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This is scrawlspace. I scrawled elsewhere and then moved it into this space. Do not expect coherence or permanence here, either.
If youād like to see newer entries, have a look at 2023ās page:
iCloud has a new option called āAdvanced Data Protection for iCloudā. In short, it means that Apple doesnāt have encryption keys to decrypt most of your stuff that you put in iCloud.
Advanced Data Protection for iCloud
In order to turn this on, though, you canāt have any devices on your iCloud account running anything but the latest (as I write this) versions of their respective operating systems (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and maybe tvOS).
This means that I need to boot my old laptop that can only run Monterey off my iCloud account.
But what to do with it? I could:
ā¦and I chose the second option. The old machine could fail to get critical security updates at any time, and Apple doesnāt announce end-of-life schedules like Microsoft does.
There are instructions on how to install Debian on a laptop like this:
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/MacBookPro/Early-2015-13-inch
My screen is bigger, but I figured that wouldnāt matter. I was right.
Iām running GNOME, not KDE, so I didnāt have to do anything to get the scaling to 200%.
I havenāt tried this āsleepā thing. The power-off menu of GNOME has a āsuspendā option, but I havenāt needed to turn down the laptop for only a little while.
ā¦OK, I tried the sleep thing a while later. It kills the WiFi. Iām just not going to let this thing go to sleep, and maybe that one WiFi restarter will also help if I actually let it go to sleep.
My battery maxes out at 77%, but thatās to be expected given the laptopās age. Whatās odd is that the battery display drops straight from 100% to 77% when I unplug it.
I installed a bunch of fonts with apt. Surprisingly, Cascadia Mono/Code was one of them. This is Microsoftās new monospace font. Itās a bit nicer than the default monospace font.
I chose a Compose key. Itās Scroll Lock. In order to get a ā, I need to press Scroll Lock, then >, then '. This is much less pleasant than the option-shift-] that Iām used to. No, I donāt have a Scroll Lock key on the built-in keyboard. Iām using an external at the moment.
I miss Universal Clipboard from the Apple ecosystem. [Narrator: Little did he know that upgrading his main Mac to Ventura would break Universal Clipboard.]
All in all, not a bad OS for a laptop that doesnāt leave the house. Most of this post was written in micro, a TUI editor (like vim and emacs) that makes good use of the Alt key.
Iām writing this at the top of a mountain. Itās not a tall one, but it has āmountainā in its name, so close enough. I donāt have my deployment setup ready to go on my phone, so youāre getting this a bit later than normal compared to when itās composed.
If youāve been reading along, you know that I have an Apple Watch. Itās kind of neat to be able to see your hikes and splits during a hike, but on the other hand you need to have the presence of mind to double-tap it to mark a split. Iāve failed to do that once.
You also need to remember that pressing both buttons will pause/unpause it, and that pause/unpause is not a substitute for marking a split.
So now my workout thinks I teleported from ā to ā the way up the mountain. At least I still got the calorie-burn points (red ring).
ā
Addendum, long after arriving home: I managed to foul up my recordkeeping even more after I wrote the above. In addition to the big middle gap, there are even more gaps. Normally, for a hike like this, there should be one big pause in the middle ā where Iām at the summit and recovering. Not only do I have the mid-ascent pause mentioned earlier, but also a during-descent pause.
Interesting what you can get from a graph of what your heart rate was when.
Going to the map, I expected to see my path. Sure, I messed up the ascent, but I figured that I would have records from my watch while I was walking downhill.
Nope. I have a giant gap in the middle of my hike. The Fitness app on the phone doesnāt really clearly distinguish between uphill and downhill when youāre retracing your steps, so it looks like I teleported past a no-manās land in the middle of the hike, both going and coming.
Like many people who enjoyed The X-Files, I also liked Fringe. It managed to outdo itself in the weirdness factor in the latter few seasons and tried some ambitious things that didnāt seem to quite pan out, but I liked it. It starred Anna Torv, Joshua Jackson, and John Noble as they dealt with weird things going on.
A little while later, I managed to catch up on Stargate: SG-1, a series that I saw on TV when it was new, but never was able to watch consistently. On one of the episodes where SG-1 gated to a world populated by the descendants of northwestern European people, the village elder was none other than John Noble, the guy I knew as Dr. Walter Bishop from Fringe.
ā
I subscribe to Dan Luuās blog. He has great content, but some of his stuff is super duper long and I need to be in the right frame of mind to be able to digest it.
At any rate, I finally got around to reading his most recent post:
Chat log exhibits from Twitter v. Musk case
I was reminded of this sort of reversed recognition when I saw the name āSam Bankman-Friedā in the chat logs above as a potential Twitter investor.
Background:
I got a new 11ā³ gizmo to replace the 10.5ā³ gizmo. Because the computing world is more than a bit topsy-turvy at the moment, itās the fastest computing device in my house.
Today, Homebrew had a new formula. It was for this:
https://github.com/crate-ci/typos
I installed it and ran it on my capsule. Apparently I misspelled āmagnificentā last year.
I got bitten by someone elseās typo in a repository I work in kind of recently. While it does have false positives in weird places like snippets of SHA-1 hashes, the false-positive list is pretty small. Iām a fan.
If youāre like me, you have lots of things around that display the time. Computers, phones, laptops, tablets, maybe even a watch.
However, if youāre very much like me, you have a clock around that you donāt look at much, and is basically never your clock of first, second, or even third resort.
A clock, like, say, this:
It shows the date and time in the lower left.
Even if you only occasionally need to care what time it is in GMT to understand when something happened in a recent log file, it canāt be the worst use for a timepiece you almost never look at, especially if youāre far enough from England that the time almost always looks obviously wrong.
According to my Soulver-assisted calculations, Timeās 2006 Person of the Year issue was released 15 years, 9 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days ago.
Anyone younger than that probably hasnāt been Person of the Year.
Soulver, the notepad calculator
Background:
evenfire, āClickbait on Geminiā
When I write a post here on Scrawlspace, I have to generate three different descriptors for it:
Because clickbait titles ā which Iām defining here as ātitles that withhold important information in order to get you to click through to see the entire articleā ā are so common on the Internet, I usually try and get myself to stop and consider if I could rewrite the feedsā content text to put the most important part of the post in it, saving people clicks. More often than once, Iāve rewritten a title or two to make it more useful and less like Buzzfeed house style.
On the other hand, I tend to craft titles that make me grin, and care much less about whether they make sense or if theyāre just a good vehicle for a joke or pun or a snowclone. Besides, if youāre reading the title, youāre already here.
I like TypeScript even though I donāt use it much. Or barely ever.
Occasionally I notice that itās easy to forget that conveying types to the TypeScript compiler is rather difficult if the types are complex.
A few days ago, I noticed a way to remind myself of how difficult it can be to type things. I was poking around the DefinitelyTyped repository:
Some of these typed libraries are trivial to type:
/** * Compute the absolute path of an input. * @param input The input path. */ declare function abs(input?: string): string;
The above is from
Others, however, when I look at them, I think āthereās no way Iād be able to type thisā:
declare module ActionCable {
// ā¦
interface Subscriptions {
create<T extends CreateMixin>(channel: string|ChannelNameWithParams, obj?: T & ThisType<Channel>): Channel & T;
}
// ā¦
}
The above is from
About every month, the TypeScript team comes out with a new release of the language that helps people better type their applications. The snag is that I barely understand the problems that theyāre trying to solve, and I worry that if I try using the language again, Iām going to run into a wall at top speed trying to figure out how to type something that wouldnāt be a huge issue in JavaScript.
Thereās a newish Kakoune-inspired editor named Helix:
Kakoune, in short, is a Vim-style modal editor, except that itās selection-first instead of action-first. So, instead of typing ādwā to delete a word, you type āwdā to select a word and then delete it.
One snag I ran into: it doesnāt support soft-wrapping yet. Soft-wrapping is a hard feature to implement.
https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/136
I donāt think Iāll be using Helix to update my capsule again anytime soon.
Background:
Bjƶrn āew0kā WƤrmedal, āSneakernet in a Free, Developed Societyā
Specifically:
But is there an actually useful purpose of sneakernets in democratic countries in the developed world?
Suppose that you aren't persecuted or part of a criminal network. Which actual use do you have for a sneakernet then? It's super simple to set up a server with sftp or file upload and download through https. That's also a lot faster and less costly than posting microSD cards to each other.
To use a sneakernet in that case sounds like using a cumbersome solution to a non-existent problem. Despite that the idea of it persists and has a certain charm. Just look at NNCP; It just got an update to better support a network of data mules. Is anyone in a real need for this actually using it?
If it werenāt a real need, cloud providers wouldnāt offer it.
Azure Data Box Disk: Frequently Asked Questions
The Azure Data Box Disks allow a quick, inexpensive, and secure transfer of terabytes of data into and out of Azure. Microsoft ships you 1 to 5 disks, with a maximum storage capacity of 35 TB. You can easily configure, connect, and unlock these disks via the Data Box service in Azure portal.
35 TB in 8 hours (about how long it takes to drive between Los Angeles and San Francisco) is 1,215 megabytes per second. My Internet connection tops out at around 12 megabytes/sec, and I consider myself pretty lucky in the home-Internet department.
Backblaze Fireball is an import service for securely migrating large data sets from your on-premises environments into B2 Cloud Storage. We will ship you a Backblaze Fireball, a 96 TB storage array with 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. Load it up, send it back to us, and weāll quickly and securely upload your data into your B2 Cloud Storage account.
96 TB can make the LA-to-SF trip at a rate of 3,333 MB/sec.
AWS Snow Family service models
AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data migration device used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. Migrate up to 100PB in a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck.
Assuming the semi doesnāt drive any slower than a car does, an entire Snowmobile transfers data from LA to SF at 3,472,222 MB/s.
I saw a bumper sticker today. It had a cute hand-drawn picture of a globe on it aside some text. The text read:
Only Earth has bagels
My first thought: āWe need to get bagels on Mars.ā
This capsule is hosted by the (unsinkable) Molly Brown. For reasons Iāve never dug into, itās available at both /~adiabatic/ and /users/adiabatic/.
Once I noticed that it was available at two different locations, it started to bug me a bit.
Finally, when I decided to fold one into the other, I had a bit of trouble figuring out which I should fold into the other. The /~username/ convention seems much more, well, conventional, while /users/adiabatic/ is the one thatās linked to from the user directory.
Eventually I decided on making /users/adiabatic/ the official one.
Because cool URIs donāt change, I tested redirects. This is what the permanent-redirect section of my .molly looks like:
# https://pkg.go.dev/regexp
[PermRedirects]
"/~adiabatic/(.*)" = "/users/adiabatic/${1}"
"(/users/adiabatic)/unfiled/lets-play/metroid-dread/" = "${1}/words/games/metroid-dread/"
"(/users/adiabatic)/unfiled/parthenon/" = "${1}/words/parthenon/"
All the URLs in my feeds got changed, too. The IDs, of course, didnāt, because theyāre IDs and supposed to never change no matter what. If your feed reader is cool, then you wonāt get an avalanche of every single noteworthy user-facing change on this site. If it isnātā¦well, hmm.
References:
https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/molly-brown
w3.org, āCool URIs donāt changeā
Itās beginning to look a lot like Go code
nil checks everywhereā¦
I generally use Alton Brownās ghee recipe. My saucier and eight-quart Pyrex container can fit seven 280something-gram blocks of butter in them, and I could probably fit an eighth without much, if any, trouble.
Alton Brownās ghee recipe (read the comments, too)
Because the water in butter gets boiled off during the gheemaking process, thereās no water in ghee to go pop and explode butter all over the roof of your microwave.
If your recipe is enhanced, or at least not made worse because of whatever nutty flavors are in ghee that arenāt in butter, then you might want to consider using ghee if you need basically-butter in liquid form.
If youāve been waffling back and forth on whether you want to, on net, have a /now/ page on your capsule, know that youāre not alone.
The new name: macOS 13 Ventura.
A couple things that got shoved off until later:
Iām not sure I want apps to know my current focus.
Seems like a good pile of updates. More useful ones than Iād hoped for. Wonder if thingsāll get buggier. Dictation and System Preferences settings worry me a bit.
Iād say that Stage Manager gives me a small reason to upgrade to a latest iPad, but Iām not sure how useful itād be on an iPad-sized screen. The larger iPad Pro is a thumb-unfriendly monstrosity.
WWDC 2022 is next Monday.
I want:
I wonder what weāll get. Last I heard, more teams were being given more self-directed time instead of time to implement company-wide flagship features. I wonder if that was a one-year change, or if this change has been made semi-permanent.
I have no predictions to make. I suppose theyāre about due for new iPad Pro models.
I wouldnāt think theyād need to announce anything for M2 chips, but on the other hand, they might have big hints that the best way to do things in Metal might change.
Oh, and they might announce a proper Mac Pro. That likely has architectural changes that are going to be way different from all these everything-on-a-chip M1 devices that can have all the RAM and GPU be on-die or whatever. Thatāll be super exciting for people who arenāt me.
OK, I guess I had predictions. Handwavy number-free predictions, but predictions nonetheless.
Thereās been some chatter in Geminispace on the lack of deep, meaningful conversations. Oddly enough, the first-person plural pronoun is used a lot. Iām not sure if this is supposed to be a substitution of the first-person singular to make the sentiment more socially acceptable, or if itās supposed to be a substitution of the second-person plural, or maybe the third-person plural.
Iām in favor of having deep, meaningful conversations, if you can get them.
In general, if you want people to have more of a thing, you should get more of that thing and tell other people how great it is to have more of that thing and the things you did to get more of that thing. Iād be quite happy if, in a month or two, some of the lamenters reported back to mention what changes they made to their lives to get better conversations and what worked and what didnāt.
Some scattered relevant thoughts. But first, a disclaimer:
ā You should not assume that any of this is actually good advice. In fact, you should assume that this is actually worse advice than advice specifically crafted to sound like a good idea but is actually, on net, a bad idea for you. ā
Background reading:
Release notes for Visual Studio Code 1.67.0 (April 2022) (actually released in early May)
Visual Studio Code just released a feature for collapsing files under other files.
However, it doesnāt seem to be able to collapse, say, files named index.gmi under their parent directory. At least, when I tried to have a parent of ā*ā and a child of āindex.gmiā, every file in my capsuleās root, like, feed.yaml, got index.gmi nested underneath it.
Also, when I tried a parent of āfeed.yamlā with children of āfeed.jsonā and āatom.xmlā, all three files were declared children of some other unpublished file.
Pity.
With great brevity comes great responsibility.
I wanted to do only a little bit of thinking, so I started redesigning the guts of a game again.
Iāve been meaning to make a loving homage to Kingdom of Loathing for quite a while. Life always gets in the way before I actually ship something, and by the time Iām ready to come back to it, the best-available software stack that Iād use to make it in is obsolete.
Iām surprisingly OK with this. Maybe itās because I never get very far and Iām not faced with the prospect of writing user-authentication code for the umpteenth time.
Also, the last time I tried this, I tried to make it RESTful initially, but eventually came to the conclusion that the best way to do a lot of things, especially combat actions, was to basically have RPC with nice-looking URLs (often claimed to be RESTful, but isnāt at all).
As I write this, the new hotnesses are GraphQL and TypeScript (currently 4.6). Ideally, Iāll be able to model game stuff well as TypeScript types and GraphQL types.
Anyhow. Let me spec out the lay of the land, so to speak.
There are players in this game. Players do things by expending turns. Most actions cost 1 turn. Fights may cost 1 turn, but are further subdivided into (combat) rounds.
Players have all sorts of properties like hit points, experience points, the number of turns they have remaining, how muscular they are, whether theyāre poisoned, how long the poison will last (in combat rounds or even turns, or maybe forever), and whether theyāve got stuff equipped that will let them regain, say, 3ā5 HP per turn (or even round!).
After quite a bit of thinking, I eventually figured out that I probably needed three different types, probably with better names:
The first type I thought up was StatusEffect. After a little bit, I realized that the additive HP modifier (as opposed to the additive maximum-HP modifier) didnāt make sense as a status effect, so I spun that out into its own type.
Then I realized that an actual status effect can be generated from something that has a range to it, so I split off parts of StatusEffect into the very poorly named StatusWhatCouldHappen. Another candidate name for this was āStatusWhatItSaysOnTheTinā, or something like that. However, this would be a bad name if I ever wanted to be less than 100% forthcoming with my itemsā statuses.
(Everyone laughs at the third item in āthe three hardest problems in computer science are naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errorsā, and the second item is obviously hard, but the first item deserves it place in the list even though itās, by far, the most unassuming problem of the three. Iām convinced one of the reasons why Bootstrap is way more popular than BEM-based solutions is because developers donāt need to think of reasonable, unique names for things all the darn time.)
Also on my mind: how do I handle poison? Iām thinking of poison as a status effect that
Letās say I have a status effect called āA Teeny Bit Poisonedā. It subtracts 1ā5 HP per turn. You might get bitten by a weak asp and have this last for 3ā5 turns, or you might get bitten by a long asp and have this last for ā turns. How do you model all this? ā1 is a bad sentinel value because one might have some kind of poison-duration reduction buff. INT32_MAX isnāt a good option because a lot of this will be in JavaScript, and its maximum non-big integer is Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER, or 2āµĀ³ā1.
Then again, treating all numbers equal to or greater than 2āµĀ³ā1 as +ā isnāt the stupidest option. However, the Int type for GraphQL only handles up to 2Ā³Ā²ā1 for obvious reasons, and I like the type safety of not supporting nonintegral values. On the other other hand, 4.3 billion Meat seems utterly attainable, so sticking to double-precision floats everywhere might be the winning play if BigInts arenāt available.
Cream is useful. Trouble is, I seem to have some difficulty finishing it off.
Here, heavy whipping cream:
However, there are 1,550 calories in the entire pint. If I were to finish it all off in a week, Iād be eating 221 calories/day of cream.
Luckily, the cream I have seems to be OK after a week and a half. Iām not quite sure how Iāll polish it off before weekās end, though.
Fiction became slightly more interesting once I internalized that the paleolithic-to-neolithic transition happened 10,000 years ago.
A while back, I heard of Cochran and Harpendingās _The 10,000 Year Explosion_ and, while I never got around to reading it myself, the big round number stuck in my head as the end of the paleolithic.
Of course, 10,000 years can pass in fiction, too.
ā
During the opening sequence of Mighty Morphinā Power Rangers, the main antagonist, Rita Repulsa, declares āafter 10,000 years, Iām free!ā.
Humanity, however, most emphatically did not have giant robots back then; how did she get locked in back then?
ā
In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, all the Guardians and similar capital-A Ancient tech is from 10,000 years ago. Granted, Hyrule has a nasty tendency to get squished flat every so many generations, but I canāt help but wonder if ancient Hylians had lactase persistence 10,000 years ago. Maybe one day Nintendo will release a Zelda game set during that time and weāll find out if milk is an option.
Then again, supposedly Skyward Sword is the first (released so far) iteration of the Link-kills-Ganon-or-similar saga, and there doesnāt seem to be any adults consuming milk in it.
ā
Genie, in Disneyās Aladdin, famously declares that 10,000 years will give you _such_ a crick in the _neck_, but I donāt think they had much metallurgy back then, so itās not obvious where his containing lamp came from if heās not messing up the time and this is a consistent universe.
On the other hand, cāmon, this is a Disney flick weāre talking about.
ā
Thereās also the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe, where stuff happened 10,000 years ago. On the other hand, they kind of lean into the Chinese meme of using ā10,000ā where we use āgazillionā, with similar levels of non-specificity. So we canāt really set our calendars to it like we can with Hylian archaeologists.
If a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day, then it stands to reason that a clock that goes in reverse gives the right time even more times a day.
My watch pesters me to stand at the 50-minute mark every hour if I hadnāt stood up during that hour. This means I need to plan ahead if I want to sleep in extra on the weekends, but thatās a story for another day.
Usually, when it says āhey, you should stand up for a minuteā all I need to do is go to the bathroom, and I get a second notification about halfway through congratulating me. I wouldāve figured that getting praise for going tinkle in the potty was long behind me, but here we are.
Today, I got the usual notification while I was already seated in the bathroom. I wasnāt too surprised I got this, since it doesnāt take me a whole minute to walk there.
I was surprised, however, when the you-stood-for-a-minute notification came through and I hadnāt finished my afternoon constitutional yet. I had no idea bidet use, to a watch, feels more like standing than sitting.
Palladium Magazine says nice things about Gemini
(Note the publication date.)
Today, I cooked three pounds of tandoori chicken thighs in a Dutch oven, in batches.
Two thoughts:
Well, _that_ was certainly unexpected.
Background:
āModularā, in Apple parlance, means āthe monitor is separate from the computerā.
They announced:
Nothing I need now. I briefly considered getting a new iPad, but the one I have is still OK, has four speakers (not two), a proper home button (instead of a horizontal bar at the bottom taking up some of the real estate), has a Smart Cover instead of a Smart Folio, and wonāt cost me $800 or so after Iāve added on the things I want to the base model.
Theoretically I could buy a 5K display and add it to my current setup, but I donāt need the real estate that badly. I like having a 27ā³ 4K monitor as my side monitor because the extra-big pixels are what I need for something that far away, even if 1080 points is not very wide at all. I mean, itās only a bit bigger than 1024 (of 1024Ć768 fame) and smaller than 1280 (of 1280Ć1024 fame).
I figure my next Mac will be a Mac Studio of some kind. One thing that worries me is how dusty my desktop gets, given that its intake holes are on its bottom. Almost makes me want to buy a banana hammock or something when the time comes so I can suspend it 4ā³ above my desk to keep the dust from coming in at rates faster than my current iMac gets.
As for yesterdayās predictions:
ā¦although what they did announce were near-equivalents of both.
Appleās got an event tomorrow. Theyāre calling it āPeek performanceā.
Predictions:
Probably nothing thatāll make me say āshut up and take my moneyā. My Intel stuff is still fast enough, and not having to think about juggling multiple architectures for work projects is still very nice.
Background:
The relevant (to me) bit. Linebreaks added:
The Gemini community is globally very nice and I've really been enjoying the different interaction I had with fellow geminauts over station, tinylogs, gemlog entries or via email (keep emails coming!).
I really like those interactions, but I feel like interacting with each other over gemlog entries remains difficult. At least to ensure the author see all the responses to their posts.
It's very common to see a gemlog entry being a response to another author entry, but we don't have yet a simple way to notify each other.
The problem is, of course, how to contact the author of a given post to tell them we wrote a response? A "simple" solution would be going to the capsule, find the contact of the author and send an emailā¦ But not every capsule has a contact page and the process is very manual, requiring to use another tool and protocol to communicate.
One of the tradeoffs of a system where youāre going to see all replies to your posts isā¦you see all replies to your posts. Even replies you might not want to have seen.
Of course, people can and do put e-mail addresses or other contact information on their capsules. This is a good idea. I donāt, mainly because I weighed the pros and cons and figured that Iād rather not get a response to something Iāve written than risk the small chance of getting mail in my inbox that Iād rather not have gotten. Sure, Geminispace is mostly Calmā¢ now, but I like keeping my mellow un-harshed and Iām not much of a gambling man.
Of course, this dampens the likelihood of someone else writing a response to what Iāve written here. Without any surefire way to contact me, a potential respondent might wonder āsure, I could write something, but what if heās not checking Antenna that week? He might miss my superlatively enlightening reply! It might be entire months before he checks the relevant backlinks page on geminispace.info!ā and decide to not bother after all.
I take that sort of risk of failure-to-connect as part of communicating on the Internet itself, as opposed to a communication service hosted on top of the Internet, like Twitter or Tumblr.
And, of course, if I want either Twitter or Tumblrā¦I know where to find them.
Normal HTML pages have lots of branding and stuff on them, so if someone decides to download an HTML page from your site and save it on a hard drive somewhere, anyone who views that page will be able to figure out where on the Web it came from.
Ditto printed-out Web pages; they usually have some kind of URL of the page theyāre of printed in the margins somewhere.
One of the nice things about gemtext is that you probably donāt need to brand every single page on your capsule. Any decent client will have Up functionality itself, leaving you to have a first-level heading thatās just the page title, without a sitewide header on every single page.
However, if you donāt, people might download one of your super-cool pages, and, three years later, have no idea where your capsule is, or at least was.
Hereās an example of a superlatively well-branded page:
āWhatās the Deal with Leap Seconds? A Brief Overview of Timescalesā by Solderpunk
It has a preformatted-text pseudo-header, plus a real header for the actual document. The preformatted-text header will help anybody who sees the document figure out āoh, this is from Circumlunar Transmissions, whatever that isā and the āCircumlunar Transmissions - Issue 1ā link down at the bottom will give a further clue as to what the page is from.
But other capsule pages donāt. Most of my own capsuleās pages donāt really say where theyāre from. This saved me quite a bit of work for the Halfway to Mars rebranding, but if, for some reason, someone hits Ctrl-S and saves a page of mine, well, then, good luck figuring out where it came from 18 months later.
At any rate, do you think this is a problem for your capsule? Or, like me, do you not really care?
As mentioned previously, I am the owner of an Apple Watch.
There are three rings:
Given the initial movement target for the red Move ring, there are only a few ways I could fail to close it:
āclose your Move ringā seems like a subtle way to merely get people to wear the watch all day instead of leaving it off. Sure, I could crank it up materially, but Iām not convinced thatās a better idea than making sure I get decent levels of proper exercise per day.
The middle green Exercise ring closes automatically when you get your activity level āabove a brisk walkā, or if you manually start a logged exercise from the watch.
This is the interesting ring to close. Cutoff times are right at midnight, so thereās no fancy logic for people who have a nonstandard sleep cycle. One evening, I started a 45-minute yoga session (with the three-months-free Apple Fitness+) at 11 PM. Still made the midnight cutoff, but if Iād started 35 minutes later I wouldnāt have closed that particular ring that day.
I should probably try HIIT workouts on Fitness+ if Iām feeling too lazy to prep for a gym run or even strap on the Ring Fit Adventure Joy-Con thigh garter, but yoga seems to about as useful for calorie burning as a walk around the neighborhood.
The inner teal Stand ring closes when you stand at least once per hour for at least one minute.
I turned the initial stand count down to 10 hours, mainly because I donāt have the thing on my wrist all the time and I donāt want to get penalized for not wearing the watch. I may turn it up back to 12 or whatever, but I donāt really have a strong incentive to do so.
One of the insights that I had the other day was āif I close all my rings, I wonāt have any incentive to keep the watch on, and Iāll be able to take it off and just leave it on my desk until itās time to go to bedā. This does not sound like the start of a happy, productive relationship with an electronic gizmo.
While I could stand to lose more than a few inches (ask any but one of my pairs of pants), the oblique ākeep me on your wristā clinginess via incentive structure is vaguely unsettling, even if it is useful. The exhortations to close oneās rings at the end of yoga sessions still manage to seem vaguely creepy.
I got an Apple Watch recently. Itās utterly incapable of telling the difference between me sleeping in bed and me lying in bed awake, making it useless for the main reason I bought it, but thatās a story for another day.
One of the ways I keep from morphing into a blob of fat is by doing Ring Fit Adventure for the Nintendo Switch. As you might guess, you can tell it your height and weight and, as part of all its tracking, will tell you how many calories youāve burned during a play session.
Todayās play session lasted one hour and 40 minutes of wall-clock time. This translated into 48 minutes of exercise time (as opposed to resting-pose time, or navigating-through-menus time).
Ring Fit Adventure says that I burned 328.75 calories.
My Apple Watch, set to track calories as I perform āFitness Gamingā, says I burned 891 āactive caloriesā, and had a total calorie-burn count of 1,083 calories. This was counted during a duration of 1 hour and 37 minutes (I counted RFAās cooldown separately).
The Apple Watch says at the outset of the exercise session that anytime it canāt track your calorie expenditure, itāll fill in the estimate with however many calories are burned by a brisk walk, but I donāt have any idea how much workout time it had to use this fallback for.
For reference, 328 calories is, roughly, biking on a recumbent bicycle trainer at a leisurely pace for an hour or so, according to the bicycle trainers Iāve been on. Meanwhile, walking uphill at a 13% incline for an hour at 3 MPH (4.8 kph) burns about 800 calories, according to all the treadmills Iāve been on.
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Iād like to have some kind of wrap-up or broader lesson that I drew from all this, but I donāt have one. Iām still stumped. Calling Unsolved Mysteries at (800) 876-5353 wouldnāt do anything, but Iām not sure what would.
Background information:
Overcast, an iOS and iPadOS podcast client
Concourse, a font by Matthew Butterick
Overcast got an update yesterday. From its release notes:
- Now exclusively uses the system font for practicality, modern design priorities, and broader world-language support. I bid a very fond farewell to the excellent Concourse font that served us well for many years.
While I can totally understand why Arment dropped Concourse in favor of SF Pro, the visual change had two pronounced effects on what the UI looked like:
A net negative for my uses, but I really didnāt expect the weak positive on my iPad.
If you want to keep reading even older entries, hereās the page for the previous year:
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