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The Video-for-Posterity Edition Tuesday, March 5, 2019

If You Die Early, How Will Your Children Remember You?, by Dougal Shaw, BBC

"So often people were told that their mum or dad loved them so much, but they needed and wanted to hear it."

Sometimes they wanted to hear a very specific set of words.

"They wished they could ask their parent, 'I remember you whispering something to me every night, what was it? I want to hear it again.'"

It could have been a prayer, or nursery rhyme or other words that became part of a nightly ritual and helped them know they were loved before they fell to sleep.

So one key aim was to get parents to record that simple message in video form for posterity. Gaby's app, called RecordMeNow, is essentially a series of prompts that helps people to create a video library for their children, broken down into subject areas, based on Gaby's findings.

From Video Game To Day Job: How ‘SimCity’ Inspired A Generation Of City Planners, by Jessica Roy, Los Angeles Times

Along the way, the games have introduced millions of players to the joys and frustrations of zoning, street grids and infrastructure funding — and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living. For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, “SimCity” was their first taste of running a city. It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone's job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go.

2018 MacBook Pro May Not Be Susceptible To ‘Stage Light’ Screen Issue Due To Longer Internal Flex Cable, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

The 2018 MacBook Pro appears to avoid the stage light issues that are plaguing some fraction of the 2016-2017 models. What iFixit highlights in its latest blog post is that the display flex cable is actually longer in the 2018 iteration than earlier MacBook Pros.

iFixit measured it as a 2mm size difference. That number is small in absolute terms but when tolerances are this tight across the machine, a couple millimetres can make a big difference.

Stuff

NFB iOS App Takes You Inside Canada's WWII Japanese Internment Camps With Apple's ARKit, by Gary Ng, iPhone In Canada

The National Film Board of Canada released a new iOS app called East of the Rockies last week, to tell the story of Canada’s Japanese internment camps during World War II, powered by Apple’s ARKit.

8 Home Library Apps To Keep Your Book Collection Organized, by Erin Mayer, Book Riot

The great thing about books? You can never get enough of them. But if you find your book collection becoming unmanageable, there are plenty of home library apps to help you get it under control. Take stock of the tomes on your increasingly crowded shelves with these eight top-rated cataloging home library apps for iPhone and Android. Then you can carry your personal library right in your pocket for easy reference.

Nizo Blurs The Lines Between Shooting And Editing Video, by Charlie Sorrel, Cult of Mac

Nizo is a new take on video apps. It manages to blend shooting and editing together, so you can edit your movies on the fly as you capture them.

Develop

Swift Code Formatters, by NSHipster

This week on NSHipster, we’ll take a look at the current field of Swift formatters available today — including the swift-format tool released as part of the proposal — and see how they all stack up. From there, we’ll take a step back and try to put everything in perspective.

How To Save Americans From The Hell Of Work, by Jonathan Malesic, New Republic

Americans of all stripes—millennials especially, some argue—are indeed burned out, and elites in particular have unrealistic expectations that work be not just remunerative, but self-defining and wholly fulfilling. It’s also true that the rising devotion to work in America correlates with a decline in religious worship. But work itself is neither a religion nor a substitute for it. As some of the above reporting makes clear, work too often accomplishes precisely the opposite of what religion promises: It saps meaning from life.

What, then, can save us from the hell of work in hypercapitalist America? The answer is right in front of us. Let us bow our heads.

Want To Be Happy? Embrace Being Miserable, by Ephrat Livni, Quartz

Know that you’ll fail, you will fall, you’ll feel pain, and be sad. You will be rejected. You will get sick. Your expectations will not be met, because reality is always more strange and complicated than imagination, which also mean something more interesting than you know could yet be on the horizon. Know, too, that even so, dull moments will abound. Yet it can always get worse, which is why it’s worth remembering that every day, at least some things have to be going okay, or else you’d already be dead.

Notes

The Siri Shortcut, by Benjamin Mayo

It is disappointing that Apple is leaning so heavily on shortcuts as a mainstream way for customers to get more from Siri. It flies in the face of how you want a voice assistant to work and behaves differently from every other type of Siri interaction.

Apple Is Hiring An Analyst To Explain Siri Complaints To Executives, by Jeremy Horwitz, VentureBeat

If you’ve ever felt that Apple wasn’t listening to your complaints about “intelligent assistant” Siri, good news: The company is ready to hire someone to gather public comments and present them — along with recommended fixes — to its leadership team. Working as an engineering program manager, the new employee will also corral Siri engineers to support Apple’s marketing efforts, enabling the assistant to play a more frequent and positive role in company messaging.

Bottom of the Page

Life is short. Stop trying to find meaning in your work. Rather, go find meaning in other places with higher probability of the existence of meaning.

~

Thanks for reading.