Frank McPherson's Web Notes

  • This is a really good description of leadership.

  • How can one follow Jesus and not have empathy?

  • Calling Bullshit — Videos

    The videos on this site look interesting and worth watching.

  • I have enjoyed my extended birthday and Easter vacation, although I prefer today’s weather over what we had last Thursday through Saturday. Today I enjoyed Mother Earths warm sunshine, blue skies, and flowering trees.

  • Abraham Lincoln on the Kansas-Nebraska Act:

    “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.” from “These Truths: A History of the United States” by Jill Lepore a.co/48N8IUe

  • Berries be gone. Nice enough to sit out on the patio for the first time in 2019.

  • Remember when Republicans talked about the rule of law? They used to talk about that, and other things like the problems caused by increasing the deficit.

  • I am surprised that I cannot take a screenshot in the iPad by double tapping the Apple Pencil on the screen. The iOS process to take a screenshot by holding the power button the pressing Home feels awkward. I think Apple can do much more to integrate the Pencil with iOS.

  • Migrating To A New iPad

    I got a new iPad Mini for my birthday. It is noticeably faster than the Mini 4 and I am happy to be able to use the Apple Pencil with it. I have found that GoodNotes can be configured for vertical scrolling rather than horizontal so it best approximates the Newton notepad.

    The setup process for moving from one iPad to another is pretty neat. It automatically detects the old nearby iPad and establishes a connection to it by scanning a barcode with the camera. All the settings transfer and apps restore from a recent backup. Not all app settings, particularly logins, restore so I am finding that I have to check each app individually.

  • Today we got confirmation that POTUS is above the law. So much for the rule of law in the United States, particularly if the House Of Representatives does not consider articles of impeachment. As much as Nancy Pelosi does not want to deal with impeachment given what I have seen of the report I don’t know how she avoids it.

  • Yippee, I made it to 53! Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday wishes. The entire day has been a gift. Onward to 54!

  • Breaking And Fixing Things

    I have been having fun breaking and fixing my wiki over the last several days, and in the process learned more about wiki. Wiki is written in nodejs and there is a wiki-server and a wiki-client along with several plugins. My adventures began when an update was made to wiki-client that broke the ability to use HTML forms in a wiki page. A fix was made to wiki-client that resolved the problem but my server was not getting the update.

    It appears that somewhere along the line I managed to install wiki in two different directories on my server. The install from which I was running wiki was not updating when I ran npm install -g wiki and it took me a while to figure out how to run the global install instance of wiki that I was updating.

    Today I removed the “second” installation but now I have to provide the full path to the correct, current, installation of wiki. When I just run wiki it tries to run it from a directory in which it is no longer located. I must have an alias or script pointing it in that direction but for now I haven’t figured it out.

    Anyway, I now have the current verison of wiki-client so I can now fill in html forms, one of which is for a search plugin that now appears to be broken. Oy vey! Search works on a older installation on my Pixelbook, but the new version/current version is not working.

    At least I did manage to get the graphviz plugin installed (you can see it in action on this page), figuring out how to set up myself as an admin user to do the installation took time to suss out.

    Breaking and fixing things is a important part of the learning process when learning software.

  • Checking in at a new coffee shop on my birthday.

  • Calling the Samsung Galaxy Fold a foldable tablet makes sense. What remains to be seen is whether it sells enough at a really high price for more companies to make and sell them at lower prices.

  • I created an outage for my wiki because I did not read the warnings when I upgraded the wiki software. Fortunately I made a snapshot backup so I could restore and try again.

  • The Pistons are in the NBA playoffs as the eighth and lowest seed in the east, which means they play the top seed Milwaukee Bucks. The first playoff games of any sport in Little Caesars Arena will be the Pistons’ and I bet the Illitches never imagined the Red Wings would not be the first to host a playoffs in their arena.

  • At 2:30 PM I got a notification that Tiger Woods won the Masters, which was a surprise because the final pair usually doesn’t tee off until late in the afternoon. I did not know they decided to start five hours early due to the weather forecast. At least I did get to see the rebroadcast of Tiger’s last nine holes. Seeing his son greet him off the 18th hole was special.

  • Google has enabled the ability for me to use my Pixel 2 phone as a physical security key by using Bluetooth. I hope to use this with my Pixelbook, however, the Bluetooth on my Pixelbook often stops for no good reason.

  • Today we saw the first picture of a black hole. I found a good video that explains how to understand the image.

  • I think the iPad Mini 5 is the closest we will get to a modern version of the Newton MessagePad. Nebo incorporates some of the handwriting gestures available in Newton but not all. What I wish I could find is a notepad app for the iPad that works like the one in Newton. WritePad also is familiar but I find it frustrating to use.

  • This sounds like a 2-in-1 with built in LTE. It might put an emphasis on Crostini.

  • One link out of every 200 disappears from the Internet. gwern.net

  • Why Big Pharma Is Winning the Drug Price Wars

    Drug companies are able to pay PBMs — as well as hospitals and some doctors — to make sure cheaper drugs are left out. It’s as simple as that. Drug companies pay everyone along the way so that lower-price drugs lose.

    You don’t have competition when the system is gamed, and those who argue against “single payer” health insurance always hinge their argument on competition. If you don’t want to change health insurance then do something about the costs with regulation that forces competition.

  • It’s that time of the year when the outdoor temperature is so warm the furnace doesn’t run and therefore the basement, where I work, gets cold and feels colder because I am not yet in summer mode.

  • Feedbase provides a location for finding RSS feed URLs for popular web sites.

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