Finished reading: Greener Than Thou by Mark Leiren-Young is a scathing, and funny, look at the Canadian Green Party. I’ve voted for them in some previous elections, but doubt that will happen again📚
Microposts
Strange times. For the first time since 1997, we do not have a Mac in the house. Yesterday, I pulled our 2019 iMac out of storage in the basement for some routine maintenance. After waiting 10 minutes for it to boot up and another 10 minutes just to open a few apps (watching those Dock icons bounce up and down), I decided there really wasn’t a point in keeping the computer. We have a good half dozen iPads and many iPhones that get daily use. So we have plenty of computing resources and no plans to abandon Apple products. That said, it is still strange to not have a “real computer” in the house (ignoring our work-issued Windows laptops).
Watched: A House of Dynamite is terrifying 😳🍿
Finished reading: Although less cozy than previous books in the series, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older was still entertaining 📚
🏃 The running tights season has begun
I’ve been wanting to get back to my default apps. And with good timing, MacSparky has released the Apple Productivity Suite Field Guide.
The field guide is a thorough tutorial of using Apple’s Reminders, Notes, Calendar, and Freeform applications. Done in MacSparky’s easy going and comprehensive style, no feature is left unexplained.
I’m a pretty knowledgeable user of Reminders, Notes, and Calendar. So, I didn’t learn much. That said, I knew this going in and did get new momentum to actually use these three apps more effectively and consistently. So, for me it was worth it. Anyone new to these apps will certainly benefit.
As for Freeform, I had never really used it. I’m planning to upgrade a rather old iPad with an iPad Mini and Apple Pencil and think that Freeform will be much more useful with that setup. The field guide included some extra use cases for Freeform that sparked several ideas.
If you’re curious about Apple’s built-in apps, this field guide could be really useful. The apps have become rather powerful and integrated tools.
George enjoyed greeting each trick or treater 🎃
🔗 How Canada got immigration right for so long – and then got it very, very wrong
Canada conducted a decade-long experiment. The experiment’s principal investigator was the Trudeau government, assisted and enabled by the provinces, the business community and much of the higher education sector. They were opposed by essentially nobody. The hypothesis was that Canada, already one of the developed world’s highest-immigration countries, could jump start its slow-growth economy through higher immigration, and lower standards. The experiment was not a success.
Important context for current debates about immigration in Canada
Watched: Diminishing returns on the Invasion series. I really enjoyed the unsettling creepiness, persistent mystery, and international scope of the first half of season 1. The rest is just okay🍿
I’m intrigued by the Oura Ring and the idea of more passive activity and recovery tracking.
Realistically though, would I actually be able to stop wearing an Apple Watch? I use the watch to reduce my temptation to use my iPhone, since that’s a strong source of distraction. If I had a ring instead, wouldn’t I just go back to carrying my phone around? With the watch I can still get useful notifications, as well as listen to podcasts and music. A ring can’t do that (yet).
I think this is a false attraction. Until I can more honestly say that I can get by without the Apple Watch features, the ring would only be an additional gadget. I’d end up wearing both of them, most of the time. The only exception might be while sleeping or on a cottage vacation. Those don’t really seem like enough to justify the cost of a ring, plus subscription.
And, having now watched a video from The Quantified Scientist, I see that the heart rate tracking by the Oura Ring during exercise is quite poor. So, that really reduces the attractiveness of the ring.
I think that the watch is simultaneously versatile enough and subtle enough to optimize the trade off between features and distractions.
George is taking it easy today
Finished reading: The Book of the New Sun: Volume 1 by Gene Wolfe is a great mix of fantasy and sci-fi. I enjoyed it and will carry on with the rest of the series 📚
I used to work on a fun project to simulate elections in Toronto called PsephoAnalytics. But, we got busy with other things and haven’t posted since June of 2020. Realizing we’re not going to resurrect the project, we let the domain name expire and I’ve archived the content to a blog category.
Last night my phone noticed the next day was a holiday and sent a notification asking if I wanted to change my alarm. I did! So tapped the notification to open sleep schedule settings, made a quick change, and slept in this morning. This is the kind of “AI” I want: proactive, specific, and useful.
Finished reading: After hearing a recommendation for the Fifth Business by Robertson Davies on The Paul Wells Show, I decided to reread it after about thirty years since the last time. Such a great story. I’m glad I revisited it 📚
A great benefit of my “only one coffee a day” rule is how effective the second coffee is on the occasional days that I violate the rule
🔗 Dispatch from the Front Lines: Major Avoidance Office
If we properly re-characterized our military procurement system as the federal money-distribution, political-delaying, and accountability-avoidance system, we’d all be raving about what a success we have on our hands here. Because it’s great at all of those things. That is what the politicians and the bureaucrats want it to be. They might not admit it, but that is exactly the way they have designed the system, and they are getting exactly what they pay for.
🎶 Amazing, Rush is going back on tour!
🎵 Worldwide by Snõõper will wake you up
🔗 The Imperfectionist: Five short thoughts
Advice for big, daunting projects: do something right away. When a major project lands in your lap, perhaps with a deadline weeks or months away, make it your business to take some kind of concrete action on it as soon as you can, even if you won’t get to the majority of the work until later.
I’ve found this works really well. For me, this typically means writing a short, clear sentence about the objective of the project. Too often we launch into busy work before confirming what we’re actually trying to achieve.
Apple’s ICEblock capitulation is business as usual
So let me repeat the maxim we should all be living by: do not expect a moral stand from a corporation.
This can be both true and disappointing, as Dan Moren is clear to write.
🎵Delightfully strange music from Patrick Watson on Uh Oh
Finished reading: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is a dystopian view of where we’re headed with data-driven algorithms. I enjoyed the story, despite the scary implications 📚
An interesting series of articles in Quanta Magazine on climate science: How We Came To Know Earth. Such an important field of research and remarkable how much has been learned, though still lots of uncertainty.
Finished reading: Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a really good first contact with aliens story 📚
Finished reading: Pines by Blake Crouch is an exciting start to the series. I appreciated the Twin Peaks vibes 📚
Saturday, September 20, 2025 →
Spotted on today’s run: a dog library for sticks
Thursday, September 18, 2025 →
Amazing that Quirks and Quarks has been going for 50 years! I’ve been listening for close to 40 years, starting with a small transistor radio when I was a kid and then was my first podcast subscription (before that was even a real thing).
Finished reading: The 51st State Votes by Justin Ling is a good overview of what happened in Canada’s recent, strange election campaign 📚
🏃♂️ Well, there’s a week that hasn’t gone to plan. Try again next week!
