An orange in an apple orchard
Part of me wonders if iPad OS 13.1.3 makes the pen swipey friendly floating keyboard even more prone to doing its wiggle off screen act, and other bullshit—or if I should just reboot my ducking iPad Pro every hour. This is getting highly annoying when tablet == main computer.
Apple, debug your shit.
Things a smidge useful about having been around a while, and stuck in heterogeneous computing environments.
One of my routine tasks when Cream reboots for updates every now and then, is to run a simple script that runs my post bot for sending my blog posts to D*. The issue that the Intel chipset likes to hang on reboots over USB things is a different issue than making sure software starts up on sign in.
In *nix land, the cheesey, read simplist, method is just insert it into your X session script (Yes, I still use xinit :P). Fancier session managers, XDG autostart, and gasp, systemd user units, also exist. Of course there’s always more than one way to do it. Not to mention that when its your box, you can abuse the system level parts ^_^.
NT on the other hand, I remember the easiest way. Go stick a shortcut to the script in the startup directory and be done with it. That’s “%APPDATA%MicrosoftWindowsStart MenuProgramsStartup” in this day and age.
My scripts are pretty simple. The first is a wrapper (post-bot.cmd) that goes to where I keep my post bot’s install, and runs this daemon.cmd script:
@ECHO OFF
IF EXIST %VIRTUAL_ENV% GOTO post_loop
:load_venv
ECHO Loading venv
CALL .pythonScriptsactivate.bat
GOTO post_loop
:post_loop
ECHO Running
python .pythonScriptsrss2diaspora-spider -v -s dataconfig.txt
ECHO Looping
TIMEOUT /T 900
GOTO post_loop
Which is sufficient for making sure it runs every fifteen minutes without having to care about much more than the box rebooting. So whenever my blog’s RSS feed updates, my posts eventually get converted to markdown and pushed to Diaspora without me having to care too much.
Yay, for laziness!
An interesting little bit of calculation:
Apple iCloud: $0.99/month for 50 GB = $0.02/GB
Google Drive: $1.99/month for 100 GB = $0.02/GB
Box: $10/month for 100 GB = $0.1/GB
Office 365: $7.99/month for 1000 GB = $0.008/GB
Dropbox: $11.99/month for 2000 GB = $0.006/GB
Sorted by smallest to largest firsts storage option. I’d include Amazon but having trouble pulling up prices on that.
I can’t help but think the pricing makes the larger, less tiered options more attractive. The options from the competing phone nerds cost more per GB but offer the ability to have a lower monthly cost.
For comparison, standard 3.5”/7200RPM hard drives are about $0.045/GB for a 1TB drive at the local tech store. My file server costs probably about 45¢ a month on my electric bill, since it’s a low power N-series processor instead of an actually worth using CPU.
I’ve never had a very high opinion of Microsoft Outlook as a mail client, beyond the comprehensiveness of its rich text editing widget. Today I was kind of reminded why.
Email came in canceling a meeting. I hit the button to remove it from my Exchange calendar, and as typical the email just disappears upon interaction. Usually to trash or something.
Outlook continued to display a badge showing one unread email, or something. Yet I had no messages, no matter how many times I refreshed or tried to filter by unread. Nada.
Then I switched from my tablet to my laptop, and took a gander at Thunderbird and scratched my head. There was the cancellation message at the top, and it was marked unread. Even after whomping get messages.
Checked outlook and despite being excluded from the unread filter(!), there was same message at the foot of my inbox with the blue circle. Tried to load it and I get a message saying that it doesn’t exist, and lo and behold the problem is solved with one more sync….lol
At some point I need to find a mail client that sucks less than outlook, yet speaks Exchange mail, contacts, and calendaring. Sigh, I do miss Aqua Mail for Android: it was such a great client, I used it for both my personal and work accounts. Sadly though it is Android only, leaving me without a good iOS client for my tablet and with meh options for my Debian laptop.
Safari in iOS 13 was sending browsing data to Chinese tech giant Tencent
http://flip.it/_rQW_A
I find it a little amusing in a way. Having had internet access since about 1996, I’ve long since gave up on considering my browsing habits to be private—it’s my browsing contents that I want kept private.
Between how browsers work and how much control we yield to the other end of a socket, I think it fool hearty to assume you can remain private about the basics. If you have ever visited a web site in recent times, it’s a fairly safe bet that someone, somewhere can collate a unique identifier for you across several websites. Yielding things like your IP and resources (you know, the /blah/blah part of urls you visit) are integral to how user agents (browsers) and servers work. Cookies have been a fact of browsing virtually forever. You don’t have enough control over how any of this shit works, to be able to enforce strict privacy from being tracked.
Anonymity is the difference between sending the Gestapo to 742 Evergreen Terrace and f24088cc-4914-43ab-9810-07cdc069ebac visited five websites about donuts, and then logged into Yahoo mail; let’s ask Yahoo about them.
What we do however have some control over is the secrecy of our session content. Transport Layer Security, ala HTTPS, provides for some measure of privacy where it matters in our browsing. Nothing is going to stop donuts dot com from using an obvious /glazed resource for finding out about glazed donuts, but telling that you typed “HJS” into the search box and it popped up a super secret bulk ordering form, and your transaction details, is a different story. The security measures make it harder for someone to be dropping eaves if the other side is trustworthy; not being tracked is just hopeless at this point.
I have more hope in solutions that are technical and procedural in nature. Because if you can’t trust donuts dot com with where to bill and ship donuts then you probably shouldn’t be ordering donuts from them. If donuts dot com isn’t allowed to do business in your country without being obligated to offer up your payment data to the request of law enforcement, or pushing it to government donut databases, that’s a social problem and therefore political.
For better or worse there’s only so much that can be done on a technical front without changes to how the World Wide Web functions, and that shit just isn’t going to change for the sake of personal privacy.
Tapped the notification and was greeted with this view of the Tips app:
After annotating the screenshot it remained glitched, but did recover when I changed orientation to portrait and then back to landscape.
Supplemental to last, a nifty thing as well—the per-app directory things in the Files app virtualizes the Documents directory associated with an app’s private-ish data container; or at least iVim makes it appears as such.
E.g. placing a file in iVim/Documents makes it appear in {container}/Documents when exploring it with netrw.
Likewise, while I can’t find any way to make Files express the concept of Unix hidden (.)files, the Files app does show a count that includes the .vim / .viminfo entries that come up when browsing through iVim itself.
This is kind of nice IMHO. If iOS just exports the thing somehow to a trusted Files app rather than making a separate directory outside the per-application containers, that makes the application directories in Files potentially a lot more useful for shuffling data around via the file manager. On the downside, I suppose, could mean Files would get a huge bullseye painted on its forehead for anyone wanting to find a way around some of the file system security.
By contrast, Android is a bit more liberal. The per-app area (e.g. /data/…) is generally a total no-no to any other application, and apps are given explicit support for the “Shared” storage area (e.g. /sdcard) and a separate directory of their own located beneath it (e.g. /sdcard/Android/…)
Well, I might be a sorta happy camper. Looks like iVim is a decent port of Vi IMproved to iOS. From what I can tell, seems like a rather old (7.4) version, compiled as Big with external scripting and various mice/gui things disabled.
Limitations seem to be principally iOS imposed ones, such as Extreme Sudden App Kill Syndrome and overly restricted file permissions. So in effect, it’s about as good as you can hope for on anything more fruity than a Mac.
On a related note, I can also say that iPadOS doesn’t do key repeat. E.g. holding j doesn’t move the cursor in iVim, nor does it insert a bunch of j’s into Safari. But the repeat stuff works fine when combined with a modifier like doing
Ars’ is probably the best in depth review that I’ve seen of iPadOS 13, outside of YouTube videos.
While pretty much every freaking thing about the Fruit Company’s operating system demands you learn to swipe friend in Elvish, Dwarvish, and sometimes enemies in Klingon, the multitasking is pretty win. In my eyes: Google mostly frakked it up with Android 9/Pie, and the ubiquitous metaphors of stacking window managers just suck when you throw fingers at them.
Coming from Android land: the iOS home screen is pretty damned primitive. Like any more primitive and iOS 12 would have had me pounding rocks together to make fire. It still mostly smells of cave men in iPadOS 13, but has a longer beard.
The floating keyboard supporting swipe style typing, pretty much rectified my only true issue with Apple’s keyboard. Not that I like it being one glitchy mother fucker. The amount of times I’ve had my FKB decide to reposition itself, usually by zig zagging its ass until the drag bar is offscreen — or simply fscked up input, is insane for a released product. But when it doesn’t make me have to reboot my iPad it does work really, really well; much like Gboard on my Samsung. Like Mr. Axon, I’d rather see the input as part of the regular full sized touch keyboard but I’ll take whatever progress I can get.
Editing text in iPadOS 13 being improved, I don’t think can be overstated. When I first booted up my iPad Pro, I felt like trying to move the cursor for editing text was bad. Somewhere between having my hands wrapped up like a movie burn victim and fuck it, I’m returning this shit level bad. Seriously, the two finger trackpad trick the keyboard does is the only reason I persisted to see what iPadOS 13 would bring. By contrast, iPadOS 13 feels like someone finally admitted that the era of 3″ phone screens and being totally hopeless typing at all on the damned thing, is long since over; or needs to be.
I for one, look forward to 13.2 in the hopes of less bugginess–and have high hopes for 14.x being an iterative improvement on the system.
Rebooting for the modern age:
BSD: time for kernel updates.
Linux: power outage finally won.
Android: dog ate the charger.
Windows: every update and driver fart.
Chromebook: whenever it gets funky.
iPad OS: more often Chromebook but same concept.
In vague order of frequency, lol