Linked List: September 28, 2019

Saturday, 28 September 2019

Robin Houston on Self-Referential Sentences and Pangrams ★

Robin Houston:

I think it’s time for a thread on the cultural history of this tweet:

This tweet contains exactly four As, one B, three Cs, two Ds, thirty-two Es, six Fs, one G, five Hs, twelve Is, one J, one K, three Ls, one M, twenty-one Ns, sixteen Os, one P, one Q, five Rs, twenty-five Ss, twenty-one Ts, two Us, seven Vs, nine Ws, five Xs, six Ys, and one Z.

Very fun thread, if you enjoy such puzzles.

iPadOS 13 Makes Spotlight Search Responsive Immediately ★

Back in May, I griped:

When I have a hardware keyboard paired with iPad and do Cmd-Space and type an app to open, it misses the first character I type every time. How can this be so slow?

I’ve been typing Cmd-Space and immediately beginning to type for like 17, 18 years with LaunchBar on the Mac. It never ever misses what I type. That the iPad requires you to pause before typing is insane and makes me think the engineers who wrote the feature don’t even use it.

A week or two later, a little birdie told me this would be fixed in iOS/iPadOS 13. And I’m happy to confirm that — so far at least — Spotlight search with an external keyboard hasn’t missed a keystroke for me yet. There actually are bug fixes in iOS 13, too.

The Whistle-Blower Knows How to Write ★

Jane Rosenzweig, writing for The New York Times:

I can’t tell you what’s going to happen to his blockbuster complaint about the president’s behavior, but I can tell you that the whistle-blower’s college writing instructor would be very proud of him.

As a writing instructor myself for 20 years, I look at the complaint and see a model of clear writing that offers important lessons for aspiring writers. Here are a few.

I thought the same thing reading the letter and its appendix — it’s a model of clarity and concision.