I have never been so glad that I talked myself out of buying the new iPhone this year! Siri is the primary input method I use for my iPhone. I would say I make around 20-30 vocal requests a day. It will be so nice to be able to do things like create a meeting on a calendar with a conversation instead of having to frame the request in a single sentence! I hope they do this rollout well.

In 2005 or so, I got a tip about an application called LaunchBar, which would later be copied by Apple to replace the Sherlock search tool, and later by Microsoft in its PowerToys suite. The machine learning LaunchBar used to tailor its responses based on my previous behavior was life-changing. Instead of configuring an application, I just had to use it to change how it behaved.

This is how language models and AI are going to improve your products. Subtly. Behind the scenes. Slightly improving a thousand different use cases, only a fraction of which your regular usage patterns are going to intersect with.

That title makes me chuckle. He should go set up a fresh install of Windows and see what the default security experience is like. Mac OS makes it smooth and fast, and relatively unobtrusive in comparison.

I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.

Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.

Okay, I have a lot of recommendations here.

how can I quit textEdit/close a textEdit document and either:

Choose not to save at all or

To my knowledge, this can’t be done. Choose a different text editor, such as BBEdit instead. In BBEdit, if I want to choose not to save, I press Command-W to close the window. The “Save changes before closing?” dialog box will accept Command-D as input for the “Don’t Save” button. BBEdit also has command line utilities, which I will come back to.

Choose to save somewhere and pick a location and filename to do so WITHOUT touching the mouse?

You have already answered this one. All application Save As dialog boxes accept the command-shift-G (Go to) command. You can then type the path to where you want to save your file and use tab-completion to make it go faster. Saving files in locations that can be accessed with tilde expansion will dramatically speed your workflow.

For example, I often work on little projects that involve editing lots of files. I will choose to put my project directory in my home directory so that I can access it with the following keystrokes:

1. Command-Shift-S (Save As)
2. Command-Shift-G (Go to)
3. ~/Rot(tab)/Proj(tab) (which tab-completes to /Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/)
4. (enter)

But what I keep thinking about while reading your post is how much you should be working with an open terminal window. The zsh commands you can use there will change your life. It requires learning unix, and it requires you changing the way you work a bit, but I can immediately think of approaches that would make it so that you never have to use the Go To command again. Let’s walk through that now.

In Linux/Unix, it is not uncommon to create your file in a location before you even edit it. For example, I can do this:

touch ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

This creates an empty file at that location. Now I can open the file, edit it, and save it, and I don’t have to specify where. My hands never have to leave the keyboard. But we can do better:

nano ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

Now I’ve opened the text editor nano. I can write in that file. When I save it, it will be saved at that location. But we can do even better.

Remember how I mentiuoned that BBEdit has command line tools? Once those are installed, we can use bbedit as the text editor instead of nano.

bbedit ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

As you might have guessed, this opens a new BBEdit text window. The BBEdit developers have gone the extra mile, though. That empty BBEdit window will have the name you passed to it in the title bar as well as the path to the file visible in the toolbar even though the file doesn’t even exist until you save it.

So far so good, right? Once you start using a terminal window in your workflow, you can begin to take advantage of things like environment variables, symbolic links, and commands like find and grep to rapidly increase your productivity.

Oh, one more thing: if you don’t know how to use regular expressions, set aside some time to learn how to use them. Regular Expressions are probably the single most life-changing thing I’ve ever come across for computers.

Commnad-option-C will copy the path of the currently-selected folder or file to the clipboard. If you use a finder replacement like PathFInder, you get this behavior with just command-C.

Designate your DMCA contact, pay your $6, set up a clear infringement policy, and rest easy. Full details in this EFF Fediverse Legal Primer.

Are you 100% sure about that? click

I just up-voted this post after click. No change on Safari for iPad OS.

Now this has some potential! I have something for my nighttime reading list! Great post!

I just want to make sure I understand.

The docker containers need to be set to the same time zone as the docker host. Is that right?

Our docker host has been set to America/Denver for weeks, but the containers have been UTC, and we haven’t had any unusual behavior.

I did set the postgres container’s time zone to America/Denver a few hours ago and also saw no strange behavior.

I took a snapshot before I did that, so I can roll back, but I’m wondering what bad things would happen that I should look out for.

I know this pain. This is why I have so many 49 minute timers

Most people pick an instance by collecting a list of instances that are physically close to them, and then reviewing the /instances page to see how big the block list is. Lemmyverse.net can tell you how many users are on those blocked instances.

Heck yeah! I can’t believe how popular that game was. Every time I bring up this era, everyone talks about it.

I was a big Tradewars 2002 fan, myself. You can still play it, which is what made me start to think about connecting it to Lemmy somehow. That, and Nethack.

As a site admin, I really wish it was easier to modify the content on the front page. We’ve had some interesting ideas over here, like linking to some simple online games and posting high scores for the site, or maybe just adding some analytics boxes to the site. But for us that’s difficult.

A lot of our ideas come from a shared experience in BBSes from the 90s, where they had game doors, ascii art, and other fun site-specific elements. Technology has changed, but there are modern equivalents to all of those things that we wish we could implement.

Paradoxically, Apple has regularly introduced features over the years that result in me needing to use my devices less. When I got my first iPhone (an iPhone 4, I believe), every little notification would light up my phone’s screen. These days that doesn’t happen, and Apple has further cut down on those intrusions with focus and bed time configurations. I’m big into using HomeKit for home automation. And while it annoys me that home automation is still such a simple application, Apple has done a good job of insulating me from the need to use my devices when I want things to happen in my home.

In short, letting myself take advantage of the Apple ecosystem reduces the touch-points of the technology I use. I just have to invest the time to learn about features and how they work, and to tune them to my preferred lifestyle.

You can do that, but it’s provided on iPhone without any internet connection, it integrates seamlessly with system events, there are no download or install requirements, and if you use Airpods Pro, you can mix in environmental sounds. Plus, as another user mentioned below, you can add a toggle for this setting in the control center. That’s a stellar implementation!

This is a great idea! I just added it, but it’s tricky. For anyone coming across this who wonders how it’s done, here are the steps:

1. Go to Settings > Control Center
2. Scroll down to Accessibility Shortcuts and tap the green + on the left to add it to the included controls
3. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut (all the way at the bottom in the General group)
4. Tap Background Sounds. A checkmark will appear on the left.

Now there will be a generic accessibility icon on the control center that will toggle the background sounds on and off.

The problem is most likely that nobody on lemmy.ml has ever searched for the songaweek community before. That means that the [email protected] “shorthand” URL will not work. This is a big problem for smaller or younger instances. The problem is so pervasive on Lemmy right now that Lemmy.ninja voted to recommend people use the full URL when linking to communities in our communitysearchtips community.

You know how Amazon has that great feature where if you pause the show you get to see links to the actors currently on screen? A vision pro app could give you that same information off to the side so you don’t have to pause. Eye tracking takes this a step further. I’m looking at a specific actress and signal that I want more information about her. I can get just the information about her, not the other actors in the scene, and I can get it in a pane that doesn’t block the show. No pause needed.

In the 2010s, a lot of shows had companion podcasts that you had to start at the same time as the show. Or they would have companion apps. I can think of easy ways to improve this with a vision pro app.

A lot of other changes I can think of require collaboration with content creators. Things like signaling that there’s a bit of commentary about this specific scene, or embedding easter eggs that you have to look at to uncover, or creating jumping-off points from a show that lead to additional content like Trent Reznor’s Year Zero.

Could you expand a bit on step 4? Do you have to create just one shortcut, or do you create multiple shortcuts?