I’ve been favoring Mastodon over Twitter awhile now and have been following the moderation drama. A solution occurred to me.
Continue readingOn Russians & Their Apps
The FaceApp controversy took on a feverish pitch over its Russian roots. I have Opinions.
Continue readingOops
I was Wrong on The Internet when I raised alarm over FaceApp. It blew up. People got mad. Here’re the highlights.
Continue readingHey Siri
There’s been a lot of angry chatter about our digital assistants responding to commercials lately. A commercial saying, “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google” or “Alexa” invokes our now-omni-present “friends”. Many of these scenarios can be avoided due to foreknowledge that the “wake word” will be spoken but the AI doesn’t know this. So what can we do? One obvious solution has existed for decades and comes from a non-obivious place: amateur radio. I propose a human-imperceptible “suppression tone”.
Continue readingEnter Hackintosh
Given Apple’s obvious lack of Mac updates, it’s no surprise a lot of professionals (developers in particular) are looking into building their own Hackintosh. I’m one of them.
Continue readingA Swiftlier Undo
After struggling to get NSUndoManager to work correctly in a Swift-only app under OS X 10.11 El Capitan, I finally figured it out (and it works the same for iOS 9). The meat is in answer I posted to a StackOverflow question. Reposted below for completeness.
Ads
I’ve been watching the recent discussion of (and revelations about) the state of the online ad industry lately. It’s clearly out of control. We know ad revenue is the only source of income for many of the sites that provide the content we love (or at least prefer to waste our time with). Without income, only children or those who have childlike minds would expect these providers to work as indentured public servants just so we can enjoy yet another wildly inaccurate (and poorly edited) listicle. Ads are obnoxious but paywalling everything would certainly stifle the free flow of information that makes the Web the wonderful boon to global civilization it is. So what’s the solution? I have a “modest proposal” (that doesn’t involve eating children).
Continue readingIs It A Disk Image?
A comment on an old StackOverflow answer of mine took me to task for a “partial answer” so I decided to improve it. Both posters wanted to know if a mounted device is a disk image. I wrote a simple routine using the DiskArbitration framework to test this given a file URL.
Continue readingAn NSURL Category For Adding to Favorites Lists
I encountered a question on StackOverflow today about how to add items to the favorites list in the Finder sidebar (which also appears in the standard Open and Save dialogs’ side bars). Though it’s already been answered before (I marked it as a duplicate, pointing to an answer from 2011), it appears the information is a bit outdated and contained no example code. I wrote, tested, and added the code to an updated answer. Not satisfied to stop there, I felt it would be easier to use if I created a simple category on NSURL so you could tell a valid file URL directly to add itself to either the favorite items or favorite volumes list with one call. It’s compatible back to 10.5.
Gestimer
It’s rare these days that I encounter an app with a user interface that surprises and delights me. I encountered one such app this morning called Gestimer, written by Martin Nguyen ( @imaddin ).
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Josh lives in Danville, Virginia, USA with his husband and too many cats.