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.

State: Answers were erased on 14,220 STAAR tests | www.mystatesman.com:

State officials are threatening to reconsider a $280 million contract with its testing vendor after answers to 14,220 state standardized tests were erased because of a computer glitch last week.

Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they're still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody's pretty sure they're important parts.

Programming Sucks

Every project I’ve ever worked on has this smell somewhere.

People like to think Microsoft is the dean of proprietary software companies. Nonsense! Microsoft is making serious investments in open-source software. Apple, though, now there’s a company that likes to lock down its code.

Apple’s Swift Comes to Linux - ZDNet

Likes to lock down their code? WTH? Pay attention to that which you critique. The OS is open source, the compiler has always been open source, WebKit is open source, the core frameworks are open source, and they publish all changes to GPL code as they should. Seriously, what’s your standard here, especially when comparing to MS?

The issue is larger than the folks running the show can fix. Their members vote based on what they see as talent. Their membership is not at all diverse. Even this, though, isn’t in their control. They mainly have A-level members with some scattering of Bs. Folks at that level trend towards the pale end of the spectrum as a product of the viewership’s perceived preferences (“Ain’t no white family going to see a movie with a black lead!” uhh, Lethal Weapon? The Matrix? A hundred others?)

The silent trade: universal objective ethics in action:

Once upon a time, back during the Age of Exploration, there was a marvellous practice called the “silent trade”. It was a solution to a serious coordination problem between groups who had no languages in common, or distrusted each other so much that they refused to come within range of each others’ weapons.

I do love interesting bits of trivia.