Asides

You’re not my dad, Apple

Great article today by the Macalope.

Apple’s banning of vaping apps, of course, does not affect the Macalope at all. And he’d never want Apple to risk the security of iOS by allowing any app into the store. But adults should be able to make adult choices. The Macalope would rather be able to make them without having to switch to Android to do it. He’s certainly not going to do that. His lifestyle of donuts and drinking is dangerous enough.

Macworld

Agree. I think Apple is protecting itself but from outside of Cupertino it looks a lot like adulting from someone other than an adult.

News I Would Pay For

This article isn’t about telling you what news channel to watch. I can’t recommend any of them because they all suck. The reasons they suck are very simple.

  1. Opinion – They don’t just tell you want happened but news outlets feel obligated to give you their opinions on the matter. I do not care what they think and neither should you. I just want to know what happened. I don’t care about WHY you thought it happened or WHO is to blame or HOW you feel about it. Don’t care. You are simply not smart enough to tell anyone how to think or what to think.
  2. 5 minutes should be enough to tell you what is going on. The closest form of news to actually get it right is the news at the top of the hour on radio. They simply don’t have time to tell you about anything else but what is happening in the world. It is not opinion free but it is pretty darn close.
  3. Negative versus positive. If you want positive news, good luck. The old adage that says “if it bleeds it leads” is still alive and well today. If done correctly, the news can be delivered in a manner that is neither positive or negative. It just is.

Here is an example of good reporting versus bad reporting.

Good Example

“Delta Flight XXX took off from O’Hare airport and crashed 5 minutes later. Five people were killed.”

Bad Example

“Delta Flight XXX took off from O’Hare airport. It crashed after a mere five minutes in flight and killed five people in the process. Sources close to the airline who are speaking on condition of anonymity are claiming that the maintenance records clearly show a lack of regular upkeep on the jets engines and this may have led to the crash. Mrs. Johnson who was baking a cake heard a noise and looked out of her window. “It was a loud bang kind of like a cannon going off.”

If any company can give me the “good example” above, I would gladly pay for it. I don’t care about opinions, side stories, or personal first hand accounts. People suck at remembering things that happened to them only minutes before. I would also appreciate it if we could keep politics out of stories where they clearly do not belong.

Is that too much to ask?

Vacation = Problem Fix Time

I am off for the next week and have a couple of things that will need “fixing” as my southern friends would say.

My watch is essentially bricked. I tried unpairing it from my iPhone to fix an update issue and now, it absolutely refuses to pair. It goes through the beginning of the process but then stops and unpairs again. This could have to do with a software update. I am on bleeding edge so its possible that my iPhone’s software and my Apple Watch are no longer friends.

The 2nd problem is Minecraft on xBox. If you bring it up and try to play it, the entire xBox shuts down. This is not a new problem but it is a new problem for me. The 1st thing I’ve done is to clear the xBox cache and reboot. If this works, great. If not, then I will try to uninstall and re-install. Of course, I am afraid of losing worlds I’ve spent hours and days building.

I’ll keep everyone posted. Everyone = me. The only person who reads this garbage.

Update: I’ve reset the cache on the xBox and was able to play Minecraft for about an hour before the xBox shut down.

ASMR and What it Means for Writing

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. That is what it stands for. Check out the article over at inkygirl.com.

Writing against a nice background is always soothing for me. I can’t say that I use this technique pertaining to the YouTube channels but my office overlooks a busy intersection in the middle of farm country, USA.

If you write and need some extra help staying focused, this might help.

PHP Storm – A Small Rant

I like PHP Storm. I use it to write PHP pages and for the most part, it works rather well. Except that is, the debugging part. I’ve always had real trouble getting the debug function to work properly. I have to admit that most of the time, the problem is me.

Fast forward to this past week. I have been working on my computer since Monday trying to identify problems with MacOS Catalina, report them, and try to figure out how we are going to fix them.Part of tat process has been fixing MySQL (which broke really bad) and also working on getting PHPStorm to debug..again…sort of. The port for xdebug has always been 9000.

Until, whenever someone at Jetbrains decided to change it to 9071. I cannot tell you how much time I wasted trying to get debug to work only to find out that the port has changed! Why on God’s sweet green Earth would anyone do that? It wasn’t well publicized and I found the answer quite by accident. In a random post, someone mentioned trying port 9071. What the actual fudge?

Debugging in PHPStorm is great when it works and for now, it does. Of course, when I update the OS it will probably break again. I’ve tried MAMP and XXAMP. The idea is wonderful. It is a contained system that should not care about my constant OS upgrades. Well, I couldn’t get it to communicate properly. I’m chalking that one up to Catalina. There are a number of things that just don’t work right now and it is because of a lot of different things. Security has been ramped up but it also prevents developers from doing basic things. For example, good luck getting a new setup of postfix to work on any level.

Ok. I am done ranting now. I’m blaming travel fatigue and a daughter for making me well, travel.

New Kilogram Definition

Good article about changing the definition of what a kilogram really is.

The kilogram has been defined since 1889 by a shiny piece of platinum-iridium held in Paris. All modern mass measurements are traceable back to it – from micrograms of pharmaceutical medicines to kilos of apples and pears and tonnes of steel or cement.

The problem is, the “international prototype kilogram” doesn’t always weigh the same. Even inside its three glass bell jars, it gets dusty and dirty, and is affected by the atmosphere. Sometimes, it really needs a wash.

via Reuters…

Daylight Savings Time Saves 0.03%

There is a pretty good article in the local newspaper today about Daylight Savings Time, who thought of it, why, and how most countries would like to get rid of it.

Ben Franklin sometimes gets credit for coming up with the idea of saving time because of a 1784 essay for The Journal of Paris that suggested the French could save on the cost of candles by getting out of bed earlier to take advantage of sunshine. But the piece was satirical, and he never mentioned turning clocks back or forward.
Germany became the first country to adopt the measure, to save coal during World War I. France and other countries followed suit. The U.S. tried daylight saving time in 1918, but repealed it a year later. However, some states set their own daylight saving time, leading to confusion.
It wasn’t until the establishment of a uniform system under the Uniform Time Act of 1966 that daylight saving time became standard. It gained traction under the belief that electricity use inside homes would drop as people stayed outside to enjoy the later sunset. And, it was believed most people would be awake after the sun had already risen and have less need for lights.
The federal government also believed daylight saving time, which begins in spring and ends in fall, would prevent traffic crashes as morepeople would travel to and from school or work during daylight. Further, it was believed daylight saving time would reduce crime as more people remained outside during daylight when less crime took place.

via LNP (paid subscription)