Interesting Juxtaposition  

First, from The Guardian:

I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase, if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every “scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.

Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

As for her statements on issues, Politifact, a Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking organization, gives Clinton the best truth-telling record of any of the 2016 presidential candidates. She beats Sanders and Kasich and crushes Cruz and Trump, who has the biggest “pants on fire” rating and has told whoppers about basic economics that are embarrassing for anyone aiming to be president. (He falsely claimed GDP has dropped the last two quarters and claimed the national unemployment rate was as high as 35%).

Now, from the GOP Town Hall last night. CNN’s fact checking:

Reality Check: Cruz on the Muslim Brotherhood

Verdict: False.

Reality Check: Cruz on Wall Street Journal article on Arizona immigration

It’s true that the Journal story said that spending on education dropped by hundreds of millions of dollars. But Cruz exaggerates the other claims, so we rate them as false.

Reality Check: Cruz on anti-ISIS campaign

Verdict: False.

Reality Check: Cruz on 2009 Fort Hood attack

Verdict: False.[1]

Reality Check: Cruz on NYPD surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods

is completely false.[2]

Reality Check: Trump on refugees

we rate this statement false.

Reality Check: Trump on NATO and terrorism

Verdict: False.

Reality Check: Trump says reporter grabbed him

Verdict: False.

Reality Check: Trump on self-funding

Verdict: False.

Reality Check: Trump on San Bernardino

Verdict: False.

Reality Check: Kasich on beating Clinton in polls

Verdict: True.

Reality Check: Kasich on Ohio job creation

It’s false that Ohio is now among the top 10 in terms of job creation.

I don't even know how you combat that.

The GOP Lab Experiment in Kansas   ⚐

The Koch-backed Kansas Policy Institute predicted that Brownback’s 2013 tax plan would generate $323 million in new revenue. During its first full year in operation, the plan produced a $688 million loss

This article is entirely damning of the tea party, ultra-free market, low business taxes, “let them eat cake”, GOP philosophy. There’s a balance to be found in taxing corporations, but the current-ish crop of GOP establishment candidates (Cruz, Rubio, Perry, etc.) seem to believe in the fallacy of corporate trickle down economics.

And it hurts those least able to defend themselves.

Between 2010 and 2012, Kansas saw income growth of 6.1 percent, good for 12th in the nation; from 2013 to 2015, that rate was 3.6 percent, good for 41st.

I’d be willing to bet a whole bunch of jellybeans that the income growth rate disproportionately impacts low-to-middle income households.

There’s a reason the Trump campaign is resonating with the disenfranchised on the right. Many of the voters don’t realize it, but their party has left them behind in favor of uber-social conservatives with an ultra-libertarian view on the role of government, who look at them as collateral damage in a big fiscal experiment.

The Reagan Republicans, who Ted Cruz claims to carry the mantle of, are really voting for Trump, who’s championing the middle class, hawkish (albeit nuance-less) foreign policy, and middle-of-the-road social views.[1]

It’s remarkable that Donald Trump, who is spouting absolutely insane policy proposals, is somehow the most relatable and electable Republican candidate.[2]

(Via NYMag.)

Stupid Siri Won't Read Me Text Messages  

In hindsight, this makes a ton of sense. For the last 3–4 months, however, it’s been infuriating.

I have a tendency to have Siri read me my text messages if I’m out walking or driving. It worked forever. In the old days, hold down the button, ask Siri to read the unread text messages, and then you could respond. Since I got my iPhone 6S, it was even easier—if I was in speaking distance, just say “Hey Siri, read me my text message” and she would.

Until a few months ago, when Siri said “I’m sorry, you’ll need to unlock your iPhone for that.”

Say what? Why you gotta be that way?

I googled and binged and duck-ducked for the last few months. I always assumed it was a bug. The only fix I ever saw was a factory reset, which I wasn’t going to do.

When iOS 9.3 came out yesterday and I got a new text message, I figured “Ah, maybe it’s fixed! Let’s give it a shot!”

“Hey, Siri, read me my text messages, please”

“I’m sorry, you’ll need to unlock your iPhone for that.”

Oh, Siri, it’s on.

I kept poking around the settings and turning things off and on to no avail. Finally, I noticed that I had turned off showing text messages on the lock screen (which was a result of a text barrage I was on the end of months ago and was sick of my phone lighting up every 2 seconds).

Hmm … I mean … if I didn’t want messages on my lock screen, it probably makes sense that Siri shouldn’t read them to someone who walks by.

Flip that switch, Siri is back to being my best friend.

So, again, in hindsight, this makes sense. The UI doesn’t make this obvious though. Somewhere in the UI it should say “This will also prevent Siri from reading you text messages on a locked phone”, or when you try to do it, Siri should say “I can’t do that. You can change that setting here.”

Or something.

Anyway, my phone outsmarted me and Siri and I are cool again.

Owning Your Own Social Media Content  

I’ve been linking to Manton Reece a good bit lately, as he’s hitting on some topics that I’ve been thinking about. Namely how do you ensure that while you’re putting stuff into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., you ensure that you own the canonical versions of your files (or at least make it so that when one of those businesses pivots, gets bought, whatever, you don’t lose everything).

“I rarely post photos here on my own site. I’ve stuck with using Instagram instead.
I need to change that. I do like the Instagram app, though, so I’m going to keep using it. I’ll just copy the photos over to my site as well, and I’ll use Workflow on iOS to help automate it.”

He made a nice workflow for the Workflow app for iOS. Workflow is really cool, and sometimes you just need a little kickstart to get going.

I loved the idea of making it easy to post photos to this here blog, so I adapted his workflow a bit to make one that’s a bit more generic. You can find that here.

With it, I can take any photo on my phone and post it over to my site in about 10 seconds. You can see an example with this post about the bottle of Pretty Things I opened up the other day (two more bottles of Jack D’Or hanging out in my fridge for a special occasion).

Saved Some Pretty Things for a Special Occasion  

Speed Up Time Machine Backups (and General Backupery)  

More “make sure I can find this later” blogging.

Keir Thomas posted a tip about speeding up Time Machine backups. Run this command in a terminal window:

“sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0”

and the backups will move a bit faster. I’m giving it a shot now because I’ve added a new backup option to my rotation. I found a good 4TB USB drive on Amazon and added it to my Airport Extreme. This acts as a remote Time Machine disk (awesome), which lets me backup my iMac, my laptop, but also my wife’s Mac, which she never remembers to backup (last time she backed it up was in November).

Everything finished pretty quickly except for my laptop (which I can’t leave just sitting around all day—it’s my work machine), which is finally nearing the last few hours of backup.

I’ve become paranoid about having enough backups, just due to the fragility of disks. Knowing that I’ve got at least four backups of my main machine, and two of everything else, makes me feel at least moderately secure.

(I should say, I’m not seeing much evidence that my backup moves noticeably faster, but I wonder if that’s because it’s a network backup.)

(Via Michael Tsai.)

Stop Spotlight from Indexing Your Time Machine Backup  

So that I can find this again some day.

I plugged my Time Machine drive in to backup my laptop today (at work, my offsite backup). I couldn’t eject it once it was done. After a bit of research, seemed like it was stuck with Spotlight indexing the drive, even though I have Spotlight set to ignore the drive.

After some googling, found this on Stack Exchange:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Running that stopped Spotlight, and allowed me to eject my disk. Running

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

started Spotlight back up again normally.

Still not sure why Spotlight ignored me telling it to not index the backup disk, but that’s a different problem.

Best Election Coverage  

Josh Marshall and the team at TPM are doing the best election coverage, I think. They certainly lean left, but I think they’ve got an incredible understanding of the political machine and the implication of the various results.

I think today’s coverage has been a good example:

No, There Won’t Be a Contested Convention

Worst Possible Outcome

I think these are the best assessments of the outcomes from Super Tuesday on the Republican side. If you’re not reading TPM this election cycle, you should add it to your list.

Let's Encrypt SSLs  

A couple of months back, I went through the process of trying out Let’s Encrypt to setup some SSL certs for my various little sites. Do my sites really need encryption? No. But, at this point, it’s easy enough to setup an SSL cert, and I’d rather my sites pass their data securely, even if no one cares what goes on between my site and your browser. I’m not storing credit cards or capturing info about my visitors (beyond the analytics Google captures), but in a world where the government is increasingly looking for ways to get at the data of citizens, why not do it.

Plus, it’s free.

It’s a little bit of a challenge to get setup if you’re not already used to mucking around with server management. The newer versions (as of this moment, 0.5.0) make things much easier, but you’re still going to need to be at least familiar with git, python, and sudo.

Once you’ve gotten certs and gotten your servers configured, you just need to remember that these certs expire every 3 months, unlike yearly (or longer) for more traditional certs. Currently, you’re on your own to renew them, but it sounds like they’ll be building out renewal scripts to make it easy.

SSL certs are already reasonably inexpensive (providers like Comodo often sell them for less than the cost of your annual domain renewal), but the ability to get certs for any number of subdomains for free is pretty compelling. Once the automation is in place, they’ll be almost no reason to run a server without https.

(Of course, Let’s Encrypt could be a big government ploy to get everyone to install free certs that they have the key to, and they’ll be able to eavesdrop on all of us with ease.)

Microblogging  

Manton Reece has been working on an app/business/service that I think is really in the “own your own Twitter” space. Basically, why not own your own work, rather than just pushing it into Twitter.

It’s something I’ve thought about in the past. If I could post to Twitter and push those to my blog at the same time, it’d give me a full accounting for most of what I do on line (suck in Instagram, and you probably get the totality of it).

I’m interested to see what he comes up with. I think, often, that my Tweets only make sense in the context of the moment. A Celtics game or a concert, or whatever is happening on TV. Some are of the moment in a world sense, and make more sense standing alone.

For example,

My @serial experience so far…
Pre Ayn Rand reference: I completely get it. He seems well intentioned.

Post Rand reference: Fuck that guy

— Ryan Toohil (@ryant) February 19, 2016

Serial is pretty popular, so that stands up on its own alright (and, for fun, go search Bergdahl and Rand on Twitter. It’s amazing.)

This tweet, however,

That’s the sort of game a contender wins.

— Ryan Toohil (@ryant) February 11, 2016

only makes sense when you realize I was at the Celtics/Clippers game before the All Star break, that the Cs pulled out in overtime.

If you push your tweets/microposts to your blog, even if it’s within the context of your other tweets/posts, can you maintain that context of the moment? I’m not sure.

It’d be amazing if, whether via an app or later inside of your blogging applicaiton, you could add that context. If I could post from an app, that knows my location, and can determine I’m at the Celtics game, and add enough meta-data to that tweet to put it in the context of “Posted from the TD Garden during the Celtics victory over the Clippers”, that’d be pretty amazing.

And it’s not really out of reach today. That tweet could have had geo-data, which would put me at the Garden, during the time the game was going on. I mentioned “game”, which likely narrows the context down even further. If an app/web service could even let me go through my tweets later, tag them with context, and have that flow to my site, that would be a pretty amazingly wonderful service.