Earlier today, I opened the Stocks app to see how bad things were after yesterday afternoon’s tariff announcement. I thought its one-day plots weren’t very useful. Here’s APPL: | Continue reading
While writing last week’s post on the built-in Apple thesaurus, I looked around for other ways to get a list of synonyms. I came across the Merriam-Webster API, which gives you free access (for light non-commercial use) to the M-W dictionary and thesaurus. I didn’t spend too much … | Continue reading
I updated my Mac to macOS 15.4 last night and after the reboot, my desktop was white. Pure white. | Continue reading
I was reading a news article today about Trump’s hope to get a ceasefire in Ukraine arranged by April 20 because it’s Easter. I thought, “Wait, that’s our Easter, but is it also Ukraine’s Easter?” Based on the Ukrainian neighborhoods in Chicago, I assumed most of Ukraine would ce … | Continue reading
A big update to Greg Pierce’s Terminology app came out this past week, and I’m sure you’ve already read the reviews. I especially like how you can create “resources” to look up words in thesauruses, alternate dictionaries, or even on websites that are only vaguely similar to dict … | Continue reading
In an update to the phone bending post, I used the term “factor of safety.” It’s a simple and seemingly self-explanatory phrase, but there’s a lot of depth to it. This post discusses how it’s used—and not used—by structural and mechanical engineers. | Continue reading
A few people wrote to me after yesterday’s post with gentle warnings about the potential danger of building an SQL query by concatenating strings, in particular when one or more of the strings comes from the user. Which is exactly how the shell scripts in that post worked. The “B … | Continue reading
I had a couple of SQL database queries that I wanted to improve. Instead of going my usual route of searching for the answer in SQLite’s documentation, I decided to give ChatGPT a crack at it. I hoped that I would not only get better queries, but that I’d also learn something abo … | Continue reading
Here’s a simple problem assigned to me by John Siracusa. He was the guest host on this week’s episode of Upgrade, and early in the show he and Jason Snell were discussing the “thin iPhone” that’s rumored to be coming out this fall. Apparently, there will be only one size of this … | Continue reading
One of the apps I was thinking of (but didn’t mention) when writing about smart quotes on the Mac was the Mastodon app, Mona. While the iOS version of Mona handles smart quotes as expected, the Mac version doesn’t. This was particularly annoying as I started tweeting1 more from m … | Continue reading
After reading Jason Snell’s review of Shareshot and Framous, I thought I should start adding frames to my iPhone screenshots again, something I haven’t done for several years. But I didn’t buy either of the apps he reviewed, nor did I download Federico Viticci’s Apple Frames Shor … | Continue reading
Yes, the ads are annoying, but I’m coming around to Apple News. And I’ve found it’s better if I don’t have to scroll to get to my favorite sections or channels. Here are a couple of Shortcuts that get me directly to places I like to go in the app when I’m on my phone or iPad. I’v … | Continue reading
I didn’t turn on the smart quotes feature on any of my Macs until earlier this week. I probably should have, but I didn’t need them when writing blog posts or reports,1 and I did virtually all of my social media posting from my phone, which has had smart quotes turned on for year … | Continue reading
Yesterday’s post included three drawings I made using a combination of Mathematica, Acorn, and OmniGraffle. The roles that Acorn and OmniGraffle played were pretty obvious, but the Mathematica1 part is worth a description. | Continue reading
A week or so ago, Scientific American republished this Martin Gardner puzzle from 1958: | Continue reading
I listened to the most recent (and long-delayed) episode of The Talk Show today as I drove south from home to Champaign-Urbana to watch the Illini men’s basketball team try to reclaim their season against the Iowa Hawkeyes. The drive usually takes between 2 and 2½ hours, which is … | Continue reading
Back in January, I got a question from Adam Bodnar on Mastodon:1 | Continue reading
This morning, I went to Swallow Cliff Woods to walk around its trails. As I was driving there and listening to a podcast through CarPlay, an Amber Alert icon appeared on the screen. When I tapped the screen, Siri described a car I was to report if I saw it. There were a couple of … | Continue reading
Speaking of Jason Snell, which I was in yesterday’s post, he recently gave an interesting interview to Allison Sheridan on her Chit Chat Across the Pond podcast. The topic was Jason’s longstanding series of charts following Apple’s quarterly results—the latest of which is here—an … | Continue reading
A week or so ago, Jason Snell asked if I could help with a problem he was having using the Python Imaging Library (PIL)1. He wanted to update his e-ink status board with color images, as he now has the color e-ink display that Dan Moren uses. But he couldn’t get consistent result … | Continue reading
I got in my car a little before noon today to go see my dentist. Because the appointment was in my Calendar and included the dentist’s address, I expected CarPlay to bring up the address and ask if I wanted driving directions there. Instead, it suggested a location in the opposit … | Continue reading
It’s been well over a year since I last wrote about how I’m using a single notebook and making it easy to search. Normally, such a gap would mean that I’ve stopped doing whatever it was that had my interest, but that’s not true in this case. I can see a bunch of filled Feela note … | Continue reading
I recently came across this post, written ten years ago, in which I used a short Python script to solve a simple enumeration puzzle. Looking at the code, I realized how differently I would look at this problem today; partly because I know more Python libraries than I did then, an … | Continue reading
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Bruce Ediger solved the conditional probability problem using Monte Carlo simulation. This is when you use a random number generator to numerically simulate many repetitions of the problem and track the conditions of interest. | Continue reading
Bruce Ediger of Information Camouflage solved a nice little probability problem on his blog the other day. He got the problem from Greg Ross at Futility Closet, a blog I hadn’t run across before. Here it is: | Continue reading
You may remember this post from back in October. It’s about a puzzle in the November issue of Scientific American in which the goal was to determine if you could build a house of cards of the following design with exactly 100 cards. And if so, how many stories would the house hav … | Continue reading
You may remember the Weight Today shortcut I wrote about last month. I run it from my iPhone every morning to record my weight in both the Health app and a CSV file I use for graphing my progress (or lack thereof). It’s a simple shortcut, and yesterday it proved to be too simple. | Continue reading
We had very clear skies in the Chicago area last night, and I was able to see Mars just before the Moon passed in front of it. This happened somewhere between 8:00 and 8:30. A couple of hours before that, I tweeted | Continue reading
Shortly after I published my CleanShot X/Retrobatch post, Allison Sheridan posted this on Mastodon: | Continue reading
As last year wound down and software went on sale, I bought some new apps and updated some others. Included in these gifts to myself were CleanShot X, which is as good as everyone has said it is, and the Acorn/Retrobatch upgrade bundle. Over the past few days, I’ve been using Cle … | Continue reading
Inspired by Brett Terpstra’s post today about viewing man pages in iTerm via the x-man-page handler, I made some changes to the way Terminal on my Mac displays man pages and have been thinking—again—about how I should link to man pages here on the blog. | Continue reading
It’s been a while since I ran into a website that asked for a phone number and didn’t know how to clean it of non-numeric stuff like hyphens, parentheses, etc. But today I did, and I realized that I didn’t have a Keyboard Maestro macro that would clean a telephone number on my cl … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, Presh Talwalkar released this Mind Your Decisions video in which his original attempt to solve the video’s puzzle was, he says, incomplete because he was led astray by plotting the function at the heart of the problem. I say he didn’t do enough plotting. | Continue reading
Today I needed to reverse a string. Someone had decided to take an easy-to-remember mix of words and numbers, reverse it, and use that as a password for a service that several people would use, including me. Let’s not argue about whether that’s a good way to set a password—I had … | Continue reading
A few days ago, I noticed an error in this Scientific American article (that’s an Apple News link). It led me to thinking about how I use Jupyter Console as a calculator on my Mac. | Continue reading
The release of iOS 18.2 has come with a release of anger at how the Mail app is handling our email. There was this post by Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels and this one by Joe Rosensteel at Six Colors (with a followup at his own place). The unsurprising conclusion is that the compan … | Continue reading
Sometime in the early evening on Sunday, I looked at that day’s Antikythera post on my phone and saw that two of the equations weren’t rendering: | Continue reading
A recent episode of the In Our Time podcast is about the Antikythera mechanism, which you’ve probably heard of. It’s a bronze device that dates back to the first century BCE and was found by divers on an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in the early 1900s. It … | Continue reading
Here’s a followup on my post about tracking and plotting my weight. The shortcuts we’ll cover were written a couple of weeks ago, but I thought weight would be a touchy subject during the week of Thanksgiving. | Continue reading
I’m still not sure how to think about AI. While some aspects of it seem useful, I’m not sure I care about them. The few times I’ve tried it out on topics of interest to me, using both ChatGPT and Perplexity it’s failed. | Continue reading
A few days ago, I saw this short YouTube video from Grant Sanderson at 3Blue1Brown: | Continue reading
I’m pretty sure there’s a Peanuts comic strip in which Linus works out how many of each gift was given in the “Twelve Days of Christmas.” I’ve been unable to Google it, because the search results are overwhelmed by links to “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” So I decided to work it out … | Continue reading
Back in the summer, I decided to get more serious about controlling my Type 2 diabetes, and I enrolled in a program that I found through my insurance company. Overall, things have gone quite well: my blood glucose is down, my weight is down, and I’ve been able to cut my medicatio … | Continue reading
I think I’ve mentioned here before that sometimes I’ll run into a computer problem and Googling for the answer leads me to a post I wrote (and forgot about) years earlier. I had a similar experience today in the physical world. | Continue reading
I got my new MacBook Pro last Friday, and so far only two things have annoyed me. The first I got used to much faster than I thought I would, and the second I’ve turned off in System Settings. | Continue reading
Earlier this month, I got an email from Anthony SEROU about my post on the golden ratio and converting between miles and kilometers. They suggested using consecutive Fibonacci numbers as a quick way to do the conversion, e.g., 5 miles is 8 kilometers. And if the amount you’re con … | Continue reading
Yesterday my old vaudeville partner,1 Dan Sturm, wrote a post describing a Keyboard Maestro macro he wrote that increments the version number in a file name. It’s the sort of thing I could have used years ago when I was writing reports and analysis scripts that often had to be up … | Continue reading
The Matplotlib code in the last post was initially generated with a Typinator abbreviation that I tweaked to make the final script. After writing the post, I decided it would be nice to have a second, similar abbreviation. This post shows you both. | Continue reading