Soon enough, though, I will purchase a new machine; either because this one dies, or because Apple finally releases a promising replacement (read: no keyboard issues).

Naturally, I had been looking for a way to automate what I consider the most dreaded part of migrations: reinstalling macOS applications, packages, and command line utilities.

I wrote about macOS migrations with Homebrew and Brewfiles on Open Folder. I estimate it shaves off 95% of the time (and effort) it takes to install applications on a new Mac.

Yes, it involves using the Terminal, but I’ve seen iOS shortcuts more complicated than that.

A simple, easily solvable example: If cell D1 is supposed to hold the formula =SUM(B3:B4), and we then select and drag those two cells down, the formula in cell D1 will now say =SUM(B5:B6). Sometimes this is the desired result, other times it isn’t, and if it’s the latter case, it’s easy enough to fix by using INDIRECT: =SUM(INDIRECT(‘B3:B4’)).

But here’s a more complicated scenario: you are one of many collaborators on a protected sheet, of which you are only permitted to edit a certain range: B2:C20. In other words, this is the only unprotected range in the sheet.

Everything is cool. Unless you decide to drag the first cell in the range. Here’s a short video I’ve created to demonstrate this:

Notice how when you try to drag the two rows selected from row 3 back to row 2, Sheets throws an error. This is because you are now no longer allowed to edit row 2 — the new unprotected range is B3:C20. You are effectively locked out of a range you are supposed and were originally permitted by the owner to edit. Since you are only a collaborator, you can’t simply go to the “protected ranges” menu and reconfigure them.

This is how all spreadsheets work, it isn’t specific to Sheets. And still, it seems like the wrong behavior from a user-experience standpoint: all cells that were manipulated in the example were within the unprotected range. It’s not like we dragged a protected cell into the range. I also believe that with protected sheets, only the owner should dictate which cells remain unprotected. But Sheets not only allows collaborators to lock themselves out of cells, it allows them to lock out other collaborators too.

So as the maintainer and owner of more than a dozen spreadsheets used in my company for mission-critical tasks, I set out to find a solution.

Telling tens people to use copy-paste instead of dragging wasn’t an option. You don’t count on humans to not do things they’re used to doing. Using INDIRECT as is possible with formulas was also out of question because Google doesn’t support it when dealing with ranges.

Since we can’t really prevent collaborators from locking themselves out of their own ranges, we need a way to verify, and if needed, change the sheet’s (un)protected ranges to what we intend them to be.

As in many cases, what isn’t possible in the interface can be achieved quite easily with JavaScript in the script editor:

// protect the sheet, add a description
var protection = sheet.protect().setDescription("Protection Validator");
// select the range we want to un-protect  
var unprotected = sheet.getRange('B2:C20');
// remove the protection from the range
protection.setUnprotectedRanges([unprotected]);

This code is set to run whenever a change is made to the spreadsheet. No matter how people “misuse” it, protected ranges are always re-set to the desired result. They get to use drag and drop, and I get less phone calls.

Challenging subjects like ML are fun to practice, but nothing beats automation in my world.

For a recent project, the need was to run some local script whenever a button is clicked in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Each script automates a specific After Effects composition, based on data in its respective spreadsheet. So we have sheet-script pairs, one button per sheet, and many users interacting with different sheets.

Google makes it fairly easy to manipulate Drive files based on certain events. Apps Script runs on their own cloud platform and can do pretty much anything a human can with Google’s own services. Invoking a locally hosted script isn’t one of them though.

Generalizing the problem helped pave the way: what we needed was to notify the machine, in realtime, of an event taking place on the web. Once that’s done, executing the appropriate script is straightforward.

There are two ways to make a computer aware of remote events: we either have it pull them periodically from the sender, or we have the sender push each event to the machine. The pull approach is simpler, but wouldn’t have worked here: it’s possible to write a script that pings Google’s servers every second, but that’s also a surefire way to go over the API’s quota.

So we need the sender to push the notification, something Google’s platform doesn’t provide out of the box. But actually, the only thing a Google script can push out of the box is even better: a filesystem event. That is, if Google Drive is synced as a local folder, changes in this folder are normal file events as far as the operating system is concerned, and these are among the easiest to monitor. Now the question becomes how it is best to do that.¹

For our use-case, I decided to create a timestamped JSON file each time there’s a button event. It sure would’ve been nice to do the tracking in one file, but with multiple users and sheets, such design would create a substantial risk of race-conditions.²

Here’s where I complicate things a bit: Since I already had Dropbox installed, I decided to save the JSON files there, and not in Google Drive. This changes the implementation, but not the underlying concept.

So, each time one of the users clicks a button, a Google script is invoked, creating a new file in the Dropbox subfolder “json_jobs”:

### filename example: rhino-12-8-2017 10/32/30.json
{
"processed": false,
"script": "C:\\ae_folder\\ae_script_1.ps1",
"generated_at": "12-8-2017 10:34:02AM",
"delegator_spreadsheet": "spreadsheet_id",
}

Whenever a file like this is created, it’s grabbed and inspected by a Python script running in the background: this script then invokes the PowerShell script at the specified path, moves the resulting files to their final destination, and if all went good, changes the processed flag to True. This way retries won’t reprocess completed jobs.³

But that’s the end result. The very first step was to write the script that creates the JSON file and saves it to Dropbox. Here’s a slightly modified version of the main function, the one connected to the button-click event:

function main(spreadsheet_id) {
var json_dict = fillDict(spreadsheet_id)
var json_obj = convertDictToJSON(json_dict)
sendJSONToDropbox(json_obj)
};

“Connected” is a little misleading here: the file holding this code isn’t actually bound to any one spreadsheet. Instead, all spreadsheets involved import and utilize it as a library, passing their IDs whenever they call it. From there, we pass spreadsheet_id to a function that constructs a dictionary with the appropriate values, convert the dictionary to a JSON object, and send it to sendJSONToDropbox():

function sendJSONToDropbox(json_object) {
var timestamp = timeStamp()
var parameters = {
"path": "/json_jobs/rhino" + "-" + timestamp + ".json",
"mode": "add", // do not overwrite
"autorename": true,
"mute": false // notify Dropbox client
};


var headers = {
"Content-Type": "application/octet-stream",
'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + 'dropbox_access_token',
"Dropbox-API-Arg": JSON.stringify(parameters)
};


var options = {
"method": "POST",
"headers": headers,
"payload": json_object
};

var API_url = "https://content.dropboxapi.com/2/files/upload";
var response = JSON.parse(UrlFetchApp.fetch(API_url, options).getContentText());
Logger.log(response)

};

And that’s one way to run a local script from Google Sheets.

The existence of a secretive unit within London’s Metropolitan Police that uses hacking to illegally access the emails of hundreds of political campaigners and journalists has been revealed. At least two of the journalists work for the Guardian .

Green Party representative in the British House of Lords, Jenny Jones, exposed the unit’s existence in an opinion piece in the Guardian. The facts she revealed are based on a letter written to her by a whistleblower.

In May 2015 it was unveiled that the UK government quietly rewrote its Computer Misuse Act to exclude police and intelligence agencies. I wrote about it here. Today we see the bastard child.

On one hand, Paypal was saying that our account was too risky for them to release the $20,000 they’d taken as collateral. On the other hand, they were saying our account was credible enough to offer us a loan.

We chose to approach this in the spirit of Hanlon’s Razor: when in doubt, assume ignorance, not malice. So, we emailed a screenshot of the ad above to the startup evangelist, assuming it was some kind of clerical error.

Unfortunately, for customers outside the US there is no practical alternative to Paypal. I still use them for most of my recurring payments, with the occasional online purchase.

Background

Zive Inc. launched their Kickstarter campaign for “Gmail for Mac” on November 15, 2014, dubbing it “the true desktop email client for Gmail”.¹ The project was fully funded within six days, and by the time the pledge ended, Zive had raised $42,200: more than two times their initial goal. The app’s name was changed in May after Zive were approached — politely they say — by Google.

Kiwi for Gmail launched on June 23 and costs $10 on the Mac App Store.

Two Kiwis

A free version — “Kiwi for Gmail Light” — can also be found on the App Store. Contrary to the full version, Kiwi Light lets you add only one account, and does not support shortcuts, important-only notifications, do-not-disturb mode, or Gmail plugins.

Setup

The setup process is very simple. A tutorial is presented on first launch, after which you’re taken to a standard login window, and then to your inbox. Two-step verification is supported, so there is no need to create an app-specific password for Kiwi.

Preferences

Once you set up your first account, up to five more can be added through the “accounts” tab in the preferences pane. There, it’s also possible to change various account-specific settings: notifications, sounds, and colors.

There are three other tabs besides “accounts” in the preferences pane:

General: where you can set Kiwi to launch on login, and supposedly make it your default client. Supposedly, because this box is greyed-out for Yosemite users. Zive says this is “a bug” that affects all email clients, and that the only way to set one as the default is via Mail.app’s preferences. However, to merely access those preferences one first needs to have an account authenticated in Mail.app. Annoying.

Notifications: set global settings for notifications and sounds, and choose whether the unread mail badge is shown on the dock, menubar, or both.

Shortcuts: Kiwi supports several of them, but only the “new email” shortcut appears here. Press ⌘ ⌥ ⌃ M anywhere and a new window opens with a list of your accounts. The list’s item order corresponds to the keyboard’s numbers, so typing “2” would select the second account. There isn’t a way to choose a default account to compose from.

Inside the app, ⌘ ⇧ and [ ] are used to switch between accounts. To cycle between active windows, you can press ⌘ `.

I was puzzled to see no shortcut for simply bringing up Kiwi’s window. Adding shortcuts is relatively easy in OS X, but every email client should ship with a default, configurable one.

Design & User Interface

Kiwi’s menubar item comes in the shape of an envelope (no kidding!) and displays the total count of unread items.² A neat menu opens when you click on it, featuring individual counts, as well as buttons to start composing for each account.

A thin, colored strip is visible right below Kiwi’s title bar. Envelopes — each in its designated account color — are horizontally stacked from the right. Switching from one account to the other will update the address on and the color of the ribbon on the left. Other than these, there aren’t any noticeable aesthetic differences compared to the browser experience.

Kiwi for Gmail looks as nice as a “web-view” app can. Zive can’t control Gmail’s own interface design, but they have done their part of the deal.

Features Overview

Multi-account support: Zive promised 100% fidelity and zero friction for Kiwi’s biggest selling feature. And the execution here is flawless. I’ve set up three different accounts in less than ten minutes, and switching between them is instantaneous. For those with more than one Gmail account, the benefits here can’t be overstated.

Drive support & attachment handling: Seems to work great but asks to you switch to the older look because “your browser (which is actually the new window opened inside of Kiwi) is old and unsupported”. A killer feature for those who use Drive regularly.

Gestures: left is “back” and right is “next”, which is just about enough. These work inside the web-view and not for going back and forth between accounts.

Lab support: I have several lab features turned on and they all worked fine inside Kiwi.

Zen Switch: the ability to turn-off all notifications until the next day. Works as expected.

Filter by flags: I haven’t tested this one, but if works as advertised it should be pretty useful for those who do use flagging.

Gmail plugin support: “coming soon” according to Zive’s product page.

Bottom Line

A month after its launch, Kiwi for Gmail does what it set out to very well. There are minor annoyances, but my Gmail experience has been less cumbersome and nicely streamlined after the Driver bug got fixed. (see below)

For me, Kiwi was well-worth its price.

Appendix: Labour Pains & How to Piss off Your Customers

I have a soft spot for indie developers, so I’ll try to proceed as gracefully as I can.

Let’s start with launch day: in one of the first batches sent to customers, thousands of email addresses were exposed because whoever sent it was careless enough to simply dump them in the “to:” field. Zive were quick to respond, but the damage had already been done.³

Second, the Google Drive feature wouldn’t work during the first week. When I contacted Zive, I was told this bug was affecting some retina Macs, and that I should “turn on low-resolution mode until a fix is released”. When was a fix coming? “No ETA.”

I replied saying I would’ve gotten insulted. “Would have”, because I’m sure Zive’s support rep wasn’t using a retina screen himself. Otherwise, this idea wouldn’t have even crossed his mind. It’s not “inconvenient but usable” or “a trade-off”, as he insisted thereafter, it’s impossible.

My gripe isn’t with the bug. Stuff happens, and again: if you’re a small team working under tight conditions, I can sympathize. Just don’t give me the impression I’m complaining about some minor issue, or insist I patch it with something that makes the app itself unusable. How about this instead: “Sorry our app/this feature is nonfunctional, we’re working on a fix”.

The exchange that followed with Zive’s support, while polite and prompt, was quite frustrating. Several days after I tweeted about it, Zive’s founder Eric Shashoua got in touch and said he’d like to know more about how his team had handled this. More importantly, a new version rolled out on June 30, fixing the Google Drive bug.

All things considered, Kiwi is an excellent app if you want the full Gmail experience. I can’t help but feel it shipped one or two weeks too early though.

A confession: there is one phrase in the aforementioned article that I thought meant something entirely different than what it turned out to mean. Here’s the relevant snippet from my piece:

The impending yearly car test, why do you need to remember when that is? The house insurance you need to renew, the phone call you promised to make for a friend, your mobile plan expiring soon, the meeting you just agreed to. You think you don’t spend time thinking about these little, mundane bits, but they are there, accumulating brain-cruft at the back of your head, not letting you achieve a “mind like water”.

“Mind like water” is a simile which David Allen mentions in his book about the “Getting Things Done” framework. I bought it a few days ago as I’m increasingly intrigued by Allen’s brainchild, and have been considering Omnifocus, an app that’s based upon it.

When I referred to “mind like water”, I was pretty sure “water” was recruited to emphasize flow. It makes sense: an unobstructed mind flows powerfully, like a river. But apparently, the karate master that coined it saw a different image. I really like how Allen describes it in his book:

In karate, there is an image that’s used to define the position of perfect readiness, “mind like water”: imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond, how does the water respond?

The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact, or underreact.

So there you go, a complete opposite of the state I had in mind. And perhaps one that’s appealing even more.

Bonus: an excellent, actionable essay on designing metaphors.

There’s one type of conversation, though, that usually leaves me a bit… frustrated.

“Oh, that’s very cool. But I wouldn’t pay for it.”

“Who pays for apps these days?”

“I don’t work hard just to spend my money on this stuff. Besides, there must be a free version that does the same thing.”

See, it’s not like I walk around, stomping my feet and mumbling grumpily; I couldn’t care less what apps individual people choose to buy.

In the abstract, though, I do.

The opinions above are a symptom of a broader underlying issue: we still look at these ever-shrinking machines — our phones and computers — as harmless toys. And logically, if you think of something as wielding little influence in your life, it can neither benefit nor harm you too much.

And I care because those who under-appreciate the benefits of technology often fail to notice or take seriously the potential hazards of the march forward. We know intellectually that technology affects every single aspect of our lives, but this fact doesn’t hit home on a visceral level.¹

Let’s zoom out a little.

Money

What is the purpose of money?

Why do we go to work? Why do we need money? Why do we want money? Why do we want more money? Why do we save, invest, why do we start businesses?

The purpose of money is time.

“Nope,” you might say: “For the poor, the purpose of money is survival.” To which I would counter: Survival is the continuation and extension of life, and life is made up of amounts of time. When you die, you have no more time.

Almost everything we buy or do with our money is a way to give ourselves more time.²

Time

What is the purpose of time?

The purpose of time is self-actualization.

The term was originally introduced by the organismic theorist Kurt Goldstein for the motive to realize one’s full potential. Expressing one’s creativity, quest for spiritual enlightenment, pursuit of knowledge, and the desire to give to society are examples of self-actualization. In Goldstein’s view, it is the organism’s master motive, the only real motive: “the tendency to actualize itself as fully as possible is the basic drive… the drive of self-actualization.”

Self-actualization can mean a variety of different combinations of the following (and more):

• Living as much as you can among your loved ones
• Becoming the president
• Writing a book
• Helping those in need
• Inventing a revolutionary product
• Buying a Picasso
• Becoming a Picasso

In many instances, self-actualization will result in financial prosperity, but again, only as a by-product: A successful entrepreneur who enjoys innovation and business is bound to be well-off.

Time vs. Money

Time is more important than money. But why?

Because time is irrecoverable: unlike your bank balance, your time balance is always going down, no matter how you are spending it. And once it’s spent, it’s gone forever.

Because time cannot be generated: And money can. There is no mix of two or more ingredients out there that will yield you time. You can’t go to the store today and ask for two hours of life. You can ask a bank or a friend to lend you money, but they can’t give you time. You can’t “make” more time in the literal sense, no matter what you do.

Because time is limited: and money isn’t.

Whatever self-actualization means to you, you need time. You might need money, but you must have time.

Today, the End, and the In-Between

In the Druze religion, it is believed that both the time of a person’s birth and the time of their death are predetermined. That’s quite an incentive to spend time wisely, if you ask me. But you don’t have to be Druze or even religious to understand that the time of your death is predetermined, in a way.

Am I forcing religion on you? God forbid! I’m only suggesting that you are going to die. Maybe you’ll live a whole century, and maybe tomorrow a car will have smashed into yours and killed you. We don’t know. But however far or near the day of your death is, you have exactly the amount of time between now and then — that unknown point in time — to live.

And so if the purpose of time is self-actualization,³ one should want to spend as much of it as possible on this purpose.

Time Now for More Time Later

The good news is that — within the remaining quota — time can be traded profitably. A profitable trade is when you invest a certain amount of time that yields you more than that amount in the long-term. Optimization, delegation, automation. This is the essence of productivity. (It’s also possible to make unprofitable time trades, like the time yours truly spends fiddling with this website’s design.)

Take a look at this ingenious chart from xkcd, titled “Is it Worth the Time?”:

To the left of the chart is the time you can save on a certain task, and above it is how often you perform that task. So, if it’s possible to save one minute from a task you do 5 times a day, you can (and should) spend six days of your life to attempt that.

You can also convert one or both measures in this chart from time units to currency and estimate whether a product or service is worth the price. It’s most obvious for freelancers, where theoretically almost every hour can be a work hour.

Money for Time

And the Jobs to be Done with Productivity Apps

Where financially possible, people also trade money for time. We hire assistants, maids, secretaries, gardeners, and babysitters. These are very common and legitimate money-for-time trades. We also buy products to save us time: microwaves, espresso machines, clothes dryers…

So why don’t we “hire” apps for the same purpose? Among the people I know, there aren’t many whose time (and money) couldn’t be better utilized with a simple automation trick or a dirt-cheap app.

One obvious reason is the maturity of the industry. Applications are much younger than the products and services I’ve mentioned above.⁴ Even amongst younger people today, there’s still some sort of psychological block associated with paying for intangibles. If you can’t grab it, it’s not real, and if it’s not real, then you certainly shouldn’t pay for it.

Ultimately, most people are skeptical towards buying apps for utility because they perceive that the “jobs to be done” with apps are still limited to the entertainment and leisure categories.

This is economically irrational, of course. If we remove the prejudice and examine these icons on the screen as money-time propositions, much is to be gained:

• I introduced Hazel to a friend of mine, a successful voice actor, just a few months ago. He says it has saved him hours on uploading, editing, and sending recordings to his clients. And Hazel costs $29, mind you, which is considered expensive for an app. In the long-term though,not buying it would have been a costly decision on his part.⁵
• Fantastical saves me a lot of time arranging my calendar and maintaining a sense of control over what needs to be done.
• Overcast, with its Smart-Speed feature, has saved me over seven hours of listening time. Why have 1 hour of Horace Dediu when I can have 1.3 hours of Horace Dediu?⁶
• TextExpander makes sending a quote to potential clients a matter of seconds, not minutes; even from a smartphone.
• Scanbot/CamScanner let you use the iPhone camera as a scanner.

Notice that most of the above have very clear (and much more expensive) tangible parallels: personal assistant, secretary, photocopy/fax machine.

Not only do they save time in the obvious sense, they also spare stress and frustration that could’ve been regarded as unavoidable. The impending yearly car test, why do you need to remember when that is? The house insurance you need to renew, the phone call you promised to make for a friend, your mobile plan expiring soon, the meeting you just agreed to. You think you don’t spend time thinking about these little, mundane bits, but they are there, accumulating brain-cruft at the back of your head, not letting you achieve a “mind like water.”

I hope it’s clear I’m not blindly advocating paid apps over free ones. Here too, there are unprofitable trades (and please don’t remind me how many text editors I’ve paid for.) I certainly don’t expect anyone to pay for something if they can get it elsewhere for free. But the idea that applications can’t be worth your money just because they’re imperceptible, again: plain irrational.

If You Just Want to Win the Argument

So next time somebody says nobody should ever pay for apps, send them this article.

Or, just ask them this insightful question from David Sparks⁷:

Imagine you’re on your deathbed and you’re told you can live another hour and that it’ll costs you four dollars. What are you gonna say?

I haven’t tried this one yet, but I’m sure not many people would answer with a “no.”

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The data shows that $120 per year is far beyond what the overwhelming majority of consumers will pay for music, and instead shows that a price closer to $48 per year is likely much closer to a sweet spot to attract a large number of subscribers.

For this reason, I believe the market size for these services is limited to a subset of music buyers, which in turn is a subset of the population. This means that there will be fewer subscribers to these services than there are purchasers of digital downloads unless one of two things happens:

This is what Go for Gmail aims to solve: it’s a free Mac app that sits in the menubar and can instantly display your account inside a web-view. You can customize notifications and configure shortcuts to toggle the inbox and compose windows. Clearly, most of this website’s readers only write LTR, but I can see other benefits to having the full web interface available.

By the way, a supposedly supercharged compeer of Go for Gmail is coming out tomorrow, called Kiwi for Gmail. It costs $5 if you pre-order ($10 otherwise) and supports gestures, direct Drive access, and streamlined account switching.

I ordered Kiwi and will do a write-up soon. But if you simply want Gmail inside an app, GfG does the job. (via Matt Gemmell)

Being a non-native writer, I followed Somers’ instructions at the end of his post and did the same. The second quoted paragraph below reminded me why I’m so fascinated with English as a language. Emphasis mine:

Recall that the New Oxford, for the word “fustian,” gives “pompous or pretentious speech or writing.” I said earlier that that wasn’t even really correct. Here, then, is Webster’s definition: “An inflated style of writing; a kind of writing in which high-sounding words are used, above the dignity of the thoughts or subject; bombast.” Do you see the difference? What makes fustian fustian is not just that the language is pompous — it’s that this pomposity is above the dignity of the thoughts or subject. It’s using fancy language where fancy language isn’t called for.

It’s a subtle difference, but that’s the whole point: English is an awfully subtle instrument. A dictionary that ignores these little shades is dangerous; in fact in those cases it’s worse than useless. It’s misleading, deflating. It divests those words of their worth and purpose.

(via Brett Terpstra)

The goal with an iPad setup was being able to leave the expensive, heavier MacBook at home on most days. Already in my arsenal were Rain’s mStand and Apple’s wireless keyboard. After crossing out the Origami, it was time to find a different keyboard-compatible case, or a combo proposition.

The criteria (in this order) were weight, comfort, size, and look. If you’ve read other reviews on here, then you know I also aim for pragmatic setups: those independent of future purchases.

On Paper

The Logitech K480 debuted in September 2014 and was marketed as “the computer keyboard that also works with your tablet and smartphone”. It’s an agnostic’s wet dream, promising to not only work flawlessly on Windows, OS X, Android, and iOS — but also make switching between devices frictionless.

It currently retails on Amazon at $48, available in white or black.

Weight & Portability

The first thing you notice about the K480 is its weight. As I removed it from its package, my hope was that the cartons accounted for most of what I was carrying.

Nope.

The K480 weighs 820 grams, or 1.81 pounds.

One could argue I should’ve known this by looking at the specifications. And I did. But like most people, not only could I not translate that number meaningfully, I also did a poor job in estimating its significance by testing against lighter or heavier objects.

The iPad-K480 carry is 419g lighter than the MacBook. While this difference isn’t insignificant, there are two factors the calculation above excludes: the additional weight of an iPad case (if one is used), and the fact that the rMBP is among the heavier laptops within Apple’s current lineup.

There is one very valid argument to be made for this keyboard’s weight: it needs to bear the weight of at least one iPad without things getting shaky.

Look

Reading other reviews, you may notice some complaints about this keyboard’s appearance. Indeed, compared to Apple’s, this one looks a bit…economic. But in fairness, how many other keyboards don’t? The K480 isn’t a sexy device, but I think “cheap” is a little harsh here. Its plastic build might make it look a bit toy-ish, but this doesn’t translate to inconvenience, or ostracism.

In hindsight, I would’ve gone with the black version of the K480 instead of Logitech’s definition of “white,” as I find the latter to be somewhat dull. No biggie.

The Dock

The dock is about 27 centimeters (10.62″) long; enough to fit both an iPad and an iPhone in portrait mode. The device-slot is deep enough to hold any iPad without completely covering its home button.¹ The rubberized inner edges mean you can plug the iPad quickly and firmly — fearing neither a fall or a scratch. However, this also dictates that you’ll have to remove most cases if you want to be able to dock it.

Because multi-device support is one of this keyboard’s biggest selling points, the slot’s width isn’t ideal for the iPad. In portrait mode — my preferred for writing — I feel the mini leans back a little too much, which doesn’t allow me to lean back comfortably enough. I’m not sure why, but when the iPad is docked horizontally, things get much better.

The viewing angle isn’t as bad as I’m making it sound — it isn’t bad at all — but neither is it perfect.

Ergonomics & Key Build

The above becomes more of an issue when you take into account one additional factor: the flat K480 sports an unadjustable base that sits 20mm above surface, providing a somewhat problematic typing angle.

But the keys..

The keys are where Logitech messed it up.

The first thing you should know about these keys is that they are loud. Not typewriter loud, but definitely the closest to that that I’ve heard from a keyboard. This can be good or bad depending on your taste, but I wouldn’t use the K480 in a classroom or bedroom.

More importantly, the keys are excessively round. If this was a stylistic decision, then may the Lord have mercy on Logitech’s designers. But stylistic or not, there are practical ramifications: keystroke misses and mistypes. The keys seem too far apart, and the space between them is often disorienting. I can’t tell with certainty whether the travel distance is longer compared to other keyboards, but the fact the keys protrude as far as they do makes me instinctively press harder.

The ergonomic experience with the Logitech K480 isn’t great. I don’t know how it compares to other iPad keyboards — and this is important to keep in mind — but while using it, I can’t help but feel I’m adjusting either my neck’s or wrists’ posture uncomfortably.

Button Placement

The switch dial is well-designed and offers just enough resistance to avoid accidental switching. I would’ve liked it to the right side, in-place of (or near) the pairing buttons, but I figure lefties would say the opposite.

What isn’t up for debate is the power switch location: Logitech has decided to put it on the back of the keyboard. It’s somewhere around the upper left side, not overly perceptible. If you’re energy conscious, you may find yourself a little annoyed by this.

Battery Life

But you have to be especially energy conscious to care about the power switch. Logitech claims two AAA batteries should last two years assuming “two million keystrokes/year in an office environment”. Eight months in, and my K480 isn’t showing any kind of slowness associated with battery drain. Take this testimony with a grain of salt though, because these days I rarely couple it with the iPad, and instead use it daily with my HTPC.

Pairing and Multi Device Support

This is where this one shines.

Thanks to its pragmatic key-mapping, which was well thought out, the K480 makes for an excellent cross-platform device. It does so without overly sacrificing cleanness or creating confusion.

Pairing new devices is a breeze on all operating systems; so is switching between paired devices and replacing paired slots. OS X and Windows controls work just as expected, and more importantly, so do the iOS controls on the top row. This makes multitasking on the iPad more plausible.

This section isn’t brief because it lacks importance, but I simply have nothing but positive things to say. Logitech gets an A+ here. Period.

Final Thoughts

I’m much less romantic about tech gear nowadays, so when I’m writing about one, I tend to focus more on aspects that I dislike and assume you’ll deduce that everything else works fine.

The Logitech K480 is an excellent multi-device keyboard. Those who use different operating systems will appreciate what it has to offer. Strictly as an iPad companion, however, this keyboard isn’t exactly a match made in heaven. I’m not sure whether I stopped carrying it because of its ergonomic shortcomings, or due to my own unrelated challenges with writing.

There’s a writer living in my head, and he’s a genius.

Or so he tries to convince me, as his prose flows freely day in and out, filling most idle moments– while I’m showering, driving, dining, taking out the trash, or performing any of the other mundane tasks of daily life. His prose is brilliant– his points always well aligned, his recall of long-ago events and facts uncannily perfect, and his agility in seamlessly transitioning from one topic to the next is above reproach. He never needs spell-check or a thesaurus, and he never struggles to find the right way to approach the topic. His efforts are frequently interrupted by periods of basking in the glorious reception he imagines for his easy labors, and is certain that untold rewards are sure to follow.

Unfortunately, this genius is a huge jerk.

There’s a draft I have lying around titled Pilcrow Angst. Had the genius writer in me showed up to write it, it would read exactly like this.

I came across Eric’s weblog because another piece of his regarding Apple’s new ad-filtering API is currently trending on Hacker News. Read it too. And check out his other posts — good stuff.

We’ve seen products create, rejuvenate, and expand small, crowded markets before, but I’m certainly not claiming this about AM at this point. It is also definitely true that Apple Music currently has zero users, free or paid. But looking at the users row in this chart can be very misleading. Here’s Jan Dawson on Twitter:

>400m people with app auto installed plus 3 months free should add up to lots of paying users a few months from now for Apple Music

In this crowded business, Apple also owns one of the platforms on which these services are competing.

Given 400 million iOS users and the day old news of Spotify reaching 20 million paid subscribers, roughly 1 in 20 iOS users would have to renew their 3-month trial for Apple Music to become the biggest music subscription service in the world.

Roughly, but probably not more: this disregards the fact Apple Music will also be available on Android, that 400 million is actually a conservative estimate for the number of active iOS users, and that Spotify — barring any retaliative moves — is bound to lose some of its paying customers to Apple. If we take those into account, and despite Apple Music launching in “only” one hundred countries, a conversion rate of 3-4% is going to be just enough.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this milestone celebrated — surely not outwardly — but I sure do hope Apple is aiming for much more than just the number one spot.

So, the real headline a few months from now would be Apple not having become the biggest paid music service in the world.

An Apple partisan might argue it just wants to give users control of their iPhone experience, and having debuted extensions in the last version of iOS, allowing them to alter web content is a natural next step.

An Apple realist might argue that its great rival Google makes more than 90 percent of its revenue from online advertising — a growing share of that on mobile, and a large share of that on iPhone. Indeed, Google alone makes about half of all global mobile advertising revenue. So anything that cuts back on mobile advertising revenue is primarily hurting its rival.

An Apple cynic might note that the company on Monday unveiled its new News app, which promises a beautiful reading experience — and a monetization model based on Apple’s iAds. iAds will, one can assume, never be blockable by third-party extensions available in the App Store. Ads that appear at the operating system level — as opposed to in HTML and JavaScript on a web page — have a rather invulnerable position so long as you keep using Apple products. (It’s good to be the platform.)

They had it coming! was my knee-jerk reaction too, but as I wrote in Adblock & Collective Punishment, I oppose ad-blocking as a blanket policy.

Ross Ulbricht, founder and mastermind of the Silk Road, has been sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of narcotics conspiracy and other charges earlier this year.

I’ve been waiting for an update on the affair so I can share this must-read two-part story on the rise and fall of Silk Road.

“Dormant” might not be the right word because this was never supposed to be your source for breaking news. Maybe breaking views. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

I did publish some pieces I’m proud of, like The Future of Information and Radio Revolution. But by and large, career developments and other life matters got in the way. Excuses.

There are so many things I want to write about.

Like Grandpa.

That man. Worth writing a whole book about him.

My grandfather died one and a half years ago. Me, my father, and my sister were on a vacation when that happened.

In London. Two thousand miles away from Israel.

We couldn’t catch a flight early enough to make it to the funeral.

But this isn’t going to be a post about Grandpa.

There are parts of your life that are so significant, you can’t just write about them. Everything feels reductive. And you never want to settle for that. It’s like that bottom-most drawer that contains so many… things. You don’t just open that. How do you make sense of it all? How can you get any one thing out for strangers to see, leaving the others hidden, never to be shown?

It could never do this man justice.

So I’ve never written about Grandpa, and probably never will.

But I would like to tell you a story.

This is not a post about Grandpa.

My grandfather was born on the 13th of March, 1938. As a teenager, he was already working the land in a town 15 miles away from his small village. He had no car, so to avoid the commute, he often slept in the field, or in a nearby cave in the mountains.

He started out working for others, but before long had enough to buy his own piece of land. Landowners from his village found the commute and the hard labour too much. They preferred to work closer to home.

For twenty years, my grandfather worked close to twenty hours a day. When my father and his brothers were old enough, he gradually left the day-to-day management to them. But he never, in his life, missed a day of work. The fact his body couldn’t do as much anymore didn’t mean his head and heart weren’t devoted to the (now-expanded) business and its future.

Grandpa was a man of vision. He amassed all of his assets single-handedly.

He was also a religious man.

“Any dollar you make by means of deception or with unclean intentions, you will lose ten against,” he would say, with a stern smile on his sun-beaten face.

He loved the land, not for its future worth as real estate, but for what it was now. “My late father always told me, never trade a piece of land for something that air can pass under,” he once told me, meaning - never trade land for money or anything that isn’t land.

My grandfather was an agronomist. “I’m a farmer, you can leave that fancy word to those with a diploma on their wall.” Okay, my grandfather was a farmer. He never felt it was a derogatory term, so neither should I.

Indeed, Grandpa’s clothes — plain jeans, khaki shirt, and Tembel hat — did well to camouflage his acumen. I owe much of my financial security — so scarce these days — to his sweat and tears.

But this isn’t a post about Grandpa.

So, the story.

My grandfather owned several herds of livestock. Some were his, and others were jointly owned.

One day, his partner in one of the herds informed him that he wanted to part ways. “Okay, how would you like to do it?,” asked Grandpa.

“I don’t know, friend, it’s a herd, you know. There are milk cows and there are calves, and sheep. They are all different ages and sizes. How in the world are we going to split a herd?”

“Well, we could appoint a…”

“I don’t want to spend no money on middlemen! I don’t have the money.”

“Alright,” said Grandpa. He nodded his head towards two cups of coffee that were now in front of them, inviting his nervous partner to relax a little.

How could there possibly be a solution that would leave both men feeling they got a fair deal?

“I’ll tell you what. You head to the field now, and you divide the herd into two groups. After you do that, call me. I’ll come by and choose the half I like better.”

The man was speechless.

“Or, we can do it the opposite way — I split, you choose.”

And that’s the story of how you split a herd of cattle fairly.

It’s not about Grandpa.

The UK government has quietly passed new legislation that exempts GCHQ, police, and other intelligence officers from prosecution for hacking into computers and mobile phones.

While major or controversial legislative changes usually go through normal parliamentary process (i.e. democratic debate) before being passed into law, in this case an amendment to the Computer Misuse Act was snuck in under the radar as secondary legislation. According to Privacy International, “It appears no regulators, commissioners responsible for overseeing the intelligence agencies, the Information Commissioner’s Office, industry, NGOs or the public were notified or consulted about the proposed legislative changes… There was no public debate.”

“I, the government of the United Kingdom — established for the sole purpose of ensuring the liberty of the people of this land — hereby restrict citizens from hacking into computers. I deem my many extensions and branches, however, completely exempt from prosecution for doing the same thing to citizens, for any reason.”

Is there a more flagrant violation of a people’s rights? Oversight for all, but not government? Made possible behind closed doors?

I know a definition for this.

Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos, the online shoe and clothing retailer, presiding over a corporate culture that most corporations wouldn’t recognize. Among Hsieh’s priorities at Zappos: having fun, empowering his call-center employees, and making customers happy at almost any cost. We’ve written about Hsieh and Zappos before — how, for instance, company meetings are sometimes held in a bar. And why customer reps are encouraged to talk to a customer for as long as they want, all without a script, how they authorized to settle problems without calling in a supervisor and can even “fire” a customer who makes trouble for them. And how Zappos gives new employees a chance to quit their brand-new job and get a quitting “bonus” because Hsieh figures he’d rather weed out anyone who doesn’t really, really want to work at Zappos.

Now Hsieh (pronounced shay) has basically bought part of downtown Vegas for $350 million. “The Downtown Project,” as it’s called, is merely interesting per se, but anything this guy does, I want to know more about.

I finally Googled it this afternoon. Bingo.

Simply precede a contact’s name with Call, SMS, or IM. A tiny quibble is that it opens the Contacts app in the background (minimized) after each query.

WikiLeaks has published all the Sony emails that had been hacked last November, and made them searchable by keyword. In 2014, a senior executive emailed an Ivy League vice-president of philanthropy: he’d like to endow a scholarship, anonymously, ‘at the $1mm level’. In another email, he tells a development officer that his daughter is applying to the college as her first choice. It’s all very decorous. The development staff arrange a ‘customised’ campus tour for his daughter and a meeting with the university’s president; but he asks for no favours and nothing is promised. An email from the president says that his daughter’s application will be looked at ‘very closely’. She gets in. He writes to his sister: ‘David… called me. he is obsessed with getting his eldest in Harvard next year.’ She replies: ‘If David wants to get his daughter in he should obviously start giving money.’ Obviously.

Welcome to a massive list of psychological pricing strategies.

Whether you’re launching a new product, selling items on eBay, or negotiating a deal on your house, you’ll learn how to choose a price that will maximize your profit.

Kolenda got some heat for some of the techniques he mentioned, but to be fair he emphasizes the purpose of his compilation upfront. It’s one surely worth contemplating.

Generalization is the hallmark of all higher-level brain functions. It’s similar to how our brains build maps of familiar places, compiling the sights, smells, and feel of a route. That mental map frees your brain up to think about other things. […] We can become blind to details because our brain is operating on instinct. By the time you proof read your own work, your brain already knows the destination.

This explains why your readers are more likely to pick up on your errors. Even if you are using words and concepts that they are also familiar with, their brains are on this journey for the first time, so they are paying more attention to the details along the way and not anticipating the final destination.

Starting with a bathymetric chart (the underwater equivalent of a topographic map), the contours are laser-cut into sheets of Baltic birch and glued together to create a powerful visual depth. Select layers are hand-colored blue so it’s easy to discern land from water, major byways are etched into the land, then the whole thing’s framed in a custom, solid-wood frame and protected seamlessly with a sheet of durable, ultra-transparent Plexiglas.

One of the first things I do in the morning is check the front pages of the daily papers and on the day following Robin Williams’ death, rarely have I been so disappointed in the British press. […]

It seems counter-intuitive to many, that a media description of suicide could actually increase the risk for suicide, but it is a genuine risk and people die through what is sometimes called suicide contagion or copycat suicide.

Sometimes I wonder if the extent to which this stuff frustrates me is disproportionate.

I also started a website, and it’s actually done somewhat respectably, but with all the leaks going out on Twitter anyway, people have little incentive to visit, and most of my tech-savvy-heavy audience seem to be pretty heavy ad-block users, as well. It all adds up to an unsustainable living, and with a progressively worsening disease [Ed; Blass was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis], I need to make sure I can prepare myself better for the future, financially.

I think the fact “evleaks” was born on Twitter and continued to be Twitter-first even after the website went live was the dominant factor in Blass’s (financial) failure. That’s a discussion for a different day though.

Adblock is one of the first extensions I install upon getting a new computer. And I’m not alone: A report published by PageFair last August showed the percentage of visitors using ad-blocking tools to be as high as 23% and growing at 43% a year. The numbers for technology websites should be even higher.

I’ve been contemplating this for a while, and I should have done it from day one, but from now on I will use Adblock in “blacklist” mode: This means the extension will be enabled only for specific domains that I add. For me these are mainly news websites: The local ones here are plagued with ads.

The truth is, most of the websites I enjoy reading are written by independent individuals. A non-negligible number of them are relatively unestablished and rely on advertising to offset some of the expenses or justify their time commitment. Coincidentally, none of them use the sketchy strategies of big, traditional websites, and most of them have only one little ad placed in unintrusive areas. I’ve previously whitelisted a handful of websites, but I don’t want to rely on my memory anymore. If I’m annoyed enough, I’ll bear the 30 seconds it takes to add a website to the blacklist.

Yes, the web is full of bad practices and Adblock successfully deals with some of them, but to use it indiscriminately is to automatically punish the minority of honest publishers. And guess who’s more likely to close shop because of such sanctions? I mean, not everyone are as venerable as The New York Times to get on this new big thing called native advertising.

When I hear people randomly saying “I don’t want any ads” as some sort of a blanket policy, I wonder whether they would be willing to sustain alternative models.

My first iTunes receipt dates back to July 7, 2010. Apple’s App Store launched in July 2008, so I can think of two reasons for why I’ve only bought my first app two years later:

1. I’m pretty sure that like the iPhone, Apple’s App Store became available in Israel only at a later date. No matter how I phrased my search queries though, I couldn’t corroborate this, so I might be misremembering.

2. Since getting my first iPhone, I’ve left iOS for two, separate and brief periods: The first time was to try a phone with a real, physical keyboard. Remember those? Anyway, it was the less-than-horrible Nokia N97. Later, in mid-2010, I wanted to find out what the Blackberry craze was all about — fittingly, after the craze had already died — so I got myself a BlackBerry Bold. If you haven’t closed this page yet, things only get better from here..

The primary goal behind this compilation was to become more familiar with Apple’s Numbers, to satisfy my growing interest in statistics, and learn more about data visualization. See, my lifelong mission is to one day become half as good as Horace Dediu. I guess it doesn’t hurt to also have my Apple related expenses in check, but that’s just collateral mental damage.

I know for a fact that even with this statistically meaningless set of data, I’ve done some mistakes and missed some key points, so I’m happy to hear from you (via email or Twitter) and improve it after it’s published. I am aware this data is anecdotal by nature. I’m also aware that becoming half as awesome as Horace is quite a challenge.

Behind The Scenes

• I’m not a statistician, but I’ve tried my best to balance between too little and too much filtering, and to control for the right variables. The following metadata were given to each purchase:

  • Date: From July 7, 2010 until July 3, 2014
  • Category: Productivity¹, Games, Content, Music
  • Price: USD and NIS (local currency in Israel)
  • Type: iOS, OS X, Music & Content
  • Special: For in-app purchases and gifts
  • USD/NIS exchange rate at time of purchase (where applies)
  • Installed: Yes, No (iOS only)
  • Of Installed, used weekly: Yes, No (iOS only)
  • Store: Apple App Store, Paypal, or Other
• Where it made sense, Music & Content were excluded. The same goes for gifts, which — for example — shouldn’t be counted when usage metrics are plotted.

• To my surprise, there was no easy way to export all iTunes & App Store purchases to a spreadsheet. So yes, I’ve gone through 90 e-mail receipts that contained 126 purchases, adding the above metadata to each individual purchase.

• Like many non-US customers, I actually end up paying more for each purchase that I make. This is because Apple does not (and perhaps cannot) adjust for the constantly fluctuating exchange rates. I ignored this fact to keep things comparable and tidy, but mainly for my own sanity.

• All numbers current through July 3, 2014.

• Where I specify app prices, the amount listed is the one I’ve paid and not necessarily the current price.

• I’ve owned every iPhone since the original came out. Looking at the first app purchase for iPad, I can confidently say that my first iPad (an iPad 2) was purchased on the 25th of July, 2011. I got my first MacBook on November 5, 2013.

• Added August 10, 2014: The iTunes Store for music and movies launched in Israel on December 2, 2012.

• This post may render awkwardly in your RSS reader. If that’s the case, click here to read it on the website.

The Numbers

Since July 7, 2010, I’ve spent a total of $740 on 126 purchases. Of those purchases, 14 were In-App purchases (IAPs) and 4 were gifts. You can see a sharp increase in expenses that starts the day I bought my first MacBook.

Here’s a purchase-by-purchase chart:

OS X vs. iOS

Obviously Mac apps are more expensive, so despite the fact I’ve been a Mac owner for only 8 out of the considered 48 months, OS X apps already account for 55% of my total purchases:

Averages

By Category

Here’s the breakdown by category:

By Category, iOS Only

Here it made sense to breakdown iOS only purchases, since 100% of my purchases for the Mac have been non-games:

iOS Price Groups

Of the 126 purchases that I’ve made 26 (28%) have cost me $0.99, making it the most common (or mode) price. The next most common price is $4.99, which appeared 18 times (20%) in my Numbers sheet, and have cost me a total of $89.82, thus making it the “highest grossing price tag”. Here’s the table for price groups (iOS only):

iOS Usage Analysis

One of the most interesting metrics to me was the ratio between installed and non-installed apps. Since the incentive to delete (or not re-download) unused apps is much bigger in iOS due to capacity and screen real estate considerations, it would’ve made very little sense to include Mac purchases:

I wondered how different the numbers would look if I filtered out games: It’s arguable that most games are often deleted (or not re-installed) after completion, or just gradually become boring or irrelevant. It’s also fair to note here that I’m not too much of a gamer myself:

The percentage of installed iOS apps goes up considerably once games are filtered out. Dollar-wise, $109.74 worth of iOS apps are currently installed on either of my devices (iPhone & iPad) vs. $109.66 that aren’t.

So what does that mean for games? Of the 34 that I’ve purchased, only 5 games — worth $18 — are currently installed on either of my iOS devices. Of the $111.66 that I’ve spent, $93.71 worth of games are on neither of my devices. Almost 84% of the money I’ve spent on games is now in the cloud.

Does that mean I wouldn’t have bought any or most of them? Not necessarily: That would be like not going to the movies because you pay $12 for 120 minutes that you can’t “reuse”. Most forms of entertainment are ephemeral by nature.

Total Spending by Year

Keep in mind that data for 2010 and 2014 is partial:

More Facts

• The first app I ever bought was iXpenseIt, a personal finance manager. I bought it on July 7, 2010 for $4.99. iXpenseIt is still in the App Store and has the same price tag. It was last updated on September 20, 2013. I no longer use it, or any other money management app for that matter.

• The most “senior” app currently installed on my iPhone is Pocket, which I downloaded when it was still known as “Read it Later”. I bought “Read It Later Pro” for $2.99 on July 28, 2010. Pocket has since went free — and later freemium — and remains a key tool in my read-save-organize workflow.

• Other apps that stood the test of time: CamScanner+ (9/1/11), TuneIn Radio Pro (1/31/12), and Calzy calculator (4/26/13).

• In contrast, here are the three most recent iOS purchases that are already gone from my devices: Reporter App (2/10/14), Unread (2/6/14), and Launch Center Pro (12/26/13). Interestingly, these are all top-quality apps. They just didn’t fit me well.

• The most expensive app I ever bought is 1Password ($49.99) for the Mac. On iOS, 4 apps have cost me $9.99 each: Two of them are Apple’s own Pages and Keynote, which you can download for free today. The other two are FlightTrack Pro and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit for iPad.

Miscellany

• My most favorite iOS app is CamScanner+. Pocket is a close second, and Fantastical 2 is another favorite.

• Most hasty purchase: The in-app-purchase of Paper’s “Essentials” pack — Ben Thompson makes drawing look as easy as spending $6.99.

• Worst app purchase: Office Stretches — this app looked sketchy from the get-go, but I guess I was desperate enough to try anything that had the potential to ease my pain (context). The $2.99 IAP that unlocked additional exercise-videos turned out to be useless since the app would crash on every second launch.

• Surprisingly good app: Screenshot — A $0.99 in-app-purchase. This one’s great if you want to take and present screenshots “framed” in iOS devices: Easy to use, intuitive, and with great syncing and sharing options.

  I think Screenshot is also a great case-study for app developers: It gives the potential buyer enough of a glimpse of what the app can do so they know what they’re paying for, and presents the IAP option as that of additive value. There’s enough balance and tension that on the one hand does not frustrate the user by hindering the functionality, and on the other, makes the incentive to spend bigger.

• Most expensive iOS app that’s not installed: TouchDraw ($6.99), which I used to plot microeconomics graphs in university. Wish I’d remembered having it when I first set out to plan my future home.

• Longest lasting iOS game is Backgammon NJ HD ($7.99): I bought this one in June of last year and still enjoy it occasionally on the iPad. I remember having done some searches for backgammon games for iOS before relying on the App Store search and this one was mentioned everywhere — another good example where paying more translates to better value with multiplayer mode, ELO ratings, nice UI and good matchmaking.

• Three most addictive games I’ve played on iOS: Fruit Ninja, Ski Safari, and Rumble (Now called Ruzzle).

• Using the Timing App for OS X, I’ve calculated the time spent on this post to be at least 20 hours². If you enjoyed this article, why not browse the homepage and consider subscribing to the RSS feed?

Lessons

• Numbers is hard. And numbers are hard.

• With data, rely on human input only when you have to, and if that’s the case, double and triple check everything. Preferably before you’ve drawn and uploaded the charts to the website. Realizing you’ve mislabeled an app as “iOS” instead of “Mac” can get dramatic. Especially if:

• The hard way is the easy way: At one point, two weeks ago, I was so anxious to finish and publish this piece that I’d forgotten that my only reason to even attempt this unnecessary craziness was to learn. So I started making shortcuts by manually counting every metric and average instead of learning formulas. And that’s why this post is published two weeks later.

• Always let someone examine a long piece before publishing to check for errors, bloopers, and prevent self-consensus bias.

Credits

• The HTML tables’ design was stolen from inspired by Shawn Blanc.

• Thanks to Florian Taltavull, Andrew Baker, Linus Edwards, and Harshil Shah for the suggestions on Twitter.

• Special thanks to Ishtaarth Dalmia who has had some crucial observations and went over several iterations of this compilation. You’re the man, Ishtaarth!