Category Archives: Personal Life

New Editor: Ulysses

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For what seems like ages, I have been on the witless search for the best text editor for my MacBook Pro. Trying BBEdit, TextWrangler, Atom, MacVim, Pages, TextEdit… the list just goes on and on. Along with this fools errand, I’ve also been searching for the best font to use. What a pile of wet monkey spit this entire task has been.

So enter Ulysses. I was interested in this a while back, but the app wouldn’t function on my system at the time because I was living in denial about Mac OSX Mojave. I was happy with Yosemite and I was going to be damned if I was going to upset every apple cart I had and upgrade to Mojave. But then app after app started to upgrade on me, and over time it was easier to capitulate to Mojave and upgrade to it. Now that I’m using Mojave, I decided to give Ulysses another shot. So far, I don’t hate it, which is about as much as I was expecting honestly. It’ll take more time to actually see how it works as a new text editor, so right now I will just say that the jury is out.

Next to that is the font issue. There is a theme that covers editors, fonts, and even can be extended to movies, music, and comic books, and that is that there are so many options that someone who is on the outside looking in simply cannot choose one place to start. Websites are full of suggestions and sometimes those are handy, you can spot a font that you’ve seen in your application and you can try it out, while other times you get advice that Font XYZ is really quite amazing and then you discover that you have to pay for it, or the application you want to use simply won’t let you use that font. So instead of fretting over endless font choices I just threw a dart and ended up with Open Sans. Maybe it’ll work for me, maybe it will drive me bananas. Although maybe the editors will do that first.

So we’ll see just what we have in store for Ulysses in the days and weeks to come. This editor also comes with a method that might be able to publish to my WordPress Blog, and that will be the next test, to see if it does what it promises.

Hidden Killer

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While working on Scott’s Thermal Cap, the brim, the band around the head, involved 32 discrete stitches per row. The pattern I was using demurred on chaining up the side and instead relied on the natural height of the SCTS to provide the height required as rows were added. Because the chain was omitted, every stitch requires attention, because usually when a chain appears on the side, it “uses up” whatever stitch was next in line, and so you customarily have to skip “where you should go” for the “next spot”. Without the chain on the side, progress is slower, the weave is thicker, and counting becomes rather picky. You want to make sure you have 32 in each row, lest you have decreases where there shouldn’t be any, and your hat comes out looking obviously wrong.

There are a lot of tools for maintaining counts in Crochet. Little plastic barrel counters, clickers, and a few apps for the iPhone. There was one of these apps, that among all the other features also had a verbal input mechanism. The app was updated and the verbal input mechanism was deprecated for Voice Control in iOS.

I have another app, called MultiTimer, in it are counters with audio feedback when you tap them. I had been using this app to count stitches in my work, but its a little annoying to have my hands on the work and then reach over to tap the phone. So I did a little poking around:

  1. Settings
  2. Accessibility
  3. Voice Control (turn it on, it downloads extra iOS components)
  4. ON: Show Confirmation, Show Hints, Overlay: Item Numbers. OFF the rest.
  5. Back to Settings, then to Control Center
  6. Customize Controls
  7. Add Accessibility Shortcuts
  8. Out to Home Screen

So, when I am working on a project, I plug the phone in (since Voice Control is a battery pig), start MultiTimer, switch to my Crochet panel where I have set up all my counters. Then I swipe up from the bottom, tap Accessibility Shortcuts icon, tap on Voice Control, then swipe down to hide the Control Center panel. Overlaid on top of all the screen items are little shaded numbers, so I focus in on the counter that I care about, “Stitch Count” and then I can say “Single Tap” to advance the counter, or “Tap 6” to clear the counter, or “Tap 4” to decrease the counter. That enables me to keep my hands on my work, and my eyes, and just say clearly what I want and the phone makes a little click sound when it does what I want. That way I can concentrate on the work, and then look at the display for the count. When my work session is done, I swipe up from the bottom, tap the Accessibility Shortcut icon, turn off Voice Control, and exit the MultiTimer app. Done and done. This way I can keep my mind focused on the work, I don’t lose count due to interruptions or cats, and it makes my phone do one singular task really well. After I started using this feature, I took back a little bit of the gripes I had previously issued against iOS, just a few. 🙂

We’re Always Shufflin

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Yesterday I came home and like many precursors to the weekend we talk about what sort of meal plan we would like for the coming week. Along with that, we put together the shopping list for our weekend supply chores.

Ever since Apple released iOS 13, we’ve had nothing but headaches with their Reminder app. So the two places we usually go are named lists in the Apple Reminders app. My partner rattled off that there were four items in one list, and I saw none of them. After we wasted an hour resetting and screwing around with Reminders I went to look for alternatives. I found one, an app called “Remember The Milk” and I chiuckled as I had seen it before. Apparently I had an account there a long time ago, so instead of creating a new account, I reccovered the old one. I invited my partner to the app, he installed it, and then I created two lists for our two spots we usually go to, and then I shared them both out to him. Then we sat back and chuckled because with this alternative, proper sync was happening, which was everything we wanted. So we have turned our backs on the Reminder app.

As I started to look through Remember The Milk, I noticed that it had grown up a lot in the time I had been away from it. I’ve been having a headache with the ToDo App from Microsoft, which is actually Wunderlist rebranded. I had split some of my work tasks into ToDo from Microsoft because it was free with my work email, an Office 365 account. ToDo from Microsoft was having serious problems, mostly whenever I had to check off a task, a zombie task would reappear and I’d have to check each task off twice. There were only a few tasks there, so converting them over to Remember The Milk was really easy.

Then as I was working with Remember The Milk, I thought that I might finally leave Toodledo, so I bought a yearly subscription to Remember The Milk, which gave me parity features with Toodledo, and then backed up my Toodledo account and imported the entire thing over to Remember The Milk.

So now all my tasks live in one place again, instead of Reminders, ToDo from Microsoft, and Toodledo, now it’s all Remember The Milk. We’ll see how it goes.

Secure Channels

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I explored the challenge of establishing a secure channel in a business-to-business use case a few days ago. Between the company I work for and another company, where the information was very sensitive, the risk of it being compromised was unacceptable, and the requirement that I share the information with the other party undeniable.

The goal was to get a secret string of text from my system into the system of another party. I have explored cryptography for a long while and so I was confident that all the tools I had could do the job very well. The real challenge was in establishing a communications protocol and a secure channel. Amongst my explorations, I had the entire suite of OpenSSL library ciphers at hand, I had GPG, and the answer which I sort of knew already even before I started this foray into cybersecurity, that Signal would eventually be my answer.

It was at first exploration of the challenge of it. How could I get a secret alphanumeric string to another party that had none of the tools or the experience of cryptography that I had in my library? All of it was fated before I even started, but I at least wanted to go through the motions and explore this problem as if I was sitting in the middle of it without any view of the win condition at the end. The first stab was GPG, so I searched for any public keys related to the other company, and there were none. That was worth a smirk, and I nodded because I would have been shocked if there was a hit at all, so GPG was a dead end. The next effort was thinking about what sort of cipher could be used. This selection of a cipher was symmetric cryptography. I would need to encode the message so that it would be suitable for email transmission, and encrypt the data using some standard cipher that I knew would be possible for both parties, and then I spent a while trying to figure out the password for the cipher. I knew that base64 would be great for encoding and decoding the message, and I still have faith in AES-256-CTR, but that left me having to select a password that I could use that both sides knew. Any effort to share that password in any other non-secure channel would render all my efforts for nothing because then the cipher would be a mathematical contrivance because the security of the password then became equivalent to the security of the payload. If the password was passed in clear text, then the entire endeavor was meaningless.

So this entry becomes a love letter to Signal. It covered everything I needed. It used encryption end-to-end and it was vetted and secure, it didn’t require public keys, or specifically, the user wasn’t involved with that part of the process, and I could trust that the inbound mobile number matched the intended recipient. I didn’t need to exchange passwords or agree on a cipher or a protocol. The application and service are free as well, so there wasn’t even a cost barrier to this solution! It checks off every box on my list. I was able to copy and paste the secure string of data over Signal to the other person and conclude the task that I set for myself at the beginning of all of this. There is more to Signal than just this use case and I encourage everyone I know to download it, sign in, and start using it.

Upgraded Mac Mini, Contacts Woes

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A dear family member upgraded their old Mac Mini to a new Mac Mini over the holiday break and from afar, I helped by making some key suggestions on how to get the data moved from the old machine to the new machine. Specifically, using Apple’s own Time Machine to restore the data back to where it belonged on the new computer. I did this through another person, by fielding technical questions from remote.

Everything appeared to go well, except Contacts was a problem. But after a few restarts, Contacts wasn’t a problem. So everything was fine and we moved on. Then I got a new call for help, that the Contacts application had crashed and refused to restart. I started my remote assistance program and shared the desktop session with the faraway computer. The Contacts app was well and truly not opening. I went to ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook and moved the folder to the Desktop, started Contacts app, and it started with the owners details and the entry for Apple. Then I closed the Contacts app, deleted the AddressBook folder that was created by default because I had moved the previous one to the Desktop, and I undid that. I then started Contacts and it opened. The user went to an entry they wanted to remove, and the app crashed. And then it was stuck again. I did the AddressBook folder out/delete/in two-step and got it back to work, but then figured out that some of the entries worked fine, while others caused the application to crash.

So after I got everything back and running in Contacts, I backed up the contacts using the Export Contacts feature. I then emptied the AddressBook folder again, started Contacts, and then Imported from the backup. Once again, the entry that was causing the crash made the application crash. So whatever it was, it was data driven and somehow got included in the backup feature. I had another option, a long shot, but I tried it. So I got everything in Contacts up and running, selected everything, saved everything as a VCARD file instead, then used TextEdit to find the entry that the end user really didn’t want and removed it manually. Then I restarted an empty version of Contacts, which ran fine, imported the VCARD data back into Contacts, and then after that, everything was fine.

So there is something from probably High Sierra’s Contacts that drives Catalina’s Contacts nuts. Its something that survives backups, but doesn’t survive being shuttled through VCARD. If you have any problems with toxic entries causing Contacts to crash, select all the cards, export them as VCARD, empty out ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook and then reimport everything. It works. I don’t know why, but it works.

This is the sort of foolishness that I expect from Microsoft, not Apple. Tsk Tsk Tsk Apple.

Crochet Day 2

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Yesterday I tried and made a lot of mistakes. First was trying to accomplish a slip knot, which by the book was impossible. I found another way and it works much better, the X method on my hands. Then struggling to make a chain stitch, but I got better slowly. Then I tried several lines of single crochet and it came out floppy and anemic. Turns out I was doing it completely wrong. So I ripped up everything and this morning tried it again. I finally figured out what was wrong, I was only picking up half of the loops that I needed so there was no depth to the work.

In a few hours I ended up here. Looks like it’s going to be a scarf for Scott. There’s some missed stitches at the base, but overall it’s not bad for a day 2 attempt.

Snakes and Foxes

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My Shazam! Christmas gift from Scott was a homemade copy of Snakes and Foxes from Wheel of Time.

This is the playing board and it comes with player pieces and enemy pieces in snake symbols and fox symbols. The dice tell you who can move and how far on the board and the board has arrows showing how everyone can move. Players start in the center and move to the edge, and if they can get back to the center they win. The game is designed to be unwinnable, unless you play as a Ta’veren which adds extra rules and enables a player to win.

We played it at Chocolatea today and got lots of interested folks looking on. Maybe also helped sell some folks on Wheel of Time itself. LOL!

It’s a one of a kind thing and apparently it took quite an effort to assemble. I’m thoroughly impressed and touched. To be able to play a central game featured in the book series is quite something!

Done with Higher Ed

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I haven’t had a University dream in a long while. We were moved to new offices and I went exploring. Trying to find the vending machines I end up on a service elevator that heads to a basement. I don’t have the oddly shaped key that lets you return so I leave and discover that I’m in the middle of service corridors and I start to try to get outside. I end up in another one way hall in the library with an odd platform that seems to have only one function, to crush people. Like a compactor. I get out of there and end up in a sub-basement and eventually find my way out through a construction area with metal and glass doors allowing only exit, not entry. A student looking terrified actually gains entry and runs the other way. I make my way out to a courtyard and run into a younger student fleeing an older man who is chasing him with a machete. Then I wake up.

I can say that the part of my life where actually being inside University buildings is well and truly over. Here’s a dream exploring that awful place. I woke up and laughed, “Yeah, not going there ever again. You don’t have to wrap it in symbolism.”

Higher Ed, hah. Done with that.