb in post.

Now I can’t hear the song without it.

I’ll have to learn how to replicate it live without taking away from the other part I should be playing at the same time.

I thought the latest ‘Severance’ was an interesting affair, giving backstory to a character seemingly on the road to redemption. No series has wall to wall action episodes and given it’s going to run for another season or two I can’t see why so many hated it.

I agree with Ben.

(This post is spoiler free)

I think last night’s episode, (Sweet Vitriol, season 2, episode 8) was actually quite good. I think the criticism comes from its placement in the season (it’s a big tonal shift from what’s been happening) and from the fact that we’re watching episodes drop weekly. The weekly release schedule is great for Severance– there is for sure a conversation about this show. So much so, I feel like I have to watch it as soon as possible or I risk being spoiled. But some times quality television, like Sweet Vitriol, is just not well-constructed for appointment, edge-of-your-seat viewing. Sweet Vitriol evokes a very specific mood and feeling, and it’s not necessarily what you expect tuning into this season of Severance each week.

I had never heard of Gandhi’s List of Seven Social Sins until Robert posted them:

1. Politics without principles.
2. Wealth without work.
3. Pleasure without conscience.
4. Knowledge without character.
5. Commerce without morality.
6. Science without humanity.
7. Worship without sacrifice.

Apparently, while popularized by Gandhi, they were actually written by Anglican priest, Frederick Donaldson.

Seems like a pretty great list to me, and rather… relevant in these times.

This is a small update for a Now post.

I updated my About page to reflect some changes in the last year, both in my life and with how this site is organized.

I have been slowly (once a week) returning to volleyball after over 6 months away due to injury. My shoulder is still not 100%, even after PT, but at this point, I think the only thing that will make it better is using it without overdoing it. I definitely need to add back in the cardio I have been missing.

Ancestral Worm has a solid set of material and we’re working on recording demos to get out on Bandcamp and book some shows. I’ve been doing some gear swapping that will have to show up on the Uses page once things settle down.

I’m headed to Disneyland for the first time since I was under a year old for a work event later this month and then down to Florida for a funeral/memorial for Elsa’s grandma at the end of the month. Nothing is fully finalized, but the next trip after that is likely going to be Portland/Seattle again, this time with Elsa in tow.

The winter weather this year has been brutal on my mental health, so the fact that next week we’re going to be consistently in the 60s during the day exciting me far more than it probably should.

Oh, and of course, I am trying mightily to find the right balance of staying informed and doomscrolling, since it seems Trump and the GOP are finding no roadblocks to destroying our federal government and accelerating the downfall of my home country. I, like many others, feel powerless to stop it, in the face of having hollered for years that this is exactly what was going to happen. I’ve become less and less mad these days and increasingly just sad, and I know that if nihilism fully creeps in everything will get worse.

I added photos to my list of posts “This Month” at the bottom of each page. I’ve really enjoyed my updated design and the emphasis on long posts. But pretty quickly I had the thought that photo posts deserve the same kind of emphasis. A nice consequence of using the same partial for my Archive page and the “This Month” section of the homepage is photos now show up in my archive list as well.

I took a screenshot of February, since as soon as I make this post the change will no longer be apparently, at least until I post a photo this month.

The final day of February is actually a great indication of how I want the site to work– it was a day of short posts, some of which make more sense read sequentially as I had those thoughts. The full day fits without scrolling and is clear. At the same time, you can see the “anchor” posts in February– those times I had more to say or posted some photos that may still be interesting a few days or weeks later.

I think this redesign has been a success.

Some additional technical notes about this change

I used an emoji to indicate that there’s a photo, but I may switch to using an SVG or similar in the future. We’ll see how it grows on me. I think the fact that emoji styles change on different platforms makes them a bad choice, and I’m not sure the look goes with the fixed-width font I use everywhere.

Photo posts have text along with them– but often not titles– so I chose to render:

1

📸:  {{ .Summary | truncate 280 }}

The thought is I don’t want long content, so limit them to the canonical “tweet” length. I may adjust that over time.

I also have precedence– if the photo post has a title, it does not have the emoji right now and just the title shows up. I might change that, I’m not sure. It’d be fairly easy to show the title and photo, but I think this is kind of rare and this new design fits better the expectations of photo posts that are syndicated elsewhere– picture plus short comment, not title + photo + comment. Plus, posts that happen to have photos but are titled are more likely to be true “macro” posts anyway.

My category for pictures is photoblogging, and it’s set using a Micro.blog category filter for any post containing jpeg or jpg. So screenshots, like the png in this post, are not included.

A few weeks ago, someone asked what DOGE was doing to the reputation of USDS and 18F among folks who work in tech. I replied, and then posted this:

One small way 18F and USDS are no longer a place of aspiration. It’s no longer an exciting place to improve basic government functioning that’s earned independence through success.

Ethan Marcotte’s now widely read post about resigning from 18F is just heartbreaking. I especially appreciated this succinct description of what government actually does:

In government, that infrastructure is built by laws, policies, and regulations. But regulations alone do not infrastructure make. Regulations require workers to become infrastructure: those workers who labor to understand new policies, how best to enact them, and then work to make them legible and understandable to the American public — and, yes, to enforce them. Without those federal workers, and their labor, these systems fall apart. And the architects of this assault on the federal workforce are keenly aware of that fact.

The administration is not working on efficiency or effectiveness of government. They are working on crushing it.

I booked my annual checkup 6 months in advance. I asked to be on the waitlist, because generally that gets me in a couple of months early.

Yesterday I get offered a slot for tomorrow, 6 weeks early. So I grab it. Today they call and say that’s a mistake, but someone already took my original appointment.

The earliest they can book me now?

June.

I’m not in dire need of care, but I do have some expiring prescriptions that I’d like to talk to a doctor about and blood work that really should be done annually. This sucks.

When we were acquired by PowerSchool a bit over a year ago, I had to put up a wall between all personal and work data to a much greater degree than before. This included them determining my (relatively new) laptop had to be recycled in favor of a PowerSchool issued one. Gone was a beloved 14" MacBook Pro in favor of a very beefy 16". I did not love the 16", but appreciated that they did not cheap out at all on specs. It is a great machine, but it is a work only machine. It does not have my AppleID, and to a large extent, it does not have my data.

At the time, I already had a personal Mac mini at my desk, but I only had an older iPad Pro as my personal “to go” device. That’s how things were until today. It was mostly fine. On weekends, especially, I missed being able to easily use my Mac away from my desk for personal tasks, but it also felt like it made me less likely to stay on the computer all the time. I have traveled a lot less for work in the last year, so that was also less of an issue. My life was just less on the go.

The band forced the issue a bit. The laptop we were using to record sometimes and run our interface has “issues”. So, given that I don’t have my own laptop and I want to be able to record at our space on the Focusrite interface I bought, and I’ve missed having a personal laptop anyway, and there was a good deal on Amazon on a refurbished M3 MacBook Air where I already had a few hundred dollars in credit cart points saved up, I ended up with a new computer.

MacBook Air’s are just remarkably thin and light. Wow. This is a lot of computer in an absurdly tiny package. I can tell the difference in screen quality with the Pros, but I don’t think it’ll bother me that much. Because this thing is so small. Have I told you how small it is? It’s freaking small.

Setting up a new computer without Migration Assistant is still a process, even with scripts I’ve written and not maintained. But I do like a fresh start, and this is not meant to be my main squeeze. Some things that are terribly annoying:

• Fastmail’s profile-based log in system it really wants you to do almost always creates problems when I have a new device. It’s just about the only thing that annoys me about Fastmail.
• Setapp was having issues just today in the period I was installing stuff. All resolved now.
• The Mac App Store just wouldn’t install the 1Password Safari Extension for like two hours. Of course, none of that nonsense is even needed for Firefox. This experience is still subpar and that’s mostly on Apple.
• iCloud stuff, especially Messages, just has a terrible time without being left to do its thing in the background for hours.
• MarsEdit still can’t autodetect my settings for my blog. I have no idea why or what I’m missing.
• I can’t believe I can’t sync various settings via iCloud. Things like “My Caps Lock is an escape key” feels like I should be able to sync between machines without doing a full Migration Assistant situation. Same with “don’t play fucking interface sounds ever”. The all-or-nothing world we live in annoys me a bit– even though MA has been basically flawless for quite some time, I am often not tying to recreate the same machine.
• For the love of God, please end the annoyance that is the long xcode-select --install process. All of that stuff should just be on the machine.
• There’s no solution for this, but having many credit cards in my Apple Wallet continues to be the worst part of any setup process across any Apple device.

I’m sure a thousand things like this will come up over the next month as I make this pristine machine a cozy little shithole that I love.

Version 1 of the new blog design is out. From now on, the front page will have all the posts from the most recent day I made any posts. They will be in chronological order for that day, mixing short and long posts. The front page is essentially focused on today.

I will also show any long posts (i.e. they have a title, so it’s not really length) that were made in the current month at the bottom of the page. Below that, a list of my slash pages, ¹ which will appear on every page.

My archives will continue to show only posts with titles. Therefore, all short/micro/titleless posts essentially “fall away” from the navigation. I am not actually deleting them, but I’m not making it easy to find them either.

This is the best reflection of how I treat blogging– I am writing thoughts throughout the day, and the best way to understand them is often within the context that they are written. Anything without a title is quasi-ephemeral; they’re not long considered koans imparting wisdom meant to stand the test of time. They’re meant to be said and read within the flow of conversation and slowly forgotten like most things that are said in conversation. If I sat down to write something longer that has a title, I probably put at least a little more thought into it and have a bit more of a desire to be able to reference and find it again easily. Those posts are at least somewhat meant to stand the test of time.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few spots in my theme and haven’t thought of some edge cases– let me know if you ever see something funky! But for now, this feels like a natural evolution of what I had before: reverse chronological by day, chronological within day, with an archive focused on long posts. Now there’s just no easy way to page through to the past.

I have figured out the direction of my next redesign of my blog. It came to me immediately reading about a new Micro.blog theme by Matt Langford:

In my opinion, longform content should have higher visibility than microposts. Unfortunately, that content is often lost in the constant stream of thoughts we push out. As a remedy, I’m soon to release a Micro.blog theme that prioritizes longform content without losing your microposts. Hello, Bayou.

I thought I had achieved this– I only include long form posts in my /archive. I organize my posts in a very specific way on the home page: reverse chronological by day, then chronological within a day. This is so that you see the most recent day’s posts first, then are presented them in order. Within a day, the short posts often lead to long post ideas and the long posts often lead to short posts. So reading the day in order feels contextually correct. You can still see all posts right now by going through the pagination on the main page, but that’s way harder and causes old short posts to “disappear” whereas old long posts are easier to find in the Archives.

Except, does this really sufficiently create higher visibility? It does not. The archive is stuffed away and not surfaced and probably not worth visiting for most. Plus, I don’t really want you to go backwards very far on the front page. What I really originally was to paginate on day breaks but thats not really possible with Hugo.

So here’s the new plan. The front page will have just the most recent day’s posts (on the rare day I don’t post, it’ll be yesterday’s posts). Underneath that, I plan to highlight the current month’s macro posts, in a format similar to the month view on the Archive page, along with a link to the archive.

I think I’m also going to move the navigation menu to the bottom of the page, likely below this “month” callout.

I will include the “month” callout on my single pages as well– this way I am pointing toward this month’s writing anywhere you might land on my site.

This has an effect similar to having “featured” or “highlighted” posts, but instead of having a curated list, I’m just emphasizing a recency bias. That’s largely what I want– though not actually ephemeral, my blog is a personal running set of thoughts. The further back you go, the further you get from my current thoughts and current self.

I’m excited about this idea, even if it may take me a few weeks to have the time to implement it. All of this came to me in a flash in seconds after reading Matt’s post. Inspiration can be great.⚡️

Exercising religious freedom should not mean freedom to eliminate secular life, freedom to act in place of our government, and freedom from taxes.

These things are especially terrifying given how easy it is to claim “religion” in the US.

The Evangelical version of religious freedom makes people like me, who identify as Jewish, deeply unsafe.

As ever, oppressors find a way to use the machinery of liberation to oppress us.

Anyway, when the Supreme Court inevitable rules that we can just publicly fund religious schools we’re all fucked. The courts have already decided that anti-discrimination laws do not protect staff or students as soon as we hint religion. We know exactly what those Creationist Museum people are going to teach the next generation. Hell, we already know what many public schools teach about slavery and the Civil War today.

I am terrified.

When Vincent Ritter posted some nasty things a little over six months ago, I was disturbed. His response to directly being called out was, as I said at the time, “breathtaking”. Although much of the original content has been deleted ¹, my replies were not. I feel pretty good about what I said then.

In fact, I went on to write a post about the rehashing of Vincent’s harm and role and my blog post from about a week later that still says most of what I think. It was one of my most read of 2024. ²

My ruminations were about both accountability and forgiveness. Despite that, I did not actually forgive Vincent. Shortly after I wrote that post, after continuing to read his blog for a bit to see where things went, I decided to cancel my Tinylytics subscription and unfollow his posts from the few places I paid attention.

I am not sure that his blog post today, Silence addresses the situation sufficiently enough to earn my forgiveness or support. But it is enough to earn my compassion, which I tried to exercise even back during the original events.

What does appropriate accountability look like? That’s up to each individual to decide. I felt like direct support was too much. I felt a loss of desire to interact. I, personally, did not feel that anyone who kept any kind of relationship with him must become stained with his actions. Adam sure feels that Vincent has crossed over to irredeemable. So much so that his contract employment should be at risk as a result and is seen as an endorsement of those past views. Maybe it should be. In my work place, I wouldn’t have even advocated for firing Vincent– I would have just done it on the spot. I have team members who rightfully would have felt unsafe with Vincent on their team. I don’t fuck with safety.

Vincent is a stranger to most of us, but that doesn’t mean he was a stranger to everyone. I can hold people privately to a different standard than I would or could publicly. I can hold space for people I have a richer relationship with in a different way than a stranger. Meaningful, personal relationships allow us to directly challenge one another. They also allow us to have compassion for one another.

I hope he has people to keep talking to him, to keep holding him accountable, and to keep being able to support him as a human deserving of compassion. These things can be true all at once.

It’s easy to be right in public. It’s easy to be wrong in public with conviction. It’s terribly difficult to be wrong in public and feel it and know it.

My last DEXA scan was almost exactly three years ago. I was near a low weight for my adult life, but I was still pretty concerned. Most especially with my “visceral fat”— this is the dangerous stuff in your liver, pancreas, etc. This is the stuff you really don’t want, especially with a family history of major heart attacks and death in your 60s.

The benchmark is sub 1lbs, and I was around 5 lbs.

Today, after gaining a bunch of weight and losing it again (this time with some help), I did a new scan. Did I lose weight healthier this time? Do the drugs people are chastising do something less healthy than rigorous calorie counting?

My visceral fat came in at 1.46lbs. I’m still not healthy. My body fat remains too high and that visceral fat is not where it should be. But I’ll take every bit of help, along with the hard work at the gym, I can get. At least the long arc is bending toward avoiding an early death the best I can.

I can’t believe how far some of my friends came to watch our first show, which was meant to be a low stakes thing away from home. It was a blast to be on stage again after almost 20 years. I should have asked to have vocals and keys in the monitor up front, but oh well. Also, my old Dunlop pedal tuner is a piece of shit that was tracking terrible so I was not able to correct some tuning issues probably only I noticed.

Very successful first run out.

I realized this morning that our new home EV charger had a little WiFi symbol on it. It doesn’t feel crazy to add that as a new device, even though my car app can tell me about charging state it’s kind of slow.

So I registered and added my charger, and now I’m getting 3x faster charging at home.

Turns out, you need to configure the amperage of the circuit for the charger to take advantage of it. Because I did things properly and spent far too much money to have an electrician install the charger on a dedicated circuit to spec, this made a huge difference.

I was moderately happy with the previous charging speed– I could go from 20% to 90% in about 12 hours. I’m ecstatic with the new rate, which will let me more properly take advantage of cheap electric rate timings to keep costs low.

Overall, I have to charge so infrequently it’s not that big a deal.

The most ridiculous things about banning books in school based on “development appropriateness”:

1. There is no universal “development appropriateness”.
2. When kids find and are interested in something, it is almost definitionally “developmentally appropriate”.

“Developmentally inappropriate” is largely a term used to mean, “A topic that a child brings to an adult that they feel uncomfortable talking about with a child of that age.”

Most exposures to content that somehow becomes traumatic is only much more so when the world signals to a child that they should never talk to an adult about what they saw and how it made them feel because they were wrong to have come across it in the first place.

I was “exposed” to so many ideas my parents probably didn’t want me to talk about as a voracious young reader. It was fine– largely because I only was “exposed” because I was ready. The ability to read complex books, and interest in them, coincides with the ability to handle complex ideas. If I wasn’t mentally or emotionally prepared to take on those ideas, I would never have been able to or desire reading those books. And my “exposure” path to new books was through every channel you’d expect– what other people who liked books I had already read recommended. I was following well-trodden paths through recommendations that make sense for people like me. My age was immaterial– I was moving through a standard progression, just younger than many other people.

Books aren’t banned because of any (unproven) negative impact they’ve ever had on children. Books are banned because of scared adults.

I am rewatching Rogue One. For a moment, I was doubting whether I liked it quite as much as I remembered. I think this is only my third watch— once in theaters, once at home when it was first available.

There’s a moment an hour and twenty minutes in when Bail Organa tells Mon Mothma that he will send for his friend the jedi, turns off, and in the background says, “Captain Antilles, I have a mission for you.”

And for whatever reason in this moment, I felt that feeling in my throat. I felt a small set of tears begin to form. Because at this moment, the die is cast. Jyn and Cassian are on their way to Scarif, and this one moment begins what I know is the march toward tragedy, and hope. And after all of this time, it still wallops me.

So yeah, I think Rogue One is a pretty good movie.

For a UI enthusiast and long-time Mac user such as myself, watching Mac OS gradually become a shell of its former self — more locked down, more simplified and iOS-ified — is a painful spectacle. Have I had any problem with my M2 Pro Mac mini running Ventura since I purchased it in June 2023? No. Not an issue, and not a crippling bug either. That’s great, don’t get me wrong. But also: am I happy every time I interact with this Mac OS? No. Not as happy as when I switch to another of my Macs running older Mac OS versions like High Sierra, Mojave, El Capitan, Snow Leopard, Tiger. I use this Mac mainly for work. But it feels just like when I used a Windows PC for work. I tolerate it, I can work with it; but the fun is elsewhere.

There’s an entire world of macOS users having an experience I cannot relate to one iota. Riccardo Mori (link to the post with the above quote), who is an excellent writer, is increasingly one of those people. His downward spiral on Apple and tech in general over the last few years has been kind of weird for me to watch. I know his anguish has discouraged his blogging, especially because he has gotten a lot of push back from folks (and I think he thinks they’ve got the wool over their eyes).

I think a lot of this has to do with aging. As we get older, some ideas become things we cannot let go of, whereas other ideas become less and less important. That’s not to say this is good or bad– I’m not saying someone like Riccardo isn’t keeping up with the times or any such nonsense. I’m saying that each of us, uniquely, has a set of ideas, principles, routines, and desires that become hardened while others wither away. Depending on the mix of things you care about, you can end up deeply satisfied or unsatisfied as the world continues on its own path.

I’m glad that so far, the things that have hardened for me have not run counter to the broader directions of tech– I’ve never felt more capable while spending less and needing less. I’d be pretty bummed out if it felt like the things I need to be able to do (and have fun doing) got worse.

It’s good to read things you can’t relate to directly. It’s good to read about critiques that ring completely false and counter to your experience. I get to try on ideas and consider their value and impact and decide for myself. I am shaped by the opinions I allow in, so I don’t mind reading the endless onslaught of things that sound ridiculous to me– like how Riccardo hates the notch on iPhones and MacBook Pros and still thinks every phone is too big and super hard to use. I can reconsider my experience. Is there something that I’ve been brushing off that I shouldn’t? Are there ways of doing things I have failed to consider that would make me happier or more productive?

Should I offer any of my energy to this?

As I get older, it’s that question that comes up most often– how much of my energy am I willing to expend on this area of my life? I am, at my heart, a satisficer, not a maximizer. I do my research, I think about what my goals are, I make my decisions, and provided they work well, I move on. I want the right home theater equipment, but once installed and working great, I’m content to leave it there for a long time (I don’t think I’ve made any upgrades since getting a 4K capable receiver 6 or 7 years ago, and my speakers haven’t changed in a decade). Once things are great, I let go, no longer offering them any more of my energy.

Great is great, and best is a waste of time.

And so often, I read long critiques about details and moving form great to best and think, “Not one of these things will materially impact me.”

I use Transmit from Panic as my main app for interacting with Amazon S3 buckets and SFTP servers. I use the command line for both of those services plenty as well, but sometimes it’s nice to just drag and drop and look at things visually.

Using S3 and SFTP is not a thing that everyone needs to do.

Transmit has another trick up its sleeve that I use all the time– Dropbox and Google Drive support.

The Dropbox app is terrible, and frankly, so are most cloud storage applications. What used to be “just” a folder on my Mac that I could trust to get synchronized to the cloud and all of my other devices became a resource hog and a UX nightmare. Frankly, I just don’t use “cloud storage as my file system” the way I think these things are intended. Instead, Dropbox and Google Drive are largely places where other people share files with me and vice versa. As it turns out, 99/100 times when I’m working in this setup, I don’t need constant two-way syncing. Instead, I just want to download something someone shared with me or upload something to share with someone else. So I added my Dropbox and Google Drive accounts to Transmit, dumped their apps, and happily upload and download files.

For example, my band records all of its rehearsals. I recently bought us a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 3rd Gen – they’re being blown out now that the 4th gen has been released– and one of the other band members hooks that up to a laptop he brings. We record to Ableton directly, and after practice he cuts up the tracks and uploads them to folder in Google Drive shared with all of us.

Anyone who has used Google Drive knows what a mess it is to find anything and how bad the interface is for large files that it doesn’t know how to preview– like the wav files we record. It’s exceptionally easy to just open up the folder in Transmit, drag and drop, and have all the files locally.

At least it used to be exceptionally easy to do this. But Google have decided to put insane requirements on any developer who wants to support using its APIs, especially around Google Drive. This is messing with both Transmit and iAWriter.

Sigh. Google Drive continues to be one of the worst experiences on the web, and I guess that’s simply never going to change. Unfortunately, it seems my escape hatch has been closed.

I don’t understand why the CBO estimates changes to social security with two complicated paths— the first, raising the 250K cap to about 305 and then taxing only 90% of earnings, and the second, continuing to exempt income between 176K and 250K but then taxing incoming over 250K while keeping a benefit cab.

However, both of these methods dramatically reduce the deficit and increase the solvency of Social Security well into the future. And both methods only impact exceptionally high earners.

The most interesting reform would be something like no cap on the tax, and increase the benefit up to say, $1M in earnings. Maybe even include capital gains as subject to the employee side of Social Security taxes.

With these changes, we’d kick any problems with Social Security down the road at least another generation, maybe further.