As Elmine was working outside the country, I had sole responsibility for Y, and consequently spent more time at home this week.

• Revised two chapters of a report on open data impact in Serbia
• Prepared a workshop for a province for next week
• Prepared for travel and speaking in Serbia next week
• Worked on an analysis for a Dutch province
• Did some administration for my company The Green Land
• Experimented with a Raspberry Pi for Mastodon
• Looked at the first few of the Indieweb protocols I want to explore (in time for the Indieweb camp in Nuremberg late October)
• Spent lots of time with Y

I'm in the process of setting up a new laptop and need to wait for the giant Dropbox sync. Getting Windows 10 to stop sleeping when locked required two different registry hacks. In 2018 :(

Interested in the past, present and the future of microprocessors? If so, the video of Sophie Wilson talking about the ‘Future of Microprocessors’ at Juliacon is a must see! In case the name Sophie Wilson doesn’t ring any bells, have a look at what Wikipedia says about her.

Her presentation will not only tell you about the history of microprocessors but also why performance hasn’t really increased in the past years, the reasons behind this and why the price per transistor on a chip has started increasing again with further miniaturization instead of a further decreasing, which has fueled Moore’s law for the past decades. And most important she will give here educated opinion on where we will go from here.

From Euan Semple, Your phone doesn’t have to be your enemy. In part:

Don’t let the media convince you that it is inevitable that you are a victim of technology, and make the effort to ensure that you are not. I’ve made my phone my friend. You can too.

He’s written what amounts to, unintentionally, a very good ad for the iPhone.

Lotic, interviewed on starting from scratch:

A lot of artists have this fantasy of pulling up stakes, getting rid of all their stuff, and running away to a new city to reboot and recreate themselves—which is basically what you did when you moved to Berlin. How was that experience?

It took a long time to find my footing here, to be honest. I moved here with my husband, who was my first boyfriend ever. We’re not together anymore. I knew one person here who would book me for gigs. Luckily I met basically everybody that I know now—or about half the people I know now—during that first week. That helped a little bit, but it was fucking crazy and stupid and when anyone has asked me if they should do it too, I say no. No.

I had never even been to Berlin before. Why did I do this? What was I expecting? I don’t know. For me, it wasn’t about coming someplace new as much as it was about getting away from someplace else. It was about leaving the States. I was in the suburbs of Houston, which is nothing like being here. Given what was happening in America, I just felt like I had to leave. It was less about running towards something than it was about running away from something else. Now that I’m here and things are good—and I’m really good now—it’s hard to talk about, but it honestly did take four or five years to get my life together here. Also, I still don’t speak the language.

See also France, by the Ceedees.

Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica:

I’ve been testing iOS on old devices for six years, and I’ve never seen a release that has actually improved performance on old devices. At best, updates like iOS 6, iOS 9, and iOS 10 didn’t make things much worse; at worst, updates like iOS 7 and iOS 8 made old devices feel like old devices. Anyone using an older device can safely upgrade to iOS 12 without worrying about speed, and that’s a big deal. You’ll notice an improvement most of the time, even on newer devices (my iPad Air 2, which had started to feel its age running iOS 11, feels great with iOS 12).

As I noted in my review, I was hoping someone would run actual measurements for different system features on older devices running multiple versions of iOS. Cunningham did exactly that, going all the way back to iOS 10 on the iPhone 5S.

→ Source: arstechnica.com

One day several months ago, I filled a glass with tap water from our sink and noticed that it tasted unusually good — a bit creamy somehow, and a bit savory in the manner of club soda, which is superior to seltzer because of the sodium. It seemed especially thirst-quenching, yet so tasty I kept drinking more of it. A brewer I know told me Colorado water has more mineral content in the spring months due to mountain runoff, which might explain the change in flavor. I loved that idea.

But the explanation didn’t hold up. My husband, John, thought our water tasted the same as ever. More strikingly, every liquid I drank started to taste better to me. Wines tasted richer and more buttery; cheap wines tasted like they’d been aged for years in oak. Bourbon tasted sweeter and creamier too, almost like coconut. Canned seltzer tasted especially great, like an indulgence instead of a substitute. This went on for weeks. The internet told me I might be pregnant or diabetic. I was quite sure neither was true. Instead I grew increasingly suspicious that I might have a brain tumor.

I mentioned the symptom to my brother in a text thread: “I think I have brain cancer? My palate suddenly changed.” He responded right away: “I had that! It was a virus. Everything tasted weird and I couldn’t handle spicy food at all. It lasted a few weeks.” It didn’t sound like what I had, but I was heartened nonetheless. But if it was a virus, why didn’t anyone else have it? I mentioned it to everyone I saw, hoping for a sign of recognition. “It’s not unpleasant,” I’d always say. Finally, about three weeks in, John and I were reading on the couch; he took a sip of water and literally smacked his lips. “Mmm,” he said. “That tastes delicious.” “Oh my god!” I grabbed his arm. “You have the virus!” John’s virus, if it was a virus, didn’t last as long, or maybe he just wasn’t as attuned to it as I was. In any case, it went away for both of us. Boxed wine tasted cheap again.

Years ago, when I was in grad school, I saw the philosopher Daniel Dennett deliver a lecture about memes — memes in the Richard Dawkins sense (“a unit of cultural transmission”). He talked about a kind of parasite, the Dicrocoelium dendriticum, or lancet liver fluke, that infects ants; it makes them “want” to crawl to the tops of tall blades of grass. (What does desire feel like to an ant?) But that is not the end goal for the parasite. Those ants high up in the grass are more likely to be eaten by grazing cows, and that’s what the parasite “wants.” This mechanism is called parasitic mind control: The fluke wants to be inside the cow; it thrives in the guts of the cow and then gets the reproductive benefit of being shat out into the pasture, where it can infect more ants.

Both parasites and micro-parasites (viruses and bacteria) can hijack our minds; they make us act weird. Toxoplasma, a parasite found in cat feces, makes mice less afraid of cats; this is an evolutionary strategy, making it easier for the parasite to get from the mouse to the cat. It can spread to people too, where it may increase risk-taking in general. One bizarre study found that people, presumably cat owners, with toxoplasmosis “are more likely to major in business.” An NBC News story suggested optimistically that the parasite “may give people the courage they need to become entrepreneurs.”

If true (and I doubt it), that would be an extreme case of a microscopic parasite altering the course of your whole life. But ordinary viruses change our behavior too. A 2010 study found that people became more sociable in the 48 hours after they were exposed to the flu virus, the period when they are contagious but not symptomatic. The infected hosts, researchers noted, were significantly “more likely to head out to bars and parties.” Even symptoms we think of as purely physical reflexes can be construed as behavior changes. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond writes that “many of our ‘symptoms’ of disease actually represent ways in which some damned clever microbe modifies our bodies or our behavior such that we become enlisted to spread microbes.” The tuberculosis bacterium, for example, makes us want to cough, atomizing it into breathable air. According to the Mayo Clinic, this can happen when a tubercular patient “coughs, speaks, sneezes, spits, laughs or sings.” This makes me wonder if consumption ever makes patients giggly, or more likely to burst into song, despite the chest pain and malaise. A disease called kuru can cause what are often described as “pathological bursts of laughter.” It is not, however, spread by laughing. It was common among the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea until the cause was discovered to be prions, spread by the practice of funerary cannibalism — eating your dead.

One of the creepiest behavioral changes caused by a virus is hydrophobia, a symptom of “classic encephalitic rabies,” also known as “furious rabies.” It’s not an exaggeration: People and animals infected with rabies become morbidly terrified of water. Or perhaps more accurately, they’re of two minds about water — they both want it and can’t stand the thought or sight of it. (It’s the opposite of my virus, then, which made beverages extra-appealing.) Here’s how Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy describe it in their book Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus: “Present the hydrophobic patient with a cup of water and, desperately though he wants to drink it, his entire body rebels against the consummation of this act. The outstretched arm jerks away just as it is about to bring the cup to the parched lips. Other times the entire body convulses at the thought.”

Why does this happen? It’s not so you’ll die of thirst. The virus’s goal is not to kill you — though it does do that; once symptoms appear, close to 100 percent of rabies patients die — but to spread. The “sole mission” of a virus, according to Connie Goldsmith, author of Pandemic: How Climate, the Environment, and Superbugs Increase the Risk, “is to get inside a cell and turn it into a factory to produce new viruses.” Viruses, unlike bacteria and parasites, are not even alive, yet they too have “desires.” According to the Wikipedia article on rabies:

Saliva production is greatly increased, and attempts to drink, or even the intention or suggestion of drinking, may cause excruciatingly painful spasms of the muscles in the throat and larynx. This can be attributed to the fact that the virus multiplies and assimilates in the salivary glands of the infected animal for the purpose of further transmission through biting. The ability to transmit the virus would decrease significantly if the infected individual could swallow saliva and water.

This explains the telltale foaming at the mouth in rabid dogs, as well as their rage, which drives them to attack and bite. This rabid madness, and its spread through biting, gave birth to mythological monsters from zombies to werewolves and vampires. The association of vampires with bats stems from their acting as a “reservoir host” for rabies — bats can carry the virus without dying from it.

Rabies, like malaria, Zika, typhus, bubonic plague, and all flus, is a form of zoonosis, a disease that makes the leap from animal to human. That leap, the transmission, is called spillover. In his book Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus, David Quammen calls zoonosis “a word of the future” — “destined for heavy use in the 21st century.” Dangerous infectious diseases persist only when they have a reservoir host. We were able to eradicate smallpox, Quammen notes, because it’s not a zoonosis; it only infects humans, and once we’ve cured them all, it has nowhere else to hide.

The reservoir host for Ebola is still not known, although where there are outbreaks of Ebola in humans, there are also dead gorillas. It seems likelier that, as with the lyssaviruses that cause rabies, the host is some kind of bat. When Quammen went hunting for reservoirs in Bangladesh, the epidemiologist Jonathan Epstein told him, “Keep your mouth closed when you look up.” You don’t want an Ebola bat flying overhead to shit in your mouth.

During the 1950s and ’60s, there was great optimism that the world would soon be rid of all deadly infectious disease. The U.S. spent huge sums of money on a campaign to eliminate malaria in the so-called Third World — an act of charity, in a way, since malaria was not a threat in affluent countries. The plan not only failed — perhaps we gave up too soon, or perhaps it was an impossible task — it actually made the problem worse. The campaign reduced local immunity to malaria, while the virus evolved resistance to known treatments such as chloroquine. At the same time, heavy use of pesticides killed off many beneficial insects while the mosquitos became resistant to the chemicals. As Laurie Garrett puts it in The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, “almost overnight resistant mosquito populations appeared all over the world.” Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, said at the time, “The insect enemy has been made stronger by our efforts.” After seeming to die down, cases of malaria resurged, now in a new, iatrogenic form — “created as a result of medical treatment,” as Garrett writes.

Malaria had become something strange and ill-defined. “What is malaria?” Kent Campbell, a doctor with the Centers for Disease Control, has asked. In many parts of Africa, it’s endemic and omnipresent but often asymptomatic. Previously, children with malaria either died or survived and became largely immune. Now children might survive but lapse into fatal anemia years later, requiring blood transfusions — not ideal when AIDS is epidemic too. Further complicating matters, when a child in Africa has a fever, it’s standard procedure to give the child antimalarials, but just because a child has malarial parasites does not necessarily mean that any given fever is caused by malaria. In this way, it’s like climate change: Every bad storm feels related to global warming, but storms don’t require climate change to exist. And, as Campbell says, “we cannot continue to treat every fever as if it’s malaria, because the roster of drugs is getting shorter.” Yet a malarial fever can lead to death, and malaria is still a top-10 cause of death in low-income countries.

To answer his own question about the nature of malaria, Campbell eventually concluded simply that “malaria is a disease that responds to antimalarial drugs.” He did not name a specific drug, since the drugs have to change. It made me think of a conversation I had years ago with an ex-boyfriend, a physics major, who told me that temperature is not as simple a concept as it seems. It is not synonymous with heat or energy, he said. Temperature, essentially, is what thermometers measure. I never really understood this, but I think about it often. Or maybe I should say, what I think about is the elegant way the construction reduces what we understand.

There’s a social media phenomenon I’ve started calling the performative death wish. It happened recently when archaeologists found an unopened black sarcophagus in Alexandria. Some feared that the tomb might contain a deadly virus or unleash a curse — after King Tut’s tomb was opened, in 1922, a number of people associated with the excavation died. “I’m pinning all my hopes on the creature in the sarcophagus,” one woman tweeted. Another tweet went:

2012: oh no Mayan calendar says the world might end and we could all die

2018: PLEASE let the black Egyptian sarcophagus carry a curse that will collectively put us out of our misery

Whenever a story on the threat of an “extinction-level event,” like an asteroid or comet headed for Earth, is making the rounds, people quote-tweet it to add, “Finally, some good news!”

In this age of horrible news all the time, we get it instantly: Ironic suicidal ideation. But there’s something kind of real behind it — the fantasy of the swift death, the instinct to just get it over with. Of course, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs didn’t kill them instantly, unless they were at ground zero. It wasn’t “IPU annihilation,” to use philosopher Galen Strawson’s term: instant, painless, unexperienced. It took tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands of years of living on a sick and barren planet before they all finally went extinct. This makes the prospect of death by asteroid much less merciful.

Death may represent a kind of escape, but is this posturing really about wanting to escape, or is it about wanting to suffer? Lately, when I luck into an excellent bag of cherries or an especially luscious peach, I think, automatically: I don’t deserve this. When people say they’re quitting social media because it doesn’t make them happy, I think, Wrong reason. I think, We don’t deserve to be happy. It feels related to the death wish, my own version of liberal guilt run amok, morphed into a longing for punishment.

During the Black Death in Europe, bands of flagellants would roam from town to town, like a traveling theater troupe, putting on public performances of violent self-punishment. They would flog themselves with leather and iron whips while crying out to God, “Spare us!” As historian Barbara Tuchman writes in A Distant Mirror, “The flagellants saw themselves as redeemers who, by re-enacting the scourging of Christ upon their own bodies and making the blood flow, would atone for human wickedness and earn another chance for mankind.” In the absence of a better explanation, medieval people blamed themselves: “hardly an act or thought, sexual, mercantile or military, did not contravene the dictates of the Church … the result was an underground lake of guilt in the soul that the plague now tapped.” But the flagellants didn’t take all the blame; they also scapegoated the Jews, accusing them of poisoning the wells. In Basel in 1349, Tuchman writes, “the whole community of several hundred Jews was burned in a wooden house especially constructed for the purpose” — a medieval concentration camp.

Centuries later, we still have a tendency to interpret epidemics as punishment, divine or otherwise. When AIDS emerged in the early 1980s, it was seen as a natural and necessary corrective to gay liberation. People called it “the gay plague.” Televangelist Jerry Falwell said, “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” Former senator Jesse Helms thought people with AIDS brought it on themselves through their “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.” As Susan Sontag noted in AIDS and Its Metaphors, AIDS, in the U.S. at least, “is understood as a disease not only of sexual excess but of perversity,” which makes it easy to view infection as retribution.

When we don’t understand the cause of a disease or how to treat it, we resort to magical thinking. Ebola was initially blamed on sorcery or ezanga, a Bakola word meaning “some sort of vampirism or evil spirit,” as Quammen writes: “Ezanga could even be summoned and targeted at a victim, like casting a hex.” But the sorcery explanation fell apart the more the illness spread: “Sorcery does not kill without reason, does not kill everybody, and does not kill gorillas,” one Mbomo woman said — even sorcery has its logic. The apparent senselessness of a new epidemic makes it even more frightening, so that every plague is a double plague of contagion and fear. “The mystery of the contagion was ‘the most terrible of all the terrors,’” Tuchman writes, quoting a Flemish cleric. “Ignorance of the cause augmented the sense of horror.” Guy de Chauliac, a doctor who treated three popes in succession, wrote that he lived in “continual fear.” (Why is it so hard for me to imagine their fear? The centuries have a neutralizing effect; I imagine they accepted what they called  “the great mortality” as a fact of history in the same way I do.)

The best medical science at the time of the Black Death almost came close to an approximate understanding of how the plague spread. “That the infection came from contact was quickly observed but not comprehended,” Tuchman writes. Some thought it was transferred by sight — the evil eye. This is why plague masks had crystal eyepieces in addition to beaks stuffed with aromatics, to protect the wearer against both malevolent glances and miasma, the foul air that was really the stink of death. One physician determined that infection was “communicated by means of air breathed in and out” — which was true. The plague took several forms and could be spread through the blood or through coughing, like tuberculosis or the flu. But since no one knew what germs were, “he had to assume the air was corrupted by planetary influences.” In 1348, the medical faculty of the University of Paris delivered a report on the cause of the pestilence: “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius.” As late as 1918, physicians named “cosmic influence” as a factor in the mysteriously deadly Spanish flu — influence and influenza in fact have the same etymology, a “flowing in” as of unseen, ethereal forces.

If the plague had been sent to punish people for their sins — Matteo Villani, a 14th-century historian, compared it to the great flood “in ultimate purpose” — you might think that the period following the plague years would be one of great austerity. If anything the opposite is the case. Survivors of the plague did not become ascetic. Instead they may have sensed a baffling meaninglessness to their being spared — survivor’s guilt being a kind of miserable apprehension of one’s own good luck. “If the purpose had been to shake man from his sinful ways,” Tuchman writes, “it had failed.” People embraced “a more disordered and shameful life … behavior grew more reckless and callous, as it often does after a period of violence and suffering.” You could also say not much had changed at all, though a third of the world had died:

What was the human condition after the plague? Exhausted by deaths and sorrows and the morbid excesses of fear and hate, it ought to have shown some profound effects, but no radical change was immediately visible. The persistence of the normal is strong.

Or, as William McNeill writes in Plagues and Peoples, the plague on some level was “a routine crisis of human life.” Many at the time seemed to take this mass die-off in stride, “like the weather.” It’s paradoxical, how quickly we adapt to suffering.

A Distant Mirror, published in 1978, was so named because Tuchman felt the awfulness of the 14th century — for years, she says, historians tended “to skirt the century because it could not be made to fit into a pattern of human progress” — had clear parallels in the awfulness of the 20th century. (In my notes, I wrote, You thought that was bad? then crossed it out many times.) Her follow-up, in 1984, was called The March of Folly, which explores why people and particularly governments frequently act against their own interests: “Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests?” Why, for example, “does American business insist on ‘growth’ when it is demonstrably using up the three basics of life on our planet — land, water, and unpolluted air?” Our inaction in the face of global warming seems a clear case of this. And we’ve had 40 years to get our shit together. As a recent New York Times feature noted, “Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979.” Why can’t we or won’t we save ourselves?

A few weeks ago my husband handed me a book he must have seen on the new books shelf at our library. It was Pandemic, by Connie Goldsmith. Relevant to my interests, certainly, but, I pointed out to him, “This is a children’s book.” More accurately, it’s young adult nonfiction. I tossed it on my giant pile of plague books and assumed I wouldn’t get to it. As it happens, it was the last book I read, and it was surprisingly good and helpful. Goldsmith lays out how five global trends — climate change, disruption of animal habitats, increased air travel, crowding and megacities, and overuse and misuse of antibiotics — all increase the risk of a pandemic.

“Pandemic” sounds to me like automatic hyperbole, like “pandemonium,” but it’s fairly well defined in epidemiology: Unlike an “outbreak,” which affects limited people in a limited area for a short time, or an “epidemic,” which affects a larger number of people in multiple areas at the same time, “pandemics affect many people in many parts of the world at the same time.” The Black Death is the most pandemic of pandemics, but the Spanish flu is a more recent example, and HIV could qualify as well. In Western countries, we almost think of AIDS as a solved problem, since antiviral treatments have dramatically improved both quality of life and lifespan for people infected with HIV. But about half the people who have contracted the virus in history have died from it, making it as deadly as Ebola, and its transmission is far from “contained.”

All five of Goldsmith’s risk factors are, in essence, our fault: “Scientists do not yet know what will cause the next pandemic. It could be a new bacterium that resists all available medications. Or it could be a mutated virus to which people have no immunity. What scientists and epidemiologists do know is that human activity is largely responsible for the spread of disease.” No wonder new and re-emerging diseases feel like punishment. Mosquitos and other “vectors” (usually biting and stinging insects that help carry diseases between humans and other animal hosts), for example, are getting a leg up from global warming. They like warm, wet environments, so as temperatures rise and flooding increases, their territory expands. More monstrously, “hotter temperatures make mosquitos hungrier,” and “warm air incubates the virus faster.”

Relatedly, ticks have become more of a problem in part due to suburban development in wooded areas where ticks live. In the U.S., Lyme disease is now the most common vector-borne illness as well as one of the fastest-growing infectious diseases. And it is not well understood; there is disagreement over whether chronic Lyme disease even exists. But many patients continue to experience symptoms after treatment. This could be due to persistent bacteria not killed by antibiotics, or to permanent immune damage that causes your body to respond to the infection even after it’s gone, like phantom pain. Goldsmith quotes epidemiologist Ali S. Khan: “We humans act like we own the planet, when really it’s the microbes and the insects that run things. One way they remind us who’s in charge is by transmitting disease, often with the help of small animals, including rodents and bats.” This is zoonosis as revenge, by the animal kingdom or mother nature writ large.

Back in 1981, a toxicologist named Mark Lappé wrote a book titled Germs That Won’t Die, warning of the microbe mutations he saw happening in hospitals. “We have organisms now proliferating that never existed before in nature,” he wrote. “We have changed the whole face of the earth by the use of antibiotics” — the medical Anthropocene. Critics at the time felt Lappé was grossly overstating the problem. Now so-called superbugs, or antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains like MRSA, kill about 700,000 people in the world every year, similar to the number killed by mosquitos, the deadliest animal by some margin, deadlier even than humans.

Antibiotic resistance is often blamed on people not taking their medications correctly, but it’s not that simple. Only 20 percent of antibiotics in the U.S. are used on people; the rest are for animals. Often these are the same antibiotics that humans take. Bacteria in animals then develop resistance to those antibiotics, and when they infect humans, the drugs don’t work for us. Worrisomely, new antibiotics are not an exploding area of medical research; we’ve had fewer new ones every decade since the 1980s, and most are just variations of existing drugs, which are unlikely to remain effective against already resistant bacteria for long. Goldsmith suggests that the bulk of pharmaceutical R&D budgets may go to long-term maintenance medications rather than those used to cure one-time infections, since the former are more profitable over time.

Many experts think the most likely culprit of a future pandemic is some version of the flu; flus are common, highly contagious, and dangerous especially when there’s a new strain to which people have limited immunity. There’s hope another pandemic on the level of the Spanish flu could be avoided through the development of a universal flu vaccine, which could be possible with enough resources and support. But to state the obvious, vaccines only work when we take them.

In Rabid, Wasik and Murphy note that “immediately upon the creation” of the smallpox vaccine in 1796, there were “scientists and laypeople” who believed the vaccine was “poison.” In other words, antivaxxers are as old as vaccines. Twentieth-century advances like the polio vaccine strengthened public support — “for two decades,” in the 1950s and ’60s, Garrett writes in The Coming Plague, “insurance carriers, politicians, drug companies, and the judicial system adhered to the basic principle that the rights of an immunized society superseded those of small numbers of individuals.” But a scare in 1976, when recipients of a new swine flu vaccine seemed to have higher than average incidence of Guillaine-Barré syndrome, caused permanent PR damage. Guillaine-Barré, which can lead to (usually reversible) paralysis and other neurological symptoms that require hospitalization, can occur after any infectious disease, including the flu. The ensuing panic would “haunt all vaccine efforts inside the United States for decades,” Garrett writes, though the increased risk was very small: “Approximately one additional case of GBS for every 100,000 people who got the swine flu vaccine,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Typical flu shots most likely do not increase the risk: “Studies suggest that it is more likely that a person will get GBS after getting the flu than after vaccination.”

The antivaccination movement now seems to be in another waxing period — there have been outbreaks of formerly very rare diseases like measles both in the U.S. and Europe. We can’t blame it on anything other than ignorance. We know the flu vaccine works (I’m tempted to write, “we” “know” it “works”), but most people don’t know how it works. I’m not saying people don’t understand how it works on a technical level; we don’t even grasp the basics. I’ve heard intelligent people I know say, “I never got the flu until the one year I got the flu shot. Never again!”

People treat the flu shot like a matter of personal choice. They think if they don’t get a shot and then they get the flu, that’s their own bad luck. But the flu shot, like other vaccines, is only truly effective when taken en masse; it reduces overall infection in a population so that the most vulnerable people — usually the elderly, but for some strains it’s children — are less likely to be infected. This is collective, social action — collective inoculation. Further, the folk idea that some years the flu shot “doesn’t work” is inaccurate. Flu shots always contain a mix of vaccines against several different strains that are believed most likely to be dominant that flu season. Vaccine makers don’t always get it right, but the range of effectiveness is more like 30 percent to 60 percent; it’s not zero or 100. Even in an off year, the flu shot increases your immunity, and you’ll probably be less sick and not for as long — and therefore less contagious — if you do catch the flu. (If you take nothing else from this essay, please start getting annual flu shots.)

The immunologist Anthony Fauci has said that “in some respects, vaccines are the victims of their own success” — meaning that, when used properly, they can almost eliminate incidence of an infectious disease. But then people stop dying of that disease, and it stops seeming like a threat. So we get lax about the “cure” — though often, these diseases can’t be cured, only prevented. This feels related to the false assumption that World War II had cured humanity of fascism forever. By Garrett’s account, “every problem seemed conquerable” in the decade after we stopped Hitler. Instead, white nationalism had just gone quiet for a while, a virus hidden in an unidentified reservoir host. In Siberia recently, long frozen anthrax emerged from thawing permafrost, killing a bunch of reindeer and some children. What other ancient plagues are in there, preserved cryogenically?

“Folly is a child of power,” Tuchman writes — the result of feeling invincible, maybe. We make stupid decisions because we think, having come this far (as a culture? as a species?) we’re indestructible. On some unexpected level, I almost fear we are. Even if we don’t succumb to the worst doomsday scenarios involved in climate change (a.k.a. “Hothouse Earth”), the climate is certain to get worse and less hospitable to humans in the near term. A lot of people, especially near coasts, especially near the Equator and in poverty-stricken areas, will be displaced, will suffer, and will die.

Yet it seems unlikely, when we remember the slow tapering off for the dinosaurs, that we’ll actually be wiped out in some kind of purifying “clean sweep,” that anti-fantasy. (Have we started to think of humanity itself as a plague on the planet? A friend of mine, when I mentioned that male sperm counts have been dropping for decades, basically said, “Good riddance.”) There’s some evidence that reduced population and reforestation after the Black Death helped trigger a mini ice age; that wasn’t any fun for them, considering it led to famine. But if there were another “great mortality,” it might have a tiny bit of upside in the long view of history: A pandemic, asteroid, or nuclear war could all lead to global cooling. It could offset some of our graver errors and reset the planet. When you look at it that way, it’s almost as though we are acting with a higher collective intelligence — a hive mind employing folly as a strategy. But perhaps that’s too generous, to call it intelligence; perhaps it’s just a mechanism, like whatever makes the parasite that drives the ant suicidally up the grass blade “want” what it “wants.” We don’t know what we want, or what purpose we serve.

Over the weekend, I starting having a look at generating static maps (rather than interactive web maps) using matplotlib/Basemap, with one eye on the reproducible educational materials production idea, and the ways in which Basemap might be useful to authors creating new materials that are capable of being reused and/or maintained, with modification.

One of the things that struck me was how authors may want to produce different sorts of map. Basemap has importers for several different flavours of map tile that can essentially be treated as map styles, so once you have defined your map, you should be able to tile it in different ways without having to redefine the map.

It’s also worth noting how easy it is to change the projection…

Another thing that struck me was how maps-on-maps (inset maps?) can often help provide a situate the wider geographical context of a region that is being presented in some detail.

There are quite a few hardwired defaults baked in and the generator could be parameterised in all sorts of ways (eg changing plot size, colour themes, etc.)

Also on my to do list for the basic maps is a simple way of adding things like great circle connectors between two points, adding clear named location points, etc etc.

You can find my work in progress/gettingstarted demos on this theme on Azure Notebooks here.

If you’re interested, here’s what I came up with for the inset maps… It’s longer than it needs to be because it incorporates various bits and pieces for rendering default / demo views if no actual regions are specified.

from operator import itemgetter

from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.inset_locator import zoomed_inset_axes
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.inset_locator import mark_inset
import numpy as np

def createInsetMap(base=None, inset=None,
                   zoom=None, loc=1, baseresolution=None,
                   insetresolution=None, connector=True):

    ''' Create an inset map for a particular region. '''

    fig = plt.figure()
    ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

    #Create a basemap

    #Add some default logic to provide some demos
    #If no args, use a World map
    if base is None or base.lower=='world':
        baseargs={'projection':'cyl','lat_0':0, 'lon_0':0}
    #If set UK base, then we can add a more detailed inset...
    elif isinstance(base,str) and base.lower()=='uk':
        baseargs={'llcrnrlon':ukllcrnrlon,'llcrnrlat':ukllcrnrlat,
                  'urcrnrlon':ukurcrnrlon,'urcrnrlat':ukurcrnrlat,
                  'resolution':'l'}
    else:
        #should really check base is a dict
        baseargs=base

    if baseresolution is not None:
        baseargs.update({'resolution':baseresolution})

    map1=Basemap(**baseargs)

    map1.drawmapboundary(fill_color='#f8f8ff')
    map1.drawcoastlines()

    plt.xticks(visible=False)
    plt.yticks(visible=False)

    #Now define the inset map

    #This default is to make for some nice default demos
    #With no explicit settings, inset UK on World map
    if base is None and inset is None:
        insetargs={'llcrnrlon':ukllcrnrlon,'llcrnrlat':ukllcrnrlat,
                  'urcrnrlon':ukurcrnrlon,'urcrnrlat':ukurcrnrlat,
                  'resolution':'l'}
        zoom=10
        loc=3
    #If the base is UK, and no inset is selected, demo an IW inset
    elif (isinstance(base,str) and base.lower()=='uk') and inset is None:
        insetargs={'llcrnrlon':iwllcrnrlon,'llcrnrlat':iwllcrnrlat,
                   'urcrnrlon':iwurcrnrlon,'urcrnrlat':iwurcrnrlat,
                   'resolution':'h'}
        zoom=10
        loc=2
    else:
        #Should really check inset is a dict...
        insetargs=inset

    axins = zoomed_inset_axes(ax, zoom, loc=loc)

    #The following seem to be set automatically?
    #axins.set_xlim(llcrnrlon, llcrnrlat)
    #axins.set_ylim(llcrnrlat, urcrnrlat)

    if insetresolution is not None:
        insetargs.update({'resolution':insetresolution})

    map2 = Basemap(ax=axins,**insetargs)

    #map2.drawmapboundary(fill_color='#7777ff')
    map2.fillcontinents(color='#ddaabb', lake_color='#7777ff', zorder=0)
    map2.drawcoastlines()
    map2.drawcountries()

    #Add connector lines from marked area on large map to zoomed area
    if connector:
        mark_inset(ax, axins, loc1=2, loc2=4, fc="none", ec="0.5")

    plt.show()

So, what other fragments of workflow, or use case, might be handy when creating (reusable / modifiable) maps in an educational context?

From the beginning we have had big plans for the Librem Key. When we first announced our partnership with Nitrokey to produce the Librem Key all we could talk about publicly was the standard USB security token features it would have and some of the integration possibilities between the Librem laptop and Librem Key that would make security easier for the average person. What we couldn’t say at the time was that we were also working toward making the Librem Key do something that doesn’t exist anywhere else–integrate it with the tamper-evident Heads BIOS to make it incredibly easy to tell whether your BIOS has been tampered with. In this post I’m going to talk about why we wanted to add this feature, some of the work that went into it, and dive into some of the technologies that are working behind the scenes to help you understand how it works.

Making Heads User Friendly

Heads is an incredibly powerful and cutting edge project that takes the boot-time security protections you get with products like Secure Boot but using free software, reproducible builds, and keys that are fully under your control. We are working toward our goal of having Heads on all of our laptops by default, but when we started working on that effort we realized that the default user interface was definitely aimed more toward security experts. At the time, when you booted into Heads you got a console screen with a text menu. If Heads detected any issues, typically it would dump you to a recovery shell with some technical error output.

Since we think every user would benefit from the protections Heads provides, we have done a lot of work to bring more user-friendly GUI menus to Heads. We started with a console-based GUI and later added our own custom tool fbwhiptail which uses the same syntax as the standard whiptail console menu tool used by Debian but outputs an even more user-friendly GUI on a framebuffer.

As we continued to work toward making Heads more user-friendly, we realized we had an opportunity with the Librem Key to add an incredibly powerful, secure, yet easy to use way to detect tampering that was much better than the default. Before we talk about where the Librem Key fits in, though, it’s important to understand how Heads detects tampering by default.

How Heads Detects BIOS Tampering

Heads uses the TPM in a computer as a standalone, trusted, tamper-proof chip it can use to store BIOS measurements and secrets. In my post Demonstrating Tamper Detection with Heads I walk through the full process but I will highlight some of the relevant points here.

The way Heads protects the BIOS from tampering is that when you first set up Heads, you store the current BIOS’s measurements into special registers in the TPM called PCRs (Platform Configuration Registers). At this time Heads also generates a random string and using the TPMTOTP tool originally created by Matthew Garrett it stores this secret in a special encrypted register in the TPM–this process is called sealing. The TPMTOTP tool also takes this secret and converts it into a QR code it displays on the screen. Then you can use a multi-factor authentication application on your phone to take a picture of this QR code and add this to any other multi-factor authentication secrets you manage.

The next time the system boots, measurements from every executable part of the boot process is sent by Heads to the TPM and stored in PCRs. Then Heads requests for the TPM to unseal the TPMTOTP secret it added previously. The TPM will only unseal that secret if all of the measurements in its PCRs match what it has stored from the valid, un-tampered-with BIOS. Once the secret is unsealed, Heads uses TPMTOTP to combine that secret with the current time and convert it into a 6-digit code. You then open up your multi-factor authentication application on your phone and compare the 6-digit code on your laptop screen with the 6-digit code on your phone. If both codes match, the BIOS hasn’t been tampered with. If the codes don’t match, either the time is off on either device, or someone has tampered with the BIOS or the TPM and generated and stored a new secret to replace the old one.

Improving on TOTP Codes

It’s important to note that Heads does not require you to verify the TOTP (Time-based One Time Password) code on the screen each time you boot. In fact it has no way of knowing whether you have or not–the whole point is that the laptop is authenticating itself to you, not the other way around. So there’s a good chance that your average user may not feel like going to the trouble of getting out their phone, launching an app, and inspecting the code each time they boot. Plus, this process requires that a user must have a smart phone that can run one of these apps. Users might test the code every so often but I imagine many would just hit Enter and boot their system more often than not.

We realized we could make the process more convenient and easier to use by taking the phone out of the equation or at least adding a Librem Key to the equation. While the Librem Key doesn’t have a screen like a phone, it does have a green and red LED. What could be easier than plugging in a USB device, booting the computer, and then inspecting the LED to see whether you are safe? By making it easy, users would be more likely to test their BIOS at each boot.

HOTP to Trot

Since we were working with Nitrokey to produce the Librem Key, we started collaborating with them on this feature. The first step was to think through how this authentication would work. Because the Librem Key doesn’t have a clock of its own, and we don’t want it to trust the clock on the laptop, we decided to use HOTP (HMAC-based One Time Password) instead of TOTP as our authentication protocol.

HOTP and TOTP are very similar to each other. In fact, you can argue that TOTP is just a specific implementation of HOTP. With HOTP both sides have a shared secret and initialize an always-incrementing counter. Each side combines its secret with the current counter value and generates an HMAC (hashed message authentication code) that in this case is converted into a 6-digit code. If the codes match, then one side has proven to the other that it has a copy of the shared secret and both sides will then increment their counter. With TOTP, you just exchange the always-incrementing counter with the current timestamp, typically rounded to 30-second increments.

For this to work we needed not only to change the firmware we were going to use for the Librem Key so that it could accept this special HOTP-over-USB authentication, we also needed a userspace tool that knew how to talk to the Librem Key. The end result after working with Nitrokey was a couple of changes to the firmware and a completely new userspace program called nitrokey-hotp-verification that contains two command-line tools we needed to include in Heads, libremkey_hotp_initialize and libremkey_hotp_verification. The former tool will initialize the a Librem Key with the current HOTP secret and counter value and the latter performs various HOTP functions with the Librem Key including testing a 6-digit HOTP code.

Heads, Meet Librem Key

The next step was to add Librem Key support to Heads. This required quite a few UI changes, modifications to the default tools it used when generating new TOTP secrets, and adding libremkey_hotp_initialize and libremkey_hotp_verification command line tools within Heads itself. Instead of doing away with the TOTP code we are actually using the same exact TPM secret, just in addition to converting it into a TOTP code, we are also combining it with the incrementing counter to generate an HOTP code too. So when you tell Heads that you want to seal a new TOTP secret, if your version of Heads has Librem Key support enabled, in addition to showing you a QR code, it will also prompt you to insert your Librem Key and set up the secret there as well using the libremkey_hotp_initialize program.

The next time you boot, in addition to displaying the TOTP code in the menu as always, it also attempts to communicate with your Librem Key using the libremkey_hotp_verification tool. If the Librem Key isn’t inserted, it gets a specific error and warns the user that the key isn’t plugged in, but it doesn’t stop the user from booting. If the user then plugs in the key and tells Heads to regenerate the code, it can do a second test from the GUI. If you lose your Librem Key or leave it behind somewhere, you can always just fall back to the standard TOTP code + phone approach until you have a new Librem Key to enroll.

After Heads sends the Librem Key an HOTP code, if the code matches what the Librem Key itself generates, it will flash a green LED and return a success code to Heads to display on the laptop screen. If the HOTP codes don’t match, the Librem Key will flash a red LED indefinitely and also send a specific error back to Heads which will cause it to show a red background and error dialog. Note that you shouldn’t trust the Heads UI to display this error, it’s only for convenience. A modified UI could lie to you so you should only trust the Librem Key LED at this phase of the boot process.

Demo Time

Here’s a short demo video of the Librem Key testing a valid BIOS and then one that detects tampering with Heads.

To simulate tampering, I just generate a brand new TOTP/HOTP secret in the TPM with the Librem Key unplugged. Since the Librem Key has the old secret, it will generate a completely different 6-digit HOTP code and take that as an error.

Anti-Interdiction Protection and The Future of Librem Key and Heads Integration

As I mentioned in the Introducing the Librem Key post, having the Librem Key vouch for the integrity of the BIOS opens up a lot of opportunities for more advanced anti-interdiction protection for those customers who are concerned about that risk. The way this would work, we would configure a Librem Key and Librem laptop running Heads before shipping and then ship the two packages separately. The idea here is that it would be more difficult for an attacker to interdict both packages than just one.

Then when you unbox everything, you can immediately test the integrity of your machine before you do anything else. At that point you could also generate completely new secrets between Heads and the Librem Key so there’s not even a chance we could have a copy of your secrets–the keys are under your control. For customers willing to wait, we could even ship the Librem Key first and only ship the laptop after they acknowledge receipt of the Librem Key. With delayed shipping you would have even more assurance that someone wouldn’t be able to modify both the Librem Key and laptop in transit.

If you can’t tell, we are very excited about all of the possibilities the Librem Key opens up to us to better protect you and your secrets, while still keeping security convenient and your keys in your own control. Stay tuned: as we unlock even more features in the Librem Key we’ll be sure to post about it here.

The post The Librem Key Makes Tamper Detection Easy appeared first on Purism.

I went to San Jose this June not expecting much from macOS. After all, it’s a mature OS that already did what I need. My expectations were reinforced by rumors and leaks that Apple would introduce a Dark Mode and the fact that High Sierra introduced several significant foundational changes to macOS. I concluded that Mojave would focus primarily on a design refresh.

I was wrong. Dark Mode is the most visible and one of the most significant changes to macOS, but Mojave is much more than a UI refresh. Dark Mode and Mojave’s other system updates include productivity enhancements that have made meaningful improvements to the way I work on my Mac.

It took some time to acclimate to Dark Mode, but now I prefer it. As much as I like Dark Mode though, the most important changes to macOS have been those that surface existing functionality in new places making them more useful than in the past.

Mojave adds a collection of Desktop, Finder, and screenshot tools that are notable for the way they meet users where and how they work. It’s a functional approach to computing that has had a bigger impact on my day-to-day workflow than other recent updates to macOS, even where the Mojave updates provide new ways to do things I could already do before.

Supported By

Ulysses

Ulysses, the ultimate writing app for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

There’s a lot to cover in Mojave, so I’m going to dive right in and dispense with explaining how to set it up. Apple has a whole page devoted to the topic that you can explore if you’d like. Instead, let’s start by considering how Mojave's Dark Mode.

Dark Mode and Accent Colors

Dark Mode

High-resolution Gallery previews make it possible to spot yourself in a crowd.

Dark Mode, which can be enabled from the General section of System Preferences, is the natural place to start because it’s the feature that will be in front of you all day long as soon as it’s enabled.

Dark interfaces have been available in Apple’s pro apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for years. One advantage of dark UIs is that they emphasize the content rather than the app, which is useful when editing video or photos. Dark UIs also eliminate the harsh glare of a white screen in your eyes if you spend long hours in front of a screen.

Some of the benefits of dark UIs may be merely psychological too, but after two years in front of a dark theme in Ulysses, I’m convinced that it’s been easier on my eyes. I also prefer dark themes aesthetically.

Since installing Mojave and spending a lot of time exclusively in Dark Mode, I can report that it takes time to get used to, but it’s grown on me. At first, I felt like I had a harder time identifying overlapping windows because it was harder to see their drop shadows. Over time that feeling has faded, and I plan to stick with Dark Mode going forward.

At first, I found it harder to distinguish between windows in Dark Mode.

Before enabling Dark Mode, any time I would switch away from Ulysses’ dark theme to something with a bright white background, the abrupt change was jarring. That problem is improved with Mojave, but it’s not likely to be eliminated anytime soon I’m afraid. That’s because when you turn on Dark Mode, the appearance of third-party apps only changes if their developers have implemented Dark Mode. It’s not automatic.

This means you’re likely to have apps that don’t support Dark Mode on your Mac right away. The good news is that developers seem to recognize that if they don’t implement Dark Mode, they are going to stick out like a sore thumb. As a result, many have already made the transition as you can see in the gallery of third-party apps with Dark Modes that I’ve collected below.

Dark Mode won’t be for everyone, but I expect many people will prefer it, and for them, finding apps that support Dark Mode will become a priority. I also suspect that the number of people who run their Macs in Dark Mode full-time will be large enough that third-party developers who don’t implement it run a substantial risk of causing users to look for alternatives to their apps.

The reason Dark Mode isn’t automatically applied to all apps is that it’s not as simple as making the window chrome dark gray. There is a lot going on to make Dark Mode work. If you look closely, the grays change depending on the colors behind them. Apple is using the color of images on your Desktop and behind what you see to subtly tint the window chrome, so the grays harmonize with the rest of the environment. Even the drop shadows beneath the windows, the icons in toolbars, and the Dock’s trash can change between Light and Dark Modes to provide a cohesive experience for users.

Because it’s not a trivial implementation detail, it may be a while before your favorite apps support Dark Mode. Even then, however, not everything will be dark. Apple explained to developers at WWDC that some apps, like like photo browsers and video editors benefit from always being dark, but there are exceptions. Apple believes that other apps still benefit from the contrast of a white background and dark text, which is an option in Mail for example. In Mail, you can switch the message compose window to white, but I prefer that to be dark too and have not yet run across a situation where I want an app to run with a light-colored background.

Apple Mail lets users turn on Dark Mode for message windows.

Although Apple suggested that it can be appropriate to make content areas like Mail’s message composition window light, I don’t like it in the few apps I’ve seen take that approach. I hope that, like Apple, they too provide the ability to switch to a dark content area.

I also appreciate apps like Acorn that provide a setting to allow users to switch between system-selected Light or Dark Mode, always-on Light Mode, or always-on Dark Mode or support themes, which allows for the same sort of customization. I haven’t seen many apps that take Acorn’s approach, but I like the choice it gives users to customize their Mac environment.

Acorn gives users the option to follow the system-set appearance or force Light or Dark Mode regardless of system settings.

Safari is another app where you’ll see a lot of white. Although the window chrome is gray, the web content is whatever color the publisher decides to make it. Navigating to sites like The New York Times, with its predominantly white background, feel like having a flashlight shined in your eyes after you’ve been using Dark Mode for a while.

Apps that haven't been updated for Dark Mode are conspicuous.

Applied system-wide, Dark Mode was hard to adjust to initially. Now though, I don’t want to go back. That’s been especially true since early September, one of the busiest times of the year at MacStories when my hours in front of a screen got longer. It won’t be for everyone, but if you decide to try Dark Mode, give it a while to sink in before calling it quits.

Accent Colors

Also new in Mojave are Accent colors. Set to blue by default, these are the colors used by macOS to indicate that a radio button or other controls have been selected. In addition to blue, there are options for purple, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, and graphite, which was also previously available with blue as an ‘Appearance.’ Each shade looks a little different depending on whether you’re in Light or Dark Mode.

Pages with green Highlights and purple Accents.

When you select a new Accent color, it automatically switches to the corresponding Highlight color too. That’s the color used for things like selected text, and despite its changing automatically to match the Accent color, it can be set independently after the fact, which strikes me as something that ‘past Apple’ wouldn’t have done. Still, the company has done a good job of picking colors that in combination don’t clash horribly with one another, even if some combinations won’t be to everyone’s taste. On balance, I like the addition. I’ll probably stick with the familiar blue default, but I appreciate the option to fine-tune the look of my environment.

The Desktop

The Dock

Airmail, 1Password, and Deliveries are recently used apps separated from the rest of the Dock by a short divider.

The Dock receive the same Dark Mode treatment as the rest of the OS, though you can no longer only set the Dock and menu bar to a dark appearance in Light Mode. The Dock also inherited a handy feature from iOS: in the Dock section of System Preferences, there is now an option to show your most recently opened apps at the far right end of the Dock, or the bottom if your Dock is pinned to the side. Recent apps are separated by a divider that’s not quite as tall as the one used to separate Downloads and the Trash from your apps. Unlike iOS, the recent apps section of the Dock is not limited to just three items.

Wallpapers and Hot Corners

Mojave includes an assortment of new wallpapers.

Mojave adds two dynamic wallpapers that change during the day and can be found in the Desktop and Screen Saver section of System Preferences. One called Mojave shows a dune in the Mojave desert as the lighting changes throughout the day, transitioning through 16 different images. The second dynamic wallpaper is called Solar Gradients, which is a more abstract wallpaper that connotes the time of day through color gradients.

Alternatively, you can choose from a selection of nine other static wallpapers. Two are static versions of the daytime and nighttime Mojave dynamic wallpaper, and the remaining seven include a variety of desert scenes captured at different times of day, providing a nice spectrum of colors and brightnesses that work well in Light or Dark Mode.

The Desktop and Screen Saver section of System Preferences is also where you can set hot corners to perform system actions when you move your pointer into a corner of the screen. With Mojave, Apple has added the option to lock the screen, which for people who work in an open environment with sensitive information will be a nice alternative way to lock down your system before stepping away from your Mac.

Stacks

Stacks bring order to the chaos of a messy Desktop.

In a nod to the fact that many people park files and folders on their Desktop in a cluttered, chaotic mess, Apple has created Stacks. Stacks can be accessed by right-clicking the macOS Desktop and enabling the ‘Use Stacks’ option. As soon as you do, whatever jumble of files and folders you have scattered across your Desktop animate to the right-hand side of the Desktop, ordering themselves into neat piles. Folders aren’t stacked, but are neatly lined up too.

Stacks can be organized by kind, date last opened, date added, date modified, date created, and tags. You can scrub through items in a stack with a two-finger horizontal swipe on a trackpad. The file thumbnails can be a little small for this to be effective when files look similar, but it works surprisingly well for images and video files.

Clicking on a stack expands it in place between your other stacks so you can see the icon of each file it contains. If you’ve got a large stack, expanding it can extend rows of files far across your screen. At the end of the expanded rows will be any stacks below the one you expanded, which can be confusing until you understand what’s happening. Once expanded, you can use Quick Look to preview a file or do anything else you could previously do with a file on the Desktop. Click on the downward facing arrow icon above the first file in the expanded stack, and your stack will be collapsed again.

I like that Apple has recognized the ways many people work on their Macs and have provided a tool to tidy up the Desktop a bit. I often park files for projects that are in process on the Desktop. It’s rarely more than a dozen or so files that I clean up at the start of the next week, but sometimes it gets more out of hand. In either situation, I’ve benefitted from stacking files (usually by kind), which has made it easier to find what I need quickly. The feature works best with a limited collection of files and folders, but even if you have dozens of files on your Desktop, Stacks is a quick and painless way to bring some order and organization to them.

The Finder

Cover Flow was first implemented by Apple in iTunes in 2006 but found its way into the Finder in 2007. The interface element was originally meant to imitate flipping through record albums, but the Finder extended the metaphor to folders and files. As tastes changed, Cover Flow was dropped from iOS devices and iTunes but remained in the Finder, which has always struck me as the least natural fit for its card flipping interaction. In any event, we can all pour one out for Cover Flow today, because with Mojave, it has now been eliminated from all of Apple’s products.

Gallery View

Not great for navigating folder structures, but the Gallery View is perfect for browsing photos and video.

The spiritual successor to Cover Flow is Gallery View, which displays a row of small thumbnails along the bottom of the Finder window with a preview of the selected file above it. If you have a folder of images to review and manage, Gallery view is useful, but it’s not a good option for folder navigation. I find moving through folder hierarchies harder with the Gallery view because depending on your window size, there aren’t many icons in the row at the bottom of the window at one time. Also, to see what the name of a folder is, you have to hover your pointer over it or click on it and view the name in the Preview pane unless you turn on 'Show filename' in the Finder view options. That makes the Gallery view a much better option for visual content where you don’t need to move up and down a complex folder structure.

Finder Preview Pane

Show Preview Options opens a separate window of all the metadata that can be displayed for a file.

The Preview pane got much more useful with Mojave too. Until recently, I rarely kept the Finder's Preview pane open. If that sounds like you, I’d suggest giving it another try. Use the shortcut ⌘⇧P to open the pane if it’s not showing in your current Finder view.

The same information available in the High Sierra Preview pane is in Mojave too, but there are options to include so much more. From the Finder’s View menu you can select the new Show Preview Options menu item. That will open a separate window with a list of every bit of metadata that can be shown in the Preview pane for the currently-selected file type. Just tick off the checkboxes for the data you care about and you’ll see the information appear in the Preview pane.

The ability to customize the Preview pane on a per-filetype basis makes it much more useful. Although everyone has hundreds of different kinds of files on their Mac, most people probably only work with a handful on a regular basis. If you work with the same types of files over and over, you probably need certain data about them time and again, which is what makes the new Preview options so powerful. One drawback though is that for some types of files, like video files, the metadata window can get very long, so viewing it isn’t a great experience on a smaller laptop screen.

Quick Actions

The other new feature of the Preview pane is Quick Actions, which are located at the bottom of the pane. Quick Actions are a new type of system extension for manipulating files from the Finder’s Preview pane or the Touch Bar. Mojave has Quick Actions to Rotate, Markup, Create PDF, and Trim, all of which work great with images. Trim and Rotate also work with certain video files as does Trim with MP4 audio. Third-party apps can add their own Quick Actions, which are available behind a ‘More…’ button next to any built-in Quick Actions. You can create Quick Actions yourself in Automator too.

Quick Actions are a new type of system extension.

None of the third-party Mojave-compatible apps or betas that I’ve tried include their own Quick Actions yet. The lack of support for Quick Actions among third-party developers is a little surprising. It’s also disappointing because I’ve found that I like Quick Actions a lot.

Whether you’ll take to them too will depend on how you use the Finder. I tend to navigate folders and files from my Magic Trackpad and not with the keyboard. As a result, having a shortcut to a commonly performed file actions close by has been extremely handy. It’s better than a Service too because the icons next to Quick Actions make them easier to identify.

Even if third parties are slow to adopt Quick Actions, I’ve begun to extend them myself with Automator. One of the file actions I perform over and over every day is uploading screenshots to the MacStories CDN. The process is actually a few steps. First, images are sent to Kraken.io to be compressed, then they are uploaded to Rackspace, and a URL is returned. We have a web app that can manage the process, but it’s a little slow and cumbersome.

Custom Quick Actions can be built in Automator.

Quick Actions are a new output of Automator. With the help of one of my kids who was sitting around on the couch all summer, we built an Automator Quick Action that runs a Python script which handles the process end-to-end. When it’s finished, the Quick Action copies the URL to the Clipboard and sends a notification that it’s finished, showing how much the image’s size was reduced by Kraken. Because I’m already browsing in the Finder for images to upload, it’s trivially easy to pick my custom Quick Action and a few seconds later have a URL I can paste into a Markdown document.

Custom Quick Actions are found behind the More… button in the Preview Pane.

My hope with Quick Actions is that they are the first step in a ground-up re-imagining of automation on the Mac where Quick Actions become the equivalent of shortcuts on iOS and Automator is replaced by something closer to the Shortcuts app on iOS. Automator has served Mac users well for years, but it doesn’t take long using Automator before you need to resort to scripting inside Automator workflows to get things done. Shortcuts supports scripting too, but I’ve found I can create far more complex automations on iOS without resorting to scripts, which makes it accessible to more people.

Finder Miscellany

Folders can be displayed at the top of the Desktop.

As with any OS update, there are hundreds of little changes scattered throughout Mojave. Some are inconsequential, but others, while small, are nonetheless handy and worth noting.

In another nod to the reality that many people use their Desktop as their primary Finder folder even if they don’t think of it like that, Apple has added an option for folders to appear at the top of your Desktop when sorting by name. The ability to do that in a Finder window isn’t new, but previously, that was impossible when organizing your Desktop. I don’t expect to get much use of this myself, but combined with Stacks, it’s a much better system for organizing files and folders on the Desktop than was available before.

Screenshots and Screen Recording

As you can tell from reading this review, I take a lot of screenshots. The Mac has always had a rich set of keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots of your whole screen, a portion of the screen, or a window, saving either to the Desktop or Clipboard. With Mojave, Apple has expanded the tools available and made the experience more like what you find on iOS.

When you take a screenshot, a thumbnail appears briefly in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

The first thing you’ll notice when you take a screenshot in Mojave is that a little thumbnail appears in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, similar to what happens on iOS. Click on the thumbnail and a preview opens, giving you an opportunity to make simple edits to the screenshot, which I cover below. After a few seconds, if you don’t do anything with the thumbnail, it slides off the screen to the right and is saved wherever you’ve designated screenshots to go, which by default is the Desktop.

Apple has also added a new screenshot shortcut: ⌘⇧5. Press that combination of keys and a small, translucent toolbar appears at the bottom of your screen with buttons to create the same screenshot types described above as well as some new options.

⌘⇧5 displays a screenshot HUD at the bottom of the Desktop.

The new toolbar can also grab screen recordings. There’s a button for a full-screen recording and a user-selected portion of the screen. There’s also a timer option to delay the start of a screen recording 5 or 10 seconds, which gives you time to click record then set up your windows for the recording.

The timer can be set with the new Options button on the toolbar, which also offers additional save locations for your screenshots and recordings. Screenshots can be saved to Desktop, Documents, Clipboard, Mail, Messages, Preview, or Other Location, which opens a Finder window. Screen recordings have a similar set of saving options with the addition of QuickTime Player, but not Preview or the Clipboard. There are also options for the toolbar to remember your most recent selection, show or hide the floating thumbnail in the corner of your screen, and to show or hide the pointer in screenshots and recordings. If you’re making a screen recording, you’ll also see a list of any available microphones.

Quick Look

Quick Look has been revised too, dovetailing nicely with Mojave’s new screenshot and screen recording features. Previously if you performed a Quick Look of a file, you had only two options: a button to open the file in the default app for that file type and a Share button for sending it to another app. Those two buttons are included in Mojave too, but Apple has also added tools to allow you to make basic edits to a document without ever opening another app.

The markup controls available in Quick Look on Mojave are very close to the tools found in Preview.

For images, the new tools available via Quick Look closely mirror what’s available under the Markup button in Preview. You can draw on images, create shapes, magnify or highlight portions of the image, add text, crop, rotate, and add a signature too. As someone who uses Preview all the time only to add my signature to contracts or make minor edits before sending a PDF or image to someone, this new feature is going to be a significant time saver and leave me with one less app to close later.

For video and .M4A audio files, the options are simpler, but useful. Mojave adds buttons to rotate a video and trim it. Used in conjunction with the new screen recording feature, the trim tool is particularly powerful for video. Instead of opening the file in QuickTime, you can trim it in Quick Look then click the share button to send it to another app. That’s exactly what I did with the videos in this review. After recording the videos with the new Mojave screen recording feature, I trimmed any extra footage off the ends, saved them, and later uploaded the files to our CDN. The trim feature is less useful for audio files since it only seems to support M4A files and not WAV, MP3, or other file types.

Continuity Camera

Continuity Camera is the type of feature from Apple that I love. As much as people like to argue about whether the Mac or iOS is a better productivity platform, the reality is that sometimes, one is better than the other, but other times, they’re best together. Continuity Camera is one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen in a while of macOS leveraging the mobility of iOS to make the two together greater than the sum of their parts.

Continuity Camera lets you insert images in apps and the Finder with an iOS device.

With Continuity Camera, you can insert a photo or scan anywhere on your Mac that can accept an image using your iPhone or iPad’s camera. For example, you can right-click in TextEdit, Ulysses, Pages, and many other apps, pick Take Photo or Scan Document and your iPhone comes to life ready to go. You can even use Continuity Camera inside the Finder where the right-click menu item is called ‘Import from iPhone.’

If you’re taking a photo, you can use either the rear or front-facing cameras. After tapping the shutter, you’re asked to confirm whether to use the photo or retake it. Exiting to the home screen cancels the operation.

Scans work the same way they do on iOS with the same flash, color, and shutter controls that you find on iOS if you scan a document into Apple’s Notes app. The key difference is that with Continuity Camera, you can drop a scan into any app that will accept an image, while the same scan capture interface is limited to Notes on iOS.

As someone who moves between a Mac, iPhone, and iPad all day long, I love Continuity Camera. If I’m already in Messages on my Mac and want to share a quick photo of something or scan a receipt to a folder in the Finder, my iPhone is a great solution because it’s fast and sitting there next to me ready to help.

I wish though that Apple would adopt this sort of tight integration elsewhere. I’ve long argued that Handoff should work with iTunes on the Mac so I can continue listening to something at my desk that I started on my iPhone. Hopefully, Continuity Camera is a sign of more Mac and iOS integrations to come.

What’s Gone or Going?

As with any OS update, Apple has removed features throughout the system too including the Safari Extension Gallery, which will be eliminated at the end of 2018, Back to My Mac, social network integration in the share sheet and other parts of macOS, Jabber and other chat services in Messages, and support for OpenGL and OpenCL, which have been used to develop many games, has been deprecated.

The Apps

Mac App Store

The all-new Mac App Store.

Mojave marks the introduction of an all-new Mac App Store. Modeled in part after Apple’s successful redesign of the iOS App Store, the new Mac App Store includes some interesting features unique to it.

The first thing that struck me about the new Mac App Store is that it looks a lot like the apps Apple ported from iOS to the Mac even though there is no iOS counterpart to the Mac App Store. As the only other new app introduced this year, perhaps that indicates a shift in the design language of Mac apps that’s intended to make apps ported to the Mac look more at home there.

Like its iOS sibling, the new Mac App Store’s focus is on editorial content. The Store takes a lower-density approach like the iOS App Store, with a slightly different layout that suits its resizable window. The Store is divided into different sections than the iOS App Store too – Discover, Create, Work, Play, Develop, Categories, and Updates – which Apple says better reflect the Mac app world. Also notable, is that macOS system updates, which were housed in the Mac App Store since 2012, have been moved to System Preferences.

The Mac App Store has its work cut out for it. The Store never took off the way its iOS counterpart did. The volume of notable apps released on the Mac App Store is less than it used to be and over time, many important apps left the Store. Nor did the Mac App Store ever get the same attention the iOS App Store did, a problem that only got worse with the introduction of the redesigned iOS App Store, which seemed to monopolize Apple's attention. Add to that the fact that the Mac App Store has a history of being buggy, and it has a lot of hurdles to overcome to grow even remotely close to the importance of the iOS App Store.

It’s hard to judge how the new Mac App Store will perform before it launches. I like the new design, and an editorial focus should give users a reason to visit, but I wonder how often content on the Mac App Store can be refreshed. The lower app volume will make it difficult to update editorial content daily. I expect we’ll see something less than that; perhaps two or three times per week.

Apple is also working to bring powerful productivity apps back to the Mac App Store and others to it for the first time, including Panic’s Transmit, BBEdit from Bare Bones Software, Adobe's Lightroom CC, and Microsoft's Office 365. Those apps should help attract developers who have continued to sell directly to customers, but the option to sell outside the store necessarily means that the Mac App Store won’t ever be the one-stop shop the iOS App Store is.

The Mac App Store also needs to be less buggy too. During most of the beta period, the Mac App Store has generally been fine, but my use of it has also been fairly light. However, recently Apple updated its Store terms of service, to which it insists you agree before updating apps. That’s fine except that when I tried to update an app under an Apple ID other than the one I was logged into, the Mac App Store presented a blank modal window that blocked updating with no explanation of what was going on.

I’ve dealt with bugs related to using multiple Apple IDs for long enough that I was able to diagnose the issue relatively quickly, but that was based on experience, not the blank screen presented by the Mac App Store. I may be an edge case, but the episode does make me wonder whether the same effort that I expect will go into editorial content has gone into the app itself.

Apple has a long way to go to fix the Mac App Store. I hope it's able to do so. It may not make sense for all developers, but the Mac App Store is a great turn-key solution for new developers who are getting started and a good way to encourage users to explore new apps.

iTunes

The new Friends Mix.

The biggest change you’ll see to iTunes is the Friends playlist that Apple began testing as part of the Mojave and iOS betas in August. Apple Music subscribers will find the Friends playlist, which is updated on Mondays, in the For You section of iTunes. The playlist collects what it describes as ‘the best of what your friends are listening to.’ My sense from the playlists I’ve seen since August is that the collection is tuned heavily to the areas where your tastes overlap with your friends, though that’s not entirely the case. Roughly one-third of my recent Friends playlists have been from artists that I don’t recognize.

As with iOS 12's Music app, you can search Apple Music song lyrics on iTunes. The new feature seems to have been added to Apple Music on iTunes the same day iOS 12 was released.

Searching for a song based on lyrics.

The remainder of iTunes remains the same, though it looks particularly good in Dark Mode, which makes album art stand out much better than in Light Mode. I’m disappointed we didn’t see a standalone Apple Music app this year, but in light of the status of the migration of iOS apps to the Mac, I suspect it will be a while yet before that is a possibility, if a port of the current iOS app is what Apple has planned.

Safari

Favicons make it easier to identify sites among a sea of tabs.

Safari received many refinements that were released shortly before Mojave and parallel the changes made to the iOS version. Many of the changes revolve around passwords and security, but there are other notable adjustments too.

One small change that a lot of people are excited about is the addition of favicons to Safari tabs. I didn’t think much of this feature until I tried it. If you have a lot of tabs open, which truncates the name of the sites, favicon are a great way to distinguish them quickly.

Strong password AutoFill.

Safari makes it easier than ever to choose unique, strong passwords by auto-filling sign-up pages with suggested passwords. You don’t have to accept the password generated, but Safari makes it so easy that hopefully most people will go with the suggestion.

Your passwords are available from the Passwords tab of Safari’s preferences too. Here, you can enable AutoFill for usernames and passwords, browse and manage your passwords, and address any issues discovered by Safari’s new password audit tool. Safari flags reused passwords with a yellow warning label that lets you know on how many other sites you use the same password. Clicking the warning links to the related site so you can visit and change your password.

Safari also addresses cross-site user tracking. Apple has added what it calls Intelligent Tracking Protection to make it more difficult for sites to track you across the web. The company is also anonymizing your system configuration to help prevent sites from identifying you using a technique known as browser fingerprinting.

There are other smaller changes too. If you have pop-ups blocked, Safari now lets you know in the address bar if one has been blocked, which is useful if you’re stuck on a site not realizing that it’s insisting on using a popup for some important functionality. The gray theme of Safari Reader is also higher-contrast than before for a better reading experience.

FaceTime

Group FaceTime calls with support for up to 32 participants was originally announced at WWDC as coming with iOS 12 and macOS 10.14, but has been delayed until later this fall. There are, however, a couple of other tweaks that have been made to the FaceTime UI.

The control at the top of FaceTime, which used to separate video and audio calls, has been replaced by a control divided into all FaceTime calls and missed calls. Now Audio and Video buttons appear at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar after you’ve selected a contact to call, which strikes me as a more intuitive approach.

Siri

It's sure nice to have Siri support HomeKit on the Mac.

One of the most problematic issues with Siri is the fact that it works differently depending on the device you’re using, and the types of queries it can handle varies. Siri on the Mac, which has been one of the most limited implementations of the voice assistant, gained two notable capabilities with Mojave.

The first is the ability to control HomeKit devices, which works just as it does on an iOS device or HomePod. The second capability enables querying your database of passwords. Ask Siri to show your Netflix password, for example, and it opens up the Passwords tab of Safari’s Preferences pane and asks you for your password to unlock the Keychain. Once entered, it displays the results of the search you requested from Siri. It’s good to see Siri gaining capabilities on the Mac, but I’d like to see ‘Hey Siri’ functionality added too, along with better parity with Siri on iOS.

Project Sneak Peek

In June at WWDC, Apple confirmed that it was working on a multi-year project to bring iOS apps to the Mac. Apple didn’t give the project or its underlying technologies a name. All Apple called it was a ’Sneak Peek,’ and so will I.

Sneak Peek is a way for Apple to help iOS developers bring their apps to macOS without having to rewrite their apps’ UIs in AppKit entirely. Only the broadest of explanations were given at WWDC, but the approach involves taking certain UIKit frameworks used to build iOS apps, bringing them to macOS’s AppKit, and adapting them to that environment, so they work with things like pointing devices and window resizing.

The developer tools to port iOS apps to macOS were promised by Apple sometime in 2019, but in the meantime, Apple is testing four of its apps in what it describes as ‘Phase I’ of the project. Those apps – News, Stocks, Home, and Voice Memos – were all iOS exclusives until Mojave. All four were good choices for Phase I of Apple’s experiment because each includes relatively few views and controls, and those they include translate well to macOS for the most part. While it’s far too early to judge Apple’s efforts to bring iOS apps to the Mac, it’s worth taking a look at each of the four apps both as new built-in macOS apps and as experiments in adapting iOS apps to the Mac.

Home

Home on iOS is dominated by square buttons with rounded corners for each HomeKit-enabled device. The same holds true for the macOS version. The first major difference is that the tab bar along the bottom of the iOS app is now a segmented control in the Mac app’s title bar.

The title bar also includes a plus button for adding a scene or automation, which is notable because, on iOS, that button adds a scene or an accessory. The other thing notable about the buttons at the top of Home’s window, which it shares with the other Sneak Peek apps, is that they sit in line with the window controls whereas a typical Mac app would have a clearly-separated toolbar below the title bar. Here, it’s as though the title bar and toolbar were merged.

There is no Edit button in the Mac app’s title bar. On iOS, that button makes the accessory buttons jiggle so they can be reordered. That’s not necessary on the Mac, where the buttons can be reordered by dragging and dropping. It’s worth noting too that any changes made in the Mac app sync almost immediately to its iOS counterpart.

There is also a Home button with an icon of a house on it in the title bar of the Mac app for quickly switching rooms of your home. On iOS, the Home button is for setting up one or more homes, which you can't do on the Mac. On iOS, the button for switching rooms uses a list icon and is only available from the Rooms tab, and unlike Home on the Mac you can also switch rooms be swiping between them in the Rooms tab.

HomeKit device settings are adjustable on the Mac. Unlike iOS where you long press on an accessory’s button to open its controls and settings, on the Mac you double-click the buttons or right-click and choose ‘Settings.’ It’s an interaction that’s a little awkward given that single-click interactions are the norm for buttons on macOS. However, buttons don’t have settings associated with them on the Mac either. The choice to use a single-click to turn accessories on and off is probably the best one under the circumstances, but it’s also an example where the differences between iOS and Mac apps start to show.

Date Pickers are an example of a control that doesn't work as well on a Mac.

Another awkward area in Home for the Mac is Automation. If you set up a rule based on a date or time, you are shown an iOS-style spinning tumbler. That interaction works well on iOS, but it’s clunky on the Mac and I hope it’s replaced by something more like the Calendar app’s UI for picking dates and times. I’d also like to see Home add Automator actions to create automations beyond the Home app itself.

Despite some areas that need work, I’m glad to have Home on my Mac. While accessory buttons sometimes feel crowded on my iPhone, that’s not the case when I’m running the app on my Mac with a large display. The convenience of using Home on the Mac or iOS makes it an inherently more valuable app too. My most used apps are those that I can use whichever platform I’m on, which is something I hope Apple’s cross-platform efforts will make easier for third-party developers to adopt too.

News

News is an interesting contrast to Home. Instead of moving its iPhone tab bar to the Mac app’s title bar like Home does, News on the Mac resembles the iPad version of the app that moves the Today and news digests to the top two spots in the sidebar followed by an expansion of iOS’s Channels tab, which lets you see all the news sources you follow at once. Unlike the iPad though, the Mac version of news features a collapsible sidebar. You can change the sources you follow by clicking the Edit button, which displays very iOS-like delete buttons and reordering handles for managing the list.

Curiously, the Mac and iPad versions of News omit your local weather which is included on the iPhone version. News also declares its name in the title bar, something you don’t usually see in Mac apps except for things like System Preferences. Unlike Home and Stocks though, News does have a simple Preferences window, which brings it a little closer to what you’d expect from a Mac app.

Stocks

Stocks takes a similar design approach to News by closely resembling the iPad version of the app. The left-hand sidebar lists any stocks you follow, and the right-hand pane features business news stories.

Clicking on a stock opens related charts and news in the right-hand pane, and there’s a link to ‘Business News’ at the top of the left-hand sidebar to return to general business news, which is a little strange because there’s also a back button in the title bar that only works when you’re browsing general news stories.

At the bottom of the left-hand sidebar is a button similar to the iOS app for editing your stock list and adding new ones. It parallels the iOS app’s implementation, but I think a plus button in the title bar would be a better choice on the Mac. Stocks also dispenses with including the current date at the top of the app, which is an odd choice.

Voice Memos

Like News, Voice Memos is almost identical on the Mac and iPad. The only real difference is the absence of a delete button in the UI. Unique to Voice Memos though is that it syncs via iCloud but doesn’t have an entry in the iCloud syncing section of System Preferences. Instead, it's tucked away behind the Options button for iCloud Drive, which strikes me as not being sufficiently discoverable when the other apps have their own entries in the iCloud syncing section of System Preferences.

Where Does Project Sneak Peek Go Next?

Apple’s efforts to bring iOS apps to the Mac are still in their infancy. Despite rough edges, I’m optimistic about where they are headed. One thing that I’m particularly interested to see added are more complex content creation apps. Other than Voice Memos' simple UI for recording audio, none of the apps Apple has converted involve activities like writing, photo editing, drawing, or layout and design. By their nature, those sorts of apps are more complex and have more controls that need to be translated to Mac equivalents, but that will be necessary if the iOS apps brought to the Mac are anything more than a reimagining of Dashboard widgets.

32-Bit Support and System Security

Checking for 32-bit apps.

With Mojave, Apple continues to advance into a 64-bit future. macOS 10.14 will be the last version of the OS to support 32-bit apps. When the next major release of macOS is released, presumably in the fall of 2019, all apps will need to be 64-bit compatible. For now, the system warns users that an app's developer needs to update a 32-bit app when it's opened, but the app will still work. However in the next version of macOS, 32-bit apps will no longer run. I was pleasantly surprised to find very few apps 32-bit apps on my Mac when I checked.

You can check 64-bit compatibility by going to ‘About This Mac’ in the Apple menu of your Mac’s menu bar, then running a System Report. Go to the Applications section of the report and sort by 64-bit compatibility.

Consent is needed for apps to use system hardware like your Mac's microphone and camera.

Mojave's security has also been enhanced. The OS prevents developers from using a longer list of system hardware and data without user consent, which includes hardware such as the camera and microphone, along with data such as:

• Messages histories
• Mail databases
• Safari data
• Time Machine backups
• Location and
• System cookies

Apps sold outside the Mac App Store will be more secure too. An app notarization program has been launched for apps that are signed with an Apple developer ID to help prevent malware from spreading. Currently, the program is voluntary, but it will be required in the future. The program will allow Apple to pull the plug on a single rogue app instead of everything related to a developer’s ID if there is a problem with just one app. As Apple's Mac footprint has grown relative to the rest of the PC industry, it's reassuring to see the company continue to deploy countermeasures against malicious software.

Conclusion

I went into testing Mojave curious about Dark Mode, but not expecting the update to change the way I work. Although Dark Mode took getting used to, it’s grown on me to the point where I’m not using Light Mode anymore at all. I still occasionally find it harder to distinguish between windows when my Desktop is cluttered than when I’m using Light Mode, but the tradeoffs have been worth it overall. Most importantly, I simply like the look of Dark Mode. Apple’s system apps – especially iTunes, Messages, Notes, and Xcode – look great in Dark Mode.

I also feel like using Dark Mode has been more comfortable for my eyes. Even if that’s just a placebo effect, it’s made it easier to work at my Mac when I’ve been busy, which I appreciate.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Dark Mode though, I’ve found that the real advantages to Mojave have been its collection of Finder, Desktop, and screenshot enhancements. The interesting part of many of these Mojave improvements is that the tasks they enable are possible one way or another in High Sierra. The difference is that Mojave surfaces them better.

For example, the image uploading automation I describe in the Quick Actions section works on High Sierra as a Service or via Alfred. I prefer it as a Quick Action though because I’m usually using my Magic Trackpad to navigate several screenshots at one time as I work. With Quick Actions close at hand in the Preview pane, it’s easier to start an upload, switch to my text editor, and paste in the URL that the Quick Action returns. I’ve never liked the Services menu because there’s no good way to tell one from another; it’s just a long text list. Quick Actions surface the tools I use where I need them.

The same is true of the Markup and other tools available from Quick Look. In the past, Preview always seemed to be open on my Mac. I’d open it to make a quick edit or two and then forget to close it. I also had to edit in Preview, save, go back to the file and upload it, or send it to another app. It may seem like a small thing, but being able to accomplish all those actions within the Finder saves a lot of time when you do them over and over. It also eliminates potential distractions as I switch between apps.

I also appreciate the Desktop organization tools Apple added to Mojave. I tend to accumulate several files on my Desktop as the week progresses and I’m working on a project that involves multiple files in various stages of completion. That mess is usually cleaned up by the following week, but being able to create Stacks by Kind or Date Modified is tidier and a much better way to sift through the files I’ve accumulated during the week.

There’s nothing among Mojave’s new features that has allowed me to accomplish things I couldn’t in High Sierra, but that’s not something you see very often in a mature operating system. Instead, Mojave takes what I do today and removes some of the friction from my existing workflows. How much Mojave improves how you work will depend on what you do, but I’ve been very happy with how its combination of features has made everyday tasks faster and easier to accomplish.

Beyond the productivity gains of Mojave, the thing that intrigues me most is the apps that Apple has ported to the Mac. I remain optimistic about what bringing iOS apps to the Mac might do to revitalize Mac apps in general, but the four examples Apple has shipped with Mojave show that there is still a long way to go.

The issue isn’t the apps’ functionality. They all work more or less the same as their iOS counterparts. The trouble is that none of them feel quite right on the Mac. This is precisely why I’m not a fan of cross-platform apps built using Electron or similar tools.

One of two things needs to change. Either iOS apps on the Mac need to become better integrated and work more like Mac apps, or what it means to be a Mac app needs to evolve. I suspect Apple is working to make those things meet in the middle. There are design and functionality inconsistencies among the ported apps that need to be cleaned up, but you don’t have to look any further than the design of the new Mac App Store to see what I suspect are Apple’s first steps toward evolving Mac apps. The Mac App Store lacks the traditional window chrome of most system apps and shares much more with the ported apps than existing Apple apps.

What remains unanswered though is what all of this means for more complex apps. Perhaps we’re heading toward a more pronounced divide between professional and consumer apps on the Mac – a divide defined not only by software but maybe even hardware, at least for some period as Apple’s in-house chip designs are adapted to handle the needs of professional desktop users. Apps like the four introduced with Mojave and the developer tools that Apple has promised for 2019 will be some of the most interesting things to watch as we head into the new year. Apple has taken the first step into a future, the contours of which are too fuzzy to predict from our current vantage point, but which obviously have been set in motion. One thing is for sure though, we seem to be heading into an interesting phase of macOS’s evolution that will be anything but boring.

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Today’s TBN Urban Roller ride started at the Rouge Hill GO station, and went out to Whitby along the Waterfront Trail. I wanted to do this as it would link up two earlier rides that I did: one from Rouge Hill to downtown, and the other a ghost bike ride in Oshawa. My plan was to ride out with the main group, and then to go just a little further east to Oshawa, backtracking in time to meet up again with the main group at their lunch spot in Whitby.

Here we are at the Rouge Hill GO station; a pretty big crowd.

Adam showing off his newly acquired ride. Oh no, he will be even faster now.

Patsy is our ride leader today.

and we’re off. A beautiful day for riding with plenty of sun, cool temps, and little or no wind.

The pedestrian bridge crossing the Rouge River.

Approaching the Pickering nuclear power plant.

On the road that skirts the plant.

The first rest stop was in Rotary Park in Ajax. From this point I decided to ride on ahead as I was planning to go a little further east than the main group.

There was also a charity walk along this section of trail.

This section of the trail looked newly installed, crossing Lynde Creek.

After making a round trip to the Oshawa GO station, I linked up again with the main group at the lunch stop.

I decided to ride on to the Ajax GO station to catch a train back as I had an afternoon appointment downtown, Ajax called itself a bike friendly community, but I saw little evidence of that, riding along Victoria St. W.

Waiting for the train…. a perfect day for a wool jersey.

Now the places that I’ve marked on Veloviewer are linked up all the way out to Oshawa.

Thanks to TBN for organizing the ride. The sections of the Waterfront trail that we rode along were very scenic on a day like today. Nice way to kick start the fall.

YouTube Music for Android now features new audio quality and download settings.

Users have access to a separate setting for audio quality when on a mobile network and another for when on Wi-Fi. With either setting users can select between, ‘low,’ ‘normal,’ ‘high,’ and ‘always high’ audio quality. According to 9to5Google, which spotted the new feature first, unlike regular YouTube, YouTube Music doesn’t include the exact bitrate of songs.

Further, in the downloads menu there is another audio quality toggle that includes ‘low,’ ‘normal,’ and ‘high’ settings, alongside a ‘video quality’ option that allows users to select to store only audio, instead of audio and video.

For access to the new settings, make sure you’ve updated the app to version 2.49.57 via the Play Store. The feature is still rolling out so you may not see it immediately.

Source: 9to5Google 

The post YouTube Music for Android adds streaming quality controls appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The Apple Watch Series 4’s ‘Fall Detection’ functionality, which utilizes the smartwatch’s gyroscope and accelerometer to detect accidental falls, must be manually enabled by users under the age of 65.

This means that in the case of the majority of Series 4 users, fall detection will be turned off by default. This news was first uncovered by Reddit user ‘No1ARSoul’ on the r/Apple subreddit, and subsequently reported on by MacRumors.

The option to flip fall detection on is found in the Emergency SOS section of the Apple Watch’s settings app. According to Apple’s support documentation, when the Watch Series 4 detects what the company classifies a “significant, hard fall,” the wearable will send haptic feedback to the user’s wrist, sound an alarm and then display an alert on its screen.

The options at this point include selecting either ‘I fell but I’m ok,’ or, ‘ I did not fall,’ and finally, ‘Emergency SOS.’ If the user remains immobile for approximately one minute, a 15-second countdown launches before emergency services and contacts are automatically called. Emergency contacts can be set up in the Medical ID section of iOS’ Health app.

Apple says that it gathered data from hundreds of different falls to create the algorithm that powers fall detection. That said, in Apple’s fall detection support document, the company also states that it’s still possible for false positives to occur.

“The more physically active you are, the more likely you are to trigger fall detection due to high impact activity that can appear to be a fall,” writes Apple.

The Watch Series 4 is Apple’s most significant revamp of the Apple Watch since its launch back in 2015. Along with an approximately 30 percent larger display, the Series 4 features new ECG heart rate functionality that isn’t yet available in Canada, a faster processor, new watch faces and a Digital Crown that features haptic feedback.

Source: Apple, Reddit (No1ARSoul) Via: MacRumors 

The post Apple Watch Series 4 Fall Detection functionality isn’t automatically turned on appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The do-it-yourself heroes at iFixit published their latest device teardown, this time taking on the Apple Watch Series 4.

iFixit came away impressed with the wearable, noting that it features “radically different insides” that are “much more thoughtfully laid out.”

In fact, iFixit even went so far as to compare the Apple Watch Series 4 to the iPhone 5.

“Pundit John Gruber rightly likened this new watch to the leap in design brought by the iPhone 4, but we’d go so far as to call it an iPhone 5: A device that knows its priorities, and wants to look elegant inside and out,” writes the website in its teardown guide.

Gushing aside, the team at iFixit shared a couple of interesting tidbits about Apple’s latest smartwatch.

First, the Watch Series 4 features a new, larger 1.12 Wh capacity battery. That’s approximately a four percent increase in battery capacity over the Series 3’s 1.07 Wh battery source. What’s more, Apple was able to increase the size of the Series 4’s battery while making the wearable six percent thinner.

Second, in a nifty piece of engineering, iFixit discovered that Apple was able to integrate the Series 4’s barometric sensor into the wearable’s speaker grille, thereby reducing the number of unsightly holes the Series 4 features.

After completing its teardown, iFixit awarded the Watch Series 4 a six out of 10 repairability score. That’s the same score iFixit awarded the Series 3 and Series 2.

As before, the components users will need to most likely replace — the band, display and battery — are relatively easy to access. However, Apple’s generous use of resin, tiny tri-point screws and flex cables makes accessing and replacing other components significantly more complicated.

Source: iFixit

The post iFixit declares Watch Series 4 Apple’s most ‘thoughtfully laid out’ wearable yet appeared first on MobileSyrup.

As the world gets ready to celebrate International Translation Day on 30 September, we want to say thank you to our amazing community of volunteer translators. This talented bunch work very hard so that people around the world can learn digital making and computing in their native languages.

Can you help us translate our content?

If you speak an additional language to English, volunteering as a translator is an easy way to make a big difference.

Our translators

The #RPiTranslate community is growing every day, and at the moment we have around 370 volunteers. They are translating our learning projects into 50 languages – everything from Afrikaans, to Tamil, to Scots Gaelic! Projects in 26 of those languages are already available on the Raspberry Pi learning projects website, and we continually add more.

Our translators are all volunteers, and they come from various walks of life. They are students and professionals, translators and coders, young and retired, already passionate about our mission or completely new to it.

Abdulaziz is a language coordinator for the Arabic language team. He is finishing his doctoral research at the University of Toledo in the US, and will soon start working as an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. He translates for us because he believes our educational resources are great and he’d love to see them used by Arabic speakers of all ages.

Wojtek volunteers at a Code Club in Poland, and helps us translate our projects into Polish because he thinks translations are crucial for learning. When children can access lessons in their native language, they truly understand programming concepts, and that empowers them to experiment and create more.

Cor is the main force behind all of our Dutch projects. He is a retired simulator designer and developer for the Royal Netherlands Air Force, and volunteers at a hackerspace in the Netherlands. While teaching young people coding and robotics, he realised how difficult it is for them to learn all of this in English. He decided to translate for us to change that.

Silvia started volunteering for us when she was studying for a degree in translation. She joined us to gain some real-life experience in translation and localisation, but quickly found herself immersed in our amazing community and became passionate about Raspberry Pi’s mission. She is still supporting us now, even though she has finished her degree and is working full-time.

Sanneke is a digital literacy consultant and librarian at Bibliotheek Kennemerwaard in the Netherlands. She runs five Dojos in the area where her library is based. Sanneke translates because it helps children who want to learn to code. English is taught from quite an early age at primary schools in the Netherlands, but having learning resources in Dutch is particularly helpful for young children.

All of these volunteers bring with them a unique set of skills and experiences. They make the #RPiTranslate community an amazing, diverse, successful team.

Raspberry Pi translators: we salute every single one of you. We couldn’t do what we do without you!

Join us

Anyone can join this amazing group of people in their translation efforts. It’s really easy to get involved: you don’t need any experience of translation or coding, and you can choose how much time you want to commit.

Visit our translation page to find out more, or join one of our live Q&A sessions this week to ask our translation manager and language coordinators anything you’d like:

• Wednesday 26 September at 18:00 BST – join here
• Friday 28 September at 13:00 BST – join here

Happy translation week!

Special thanks to the Atlassian Foundation and MIT Solve for their continued support in developing our translation community.

The post Celebrating our translators! appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

I just read this 2018 book by Juliet McKenna, which I discovered in Reading August/September, a blog post by Nicola Griffith, author of the excellent Hild (which I highly recommend here). I really enjoyed it and I bet a lot of you would too.

Green Man doesn’t aim too high — a straightforward story of a fellow whose mother is a Dryad (tree spirit) living in the middle of England in the present day. His heritage means he can see, and interact with, woodland creatures out of myth (naiads, boggarts, and of course the Green Man); also that he is large, muscular, and has unusual (hetero-)sexual magnetism.

The story starts, like so many set in the middle of England, with the body of a murdered young woman, and involves interactions with cops, carpenters, interesting trees, and lots of those magic woodland creatures, some of whom are seriously lethal. There’s even an apocalyptic boss-battle sort of thing to end the story with a bang.

It doesn’t aim too high, and also doesn’t have any significant flaws. Hard to put down, hard not to smile.

There’s a very slightly odd flavor that may be the result of a woman writing a first-person male narrative (something I’m sure that many women are familiar with the mirror-image version of). I enjoyed this bit of gender dislocation, if that’s what it is.

And I’m thinking I might want to go re-read Ms Griffith’s blog post and try a couple more of the books she liked.

Same procedure as every year, James. Within its first week, iOS 12 adoption eclipses Android's last year release. Android 9 does not even register as much as 0.1 percent, because Google does not move a lot of Pixel phones. Android fragmention continues to be a problem.

Got a new phone (after selecting a new plan with some effort). As I don’t allow my phone to back-up everything to the (google) cloud, it took a few hours to get the new one ready: installing apps, and logging into all the associated accounts (using 1password). On the upside, it means a lot of unnecessary stuff accumulated over the last 2 years has been left behind on the old device.

Miscellaneous thoughts this week.

It occurs to me that what Ben's doing here is blogging, blogging on instagram. About techno and other stuff. It's superb. It's blogging. Blogging finds a way.

I saw this digital poster. I thought the headline was One Builds A Legacy By Standing Still. That's great, I thought, quite the change from the usual nonsense. Something about the value of stillness, of remaining fixed and static and having a solid place to stand. And a splendidly literate use of 'One' - a great way to assert a distinctive tone of voice. Nicely counter-intuitive and provoking.

Then I realised it didn't say that. Oh well.

Watched a lovely documentary about Christo and Jean Claude. It reminded me of a trip to New York when we happened upon The Gates. It was lovely.

A central part of the art is their interaction with bureaucracy - the permissions they have to get, the reports they have to commission - millions of dollars of work/value all embedded in three-ring binders. Those binders are hugely evocative of a particular kind of thought and organisation. They don't appear to be being digitised away.

I'd go and see an art show about three-ring binders. Make it happen!

The post The Locky makes your key smart instead of your lock [Sticky or Not] appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Photo Caption: california buckeye

Photo taken at: Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve

Instagram filter used: Gingham

View in Instagram ⇒

For many years I have been shooting everything with an iPhone. Before the iPhone 7 I also relied on the Olloclip lenses for telephoto and superwide shots. My favorite lens was the Active Lens and you can see its case hanging around my neck in many shots, like the superwide selfie shot on the iPhone 6S Plus more than three years ago.

Things started to get complicated with the advent of the dual cameras in the 7 Plus and I did not use any Olloclip lenses going forward. But then the designers figured out a solution for the iPhone X. It's bulkier and it does not feel as solid, but it's more flexible.

Lenses are now mounted to an oval base that itself clicks into a clip that fits nicely around the camera bump. Both mechanisms are spring loaded. You press a button to remove the clip from the phone, and press another button if you want to change lenses. The design lets you put a lens in front of either one of the main cameras and also in front of the selfie camera.

The pendant that holds the clip can also be be used as a makeshift tripod but I don't trust this at all beyond the photo I took for this review.

This kit comes with three lenses: a super-wide that doubles the field of view, a fisheye which captures almost 180 degrees, and a 15x macro lens behind that fisheye.

These lenses let you capture photos that are not possible with the iPhone camera. Sometimes you cannot step back far enough to get everything into the frame, or you cannot get close enough to capture a detail.

Life is difficult for companies that want to create accessories that need a perfect fit. This clip matches the iPhone X, but not the iPhone Xs or Xs Max. Apple has enlarged the size of the camera bump ever so slightly. Olloclip now needs to make a new clip which holds the lenses centered in front of the Xs camera lenses. It should not be too expensive, since you can keep all your lenses, but it's only going to become available in a couple of weeks.

While I generally like the idea and lenses work quite well, the whole kit has become a bit unwieldy. While the Active Lens was solid as a rock, the pendant, the clip and the spring loaded mechanism feel rather cheap. It's just clicky plastic. The clip won't work with any case besides Olloclip's own. When you try to use it on the go, you have a lot of moving parts: phone, case, mount, lenses, lens hoods. Chances are you are going to drop something.

The Olloclip designers are smart people. They figured out a new multi-device clip, that will work with any camera close enough to the edge. It should also work with cases up to 12mm in combined thickness. That clip will work with all Connect X lenses and it should be available in a few weeks.

More >

Every week we bring you the latest in Canadian mobile news. Listed below is a quick overview of the top stories from the past seven days.

• Belleville, Ontario project lets riders hail buses from an app [Read here]
• Northwestel, Bell Mobility bring faster internet and LTE to Nunavut [Read here]
• Apple Watch Series 4 Review: It’s all about the display [Read here]
• Nintendo Switch Online is now available in Canada [Read here]
• Win a Google Home and Philips Hue starter kit [Read here]
• Rogers, Bell, Telus to CRTC: no evidence of widespread sales practice problem [Read here]
• Telus wins Ookla Q1-Q2 2018 mobile internet crown [Read here]
• Telus to transition all customers to paperless e-bills [Read here]
• iPhone XS and XS Max Review: Expected iteration [Read here]
• Koodo, Videotron offer Canada’s best wireless plans [Read here]
• OnePlus is building a smart TV [Read here]
• Here’s everything you need to know about Nintendo Switch Online in Canada [Read here]
• iOS 12 is rolling out now with Screen Time, better performance and more [Read here]
• Telus Canada’s fastest mobile network for second year in a row, says report [Read here]

The post Top Canadian mobile stories from the past week appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Well chuffed to see my micro-essay on this site’s header image — José Moscardi’s photograph of a 1969 student demonstration at FAU-USP — reprinted in the “On My Mind” section of the current issue of international photography magazine FOAM, no. 51, available now at finer newsstands everywhere. (If you can’t make it out from the image above, you can find the text in its entirety here.)

Would you spend $530 on a pair of sneakers that were described like this?

Crumply, hold-it-all-together tape details a distressed leather sneaker in a retro low profile with a signature sidewall star and a grungy rubber cupsole.

Yeah, neither would I, and neither would these folks (aka "the internet"):

Once available at Nordstrom online, these held-together-with-tape sneakers by Italian luxury brand Golden Goose are currently sold out (or removed??). Not to worry, they have plenty of other filthy, overpriced shoes to choose from.

Peter points to a terrific video. Reminds me of how Hossein Derakshan talked about journalism as literature, as cinema, as poetry as well in this case, at State of the Net.

Written by Clare Dwyer Hogg and performed by Stephen Rea, it is a beautiful way to bring across the importance of the Irish border issue in the Brexit debate.

NPR: Trump Administration Eases Regulation Of Methane Leaks On Public Lands.

“The Trump administration is rolling back another Obama-era energy regulation, this time one that aimed to curb methane leaks from oil and gas operations on tribal and public lands.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, even more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term, that contributes to climate change. The Obama administration said that large amounts of methane are lost into the atmosphere through leaks, as well as intentional venting and flaring at energy production sites. It moved to limit that by requiring oil and gas companies to capture leaking and vented methane at existing sites, to gradually update their technology and to make plans for monitoring escaping gas.

The Government Accountability Office says as much as $23 million of potential royalty revenue from those gases is lost annually.

But in a statement, the Department of the Interior said that rule was “unnecessarily burdensome on the private sector.“”

(Emphasis mine.)

This is kind of an understatement. Each ton of methane has about the same effect as 21 to 25 tons of carbon dioxide, so it’s much worse. How about methane being “burdensome on the world’s climate”?