Linked List: March 4, 2025

Tuesday, 4 March 2025

Trump 2.0 Is More Idiocracy Than Kakistocracy ★

Ron Filipkowski:

Trump’s Sec of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says the solution to high egg prices for Americans is to get some chickens and raise them in your backyard.

No exaggeration. She’s selling the idea of everyone raising chickens in their back yards as “awesome”, with a laugh and a smile. And then the Fox News host (Rachel Campos-Duffy — wife of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — this whole world is comprised of socially-inbred reality-TV has-beens), smiling and laughing, concludes with “I think everyone who isn’t a farmer right now wants to be, so you’re in the right department, Brooke!”

This is a cult. No sense of “Hey, maybe this egg situation wasn’t so simple. Maybe this blowhard president isn’t going to solve the bird flu and halt inflation on day one...” — as they check their calendar and see that we’re already up to day 43 and their supermarket hasn’t had any eggs, at any price, in a week. No, instead, they’ve decided the answer is that all good-thinking Americans now happily want to be chicken farmers.

Next month: the fun of home dentistry.

Taska Is Now Part of Leitmotif (Developers of Kaleidoscope) ★

Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac:

Leitmotif, the team behind the awesome diff and merge Mac app Kaleidoscope, is expanding its portfolio of native Mac apps for developers. The company has acquired Taska, a native Mac app that serves as a frontend for web services like GitHub and GitLab. [...] To celebrate its release of Taska 1.3, Leitmotif is discounting its apps by 50% for a limited time.

When Taska debuted last year, its original developers (Made by Windmill) sponsored DF for the week to promote it (the app was briefly named Sonar, before some sort of legal contretemps prompted a change), and thanking them, I wrote:

Taska combines the lightweight UI of a to-do app with the power of enterprise-level issue tracking, all in a native app built by long-time Mac nerds. The interface is deceptively simple, and very intuitive. Fast and fluid too. Everything that’s great about native Mac apps is exemplified by Taska. If you’ve ever thought, “Man, if only Apple made a native GitHub client...”, you should run, not walk, to download it.

Taska saves all your changes directly to GitHub/GitLab using their official APIs, so your data remains secure on GitHub’s servers — not Taska’s. Do you have team members not using Taska? No problem. Changes you make in Taska are 100% compatible with the web UI.

Leitmotif’s Kaleidoscope is a longtime stalwart in any Mac nerd’s toolbox. I can’t think of a better sibling to an app like Taska. (A few weeks ago I ran into a gnarly syncing glitch with a long log file, where there wasn’t just an old version and new one, but two different “new” versions from two different machines. Kaleidoscope got me out of that jam, no sweat.)

‘When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works’ ★

Funny piece — if your surname isn’t “Null” — by Oyin Adedoyin for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it, he joked to himself.

In 2018 he paid a $35 parking ticket. Soon afterward, he said, his mailbox was flooded with hundreds of traffic tickets for incidents he hadn’t been involved in. Tickets were from other counties and cities for vehicles of different colors, makes and models. A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles.

Brings to mind the classic “Little Bobby Tables” from XKCD.

‘Money Job’ ★

Ben Stiller, in a delightful piece for The New York Times on working up the gumption to tell Gene Hackman — with whom he was working in Wes Anderson’s excellent The Royal Tenenbaums, his favorite Hackman movie:

“ … but I have to say for me, there is one movie you made that means so much to me. It might sound crazy, but I think it’s the reason I wanted to make movies. It’s ‘The Poseidon Adventure.’ It literally was my favorite movie when it came out. I think I was 7 or something and I went to see it in the theater about 10 times, then watched it repeatedly whenever it was on TV. It was so formative, and you were so good in it, and it just for me was my favorite movie for so long because of the excitement of that incredible score and those actors and the action and just all of it. It really changed my life and just … made me want to make movies.”

He smiled a little. He looked forward, thinking, perhaps about the movie, as if it hadn’t crossed his mind for a long time. Then he grinned and said:

“Money job.”

I can hear those words in Hackman’s voice. And I can see the grin.

Apple Updates iPad Air (M2→M3) and Regular iPad (A14→A16), and Revamps Magic Keyboard for iPad Air ★

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

The most consequential part of the Air’s update — perhaps the only real update — is the M3 processor, which brings with it GPU-based capabilities like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and video encoding and decoding for ProRes and ProRes RAW.

Otherwise, the Air is basically unchanged: it comes in 11-inch and 13-inch versions, features the same cameras, battery life, the exact same dimensions, and the same accessory compatibility as its M2-based predecessor. It even comes in the same colors — Space Gray, Blue, Purple, and Starlight — at the same prices starting at $599.

A true speed-bump update — no big whoop, but it’s good for the platform for devices to get regular speed-bump updates in between major new revisions. The previous M2 iPad Air models only came out in May of last year, alongside the M4 iPad Pro models. Just like those M2 iPad Air models, these new M3 iPad Airs have 9-core GPUs. The current (not for long?) M3 MacBook Airs are offered with 8- and 10-core GPUs. I presume these 9-core M3 chips used for the iPad Air are binned chips that didn’t have 10 good GPU cores?

The new Magic Keyboard for Air is interesting in that it seems to meld parts of the older Magic Keyboard with the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro last May. While the new Magic Keyboard includes a function row and a larger trackpad like its Pro compatriot, it lacks haptics in the trackpad and backlit keys, and it seems to be built on the same design of the original silicone exterior instead of the new aluminum-based model. But you get some cost savings for that: it’s just $269 instead of $299. Also, it only comes in white — black keyboards are for pros, I guess.

$269 feels like a crummy deal. The new-from-last-year $299 Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, with an aluminum top, feels way more than $30 better than the old-style silicone-covered ones like this new Magic Keyboard for iPad Air. It kind of feels like a design failure of some sort that these new iPad Airs can’t use the same Magic Keyboards as the iPad Pros of the same size.

The base iPad’s update is perhaps somewhat more disappointing, as that model was introduced in 2022 and its A16 processor will make it one of the few current main-line Apple devices — perhaps only — not to support Apple Intelligence.

The recently updated iPad Mini (October) has an A17 Pro chip, and thus supports Apple Intelligence. But the iPad Mini starts at $500, and the regular iPad still starts at just $350. The just-plain iPad is really the only “budget” device that Apple makes. There are no iPhone or Mac models in that price range.

Apple Hasn’t Updated Its US Government Transparency Report Since June 2023, 20 Months Ago ★

Apple:

Apple is committed to being transparent about government requests for customer data and how we respond. We publish a Transparency Report twice a year disclosing the number of government requests for customer data Apple receives globally.

Apple’s most recent report for the United States covers January to June 2023. They didn’t always lag this far behind. In November 2021 they issued the report for the second half of 2020, so that report came out 11 months after the period it covered. In September 2023 they issued the report covering January to June 2022, 15 months after the period covered. For all I know, they’ll come out with the report for the second half of 2023 sometime this month, continuing to lag 15 months behind the reporting periods. But if that’s the standard schedule for publishing these reports, they should say so. We should know when to expect them.

I don’t think there’s anything worrisome or fishy going on here, but given the recent brouhaha over the UK’s secret gag order demand for Apple to build a backdoor into iCloud Advanced Data Protection, along with the Biden administration’s shameful downplaying of that demand, it has me looking as much at what Apple doesn’t say about government data demands as what Apple does say about them.

iFixit’s iPhone 16e Teardown ★

Elizabeth Chamberlain, writing for iFixit:

But it’s still missing MagSafe, for no obvious reason other than making the phone less appealing to consumers than the rest of the 16 lineup. Wireless charging without the perfect alignment that MagSafe allows is troubling.

I’ve been waiting for iFixit’s teardown to see if removing MagSafe components might help explain the 16e’s physically larger battery. It doesn’t seem to. The 16e battery seems taller, not thicker, and the MagSafe components in an iPhone 15 don’t seem thick or space consuming. But there remains a very obvious reason for its exclusion: cost. The 16e is priced $200 less than a comparable regular 16, so something has to give, and MagSafe, alas, is one of those things.

The 16e did garner a 7/10 repairability score — very high for an Apple product from iFixit. But their party line is that you still shouldn’t buy one, opting instead for a refurbished older iPhone 14. Refurb iPhones are great, and they’re popular for a reason, but it feels like recommending refurb over new is dogma for iFixit at this point. When’s the last time they recommended any new product? For $600 I think it’s hard to beat a new iPhone 16e for current value and future-proofing.

The Free Speech Will Continue Until Trump’s Morale Improves ★

President Donald Trump, on his very popular bespoke social network (random capitalization and various typos sic):

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Trump, both he and his supporters keep claiming, represents the party of free speech. Got it.
There are going to be widespread protests against Trump and his policies. Large protests were rampant in his 1.0 administration; they seem almost guaranteed in 2.0. Trump and his cronies feel entitled to act lawlessly and chaotically, with little regard for the law and no regard whatsoever for traditions and norms, while expecting those who disagree with them to keep quiet and, I don’t know, just watch? It doesn’t work that way. Chaos begets chaos. Orderly citizenship stems from orderly leadership.
Trump, embarrassed by raucous protests in 2020, asked his defense secretary and military leaders, “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” Those men said no. Trump doesn’t seem to have any no-men around him this time.
Trump is the sort of angry old kook who thinks Norman Fell’s Mr. McCleery was the hero, not the butt of jokes, in The Graduate.

Claim Chowder: October 2022 Rumors Regarding the iPhone 16e (a.k.a. ‘SE 4’) ★

Hartley Charlton, writing for MacRumors in October 2022:

The fourth-generation iPhone SE will feature a 6.1-inch LCD display and a “notch” cutout at the top of the display, according to Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) analyst Ross Young.

Good call on the size and notch, but the 16e display is OLED, not LCD. Overall, though, I’ll award Young a Being Right Point for this call from 2022.

Moving to an all-screen design, there will no longer be space for a capacitive Touch ID Home button in the device’s bottom bezel. Multiple reports, including information from MyDrivers and Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggest that Apple is planning to add a Touch ID Side button to the iPhone SE, much like the iPad Air and iPad mini.

Real shocker there that Kuo and the fabulists at “MyDrivers” were wrong on that. If you follow Charlton’s link on Kuo’s name above, it points to this 2019 report wherein Kuo reported that Apple was planning a 2021 iPhone that would have neither a Lightning nor USB-C port “and provide the completely wireless experience”.