Honeypot.net

I’ve seen things that looked like ads for apps in the iOS App Store. Today, I saw an ad for something else altogether. It’s a public service announcement warning viewers about potentially lethal fake prescription pills:

That’s a good thing to warn people about. However, it couldn’t be more out of place between the regular listings for games and useful apps. This is the app store, not a random website. And a PSA is one thing. The first time I see a commercial ad for a non-app thing here, I’ll probably have to buy a new phone to replace the one I’m likely to throw out my window.

My kid is home from college. I’m watching them do their homework while struggling against the shortcomings of Microsoft Word. It’s the Bourne shell of word processing: powerful, ubiquitous, chock full of time-sucking footguns, and probably the wrong tool for any job that won’t fit on a single screen.

After working with more civilized tools like a good text editor paired with a Markdown processor, I’d been happy to forget that some people still voluntarily use Word.

Our Casper Glow Lights are nice. However, their charging bases are poorly made, and as seen in user reviews, they often break in a specific way. Inevitably, one or both of the little spring-loaded charging pins will permanently stick in the lowered position so that they don’t contact the charging elements on the light.

In this photo, the outer pin on the left sticks up a little above the charger’s base. When the light sits on this charger, that pin touches one of the light’s charging rings. The inner pin on the right is flush with the surface and doesn’t touch its corresponding charging ring.

That’s easy to fix. Rather than disassemble the base and try to mechanically repair the pin, I added a tiny glob of solder to the top of the pin. Then I used an emery board and trial and error to smooth it to a good height.

Ta-da! Now the Glow Light is charging away on the resuscitated charger.

After cleaning, the charger looks and acts like new, and I bet that cheap little solder glob will outlast the original spring mechanism.

I know I said I’m using Things to manage all the things I need to do, but I’ve switched back to the OmniFocus 4 beta.

I like Things. It’s pretty and ergonomic. That matters in something you’ll spend so much time with. For the most part, I like using Things more than I do OmniFocus, which isn’t exactly beautiful to look at. OmniFocus does everything right where it matters, though.

First, Things lacks end-to-end encryption. That by itself should be a deal-breaker for me. I tried to overlook it because I wanted Things to be my ideal to-do app, but I just can’t. I think the Cultured Code gang are great people. They have a long track record of treating their users well. I have no reason to think that will change. I strongly doubt they’re going through my boring to-do items, but it’s at least technically possible, and I hate that I have to trust any company’s good intentions. Even if I think they’re good people, my employer may not appreciate me storing sensitive information in an unencrypted vendor database. Even more, my wife’s a doctor, so HIPAA implies she can’t use Things at all for her work unless she keeps all her actions so vague as to be useless. If she put an item in there like “Call Joe Smith back”, she could be sued and/or fined for storing personal healthcare information in an insecure location. In contrast, OmniFocus lets you set an encryption password on your data. Then The Omni Group can’t access your information even if they want to. If you don’t trust Omni’s sync server, you can sync it with your own WebDAV server.

Second, Things’s search field requires you to type exactly what you’re looking for. If I have an item named “Do foo and bar”, searching Things for “foo bar” won’t find it. OmniFocus will. That’s bitten me more times than I’d like, usually when I can almost (but not quite) remember how I phrased a task. Sure, I could just type “foo” into Things and then scroll through the results into I see “bar”. I bought a to-do app to offload that mental grunt work.

Finally, it shouldn’t bother me so much that I can’t check off a repeated task in Things before its start date. It does. It bothers me a lot. I put everything in my to-do app, including tasks like “text my distant friend, Joe, every month”. If he and I talk today, and I’m going through my weekly review tomorrow, it’d be nice to mark that as done even though I’m not “scheduled” to chat with him for another 3 weeks. Things won’t let me unless I’m willing to dig into the task’s repeat settings. OmniFocus doesn’t care. It’s like “Oh, you’re done early? Cool. I’ll remind you in a month!” Things users have been requesting this ability for years.

I’m back to OmniFocus. It’s not as pretty to look at, but it does everything I ask of it. I wish it had Things’s gorgeous interface, and I miss being able to add sections and notes to projects, but I won’t trade encryption, better search, and smartly repeating tasks for those features.

I have a note to myself: stop looking for a better task manager than OmniFocus. While it won’t win a beauty pageant, it’s the best app for helping me get things done.

We have 2 cats. One of them¹ requires a prescription food. Predictably, because he’s a cat, he hates his food and wants to eat the other cat’s. Any other time, the second cat wouldn’t let the first anywhere near her food. Because she’s a cat and enjoys tormenting us, now she’s happy to share her forbidden kibble.

I’d heard about pet feeders that use RFID tags to distinguish between animals and only open for the one (or ones) that you’ve programmed into them. After some research, we took a deep breath and decided to try Sure Petcare’s SureFeed (affiliate link). I wish we’d done it sooner.

The initial setup was a cinch. I pressed the “add pet” button, lured our kitty to the feeder with a treat, and watched a blinking light turn solid green as the feeder detected and learned the RFID microchip her vet had implanted. It came with an RFID tag we could have clipped onto her collar if needed, but we didn’t.

Next, we used its “training mode” to get her used to the feeder. On the first day, the lid stayed fully open so it acted like a normal food bowl. Over the next few days, the lid closed a little farther and moved a little more to teach the kitty that it wasn’t going to eat her. At the end of that process, the SureFeed behaved exactly as it promised. Now our healthy kitty walks up to her food bowl, its cover opens without spooking her, and she eats her dinner. Our medicated cat bats at it in frustration because he can see the tempting food inside but can’t get at it.

The SureFeed is expensive, and I only bought it because I had some gift cards saved up. $200 is one expensive cat food bowl. Still, in our case, it’s much cheaper than having our cat eat the wrong food. It’s also one of our household items that lives up to all its claims. It lets the right cat in and keeps the wrong one out. I’m glad we got it.

I got an automated response to a job application that said:

Over the next several weeks, one of our recruiters will spend some time reviewing what you’ve shared with us.

There’s almost no situation where that would lead to a desirable outcome for either party. Either it weeds out good candidates you’d want to hire:

• “I’m unemployed and need work now.” Someone who needs a job now is not going to wait several weeks if something else comes along.
• “I’m employed but want out of this job.” If the candidate’s that serious about finding another job, they don’t want to wait around for a “maybe”.
• “I’m on a 6-month sabbatical and have plenty of time.” "…but I work for the kind of place that gives 6-month sabbaticals, and they like me, and I’m not leaving for a disorganized company."

…or it works well for candidates you might not want to hire:

• “I’m bored at work, and rather than seek out new opportunities, I’ll just quiet quit until you get around to interviewing people.”
• “I got rich in Bitcoin. Hire me or not! Who cares!”

If you list a job opening, you have an obligation to the candidates and to yourself to review the applications as they come in. Don’t start the hiring process until you can commit to doing it right.

I bought a suitcase from Amazon, partly because of its good reviews.

The suitcase is alright. It’s not the best I’ve ever seen, but the price was decent and it seems like it should last a while. A couple of weeks later, I got a postcard from the seller offering a bribe. If I sent them proof that I posted a 5-star review, they’d pay me $15.

I followed Amazon’s instructions to report the bribe. No response. I left a review of the suitcase stating that the seller had offered to pay me for a good review. That action did earn a response from Amazon: they deleted it.

If I can’t talk about it on Amazon, I’ll talk about it here. Amazon doesn’t seem to care if sellers are paying for good reviews. They don’t want you talking about it, though. The takeaway is that Amazon’s reviews aren’t trustworthy. If that seller tried to bribe me, they surely paid other customers for their good ratings.

You can do better, Amazon. Your product ratings are a big part of why people buy things from you. If we know they’re literally paid ads, we’d be better off taking our business elsewhere.

Updated 2023-12-26

Same with a travel steamer:

An acquaintance suggested writing the review, cashing in the reward, then updating the review with my genuine thoughts. That’s tempting. I don’t blame anyone who does that. I don’t want a sketchy vendor to be able to say that they’ve paid me for reviews, though.

Apple release macOS 14 Sonoma today. I always install the major OS beta versions on my work Mac when they’re first released, to see if anything critical breaks before it affects my coworkers. That happens sometimes, like when macOS 11 Big Sur deprecated kernel extensions and affected some software we used. Sonoma and its 1st-party apps were in good shape from the start.

I stumbled across a few glitches with 3rd-party software:

• Little Snitch version 5.7 adds Sonoma support.
• Rogue Amoeba’s apps that use their Audio Capture Engine (ACE) need to be updated.
• SpamSieve version 2 doesn’t work because Mail.app removed support for plugins in favor of a new extensions API. Version 3 (a paid upgrade) works with Sonoma.
• Marked 2 crashes when loading docs with fewer than 999 visible bytes. It’s still broken as of today. Workaround: Add a bunch of lorem ipsum to the bottom of the file.
• Bartender 4 doesn’t work. A paid upgrade to Bartender 5 fixes it.
• Finbar didn’t work until version 1.10.

Summary: Sonoma is a good upgrade and I’ve installed it on my Macs. You may need to upgrade some of your other software at the same time.

California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required self-driving vehicles to have a human driver.

“Considering the longstanding commitment of my administration to addressing the present and future challenges for work and workers in California, and the existing regulatory framework that presently and sufficiently governs this particular technology, this bill is not needed at this time,” Newsom wrote. “For these reasons, I cannot sign this bill.”"

Good. I don’t see this as a safety issue so much as a make-work law. If a human would have to be in a self-driving truck at all times and ready to assume the controls at a moment’s notice, that’s basically human-driven with extra steps. Either the tech is good enough to be autonomous, or it’s not good enough to replace a human driver in the first place. And as a driver, I don’t think I’d want to be legally responsible for whatever boneheaded move a truck might take in the moments before I could regain control over it. “Hey, I know it was the AI that decided to swerve into the crowd of toddlers, and you only had 300ms to respond, but you were the one sitting in the driver’s seat…”

I’m not thrilled with ending human jobs without giving those people a way to survive. Even if I weren’t sympathetic to those hard-working people who are ready and willing to do the tough jobs that keep society running (and I hope it’s obvious that I am), enlightened self-interest means that I don’t want all of them to be unemployed and hungry. That’s bad for everyone. I also wish we shipped more freight via train, which is cheaper and way more environmentally friendly. Making it easier and cheaper to carry even more via truck is probably the wrong process to optimize.

Still, I think this bill was a well meaning but ultimately wrong solution. Frankly, it seems like it’d be cheaper and more efficient to pay those drivers to stay home than to pay them to perch in a self-driving truck.

My employer’s HR department asked me to validate a coworker’s identification documents and attest that they’re legitimate, for government tax form purposes.

I got an email from our payroll vendor, TriNet, with a link to attest to those documents’ authenticity. Clicking it took me to a page with scans of my friend’s driver’s license and Social Security card without requiring me to log in first. My coworker hadn’t entered their driver’s license number into the form, so I used the scanned image to enter it for them.

That’s pretty messed up. Good thing TriNet didn’t send that link to the wrong person, or they would have shared my colleague’s personally identifiable information with random strangers.

If your company uses TriNet, ask them for more information about this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad process, and how it got past design review. Their whole job is managing private payroll information. They’re not very good at it.