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Monument To Apple's Jobs Removed In Russia After CEO Comes Out

Russian media reports say a big mock iPhone meant as a monument to the late former Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been taken down in St. Petersburg after his successor, Tim Cook, came out publicly as gay.

The monument, with an interactive screen displaying information about Jobs, was reportedly put up on the grounds of an IT university in January 2013 on the initiative of a Russian company called Western European Financial Union.

In Communist Russia… well, that's just stupid, actually. 😛

What I don't understand is why the scientists are so amazed.

Since installing Yosemite, my "Share" menu has failed to show many of the built-in sharing possibilities, including some of the Apple-supplied ones. These items would also not appear in the System Preferences ("Extensions" -> "Share Menu").

I've fixed it several times (steps below), and am adding it here so I can find it more easily.

Share button in Yosemite Safari not working, shows "No Service"

Basically:

1. Open everything in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ShareKit.framework/Versions/A/PlugIns/ with an application called "Widget Simulator."
2. Click "Okay" or whatever to dismiss the dialog box that appears.

That's it. Doing this rebuilds an index or something somewhere and makes Mac1 OS X "aware" of the extensions it has to enable more sharing.

1. I still like to call it that, dammit. [↩]

Thank you, Tim Cook

I almost wrote something like "Tim Cook confirmed what everyone all knew… now let's get back to something that really matters."

Yet if you read the linked piece above, he says:

In other words: Now let us never speak of this again.

On the surface, tweets like these seem to reflect a lukewarm support for Cook. But they also betray a deep discomfort with the idea of gay people in public life, and even with sexuality itself.

I don't mean it that way.

I mean it in a way I imagine gay people would appreciate: I don't care what their sexual orientation is. I don't care in the same way I don't care what the sexual orientation of my straight friends is. It's a non-issue. They have, in my mind, 100% equal rights.

Isn't that the way it should be? Saying "let's move on" means it's not important to me - not because I disagree with homosexuality, but because I legitimately don't think it should be an issue.

I'm not denying that for far too many, it is still an issue. People still want to suppress gay folk from having equal rights, etc. But I'm not one of them. Tim Cook coming out is about as newsworthy1 as, I don't know, Harrison Ford admitting that he's straight.

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1. To me, of course - again, I'm completely aware that there are still far too many people to whom this matters, many negatively. [↩]

35 Things That Make Travel Suck Less

I resisted these for years, a) because they're expensive and b) because the recommended models tended to be bulky over-the-ear types (e.g. Bose QC-15s) which can get hot and suck if you wear a hat. This was dumb. If you travel a lot, I recommend you go out right now and get the Bose 20's. You have no idea how loud flights actually are until you wear a set of these. The noise-canceling is absurd, they charge over micro-USB and they're comfortable in-ear headphones. Seriously, they're magic. Unless you're an audiophile, in which case you're on your own and may God have mercy on your soul.

I keep looking at these on Amazon (I'd need the QC-20i model for iPhones). I don't travel enough to justify $299, but I keep being tempted.

Maybe for Christmas or something…

A Teenager Gets Grilled By Her Dad About Why She’s Not That Into Coding and Girls Who Code.

1Password for Mac Tips: meet 1Password mini and its not-so-mini list of shortcuts

Cmd-O is nice.

Saving locally by default:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

Reason for this: Yosemite Uploads Unsaved Documents and Recent Addresses to iCloud

https://mapsconnect.apple.com

Cool.

My wife only gets better with age.

Today, she's 37.

And I made sure she knew it. 😉

Assuming I can find the storage space I need1, it's being reviewed quite favorably.

Full review here.

1. I have four 3-TB drives on my Mac Pro. Only two contain original content. One is the Time Machine backup, and the other is a cloned nightly bootable backup drive. At any rate, a simple Thunderbolt multi-drive dock may be all I need. And a Thunderbolt scanner, I guess, too, since I still have a Firewire scanner that works really well with VueScan. [↩]

Retailers are disabling NFC readers to shut out Apple Pay

So…

Retailers are banding together to:

• Keep more money for themselves
• Limit choices for consumers (you can still pay with your VISA, at no extra cost to the retailer, but you can't do it by waving your phone in front of a machine?)
• Directly withdraw payments from your checking account
• Decrease security for consumers (CC companies, and Apple, care about security. Retailers have proven they do not.)
• Force QR Codes (seriously, QR Codes???) on people

Again, NOT supporting Apple Pay is dumb. They will not be able to say "we don't take VISA" any time soon, so they're literally limiting you to SWIPING your card instead of the more secure NFC way of one-time numbers and sharing/storing no personal information.

I hope Apple and Google simply don't allow these apps to be sold. Not that it's a necessary move.

Shame on you, MCX and Wal-Mart, CVS, Rite-Aid, Best Buy, 7-11, etc.

Thoughts on Yosemite's Look and Feel

In the meantime, though, I find Yosemite lacking in polish, full of awkward decisions and unresolved tensions. Safari, in particular, seems to have trouble balancing theory—the idea that the same software on iOS and OS X should share a structurally similar user interface—with execution—its symmetrical arrangement of interface elements is not all that symmetrical in practice, and its buttons seem improvised and lacking in care.

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Worth the price1 of Yosemite alone.

Seriously.

1. Even if it was still $29 [↩]

Aperture import plugin now available. Step-by-step directions are here.

The plugin of course does not import ANY modifications to the images. It just imports the raw images right across.

I'm waiting to see what Photos brings. Apple has supposedly said they'd support Yosemite at least, and Aperture launches and works on Yosemite right now, so I'm waiting.

I'm still pissed, but I'm waiting.