Back in September 2014, Ars Technica’s Andrew Cunningham took on a Herculean challenge in modern computing. Egged on by his coworkers, he used a PowerBook G4 running OS 9.2.2 as his “daily driver” for a couple of days, placing a turn of the century bit of hardware into the present tense. It's no surprise that almost nothing was achieved that week (except for, of course, the excellent article).
I had that story on my mind when, many years later while browsing a local online classifieds site, I stumbled across a gem: a Macintosh IIsi. Even better, the old computer was for sale along with the elusive but much desired Portrait Display, a must-have for the desktop publishing industry of its time. I bought it the very next day.
It took me several days just to get the machine to boot at all, but I kept thinking back to that article. Could I do any better? With much less? Am I that arrogant? Am I a masochist?
"Back there, we've got one of those lights that a doctor uses to look inside your ears," she said, as I tried to look as if I was marveling.
"And we've got a special tool," she added.
She plugged a Lightning cable into my phone and it showed signs of life. Meanwhile, I pondered this special tool.
Overall, 1Password is just a fantastic app/service. It feels like the most native app to the Apple ecosystem. It has a fair pricing model and has continued to receive updates to take advantage of whatever new features Apple has offered with new versions of iOS and macOS. Other apps like Dashlane and LastPass are great, but 1Password provides, in my opinion, an overall better experience. Safari’s Password Manager is an excellent feature for something built into iOS and macOS, but 1Password is worth every penny. It integrates with all the major browsers for ease of use.
The Synth One, which Fecher describes as “the largest free and open-source iOS music project in history,” is a professional-level polyphonic synth created by a team of over 100 volunteers over the course of several years.
It takes great leaders and talent to grow a successful company. One of the best descriptions of a leader I’ve heard is that leaders focus on vision and strategy, guiding and removing obstacles for their teams — something like a coach in sports.
Managers typically focus more on the execution piece, working in the business. By contrast, real leadership means providing a compelling vision and clear direction. Successful leaders clarify priorities and expectations, defining employee roles and ensuring that the processes and capacity required for them to execute are in place.
“For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence. With an Oxonian wisp of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee appears the consummate academic—communicating rapidly, in a clipped London accent, occasionally skipping over words and eliding sentences as he stammers to convey a thought. His soliloquy was a mixture of excitement with traces of melancholy. Nearly three decades earlier, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. On this morning, he had come to Washington as part of his mission to save it.
I do enjoy using Evernote. I do appreciate that there is a native Evernote client in all the platforms that I do use -- iPhone, iPad, Macintosh, and Windows 10.
However, there is one frustration point for me: that the Mac client and the Windows client are similar in general, but different in many important and subtle ways: how to create stacks, how to rename notebooks, etc. This just means that whatever habit I picked up in using the software on one platform cannot be reused in the same software on another platform.
(There must be a Marzipan connection somewhere, but I am too tried to think of one.)
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The Microsoft of yore had created J++ and C# to counter Java. I wonder what that Microsoft of yore will do with Swift and Marzipan.
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Oh, and finally, all I want to say is that there are many managers who are masquerading as leaders.
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Thanks for reading.