When Star Trek: Voyager originally aired, I was too distracted with grad school to pay much attention to it. Many years later, thanks to @jean’s comprehensive Viewer’s Guide I’ve finished the series. The show is very good (certainly better than the reputation it seems to have), especially when you follow @jean’s advice and skip the bad episodes. Many great characters, interesting plots, and ethical conundrums with a good episodic approach, rather than the long narrative arcs of DS9 and Discovery 🖖

Switching to iCloud+ Custom Email Domain 📧

I’ve switched my personal email over to Apple’s custom email domain with iCloud Mail. A roughly ranked list of reasons for the switch is:

  1. One less account to worry about. Not that it was a big deal, but now I don’t need to know the various setup details for my personal email. Once I’ve logged into my iCloud account, my email is ready.
  2. I appreciate Apple’s commitment to privacy and trust that they’ll apply this commitment to my email account.
  3. I’m already paying for iCloud+ and, so, might as well use this feature and save some money by not paying for separate email hosting.
  4. I’m actively using Reminders and Notes in iCloud.com and the Mail interface there is decent, certainly better than the rudimentary one offered by my previous email host.

Setup was straightforward with clear instructions. Having said that, the only issue I had was that initiating the setup process simply didn’t work for a few weeks. I tried a couple of times a week and each time I just got a generic error. Then, for no apparent reason, one day it worked. I suspect this was just an issue with rolling out a new service.

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Although I’m generally aligned with longtermism, this essay in Aeon points out important (if slightly hyperbolic) tradeoffs that have to be considered. As with so many things, we need to find ways to fix today’s problems while also keeping an eye on the future