Category: nerd

Via Lunduke:

The Mozilla Foundation has released their latest annual report — covering the time up through December of 2022 (Mozilla’s reporting always lags by one year) — and something peculiar leaps out of the data:

* The compensation of the Mozilla CEO has skyrocketed (by millions)
* While the Mozilla revenue drops
* And the Firefox Marketshare takes a nosedive

As a child of the internet, I have been following Mozilla since day 1 (even before that, as I was a user of Netscape 1.1, but that lineage is complicated!) Talk about an organization that has just completely lost its way. Mozilla is like a non-profit that is also trying to operate like a start-up beholden to its VCs. They started chasing growth at all costs while largely ignoring (or de-emphasizing) the product that got them there: Firefox.

The non-profit org, which oversees the corporation that develops the Firefox web browser, insists it will continue its advocacy mission…

Except they laid off the entire advocacy team!

I get that there was some fear, inevitably, the Google money firehose would be shut off. But at no point have I gotten the sense that the non-profit portion of Mozilla was ever doing anything to secure a future beyond that. If the browser is the mission, and the funding of that mission is cloudy, what does your endowment look like?

I love the web. The web has been the single greatest democratization of information and communication that the world has ever seen. Technologically speaking, the web is strongest when there is a diverse ecosystem of web browsers competing and bringing innovations to a 30-year old platform. We saw what happened when Internet Explorer had a 95% marketshare: stagnation and terrible user experiences. If you suffered through the IE days, you know what will happen in a future that is only Chrome. We need Firefox (and Safari!)

Via 9to5Mac:

Apple’s exciting week of Mac announcements continues today with the introduction of the completely redesigned Mac mini. The new Mac mini is powered by the M4 and M4 Pro chips and features a significantly smaller design. It’s also the first Mac with support for Thunderbolt 5 connectivity.

I think this is a great update. I’m not sure it needed to be smaller, but I love that they were able to pack pretty much everything that the prior Mini had into this revision (minus some USB-A ports; keeping one of those would have been nice, but it’s probably time to start letting those ports go…we’ve had the form factor since 1998!) Love that 10GbE is still a BTO option.

I think that Thunderbolt 5 (only available on the Pro version) is a really underrated update. We’ve been stuck at basically the same version of Thunderbolt since 2016 (TB4 ran at the same speed as TB3, but it mandated some previously optional features and improved on security.) Assuming the 3rd party ecosystem follows, this unlocks a ton of fast storage, expansion options, and improved display technologies. That alone will be enough to have me looking at an upgrade from my launch-day M1 Max 14″ to whatever iOS announced tomorrow. I’m a big fan of the single-cable lifestyle, but I definitely feel the pinch sometimes when I’m driving my Studio Display, 10GbE, and a locally attached SSD through my single dock connection. Granted, that is not often, but usually when I have returned from a weekend of shooting a club volleyball tournament, and I have 200GB of photos to process and backup.

As a long-time nerd, I’ve used a lot of apps and have formed some very strong opinions about them. In 2021, these are my most essential apps for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS.

Craft

I’ve always been a note-taker, and this app has been a revelation. I used to fill up notebooks and yellow pads, and eventually I graduated to taking notes digitally on my laptop and my iPad. I’ve had affairs with most major note apps — Evernote, Apple Notes, Bear, plain text. This year I was turned onto Craft, and I’m not sure what could make me leave it. Craft covers all of my requirements. My notes are portable: I can export them, or store them locally, or keep them in their cloud service for syncing across devices. I can insert virtually any kind of file, and append with notes. It supports iPad Pencil drawings. I can share notes with others. It easily imported my Bear and plain text notes (and even retained creation/modification dates!) This app does it all. Mac/iOS/iPadOS

1Password

Honestly, I only know one password — the password to my 1Password app. I don’t know the password to my email, bank accounts, blog, streaming services, etc. Everything is randomly generated, stored in 1Password, and synced across my devices. If a login is compromised and shows up on the dark web, 1Password alerts me and I can change the password. It supports virtually every login type from web, server, software license, credit card numbers, you name it. I’ve been using it for over a decade and it is irreplacable. Mac/iOS/iPadOS

Things

Things is my other brain. Every reminder, project, or recurring task starts and ends in Things. The interface is beautifully designed and easy to use. Mac/iOS/iPadOS

Soulver

There are many calculator apps, but none like this one. It’s a little bit like a standard calculator had a baby with a spreadsheet and a plain text document. This has probably been the most useful app in my professional life of the past decade. Mac/iOS/iPadOS

Alfred

This is an especially nerdy entry, and maybe not for everyone, but I consider Alfred an essential part of my Mac workflow. Most Mac users are probably familiar with Spotlight search: by default it’s the little magnifying glass button that lives in your menu bar (you can also hit command-spacebar to trigger it). It just brings up a simple search box that you can use to find (and launch) anything on your Mac. Alfred is a super-charged version of that. Alfred (like Spotlight) can be used to launch application by typing their name, or opening documents, but you can also use it to launch various workflows. I use Alfred (I launch it by typing option-space) to start web searches, and to add new tasks to Things. It has an integration with my favorite calculator app, so that I can perform calculations on the fly without opening another app. I can use it to create new calendar appointments, contacts, or even create new notes. It also has built-in support for Snippets, which is a massive time saver. As of this writing, per Alfred’s built-in statistics, since May 19, 2016, Alfred has been used 19,627 times on my Mac. It’s pretty essential. macOS only.

Via lolfi.com

Back in like 2004 or 2005 you had a BlackBerry. There was an “app” on there (they weren’t called apps back then) where you would see all your incoming messages. Any type of messages, doesn’t matter what “app”, what service, it was all there. For example:

Incoming email from gmail
Incoming email from Exchange
Incoming and missed phone calls
Text messages
BBMs
Facebook messages
Google Talk
You get the idea. It was all there in one pane of glass.

Now today.

I got my first Blackberry (issued by my employer) in 2004 and was immediately addicted¹ to that unified messaging paradigm. Nothing else has come close to copying it. I suspect that for most people the stream from all of their services in one place would be completely overwhelming. Just triaging my email in one app is bad enough. Compounding it with text messages, Slack, phone calls, FB/Twitter/whatever would be unmanagable in 2021.

¹When I had to turn my device in at the end of the job, I immediately drove to the nearest Cingular store to replace my personal device with a Blackberry; I could’t be without one.

From How-To Geek:

The year is 1995. You’re stuck with slow floppy disks that only hold 1.44 MB of data. But there’s an exciting new technology: Zip drives, which can hold 100 MB and free you from floppy disks!

Now, 25 years later, we look back at Iomega’s Zip technology and its history. Did you know some industries still use Zip drives?

Zip disks were fairly ubiquitous by the time I left high school and entered college. Anyone who needed to move (relatively) large amounts of data around had a drive (or had one built into their computer.) Reliability issues and the rise of fast networking killed off the Zip almost as quickly as it emerged though.

I never owned a Zip drive personally. I instead had placed my bet on the SyQuest EZ 135 drive. It was slightly more expensive than the Zip, but considerably faster and more reliable — it used hard platters (like a hard disk) rather than the “floppy disk” medium that Zip disks utilized. I bet on the wrong technology though, as SyQuest filed for bankruptcy pretty shortly after I bought into their tech. Sigh.

My oldest daughter, a student at a prestigious northwestern institution of higher learning, is contemplating a trip across the Cascades this weekend. Seeking my advice as a sage veteran of mountain pass travel in Washington State, I sent her a link from my browser bookmarks: the Washington State Mountain Pass Road Report. She then asked for a phonetic spelling of “Snoqualmie” (she’s not a local, so don’t laugh) but I digress.

A few things then dawned on me. I’ve always kept meticulous backups of my data, so I’ve been using the same bookmarks across computers and browsers since at least 1998. I had sent her a bookmark that I had created in 1998 or 1999, back when I frequently traversed Snoqualmie Pass between my school in Tacoma and my home in central Washington.

Maybe it’s nothing, but it really seemed amazing that I was able to send a URL that I had bookmarked while in college to my daughter while she’s in college 20+ years later. It’s also pretty wild that WSDOT has faithfully maintained the same URL structure on their site such that this URL string is still perfectly valid, with no redirects (other than to HTTPS), today. Kudos to their IT team.

Really enjoyed this piece by Rachel Kramer Bussel:

 Not for the first time, I considered declaring email bankruptcy: mass-deleting all the newsletters, marketing promos, Google news alerts, and notes from friends, family, and work contacts that accumulated over the years. I’d give myself a blank slate, one that allowed me to actually notice the professional opportunities that came my way. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to nuke my inbox entirely. What if I wanted to reread a note my late grandmother had written to me? Or look up which Black Friday promos a company offered in 2016 to better inform my shopping this year?

I long ago learned to stop worrying about my email. We all get a ton of email, and if you’re a grownup, you probably have 3-4 different email accounts that you are responsible for patrolling. My work account has 48,322 unreads; my primary personal account has 2,805; secondary personal (the one where the volume of junk is so high that it exists only for shopping receipts; everybody has that one account) is at 95,776. Collectively, it’s a lot but it’s not impossible.

Here are my tips for managing the chaos:

Turn off unread flags.

If you are determined to leave behind that “inbox zero” silliness, then this should be your first step. Go into your email app or notification settings, and turn off the unread counts/flags. I’m referring to the “14,778” number that appears on the icon of your email app, which signifies the number of unread emails therein. Turn that shit off. That number is meaningless, and it just causes anxiety.

Search is your friend.

Don’t bother filing emails into a labyrinth of folders and sub-folders. It takes too much effort and it won’t really help you find anything any faster. Use the Archive function if you must, but the Search feature is your best friend in taming the chaos. The search function in most modern email apps is fast and accurate. Need to find that one email from HR that they sent six months ago? Type in a few keywords and scroll the results to the correct time frame…there’s the email you wanted.

Flag the vital stuff

If it’s an email that you will absolutely need to reference or respond to later, go ahead and flag or star that bad boy. This is particularly important if the sender or content isn’t memorable or unique enough to easily surface in a search.

Never Delete

Most email takes up very little actual storage space, so there is rarely any benefit to deleting something — especially if there’s any chance of you needing it later. Again, search is your friend.

Just wait.

If you receive an email that gets lost in your chaos and it needed a response, just wait. If it’s truly important they’ll email you again.