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The Negative-Impact Edition Saturday, April 13, 2019

Why Tens Of Thousands Of Perfectly Good, Donated iPhones Are Shredded Every Year, by Jason Koebler, Motherboard

Activation lock is a topic that I’ve heard about regularly from people in the independent repair world, and Wednesday, the Colorado PIRG Foundation (CoPIRG), a consumer rights group, published a report that found one single recycling company in the state has had to scrap more than 66,000 otherwise reusable or easily repairable iPhones in the last three years because iCloud lock was enabled on devices that had been donated by their owners.

“While activation lock is intended to deter thieves by making stolen phones unusable and therefore not worth stealing in the first place, it has also resulted in making a surprisingly high number of donated or handed down phones unusable, having negative impacts on our environment and the used phone marketplace,” the report reads.

The iTunes Break Up: What Will Happen To Our Favorite Features?, by Dan Moren, Macworld

Calls for iTunes's breakup go back years (including me), but now that it seems to be on the verge of happening, it's worth considering the things that iTunes actually does well and which deserve to stick around.

Homeland Security Warns Of Security Flaws In Enterprise VPN Apps, by Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch

The VPN apps built by four vendors — Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Pulse Secure, and F5 Networks — improperly store authentication tokens and session cookies on a user’s computer. These aren’t your traditional consumer VPN apps used to protect your privacy, but enterprise VPN apps that are typically rolled out by a company’s IT staff to allow remote workers to access resources on a company’s network.

The apps generate tokens from a user’s password and stored on their computer to keep the user logged in without having to reenter their password every time. But if stolen, these tokens can allow access to that user’s account without needing their password.

Stuff

Fear And Nagging: How The Apple Watch Annoys You Into Getting Active And Losing Weight, by Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider

The Apple Watch is well known for its ability to keep track of a person's activity throughout the day, but its greatest weapons in getting users to move around more are not the monitoring, nor its rings, but the constant nagging and it fostering a compulsion to work out.

Apple News+ Is A Total Mess, by Adam Clark Estes, Gizmodo

Right now, the service feels half-baked, and using it is full of frustrations. These include struggles with browsing content from the new Apple News+ partners as well as major problems reading that content, some of which is nothing more than PDFs of magazine pages that don’t display well on small screens. What’s more frustrating is that the paid Apple News+ subscription does not appear to give you full digital access to all of the participating publications.

Why Mac Users Need The PCalc App, by Erik Eckel, TechRepublic

Whether you're balancing a budget, calculating interest, forecasting profit or loss, or performing more complex mathematical operations, as is common for scientific, financial, industrial, engineering, and programming professionals, PCalc's functionality goes far beyond that of the macOS Calculator. In addition to offering the same scientific, programming, Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) mode, and so-called paper tape capabilities as Calculator, PCalc adds a litany of complex functions.

How To Live With A Mac Mini Or MacBook Air With A Small Internal Drive, by William Gallagher, AppleInsider

On the one hand, though, that SSD is going to make your Mac feel faster than ever. If you have a Mac with a small drive —or one with just a lot less than you're used to —then you're going to have to change how you use that machine. There are, as ever, apps that can help you. There are settings that will be of use.

More than anything, however, you're going to need discipline.

Develop

Great Developers Are Raised, Not Hired, by Eduards Sizovs, The Principal Developer

Today, companies create ridiculously complicated multi-step interview processes that filter out candidates that are “not good enough.” We rarely give an opportunity to candidates spoiled by shitty companies and bad influence. We forget that some candidates weren’t lucky enough to meet an inspiring mentor or work in a supportive team. Broken toys are not welcome.

Notes

Disney+ Just Put A Lot Of Pressure On Apple's Streaming Video Service, by Kif Leswing, CNBC

Apple said last month that it will release its streaming video service, Apple TV+, this fall. The subscription service will include exclusive original shows, movies and documentaries produced by Apple. The company is spending billions of dollars on stars like Oprah Winfrey, Steve Carell, Jennifer Aniston and Steven Spielberg.

But no matter how well Apple's shows and movies end up being received, there's no way that it can compete with the lineup of content that Disney has assembled for Disney+, which will put pressure on Apple to undercut Disney's price or give its shows away for free.

Bottom of the Page

Dim sum for lunch, chicken wings for dinner. Code a little. Wrote a little. Answered a few Jeopardy! questions. (Actually: Questioned a few Jeopardy! answers.)

That's my weekend.

~

Thanks for reading.