Routine Revelations

Further troubleshooting of my Personal Automations finds that if I switch from the opened app to another app then the close app event triggers in the automation, but if I just close it to go to the Home Screen, it does not. I wonder what that means?

I have a few Personal Automations on my iPad that should trigger when I open and close an app. Up until a recent update to iPadOS, or to Shortcuts, both triggers worked but now the close app trigger does not work. I read that when first released Personal Automations only triggered upon open but there was no option for closed and it looks like some code was reverted in a recent release.

Currently reading: OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say? by Ben Sheehan 📚

“Lovers are the ones who know most about God,” von Balthasar writes; “the theologian must listen to them.” Such listening best happens, I’ve concluded, in art.

If Christianity gradually came to make a dent on the institutions of political life, transforming the very dynamics of rule, it was because “Christ has conquered the rulers from below, by drawing their subjects out from under their authority.”

I’m a philosopher. We can’t think our way out of this mess, Christian Century

A Personal Digital Habitat is a federated multi-device information environment within which a person routinely dwells. It is associated with a personal identity and encompasses all the digital artifacts (information, data, applications, etc.) that the person owns or routinely accesses. A PDH overlays all of a person’s devices1 and they will generally think about their digital artifacts in terms of common abstractions supported by the PDH rather than device- or silo-specific abstractions. But presentation and interaction techniques may vary to accommodate the physical characteristics of individual devices.

The Wilmington coup stands as the only successful and lasting armed overthrow of a legitimate municipal government in American history on U.S soil. It was a horrific turning point for the country, marking the beginning of Jim Crow and poisoning race relations to the present day. Not only was it a stain upon North Carolina, but on the federal government, too, which knowingly abandoned Black people to death and destruction.

America Hasn’t Reckoned with the Coup That Blasted the Black Middle Class, nakedcapitalism.com

I tried Tile tags and stopped using them, because I found I don’t lose things, so I am wondering whether the people caught up in the Air Tags hysteria really need them, or just craving a new Apple thing? What I most wanted the Tile to do is not let me forget my pills. I put a tag on a pill box, but found that the notification that my phone and the tag were apart came way too late.

For me the most frustrating and disappointing thing about reactions to COVID is that so many people only think about it in terms of personal health and not public health. I may be at lower risk of severe symptoms but I can carry the disease to someone who is at high risk. The possibility that I could do something that results in the death of another obligates me to take the situation seriously.

Another problem that people don’t seem to grasp is that longer the virus out of control the more mutations that will occur, which has consequences to all of us. It is likely the recent surge in Michigan is due to a mutation.

As of today my wife and I are fully vaccinated! The question now is, what does this mean for us?

COVID-19 will be with us for years and years, continuing to be deadly, because people refuse to take the vaccines or just don’t think the issue is serious.

In an article discussing an breakout of a COVID-19 variant at a Kentucky nursing home of residents nearly all vaccinated, Zeynep writes:

Facts need the right context so that they can turn into information that’s more useful to us.

Zeynep points out that the facts of the study in the context that a breakout in a nursing home is a worst case scenario, shows good news about the efficacy of the vaccines.

Forgive my moment of patting myself on the back. Last night I found that the fill valve in the toilet on the main floor of our house needed to be replaced. I am not experienced with home repairs and in the past managed to mangle toilet repair enough to call in a professional to fix the job. So, in normal circumstances I would have just scheduled a plumber to repair, but I decided to search for information, found videos on YouTube that showed me what to do, and today I bought the parts and made the replacement as easily as was shown in the video.

The UI this website is remarkable. You might have noticed that my site is very bland, that’s mostly because I lack the design skills, but also because I like featuring the text and how it looks on mobile devices.

Amazon has broken a what has been significant piece of functionality in the iOS Kindle app, the ability to send a book’s title and author to Drafts. I used to open About This Book, tap Share and then select Drafts, and the result used to be that a new draft opened with the book title and authors. Today when I did this Drafts wasn’t even an option!

Update: Turns out the issue was not just with the Kindle app, Drafts was gone from the share sheet in all apps. After searching the Internet, I restarted the iPad and that seems to resolve the problem.

Day 1 of lap 56 around the sun.

Received the Obvious Shirt that I ordered, though this is the one that I really want. I wish their web site had a notification for when shirts are back in stock.

This is the largest flowering tree that I have ever seen.