🏃♂️ First snowy run of the season. I’d only just started wearing long pants last weekend!
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📚
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🍿