If you use OmniFocus, you should check out Paul Sahner’s Let’s Fix OmniFocus post:

But lately there has been a growing demand for the company to rethink the user experience and interface of OmniFocus. As popular competitors like Things win acclaim for their clean, modern appearance, OmniFocus – for all of its power – appears stuck in another time period. So I wanted to see what it might take to re-imagine the OmniFocus suite of apps. The answer, it turns out, is not so simple.

Simple or not, Paul’s idea of how a unified Mac / iPad / iPhone interface might work is absolutely gorgeous. I didn’t know I could want this so badly.

I’ve heard a lot of online arguments about whether you should host your Git-based projects in GitHub or GitLab, but a lot of them miss an obvious option. Is this repo for your own personal work that you don’t intend to share with others? Great! You can host unlimited, free, completely private repositories on your own system. Here’s the complete process:

$ mkdir -p ~/src/myproject
$ cd ~/src/myproject
$ git init --bare
$ cd ~
$ git clone ~/src/myproject
$ cd myproject

There, you’re done. Now you have a 100% fully functional Git repo that doesn’t require a network connection and supports every single Git feature. Pull it, push it, branch it, revert it, whatever: it’s your own repo and you can do whatever you want with it. And you don’t have to sign up for anything, or agree to a Terms of Service, or share your work, or trust a company you don’t know very well.

If you want to move your repo to another server later, you can copy ~/src/myproject to its new home via whatever means you find most convenient, use git remote set-url origin [...] to point your existing work toward the new location, and then go on about your business as usual without changing any of your workflow.

GitHub and GitLab have a lot of nice features that may be totally irrelevant if you’re not collaborating with a team. Never forget that you can host Git projects yourself, easily and for free.

Oh, and if you do find yourself needing to work with a handful of people and don’t need all of the integration features of the commercial options, I highly recommend Gitea. It’s a tiny little service you can host yourself and it takes very few resources. I use it whenever I need my Git repo to be accessible across the Internet.

In late August 2020, I bought my kid a new Dell SE2419HX monitor for his birthday. School was starting back and his laptop’s built-in screen was turning out to be too small for him to use for remote schooling. (If you’re reading about this in the far future, this was the year of COVID.) It arrived a few days later and we plugged it into his computer, sat it on his desk, and watched him happily use it for the next few months.

In February 2021, the monitor stopped working. Although it would still turn on, it had a little window on the screen saying “No HDMI signal from your device”. I swapped in a few known working HDMI cables and even tried connecting it to another computer. Nothing worked, so it seemed clear that its HDMI port was busted. We gave the kid an older TV to use temporarily while I worked through Dell’s warranty process. This involved a few days of back-and-forth with their support department, and they eventually asked me for two pieces of information:

1. The receipt from purchasing the monitor
2. A photo of the support case number, my name, and the current date written on a piece of paper and held next to the monitor’s serial number sticker to prove that it really existed

The next day they replied with a terse email:

We have received an update from our internal team and unfortunately, we are unable to process the request for the Monitor replacement as the account information of the system does not match with your information.

Please contact the store/person where you purchased the system for further assistance. Proof of Possession seems to be Invalid/tampered with/fake.

What? I replied that this must be a mistake and asked them to review the evidence again. I got back a nearly identical copy of the prior email, with an apology “for any inconvenience this may have caused you”. I replied again: yes, but there’s been a mistake on Dell’s end, and please fix this. I got back another nearly-identical with the same apology, plus a cryptic “WE have limited access”.

At this point my confusion was turning to anger. I replied to insist that they fix my broken monitor, problems on their end be damned. The same support supervisor replied:

We apologize but we cannot warranty support this monitor with the available information.

At this point I vented a little on Twitter, and the @DellCares account replied to me to ask me to send them a direct message. I did, explaining the situation. They replied with a copy-and-paste of the last unhelpful email I’d received.

The happy resolution to Dell’s utter failure to honor their warranty is that Amazon made good on it. Even though the purchase was outside their normal return window, because Dell was so horrible, Amazon made an exception and allowed me to return it for a full refund. For that, I greatly thank them.

I have a guarantee of my own: under no circumstances will I allow Dell junk into my home again.

I use the Hugo website generator to create this website out of a bunch of Markdown fils. A lot has been written about this approach, but the main advantages are that the site can load quickly even when it’s serving a lot of traffic, and you don’t have to worry about bugs in the blog software when there isn’t any. The downside is that you can’t post to it as easily when you’re out and about on a mobile device.

I wired up a nice little workflow for making it as easy easy to post here with my iPad as to a Wordpress site:

• I write the blog post in Markdown in the Drafts app.
• When done, I run an action that triggers a Shortcut which adds it to a Git repo in the Working Copy app, commits it, and pushes it to my Gitea server.
• A cron job on the web server runs a git pull from Gitea, runs Hugo to generate the site, then copies the output to the web server.

So the plumbing is a little more complicated than just opening a website form and clicking a “post” button, but from the user’s perspective it’s every bit as simple. iOS and iPadOS are starting to get a nice ecosystem of Unix-style “do one thing and do it well” tools that can be strung together with scripting.

My company is going through its annual HIPAA privacy and security refresher training. This is a good thing and I wholeheartedly support it, as it’s always nice to be reminded of some of the details. “Oh, I forgot that we’re allowed to do X! That’s good to know.”

But the most irksome thing in the world is when you know the right answer to a test question but are required to give the wrong one to pass it. For instance, we were asked:

If you then connect with a VPN, will that ensure a file sent via email will be secure all the way through to its destination? Yes / No / Maybe

Test says: maybe! If you change nothing about your setup except adding a VPN into the mix, you may now be able to send email securely.

I say: The correct answer is “of course not”. Our company uses a “split tunnel” VPN so that only connections to certain services go over the VPN but the rest of our traffic goes over the open Internet? Do we need to route someone’s after-hours Netflix viewing through an encrypted connection? No thank you. But even without that, once you send an email to your own server, you have no control over what happens next. Does the recipient’s server support TLS connections? Are emails stored on that server encrypted at rest? Does their email app require TLS? Who knows! You sure won’t. So no, a VPN absolutely does not guarantee an email will be secure all the way through to its destination.

If you encrypt the file you are emailing, will that ensure a file sent via email will be secure all the way through to its destination?

Test says: yes! If you encrypt an email to an employee at another company, it’s guaranteed to be secure.

I say: Maybe, sure. I’d even go so far as saying it probably will. However, for all I know the recipient’s company uses some key escrow thing that lets them decrypt and analyze all inbound mail, and Joe from IT occasionally sells the interesting ones to North Korea.

Thing is, our particular training program is for the most part pretty decent, as far as such things go. Again, I’m glad we’re doing it. I just wish their post-training exams were a little more carefully worded.

Suppose Joe opens a restaurant. He hires a waiter who is really great at following directions, but speaks no English. Over time, Joe comes up with a way of working with this waiter that’s very precise and detailed. You can ask the waiter for things like “order burger plus cheese plus ketchup no tomato no onion” or “bring check” or “bring water”. However, you have to say things exactly the right way each time. You can’t just say “order cheeseburger” instead of “order burger plus cheese”, or “bring me some water” instead of “bring water”. If you do, the waiter will only say “I don’t understand” and wait for you to say it the right way.

All of this is explained on the menu, and the waiter is otherwise good enough at his job that people are willing to learn the Joe’s Cafe way of ordering their food and asking for the check afterward.

A while later, Gina decides to open a different restaurant across town from Joe’s place. Her food is nothing like Joe’s, she uses different suppliers, her kitchen has a brand new setup she invented herself, and she uses little robot dogs instead of waiters. However, she does a little market research and finds out that a lot of people in her city are use to ordering food the Joe way. To make it easier for her customers, she programs her robot dogs to respond to requests the same way that Joe’s waiter would. Then they’ll be able to order food and enjoy her restaurant without having to learn a whole new system!

Now, at Joe’s, if you say “order burger plus cheese”, the waiter writes this down, carries the order to the kitchen, and hands it to the cook. The cook follows the instructions, hands the food to the waiter, and the waiter takes it back to the table. Gina’s restaurant doesn’t have burgers, but if you tell her robot dog to “order steak plus potato”, it transmits the order via radio to the kitchen where a 3D printer makes it and then sends it to your table via a flying drone.

In other words, you place your order at Gina’s restaurant the same way you would at Joe’s, but almost everything else about the process is completely different because Gina came up with her system from scratch. As it turns out, a few orders do happen to work the same because there are only so many ways to react to “bring water”. That’s natural, though. Gina didn’t copy Joe’s “leave the table, fill a pitcher with water, bring it back to the table, and fill the empty glasses” process; that’s just the way you do it.

This is same as the relationship between Oracle and Google. Oracle bought a company who made a programming language called Java that became popular. When Google was making their Android phones, they wanted to make it easy for developers to write apps and games for it. Since so many people were already familiar with Java, they decided to let developers use it. However, they made their own Java from scratch that looks like Oracle’s Java from a programmer’s point of view but is completely different behind the scenes. As with Joe and Gina, the way you place your order is the same, but that’s where the similarity ends.

Oracle is suing Google because they say it’s unfair that Google allowed their developers to write programs in something that looks like Java, except without it actually being Java, and that Google should pay them for the privilege.

If it’s not reasonable that Gina should have to pay Joe just because her robot dog knows how to respond to “order steak plus potato”, then it’s not reasonable that Google should have to pay Oracle since they didn’t use any of Oracle’s underlying work.

Google is asking the US Supreme Court to declare that they didn’t copy Oracle’s programming code when they created their own work-alike system. For the sake of the US software industry, I hope Google wins.

As a personal note, I don’t like eating at either Joe’s or Gina’s restaurant. The food’s awful in both places. I still don’t think that Gina (or Google) owe Joe (or Oracle) anything.

These are the notes I collected to determine how I’m going to vote on November 3, 2020. I’m posting this not to tell you how you should vote, but to share my reasons for why I’m voting this way.

United States

President

Biden is the only serious candidate.

Congress

U.S. House California District 13

Barbara Lee (D, Incumbent)

California

State Assembly District 18

Rob Bonta (D, Incumbent)

State Senate District 9

Nancy Skinner (D, Incumbent)

Ballot measures

Prop 14: Stem Cell Research Institute Bond Initiative

Slightly oppose: It’s a good thing to research and support in general, but this isn’t a good time to incur more public debt.

For

• Gavin Newsom
• Cal Dems
• Diabetes research
• University of California regents

Against

• No one organized group
• Main argument: it’s a $5B bond issue we can’t afford right now, even if it’s probably a good thing.

Prop 15: Tax on Commercial and Industrial Properties for Education and Local Government Funding Initiative

Support. Raises taxes on large companies while specifically exempting houses, farms, and small businesses.

For

• Everyone

Against

• CA Republicans
• Coalition of industrial property owners

Prop 16: Repeal Proposition 209 Affirmative Action Amendment

Support. Prop 209 ended affirmative action. This doesn’t bring it back, but allows it to be considered when it makes sense.

For

• Cal Dems
• Everyone else

Against

• Cal GOP

Prop 17: Voting Rights Restoration for Persons on Parole Amendment

Support. If someone’s done their time, then they should be able to participate in society again.

For

• Everyone

Against

• CA Republicans

Prop 18: Primary Voting for 17-Year-Olds Amendment

Mildly support. It seems goofy to allow a 17 year old to vote in the primary for someone they can’t vote for in the actual election, but it’s probably not the end of the world

First time we have a record turnout because a YouTuber urges everyone to support Deez Nuts for the CA Democrat nomination, I’ll protest this with a pitchfork.

For

• Gavin Newson
• CA Dems
• ACLU

Against

• Not really anyone

Prop 19: Property Tax Transfers, Exemptions, and Revenue for Wildfire Agencies and Counties Amendment

Oppose. This is charity for the rich. You can sell your house and transfer the low tax basis to a new, more expensive house three times? No way. It has some good ideas but we should weigh them in a standalone proposition, or better, a state bill.

For

• Everyone

Against

• ACLU

Prop 20: Criminal Sentencing, Parole, and DNA Collection Initiative

Oppose. This is a charity to the prison systems. Collecting DNA on shoplifters and drug possessors? WTF.

For

• CA Republicans
• Police associations
• Albertsons Safeway?

Against

• CA Dems
• ACLU

Prop 21: Local Rent Control Initiative

Support. It makes sense to let cities experiment. If it doesn’t work locally, change it. What’s good in Oakland may suck in San Diego and vice versa.

For

• Bernie
• Employee unions
• Underlying theme of endorsements: “let cities decide which policies make sense for them at the local level.”

Against

• Gavin Newsom
• Builders unions
• Underlying theme of opposition: “Will reduce incentive to build affordable housing.”

Prop 22: App-Based Drivers as Contractors and Labor Policies Initiative

Oppose: This is some bullshit charity for Uber, Lyft, and Door Dash.

Everything about this seems to be a lie. For example, it provides a good minimum wage, but only while the drive is actively on a run, not when they’re between runs.

For

• GOP
• Police unions
• Chambers of commerce

Against

• Everyone else

Prop 23: Dialysis Clinic Requirements Initiative

Oppose: No, and stop asking. No one wants this. As a prop, it’s super hard to get rid of if it turns out to be a horrible idea.

For

• Healthcare workers union. This would require clinics to hire more workers. It’s a job handout.
• Cal Dems

Against

• Cal Republicans, oddly enough
• Cal Medical Association. Doctors are saying this isn’t necessary.
• Cal Nurses union

Prop 24: Consumer Personal Information Law and Agency Initiative

Oppose. I generally support privacy laws, but this has issues. The EFF described Proposition 24 as “a mixed bag of partial steps backwards and forwards.” I’m very skeptical of a privacy bill that the EFF doesn’t actively endorse.

Come back next election with a better version and I’ll totally back it.

For

• Some CA Democrats
• CA firefighters union?

Against

• Republicans
• Greens
• CA nurses association
• ACLU

Prop 25: Replace Cash Bail with Risk Assessments Referendum

Support. End the cash bail system. Don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good”. This is a good idea.

For

• Everyone

Against

• ACLU doesn’t like the new assessment system, which is a legit concern.

Alameda County

AC Transit District

Director At-large

Peeples (Endorsed by papers. Opponents aren’t bad, but Peeples is more experienced and seems to be pretty good at this.)

Peralta Community College District Trustee

Heyman (Incumbent; opponent doesn’t have much reason to vote for him.)

Superior Court

Condes (Supported by majority of progressive groups. Opponent isn’t awful, though.)

Measure V: Sales Tax

Support. Extends the existing sales tax.

Measure W: Sales Tax

Lightly oppose. Good to fund housing and services, but we’re already slammed with super high sales taxes and that feels regressive.

City of Alameda

Auditor

Kearney (unopposed)

AUSD board

(Best profiles, and endorsed by groups that seemed relevant.)

• Aney
• Little
• Williams

City Council

(By ruling out other candidates, not as an endorsement of these)

• Codiga
• White

Measure AA

Mildly support. It’s goofy that voters are being asked to rule on this petty internal bickering, but here we are.

Measure Z

Mildly oppose. Allows altering existing 3-bedroom homes into 2 1-bedroom. Parking and traffic are already bad. We couldn’t live in Alameda if we couldn’t find 3-bedroom housing.

Treasurer

Kennedy (unopposed)

Sources

• https://ballotpedia.org/Sample_Ballot_Lookup
• https://votersedge.org/ca/en/section/2020-11-03/alameda-county/measures
• https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2020/voter-guide/
• https://www.spur.org/voter-guide/oakland-2020-11
• https://www.theleaguesf.org/#top

Western Digital just admitted to Tom’s Hardware that they use a notoriously slow technology, shingled magnetic recording (SMR), in the WD Red drives they market for use in high performance storage devices. This is a very bad look for them.

I just replaced my last 6TB Red with a Seagate IronWolf over the weekend (coincidentally; it had nothing to do with this). In my experience, Reds have a nasty habit in their old age of taking performance nosedives without reporting any SMART errors. Suddenly my storage volume would be slow and pegged at 100% utilization without anything out of the ordinary running, but everything would look OK otherwise. My NAS’s resource monitor would show that all drives are at like 30% utilization, except for a single Red hovering at the top of the graph. The drive would show no errors or really any problems at all, but would be slow as molasses for no apparent reason.

This has happened to me three times now, and each time the fix is to replace the lame duck Red. My storage volume over the weekend was actually faster during the RAID rebuild than it was with the dying drive.

I don’t trust Western Digital’s drives right now, which is a pity because they use to have a great reputation and I loved them.

I’ve had one inexplicable thing happen in my life. I remembered it today and texted an old buddy about it, and his memory of it was identical to mine.

One day after high school, 3 friends and I piled into my car and drove to Kansas City to meet up with some other friends who had moved there. They weren’t home when we arrived, and at some point we had the idea to go to the zoo to kill time because we thought it was free (and we were broke). Turns out the KC zoo was very much not free, so we decided to go back to our friends’ home.

We tried to take a shortcut through the parking lot of the Blenheim Square Research Hospital next to the zoo but got turned around in a series of one-way lanes and toll gates before we were dropped back onto the surface streets. Thing is, when we got back on the road and were trying to get our bearings, none of us could see the hospital we’d just left. We pulled into a gas station a block away and asked the attendant which direction we were from the hospital.

“Which hospital? I don’t know where that is.” When we asked him to show us where we were on a map, he pointed to the corner of Lamar Ave & Shawnee Mission Parkway - which was a good half an hour drive from the hospital whose parking lot we’d been in less than 5 minutes ago.

We were utterly flummoxed. I can’t emphasize this enough: our 1 block drive dropped us 30 minutes from where we’d started. We drove through a parking lot, turned around, and were… transported?… across town. Everyone was cold sober and very freaked out. When we compared notes, we all remembered it exactly the same way. We kind of jokingly (and more than a little seriously) talked about the “wormhole” through Kansas City.

To this day, my recollection of this is crystal clear and I simply cannot explain what happened that day.

Two more apps I really like(d) have recently announced that they’re moving to subscription models: Fantastical and Paste. The Internet almost universally decided to stomp on the former’s announcement, but I’m not sure that the latter is widely popular enough to get a lot of people riled up. With rare exception, these moves are death knells for my usage of such apps. As I’ve written before, the bottom line is that apps have to offer good value to their users. To me, $40 per year for a pretty calendar does not offer good value. A clipboard manager which jumps from $15 once to $10 per year does not offer good value.

What these changes really do for me is nudge me out of complacency and into reevaluating my app choices. As it turns out, the built-in Calendar.app isn’t as pretty as Fantastical, but for $40 per year it’s gotten to be good enough. There are any number of clipboard managers - some inside apps I was already using, like Keyboard Maestro - that aren’t as nice as Paste, but for $10 per year they’re good enough. And so those moves to subscription models, which are always accompanied by long blog posts explaining how it’s really in my best interest, move me away from the apps I had liked and push me to check out the alternatives. What they almost never do is get me to switch to the desired Patreon-like financial model.

Merlin Mann described the category of little things that sit in the background and suck money or resources from you as eels attached to your neck. One is bad. Dozens are terrible. Well, I’m getting rid of my neck eels. There are very few apps I use that can’t be replaced. And when an app’s price suddenly skyrockets and stops offering good value, that’s exactly why I do.