Honeypot.net

Commute step 1: Leapt onto Muni as the doors closed.

Step 2: Waited 2 minutes for BART.

Step 3: Waited 30 seconds for a bus.

This was the most efficient trip I’ve had in months.

We’re having visitors in our office tonight, and the office manager reminded us to put away valuables, etc., and also to put away USB chargers so no one would be tempted to sneak over and top off their phone.

If you borrow a random data cable from a desk of the security team, whatever happens next is on you.

Comcast verified that they processed my data deletion request, with exceptions including:

For internal purposes that are compatible with the context in which you provided it, such as to support and enhance he [sic] products and services we provide

No! I don’t want you using my data to enhance your services. On to filling a CCPA complaint it is, then.

My Fish shell tweak of the morning:

abbr --add checkout --command git "switch -c"

Now when I type “git checkout”, it replaces that with “git switch -c”, which is what I really meant 90% of the time: switch to a new branch.

From the letters to the editor in a recent issue of “2600”:

We used to subscribe to Wired Magazine, but their direction changed. Aside from the content of their articles, their pages became too colorful and hard to read.

So they stopped in, what, 1994?

To the younguns amongst us, Wired was (in)famous for running print articles in color schemes like neon yellow on day-glo pink. Yes, it was fun and cool to read. Yes, it was sometimes nearly impossible to focus on the page.

I wanted a hip belt for my GoRuck GR1 backpack. I tried GoRuck’s own padded hip belt. It’s great for stabilizing the bottom of the bag so that it doesn’t swing from side to side. However, I wanted a weight-bearing belt like the one on my camping backpack. This wasn’t it.

The gang over at Yomp Notes wrote a guide to make a DIY hip belt. I couldn’t make heads nor tails of their system for attaching the belt to the bag, so I tried something vastly simpler.

My shopping list:

1. Fairwin tactical belt. This is the tough, non-stretching nylon belt that cinches the setup snugly around your hips. It’s basically the tough version of a normal belt you’d wear to hold your pants up.
2. Condor Elite battle belt. This is a padded wrapper that goes around the nylon belt for comfort. It doesn’t have a buckle of its own. Feel free to roll your eyes at the tacticoolness of the description, but here we’re using it purely for its width and the padding. You wouldn’t want to wear the nylon belt directly against your hips without it, unless you’re a fan of being sawed in half. We’re going to use those PALS straps on out its outside to connect it to the bag. Sizing tip: I’m 6 feet tall and, ahem, robust. I bought a medium and it wraps all the way around me. If you’re not sure which size to get, get the smaller option.
3. Two C.A.M.P. Compact Oval Screwgate Locking carabiners to connect the battle belt to your GR1.

First, open the velcro flaps on the battle belt to expose its inner channel, lay the nylon belt inside it, and close the velcro again. Ta-da! The belt is assembled.

Next, thread the carabiners through the bottom 2 PALS straps on the sides your GR1, closest to the part of the pack that rests against your back.

Finally, lay your battle belt against the padded back of your GR1. Find the 2 columns of PALS straps that are about the same width apart as the carabiners are on your pack. Err on the side of them being a little wider apart on your belt than they are on the GR1. Now work the carabiners through those straps on your belt.

You’re done. There’s no step 4. Now your belt is attached securely to your GR1, and you can still remove it easily for all the times when you don’t want to wear a padded belt.

This is how the attachment of the belt to the bag looks. It’s straightforward: the carabiners temporarily lock the belt snugly to the GR1.

This is how it looks from the front. See how the carabiner splays out to the side a little? When the belt is snug on you, that’ll put a small outward tension on the bag to hold it centered against your back.

Eagle eyes might notice that the belt is technically upside down. Try it both directions and see what’s most comfortable for you. It’s your belt. You can wear it any way you want to.

I like the end result much more than GoRuck’s own hip belt. Their belt attaches to the sides, too, but it doesn’t go all the way around your hips. It just stretches from one side of the bag, around your belly, and to the other side. That is, your bag becomes an integral part of the belt. The tighter you snug the belt, the harder it pulls the sides of your bag outward like wings. With the DIY belt, the only force between the belt and the bag is the weight of the bag pushing downward. Tension on the GR1’s PALS straps is purely upward against its weight, not upward and outward against the snugness of the belt.

This setup costs more than the GoRuck version. I didn’t do this to save money. I did it to have a sturdy belt that works about as well as such a thing possibly can. I expect this setup to last almost as long as the GR1 itself.

San Francisco at night from the Alcatraz ferry.

Have you ever used The Policy Wonk to manage your AWS permissions? Cool! Me too! But alas, my ex-employer stopped developing it and archived the repo. I updated my own fork with the latest commits and updated PyPI to point at its new home.

Same Wonk, same dev, same license, new URL. See you there!

A seasonal reminder that a “fun size” Twix bar would be roughly the size of my forearm, and anything less is false advertising.

I’m returning my reMarkable Paper Pro Move. It’s a brilliant gadget, but it’s not right for me.

First, the hardware is state-of-the-art and exquisitely well made. And expensive, to be sure, but I could tell it was a premium device from the first moment I picked it up. And to its credit, it works exactly as advertised. It feels like I’m writing on paper with a pen, and there’s no discernible delay between drawing a stroke and seeing it appear on the screen. It’s pretty magical that way.

However, the software has some truly odd design choices for a device costing so much. For instance, many have complained about reMarkable devices being at best mediocre for reading things like PDFs and ePUBs. Especially ardent fans point out that reMarkable advertises the devices as note takers, not ereaders, but that’s nonsense. The hardware is better in every meaningful way than my less-than-half-the-price Kobo Libra 2 reader, but the Kobo’s software is far better at rendering words on the screen than this expensive Move. The flaws are purely due to substandard software, and at this price, there’s no excuse for that.

But since they do describe it as a device for taking notes, it’s fair game to grade it on that scale. The Move is flawless at recording pen strokes as lines on the screen. Truly, it excels. It’s perfect. There’s nothing to improve there. Actually organizing those notes, though? It’s… not good.

There are a couple of primary ways that the reMarkable simulates paper. A “notebook” is a collection of one or more pages that can each be arbitrarily long. When you get to the bottom of the page, you can scroll the page upward to expose more blank lines, or grid squares, or whatever other paper design you’ve chosen. That’s a pleasant way to write, but there’s no organization to speak of. You can’t link from one page to another. You can’t make an index page that jumps directly to page 23 or whatever. It’s easy to flip through them, but if you ended up with a notebook of dozens of pages, like if you have a one-page-per-day monthly journal, it’s slow and painful to get to a specific page in the middle.

Alternatively, you can use a template, which is a PDF that supports arbitrary links in pages. It doesn’t support the “infinite scrolling” option of notebooks, though, and you can’t add your own links. They can only be added through a separate PDF editor app.

Neither of these options lets you add images in any way. I tried everything I could think of, including saving images as PDFs, uploading them to the Move, and attempting to copy pages from those PDFs to my notebooks. Nope. It’s not supported. If you want to add a decorative cover to your notebook, or embed a chart or photo in the middle of a page, too bad.

There’s no automation capability at all. I thought maybe I could tolerate the lack of other features if there were a way to get data out of the device automatically. A while ago, I’d written a whole system for Drafts so that I could take notes in it throughout the day, then have those entries added to my Day One journal, OmniFocus, and my calendar by a nightly scheduled process. I’m far from allergic to Do It Yourself solutions. Alas, that’s not an option here. I could manually copy and paste handwriting recognition text into another app, but there’s not an API, or Shortcuts actions, or automatic file syncing to a location other than ReMarkable’s cloud service. You can’t set the “sleep screen” image you see whenever the app is resting between uses, unless you turn on developer mode, which disables some of its security features. There’s not a dictionary; don’t plan on looking up words or checking your spelling as you work.

With all these bizarre limitations, I’ve decided that this gorgeous, well-made, expensive device doesn’t have any real advantages over a cheap paper notebook. At least the notebook lets me flip between pages quickly, unlike the Move. And if I want to compensate for its many, many limitations with other apps on my computer, the path of least resistance is to look at my notes on my Move and hand-type them into the other app.

This is ridiculous. There’s no reason whatsoever why the Move should be so unbelievably locked down and featureless. I swear that its online fans have the Oslo version of Stockholm Syndrome. Whenever a new user says they wish it were better at reading ebooks, others will rush to ReMarkable’s defense: “it’s a notebook, not a reader!” And while that’s technically true, there’s no compelling reason why it can’t be both. The software is ruined by the maker’s dedication to mediocrity. And that’s a pity, because the hardware is exquisite.

I wanted to love the Move. I bought it with my own money, in spite of its price, because the device seemed like it was tailor-made for me. But after a month of trying to overlook its long list of usability papercuts, I gave up. I think I understand some of the more, ahem, devoted supporters. After voluntarily spending so very much on a gadget, it’s hard to admit that it isn’t worth the hassle. I’m luckily still inside their generous 100-day window, and I’m using that before I begin to convince myself that the problem is with me, not the Move.

I still like the idea of the Move. It’s exactly the kind of thing I want to have in my life: a notebook where I can store all my ideas in one place from now on. Maybe someday that will come along. It’s definitely not the version of the reMarkable Move that’s available today, though.