“A great leap in the dark” — Thomas Hobbs
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Swift Property Wrappers
A property wrapper in Swift is a simple and clean way to mix behaviors with properties via syntactic sugar. Simple means that to wrap a property you just declare it with an @ sign and the name of wrapper. Clean means that all the code for the injected behavior lives in one place. You could…
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Learning by Doing
The Wrong Way When I learned to code, I thought I was learning the wrong way. The 1980s were the Bronze Age of the personal computer with the Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 800, and the TRS-80 competing for mind and market share. I had gotten it into my head that every home, school, and…
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Learning from First Principles
A Troublesome Student I was a poor student in elementary school. I was unable to focus for more than a few minutes at a time. Bored and restless I treated the classroom as a kind of one-man show to entertain myself and earn the admiration of my peers. I remember bringing our family’s fancy silverware…
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Success Means Learning
Much of my success in life I attribute not to the fortunes or misfortunes of my birth (genetics, socioeconomics) but to my ability to learn and act on what I’ve learned. I could be totally wrong. As an experiment of one all my success could be due to luck and happenstance. I have learned that…
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Hidden Bluetooth Menus in macOS Big Sur
Last night my magic keyboard developed a bad case of typing lag. As I was coding in Xcode I observed a huge delay (in seconds!) between pressing a key and its corresponding character appearing on the the screen. 😖 IT Skills Activate To diagnose and narrow down the problem (Xcode keyboard processing? A rogue process…
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Mac Pro
Search for “Mac Pro” and you’ll get this article, You probably won’t be buying a Mac Pro this year, this video, Do I Regret buying the Mac Pro? 3 Weeks later.., and this Quora question, Is the New Mac Pro worth the price? The conventional wisdom is that Mac Pro is expensive, for professionals only,…
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RAM Disk
Slow Processing I’m writing a book. A “user guide” for a side project. This book is ballooning to 50+ pages. You would think that today’s modern work processors could handle 50+ pages with the CPU cores, RAM, and SSD drive space at modern desktop computer’s beck and call. That is what I thought. I was…
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Virus and Science
Like many, my life has been disrupted by this virus. Honestly, I don’t want to even acknowledge this virus. The only virtue of the Coronavirus is that should be widely apparent that we, humanity, are all in the same boat and that boat is fragile. In the The World of the Worlds, written in 1872,…
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No Modes
Larry Tesler died this week. He was one of my idols at Apple Computer in the 1990s. A brilliant thought leader and champion of the idea that modes are a bad user experience. A mode is a context for getting work (or play) done. In the early days of computers, before graphical user interfaces, applications…
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XML and Immortal Docments
I just read Jeff Haung’s A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web. He made some good suggestions (seven of them) to help keep web content available as technical progress works hard to erase everything digital that has gone before. I don’t know if everything published to the web deserves to be saved but much…
Got any book recommendations?