Archive for Software
If you use the Backblaze online-backup system on a Mac and you haven’t upgraded to version 8.5, I recommend doing so; the user experience is far better than in older versions. I was using a version that was a System Preferences panel, which has always been annoying to use; for example, after I clicked the […]
I just took a look at the demo for Sudowrite, an AI-based text-generation tool to help fiction writers. (You can sign up for a free trial; after the trial period, it costs $10/month.) I find it mildly intriguing, but not something I’m likely to use. But I’m amused by a couple of things in the […]
I just found out that the amazing text generator GPT-3 was opened to the public months ago! To use it, you need to sign up for an OpenAI account. If you have an account already (for access to DALL-E 2, for example), then you can use that account. If not, it looks like you can […]
About six months ago, I started to learn how to play guitar using the Simply Guitar iOS app, made by the same people who make the excellent Simply Piano app for piano learning. I’ve been using Simply Piano for a couple years now, and I mostly love it. Unfortunately, I don’t love Simply Guitar. My […]
Three recent AI systems that generate remarkable art, given text descriptions. (None are available for use by the general public yet, but you can see examples of what they can do, and you can sign up for the waiting list for two of them.) DALL-E 2 (made by OpenAI) If you ask it to generate, […]
I spent quite a lot of yesterday fixing my automated backup system at work. Most important bit of this post: In recent versions of macOS, if you want a scheduled Bash shell script to write to your disk, you need to explicitly give Bash “Full Disk Access” permissions. Side note: In most contexts, using a […]
I’ve been having problems with notifications in various computer contexts for a while now. For example, notifications that I missed were a contributing factor to the awfulness at work that ate up half of my year last year. More recently, I’ve been getting lots of iOS notifications from Mary Anne’s calendars despite having turned off […]
The Mac task management app Things 3 came out in 2017 or so, but it removed an important feature that I relied on heavily in Things 2. (The ability to sort the Today task list by date.) So I kept on using Things 2 at work all this time. But Things 2 recently stopped working, and I decided to […]
I finally got around to creating a Shortcut on my iPad to automatically set various settings when I want to launch a particular app, and it was pretty easy and straightforward, so I thought I would post about it. Background: When I launch the Simply Piano app, I’ve been doing a couple of things manually: […]
I recently had use for a little question-mark-in-a-circle icon. I did some searches for such icons, and found some, but it occurred to me that it would be better to use CSS or SVG to create a quasi-icon that isn’t an image. So I did some searching, and found two ways to do it. There […]
Do you want to download an archive of an entire Yahoo Group? Here’s how. But do it today, because you may not be able to do it this way after tomorrow. Background: Yahoo stores Yahoo Groups messages and files on their servers, but (as I understand it) they’re removing access to those after Saturday the […]
Me: Hey, cool, there’s a tool that checks ePub files for accessibility! Me: …Uh-oh, it’s a command-line tool. Me: [Downloads and installs node.js, as required by the accessibility-tool instructions.] Me: [Figures out that a certain command must be run as superuser, which isn’t clear from the cryptic error message.] Me: [Runs npm command to install […]