The Aptly Named, Sam's Blog

Apps by developers on my iPhone: 246
Apps by Apple I use regularly: 6

Without developers I have no reason to buy iPhone hardware, or develop for it.

Think about that before you malign us, Apple.

These are not the thoughts and feelings I usually have the evening before WWDC.

A couple of days ago I finished reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. It was published fifty-one years ago, but feels like it could’ve been this year. A wonderful and timeless story written with immaculate detail, and emotional depth. There were many sentences all over the book that I read more than once because they were worth savoring.

I first heard of Ursula K. Le Guin a long time ago. At the time I thought of her as a Fantasy author, and I used to think of myself as someone that enjoys reading Sci-Fi, but not Fantasy. It was an arbitrary distinction that I hope is behind me. But as a result I didn’t introduce myself to her work even though she was frequently mentioned in the context of Sci-Fi. I hope to read more of her works in the future.

Just saw two great examples of tech activism.

First was an Instagram story where all you had to do was swipe up and that opened a webpage which then brought up an email composer filled out with an email and with email addresses populated. You just had to update placeholders with your info and hit send.

Second is this bot that requests people to update their black square photos on Instagram so that they don’t drown out actual black voices using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag: github.com/char/blm-…

Both are brilliant. My hats off to these folks.

Besties.

About three months ago I heard of someone using a trackpad with their non-dominant hand at their Mac. Now I’d heard of such a use before but this time I had a trackpad lying around. I’d gotten it with my Mac instead of a mouse because I already had a mouse, but had stashed it away. So I got it out and set it up for my left hand.

A month passed. I was using it rarely. One day the battery in my mouse ran out in the middle of the workday, so I plugged it in and moved the trackpad over to the right side.

A day passed, and the mouse had long been charged, so I unplugged it, but for whatever reason I kept using the trackpad.

A week passed and I realized that I was liking the trackpad a lot more than the mouse. So I put the mouse in the closet.

Now two months have passed and I can’t think of going back. The gestures are intuitive and I’ve found several operations to be a lot smoother.

I’m a happy Magic Trackpad 2 user 😊.

Colors of Spring from around the neighborhood.

Dogwood at sunset.

It took a while but I finally finished this puzzle over the weekend. Jenni helped with about 20% of it.

When Siri doesn’t understand my accent or the concept of dal.

We’re taking care of each other in this neighborhood.

My most used emoji seems to be transitioning from 😂 to 🤞

A day off from work was a good idea. We went for a hike at Coyote Wall.

The trails have a gentle grade and there’s plenty of room to distance ourselves when we come across other people.

Lovely views. Small streams and falls. Birds and flowers.

We’d gone there last April as well. This time around we just did a four mile loop.

If you subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud, here’s how you can get two months free at this time:
petapixel.com/2020/03/1…

It worked for me.

It was pretty lovely outside today.

As many of us practice social distancing, or self-quarantine, I am feeling very grateful to the folks on the front lines of health care, and also those that are making sure my power, water/sewer, gas, internet, and disposal services continue to function. Thank you! ❤️

There There by Tommy Orange
★★★★☆

Added to /books

This is a very nice explanation of need for social distancing at this time: www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/…

We got some rare snow today. Apparently haven’t seen snow like this in March since 1968.

This cherry blossomed yard in the neighborhood 😍

Inspired by Patrick Rhone’s /reading page, I’ve created a Books page on my site.

Following is the process I followed to make that happen on my Mac:

• Export all my books out of Goodreads. You can find the page to do that by navigating to “My Books” and selecting “Import and export” at the bottom of the left sidebar under “Tools”. The exported file is of CSV format, which is pretty standard.
• Open the export file in a spreadsheeting app. I use Numbers.app. Here, you can clean up any data. I added some ISBNs that were missing. I also saved this file so I can just update it in the future as I read books. Another reason I went through this step was because I was having a hard time parsing the original CSV file using the script I wrote.
• Export the spreadsheet file as CSV.
• Run it through the script below to generate Markdown that can be pasted directly into the page on my site.

And that’s it!

Here’s the script: