I don’t travel a lot, so when I do I invariably find that I’ve forgotten something important (9 PM the night before: “say, dear, where are we boarding the dogs?” “I thought you were doing that!”). I wrote an AppleScript to copy items from an OmniOutliner document to an OmniFocus project so that I never have to forget again.

I love OmniFocus. It runs my life. But it lacks any kind of a template systems to let you quickly churn out copies of a project. That’s exactly what I needed here, though. Fortunately OmniOutliner fills that gap and gives me a nice way to describe that project. Here’s how mine starts:

When I run the AppleScript and say “I want to travel on June 24”, it creates actions like “Call the vet to make pet boarding arrangements, with the Phone context, due on June 3 at 5PM”. I add everything to this list:

• USB gadgets to charge
• Toiletries to pack
• Things to remove from my messenger bag (so I don’t find myself in line at security and realize I’ve still got my pocket knife)
• People to notify, such as telling my credit union that I’ll be using my debit card in some exotic place like Topeka and please not to block it as fraud

A magic moment for me was hearing Merlin Mann’s suggestion to add an “update this list” action:

A couple of days into my trip, I get a reminder to add anything new I’d forgotten or wish I’d done differently. This turns my template into a living document of exactly my own personalized requirements.

The shield was half-heartedly poking at her keyboard when the car started to move. Oh. “I guess I’m rolling. Coverage is sketch here so I might cut out.”

“Oh my God. You’re still shielding her? I thought we paid you better than that.” His voice lifted when he disapproved. She rolled her eyes. “Her husband gives me a hundred bucks plus six a mile. She probably just wants ice cream or fries or something.”

She didn’t mention the time when it wasn’t just ice cream or fries, but shopping down in the Long Beach Autonomous Zone. That trip had covered her rent for two months. She didn’t know how to get any good drugs in Little Utah, though, and she had been bored out of her mind, barely leaving the car. He was still pissy that she’d left without telling him first. She didn’t care. They chose her more often because she was willing to roll on a moment’s notice.

“I worry, you know.” His tone softened. He probably did worry. “I know. You shouldn’t. Nothing ever happens. As long as a rock doesn’t fall on the highway or something, it’s free money.” If it did, well, that would be different. As negotiated and coordinated with the AIs steering the cars around them, her own little car would race to wedge its way between the road hazard and the cargo she was protecting, absorbing the damage so that her employer’s car didn’t have to. Lots of shields walked away from events. Sometimes they didn’t. For six bucks a mile, she was ready to take that chance. US West law didn’t allow unoccupied vehicles on the road, so she hung out and napped her way through riding shotgun.

“Look, I’ve gotta go. I need more insulin and they pay up hourly. I wanna top off my playlist while I still have data. I’ll hit you up when I get back.”

“If. If you get back.”

“When,” her voice shaking. She didn’t have time for this.

I am pro-military. I think having a strong military means we’re unlikely to have to use it to protect ourselves. But how strong does it actually need to be?

For the sake of argument, I’ll assume that spending corresponds to strength. That is, America spending $1 million gives us roughly as much military power as China or Russia spending $1 million. If this is not true, then we’re spending money poorly and should re-evaluate our budget before increasing it. But that whole line of argument frankly disrespects our world’s finest soldiers and sailors, so let’s agree to set that aside for now.

According to SIPRI, these are the budgets of the world’s biggest militaries in 2015, in billions of dollars:

World Military Spending, 2015

The extra column, “Cumulative”, is a running total of the budgets of countries other than the United States. Look at Germany, #9 on the list: that’s where the rest of the world added together is finally bigger than America. We literally spend more than the next 8 countries after us. Of those, UK, India, France, Japan, and Germany are staunch US allies. Removing those, we outspend the remaining top three countries by 60%. Even in an outlandishly unrealistic scenario where we’d be fighting all three of them simultaneously¹, with no help at all from our allies, we’d probably still win by a wide margin.

If something like that happened, we would get help from our allies on this list, whose militaries add up to $274.4B, or just $94.4B shy of those top three “unfriendly” countries (and $59.4B greater than China alone). In a likely situation where the rest of the world shows up, our combined allied strength is vastly stronger than any potential enemies.

We’re currently hearing lots of propaganda about our pathetic, run-down little military. Those are unpatriotic lies. We already have the world’s largest military and it’s nearly three times stronger than runner up China. We could probably be making wiser decisions about how we’re spending our money, but if anyone tells you we should be spending more, make sure their hands aren’t reaching for your wallet.

Over-eager airport security has recently taken to making travelers unlock their phones and tablets for examination. This is both unforgivably invasive and trivially easy to defeat. Here’s how to protect your data¹ on your iPhone or iPad² when traveling.

Simplest: disable Touch ID

• Enable a six-digit passcode on your device.
• Set your device to erase itself after 10 failed passcode attempts. You should do these two steps anyway!
• Before you get to airport security, turn your device off. iOS devices require a passcode to unlock themselves the first time after they’re turned on. For dumb legal reasons, passcodes are generally thought to be protected by the 5th amendment, but fingerprints are not.

Now you have at least the physical ability to refuse to unlock your device. Be prepared for mental or legal pressure to supply your password, though. File this under “better than nothing”.

If you want to keep your current device

• Turn on iCloud backup.
• When it’s finished backing up, reset your device to its factory settings.
• When you get where you’re going, restore your device from backup.

You’re traveling with a device, but one as bare as the day you originally bought it. Be prepared to explain why you’re carrying an empty device.

Keep your device, but less suspicious

• Turn on iCloud backup.
• When it’s finished backing up, reset your device.
• Start using it. Add a few contacts. Set up a (disposable) email account. Add some songs.

Now you have a plausibly used device. When you get to your destination, reset your device again. Restore it from backup. This is more work than the previous instructions, but also less suspicious.

If you’d rather travel bare-handed

• Turn on iCloud backup. Let it finish.
• Leave this device at home.
• When you get where you’re going, buy a replacement device. Restore it from the backup you made earlier. Now you have an exact clone of the original.

This is the most expensive option, but you can’t unlock what you don’t have.

Conclusion

Searching travelers’ devices at airports is security theater. It’s a massive and inconvenient violation of privacy, and only the world’s least prepared criminals would ever get caught this way. I guarantee I’m not the first person to think of backing up a phone and restoring it at my destination. Since it’s ineffective and almost certainly unconstitutional, cooler heads would recommend ending these pointless searches. Don’t wait for that to happen. Protect your data.

I started this blog twelve years ago. I always meant to update it regularly, but… life intervenes. After recently coming back to it, I decided it was due for a good cleaning. There were lots of old articles about things I no longer care about but that people on the Internet keep visiting and linking to. I kept them. But there were also a lot of opinion pieces that I no longer agree with. Their disposition was a harder decision. The possibility of deleting them felt dishonest, like I was denying ever holding those beliefs. Conversely, this blog isn’t a diary (I have a separate one of those) or a public record (I just write stuff every now and then).

I won’t ever apologize for opinions I’ve had but discarded. If we’re a product of our environments, then our ideas must surely be the result of the people around us and the things we were taught. We don’t often get much say in these until later in life. However, many of my opinions have changed greatly through time, usually after meeting new friends or reading new viewpoints and considering my own beliefs in the light of new information.

Additionally, while reading through those old posts, I realized that a lot of them were phrased a lot more strongly, perhaps harshly, than I’d ever actually felt about the subjects involved. In person, I can cheerfully discuss great differences with just about anyone. I’m excited and energized by tracing back to the roots of our dissents and looking for common ground in even wildly different worldviews. And yet, reduced to written word, a lot of the things I would have said with a smile over a shared meal came across as, well, angry and mean.

Given that I now disagree with many of the ideas I’d described, and that other posts inaccurately conveyed a stridency I never felt during their writing, I’ve deleted large swaths of old content. If I won’t apologize for my opinions, I will for how I might have expressed them in ways that hurt, angered, or belittled.

And with that, let’s begin this experiment anew.

There are about 1.5 billion reasons to want to cancel your Yahoo account. Don’t do that!

According to Yahoo’s account deletion page, they “may allow other users to sign up for and use your current Yahoo! ID and profile names after your account has been deleted”:

This is a terrible policy not shared by other service providers, and there are many scenarios where it’s a huge security problem for Yahoo’s users. For example:

• You register for Facebook with your me@yahoo.com email address.
• You forget about that, read about the newest Yahoo user database hack, and delete your Yahoo account.
• A month later, someone else signs up to get your me@yahoo.com email address. They use Facebook’s password reset mechanism to take control of your account, download your private photos, and say nasty things to your friends.
• Oh, and anyone you forgot to share your new address with is still sending personal communications to your old Yahoo address, and its new owner is reading them.

Here’s what you should do instead:

Purge your Yahoo account

It’s time to move on. Yahoo has a terrible security track record and shows no signs of improving.

First, understand what you’ll be doing here. You’ll be removing everything from your Yahoo account: your email, contacts, events, and so on. Permanently. There’s no changing your mind. It’s extreme, sure, but until you do it’s likely that hackers can:

• Read messages from your spouse or partner.
• See your calendar events to know when you’ll be away from the house.
• Take over your account and start resetting every password associated with it, like Facebook, Amazon, and your bank.

Don’t delete your account. Clean it out!

Secure it

Before doing anything else, change your Yahoo password! Hackers probably have your current one. I’m not exaggerating.

Once that’s done, turn on two-factor authentication (2FA). This can prevent hackers from accessing your account even if they get your password.

Once that’s done, make a note to yourself to turn on 2FA for every other account you have that supports it.

Make your new home

Before you start, you’ll want to create an email account with a new provider. Lots of people like Gmail but pick one that looks good to you. This will be your new home account on the Internet: the email address that you give out to friends and coworkers and that you use to log into websites.

Clear your email

• Log into your Yahoo mail.
• Click the little checkbox above your emails to select all of them.

• Click the Delete button to delete all email on that page. If you have lots of messages, you may have to repeat this several times.
• Hover over the Trash mailbox to make the trashcan icon appear. Click the trashcan.

• Confirm that you want to empty your trash.

Clear everything else

If you’re like most people, that’s probably 99% of your Yahoo data. You’re not quite done yet, though! Now click through each of the services in the little icons in the top left corner:

They all may have more information stored in them. Each works a little differently but you should be able to figure out how to clean out each one.

Set a vacation reminder

Other email providers make it easy to forward all of your incoming mail to a new account. Yahoo removed that feature recently so you can’t use that convenient approach. Instead, you’ll make a Vacation Response to tell people about your new address.

• Click the settings gear in the top right corner.
• Choose Settings, then Vacation Response.
• Check the box to “Enable automatic response”, and set the Until: year to as far in the future as it will let you.

• Enter a message like:

I may now be reached at me@example.com. Please update your address book. Thanks!

• Click Save.

Now anyone writing to you will get a message with your new address, but their email will still land in your Yahoo inbox.

Change your logins

Now go through your web accounts and change all of them where you log in with me@yahoo.com to use your new email address instead. If you use a password manager to keep track of your accounts, this will be easy. Time consuming — thanks, Yahoo! — but easy.

Check back

You’re going to miss a few accounts, and some friends or family will stubbornly insist on sending email to your old address. Set a reminder or mark your calendar to check your Yahoo mail a month from now to see who’s written to you. Update each of those people or accounts, then delete all of your new messages. Check again in another month and then another after that. Eventually this will slow to a trickle and you can forget about your old Yahoo account for many months at a time (or until the next news article about a giant Yahoo hack comes along, and then you can smile to yourself because it doesn’t affect you anymore).

Conclusion

Migrating off Yahoo is a pain in the neck. Google, in contrast, makes it easy to extract all your information and then securely close your account. Yahoo does not. It won’t be quick or painless, but I recommend that you start now.

In late 2016, Evernote updated their privacy policy to explicitly grant their employees the right to view your personal information. In their own words:

And please note that you cannot opt out of employees looking at your content for other reasons stated in our Privacy Policy (under the section, “Does Evernote Share My Personal Information or Content?”).

This is unacceptable for most of the things you’d want to use a note taking application for, and I believe that makes it wholly unfit for any kind of business or private use. The good news is that there are viable alternatives now. These are the options I particularly like:

Synology Note Station

If you have a Synology NAS, you can install Note Station which is basically Evernote but hosted on your own server. It has nice (and free) iOS apps, and an Android app that I haven’t used. There’s no desktop app yet but it does have a nice web interface. This is probably the easiest drop-in replacement for Evernote — if you have a Synology.

Note Station and its mobile apps are free but might not (yet) be quite as polished as you’re used to.

DEVONthink

If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, I highly recommend DEVONthink Pro Office (DTPO). It’s not so much a note app as a personal knowledge repository. My home ScanSnap scanner deposits docs directly into my DTPO inbox and OCRs them so they’re fulltext searchable. It also has a nice UI for creating your own notes, spreadsheets, etc. directly in the app, and great system integrations to make it easy to save data from almost any app into it. It has an amazing AI classification engine, so it can perform actions like automatically filing documents that look like invoices into my “Invoices” folder.

DTPO also has a new iOS app¹ that syncs to it via options such as:

• Local Wi-Fi peer-to-peer connections so that your data’s never stored on any server,
• Dropbox, which is handy if you already use it, or
• Your own WebDAV server, with end-to-end encryption so you don’t have to trust your storage provider. I use my Synology NAS for this method.

Finally, DTPO has a web interface so that you can browse your document databases from another system which doesn’t (or can’t) have DEVONthink installed on it.

DTPO isn’t cheap, but I think it’s absolutely worth the cost.

Recommendation

Of these, I prefer DEVONthink Pro Office as it’s more mature and already has almost every feature imaginable. Note Station is pretty good today, too, and has a lot of promise. Either one will move your data to being completely under your own control and I like that a lot.

I was in a meeting when I noticed the sun was hitting my water bottle just right.

Gigi isn’t so sure about our new decoration.

It’s not possible for technologists to avoid politics because technology is politics:

• You’re writing an instant messaging app that can more easily share information with law enforcement agencies, or one designed to make that impossible. Either of those alter how governments interacts with their citizens.
• You made a ride-sharing app. It’s now easy for drivers to sign up and start making money, at the expense of existing taxi drivers. Your app alters the workforce.
• Your website does a better job of calculating its users’ income taxes and giving them bigger refunds. It shifts the flow of money through the economy.

None of those are inherently bad, but they do cause changes in the lives and finances of their users. After all, if they didn’t affect people we wouldn’t be doing them.

Technology is politics. It’s logically inconsistent and meaningless to tell an engineer that they’re “too political” or that they should “stick to tech”.