There was a period of time when reading one’s junk email was randomly entertaining. Sure, there were the people who just wanted to sell dubious substances with exaggerated claims of medical impact, or fiscal schemes designed to make something out of nothing with few details other than parting with all your money is sure to make some more.

But now and again there was a gem. As I go through all my old posts from previous sites and consider which should live again and which should be forgotten (most) I came across one where I commented on a particular piece of email that seemed wildly out of place.

It took a little work, but I managed to get iA Writer, Working Copy, and Shortcuts to play nice and create a new Hugo post on mobile. I’d toyed with the idea of adopting dynamic APIs that mutated a checkout of the site and such but there was always some extra difficulty and the whole point of going static was to avoid that nonsense.

The short of it is:

1. Ask for Text with “Post Title”
2. Current Date
3. Format Date (Current Date, ISO)
4. Text (your stub post goes here, frontmatter and all)
5. Replace “[^\w\s]+” with “-” in “[step 1]”
6. Change “[step 5]” to “lowercase”
7. Format “Current Date” as “yyyy-MM-dd”
8. Set name of “[step 4]” to “[step 7]-[step 6].md”
9. Save “[step 8]” to “[Working Copy path to content dir]”
10. Open “Saved File” in “iA Writer”

A fun trick I’ve used lately is to have Claude Code and Gemini critique each other through a Markdown document conversation. It’s surprisingly effective.

In Claude Code, I’ll have it do some work without checking it in just yet. Then I’ll start up gemini in the same working directory and say:

You’re a code reviewer. You will not edit code. Review the current changes. They were intended to [bug/feature description]. Evaluate the solution and write your review to reviews/Review-1.md and I will inform the other coder.

Finally pushed through to the end of Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds after putting it down twice over the past decade. As a conclusion to the original Revelation Space trilogy, it’s an … ending. Worth going through because the first 95% is standard RS-level fun (at least on Akarat). A solid 4/5 for the first 47/50 chapters.

If you want the ending to be satisfying—or the Epilogue to make sense—have Inhibitor Phase on the ready to start right after (so I’m told). Also, the Galactic North collection of short stories apparently has a lot of the missing bits/context that build out the world before this. Perhaps the proper reading order is: Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Galactic North, Absolution Gap, Inhibitor Phase. With Chasm City appropriate anywhere after Revelation Space for the world-building of Yellowstone.

Quick tip for Time Machine backups: Mac OS X Server (“Server.app” these days) can setup a quota for Time Machine backups that is specific per-machine (rather than per-user). This trick works on any share, actually, since it’s a root-owned property list in the share directory. You’ll want Mavericks or later as a client for this to work, but to set it up cd into the root of the Time Machine share and create the plist with (for a 500GB example):

After watching yesterday’s Apple Event and reading around a bit at the reactions, I’ve become concerned for the future of the Mac, at least in the hands of the current leadership at Apple.

For a long time we — creatives, power users, and developers, the “Pro” in the product names — felt the fear that Apple’s success in iOS would manifest itself with a locked-down Mac and candy icons on the screen. While that does not appear to have passed, something far more damaging has: Apple completely forgot why people used Macs.

Having the desire to upgrade my input devices at the home, I started looking around for a good keyboard and mouse combo. While the business-oriented lines were nice in their own ways, they lacked a certain flair and were woefully short of buttons and standard layouts. (What’s with everyone screwing with the standard keyboard layout? Stop it. I like my buttons.)

As a result, I started to look at the gaming series of devices. I’m not sure how I wound up looking at them, honestly, but once I started to look at the options it was clear to me that all the attention on making input devices better at a hardware level was going into that market instead: the keyboards were mostly mechanical, the mice were high-DPI and loaded with buttons, and the quality was far and away higher — as were the prices, of course.

Even though I knew that video modes were a nightmare mess that was made barely tolerable by standards, I had no idea the hell that awaited once one passed the 1200p edge.

A short history of video modes before we begin (this helps the pain later). Video is a three-dimensional concept that must yield to the laws of computer science and become a two-dimensional bitstream of arrays in order to go down the wire to the screen (and also in order to be stored in memory, but let’s not complicate things more). You may be wondering if I added an extra dimension in the previous sentence but I did not – that additional dimension is time.

After installing the GMs to Sierra and Friends I was eager to try out the Auto Unlock feature with the Watch as passwords generally suck and re-entering them time and again sucks more.

With all my devices on the same Apple ID and updated, I went to the Security prefs on the Mac and lo … no option for it. After reading around I learned all the devices must be marked as Trusted in iCloud, which means you need Two-Factor Authentication (not Two-Step). I set this up and re-added each device to iCloud until they were marked appropriately. Still no option on the Mac.

Is It Illegal to Make Your Spouse Ride on the Roof of the Car? | Lowering the Bar

This question arises from the recent arrest of a Florida man (credit: The Smoking Gun) after he was stopped by a police officer who wished to inquire as to why there was a woman clinging to the roof of his car. The answer to that question, as you might expect, turned out to be complicated.