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Six Colors: Kindle Voyage review

The Kindle Voyage is a premium reader at a premium price, targeting people who love their Kindles so much that they won't hesitate to spend $200 for the best Kindle they can buy. It's a smart decision, I think, and the Voyage is an excellent product.

That all said, I have to admit that of all the Kindle upgrades I've done over the years, this one felt the least significant. The screen is better, but the Paperwhite screen was already quite good. It's good to have buttons again, but the accidental touches I make on the screen adjacent to the buttons somewhat reduce my enthusiasm for that feature. The typography is unchanged and mediocre.

In other words… I'm fine with my PaperWhite.

FearlessGenius.org | One photographer was granted unprecedented access to document history in the making

I've added that to my Amazon Wishlist, and I don't mean the Kindle version…

The rest of the world is adopting a "wait and see" approach to the Apple Watch.

How Apple Watch is killing wearable tech as a gift this Christmas

My favorite iOS 8 features, big and small | DanFrakes.com

A few good ones, but most I knew about. One of the previously unknown:

One of my favorite minor details of iOS 8 is that whenever you touch the brightness slider in Control Center, the "real" screen behind it is temporarily restored to normal brightness, so you see an accurate preview while you're adjusting the level.

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. [↩]