Categories
writing

Writer’s Strike Ends

From Cynthia Littleton, Kate Aurthur, Matt Donnelly, Gene Maddaus writing for Variety:

Hollywood heaves a sigh of relief. The WGA and major studios and streamers have reached a tentative agreement on a new three-year contract that promises to end the 146-day strike that has taken a heavy toll across the content industry.

Negotiators for the Writers Guild of America and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers reached the finish line Sunday after five consecutive days of negotiations.

…

”What we have won in this contract – most particularly, everything we have gained since May 2nd – is due to the willingness of this membership to exercise its power, to demonstrate its solidarity, to walk side-by-side, to endure the pain and uncertainty of the past 146 days. It is the leverage generated by your strike, in concert with the extraordinary support of our union siblings, that finally brought the companies back to the table to make a deal,” the negotiating committee wrote in its message to members.

Now it remains to be seen how long it will take until my favorite shows are back in the air. As much as everyone hated the strike, good on the writers and their guild for sticking it out.

Meanwhile, the ongoing actors strike is entering its third month. So while late-night and daytime talk shows are expected to make a quick comeback, scripted shows that require actors will take longer to return.

Categories
bad review revue

The Bad Review Revue

The Expend4bles: “‘The Disposables’ would describe it better.” — Brian Lowry, CNN.com

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3: “This awkward threequel is one wedding you’ll wish you didn’t RSVP to.” — Fay Watson, Total Film

Retribution: “The only jaw-dropping this thriller induces is yawning.” — M.N. Miller, Hidden Remote

Sound of Freedom: “It’s bizarre, unsettling and yet – in the filmmaking equivalent of turning wine to water – bracingly dull to boot.” — Ed Power, Daily Telegraph (UK)

Golda: “It’s not that insightful into who she was… Generally, it’s just a history of the Yom Kippur War, and it assumes you know a whole lot about it already.” — Andy Klein, FilmWeek (KPCC – NPR Los Angeles)

Meg 2: The Trench: “It’s a relief, after almost two hours of this silliness, to come up for air.” — Brian Viner, Daily Mail (UK)

Categories
Google

Two Ways to Improve Gmail

Dave Winer posted to ask if anyone had a suggestion on how to quickly create new email addresses that can be forwarded to his main address. I wrote him with a suggestion and at the same time realized I’ve never posted the techniques1 here.

Gmail has a feature where you can add a + to the end of your email address and create a new address that goes to your original address. For example, jeff.milner+newaddress@gmail.com will appear to the service you are signing up for as a different address than jeffmilner@gmail.com but they both go to my inbox.

The only downside is that some services see the + as being not a valid email address.

The other feature I want to highlight is that gmail ignores periods. Mail sent to jeffmilner@gmail.com or jeff.milner@gmail.com will both arrive in my inbox. Same with j.e.f.f.m.i.l.n.e.r@gmail.com. Gmail doesn’t care about the periods but each iteration is a different email address to the service you are signing up for.

  1. I first learned about these features in a Gmail Blog post from 2008.[↩]
Categories
Apple

12 Things to Do First with iOS 17

MacRumors has 12 suggestions for what to do now that you’ve updated your iPhone.

Categories
Apple humor

Woman Rescued from Outhouse After Climbing in to Retrieve Apple Watch

This story by the AP and commentary by Gruber is just too good to not quote completely:

The Associated Press:

A woman was rescued Tuesday from an outhouse toilet in northern Michigan after she climbed in to retrieve her Apple Watch and became trapped. The woman, whose name was not released, lowered herself inside the toilet after dropping the watch at the Department of Natural Resources boat launch at Dixon Lake in Otsego County’s Bagley Township, state police said Wednesday in a release.

First responders were called when the woman was heard yelling for help. The toilet was removed and a strap was used to haul the woman out. “If you lose an item in an outhouse toilet, do not attempt to venture inside the containment area. Serious injury may occur,” state police said in the release.

Tim Cook had a good line in the keynote last week about people’s attachment to their iPhones and Apple Watches: “If you left either one at home, I bet you’d go back to get it.”

Home, yes. Outhouse, no.

It reminds about the guy who was caught dropping a $100 bill down the outhouse as his friend accidentally walked in on him. The friend asked him what he was doing. The guy responded, “I dropped $10 down there and there’s no way I’m climbing down there for 10 bucks!”

Categories
coding

Fortune

MacBook running the manual for Fortune

I’ve been learning Terminal commands from a new book that I got, “Tweak Your Mac Terminal“.

Reading through the first chapter, I discovered a simple command-line utility called “Fortune”. When it’s installed and run at the command-line, Fortune displays random quotations or proverbs. It is often used to provide a humorous or thought-provoking message to users when they log in or open a terminal session. I noticed within the fortune manual (man fortune) that there were some offensive fortunes that had been relegated to only operating when one entered the -o flag (fortune -o) but then discovered that the offensive quotations had actually been removed altogether from the home-brew repository because, well, it includes explicitly racist, homophobic, ethnically insensitive and other offensive content that directly conflicts with the Homebrew’s code of conduct.

Curiosity killed the cat and I found them online. Needless to say, they are at least pretty crass if not outright offensive. But finding them led me down the path to discovering how one creates their own quotations to add to the library of possible fortunes.

To add your own quotations or messages to the fortune database, you’ll need to create a custom fortune file and then compile it into a .dat file. Here are the steps:

Create a Fortune File:
  • Open a text editor, such as bbedit, nano, vim, or gedit.
  • Add your quotations or messages, one per line, to the file. Each message should end with a % character. For example:
This is my first custom fortune message.
%
Here's another custom fortune message.
%
Add as many messages as you like.
%
  • Save the file with a .txt or .dat extension (e.g., my_fortunes.txt).
Convert the Fortune File:
  • Use the strfile command to convert your text file into a .dat file. The .dat file is used by the fortune program to provide random messages efficiently. Run the following command:
strfile my_fortunes.txt my_fortunes.dat
  • Replace my_fortunes.txt with the actual name of your text file and my_fortunes.dat with the desired name for your .dat file.
    • Install or Copy to Fortune Directory:
  • If you want to make your custom fortunes available system-wide, you can copy the .dat file to the system’s fortune directory. On most Unix-like systems, this directory is typically /usr/share/games/fortunes/ or /usr/local/share/games/fortunes/. You may need to use sudo to copy the file:
sudo cp my_fortunes.dat /usr/share/games/fortunes/
Categories
Apple Music

Default iPhone Ring as a Ballad

The default ring for the iPhone used to change every year or two evolving through various iterations of the tunes: “Marimba”, “Opening”, and “Reflection”. In the video above composer and pianist Tony Ann reimagines “Opening” as a complete ballad.

(via Kottke)

Categories
family life

Camping

We went tent camping last weekend. Our friends Duane, Chelsea, and family were sleeping in their new (to them) trailer and our other friend Wren and her daughters slept in their car. Cold weather and a new air mattress that needed to be refilled once every two to three hours meant that our sleep was pretty disrupted. That morning Ian woke up crying… or more like whining. At the same time, Wren’s daughter Kate opened her car door which made a screeching noise exactly like the sound Ian was making. He stopped abruptly, yelled out angrily, “Stop copying me!” and looked around to see who was mocking him. I told him that was just the car door closing and Kate yelled out, “Sorry Ian.” Luckily he took it in stride and laughed along with all of us.

Later that morning we were talking about how we slept. Duane said, pointing to his trailer, you’ve got to get one of these, they’re great. I said sarcastically “Oh, were you not freezing cold all night?” referring to our own sleep in the tent. He said, “Actually, at one point it was almost too hot”.

I guess we still had fun because we’ve decided to do it again in a couple weeks.

Categories
coding

Scrumdinger

scrumdinger card color not working

I’ve been dabbling with Xcode since I got my first Macbook back in 2016. I’ve wanted to learn how to make an iPhone app and especially how to make one that uses SwiftUI, the user interface is growing in popularity and by all accounts is Apple’s recommended choice. Last month I started on this tutorial from Apple’s developer site and last week I finished it! The app is called Scrumdinger and it helps keep track of speaking turns and time limits during a meeting.

A screenshot of the Scrumdinger app.

One problem that needed to be sorted out happened within the section titled, “Creating a card view“. I ran into this warning:

Because I had followed the first section perfectly, I assumed I didn’t need to download the Scrumdinger “starting project” because if that was the case, then how would I be able to make an app myself? Eventually I discovered I would need to add color assets to Xcode in order to avoid needing the “starting project” files.

After eventually figuring out how to do it manually, I made this video showing a quick look at the process:

Then repeat for the remaining 15 colours or just download the “starting project”. I can see why the writers of the tutorial opted to skip the tedious operation of adding each colour manually but it’s nice to know how to do it.

Categories
Apple finance

Apple Earnings Report Q3 2023

Jason Snell at Six Colors:

Apple announced its results for its fiscal third quarter on Thursday. As expected, it was a down quarter—though at a 1% drop over the year-ago quarter, it’s a better result than the previous quarter, which was down 3% year-over-year. The company reported $81.8B in revenue and $19.9B in profit.

The three key hardware categories were all down year-over-year: Mac was down 7%, iPad was down 20%, and the all-important iPhone was down 2%. Things were a little different in the two portions of Apple’s business that have shown indefatigable growth in recent years: Services revenue was up 8% and the Wearables, Home, and Accessories category was up 2%.

In a press release accompanying the results, Apple CFO Luca Maestri trumpeted that it has broken the billion paid subscriptions barrier.

Apple’s fiscal 2023 third-quarter results reveal a mixed picture for the tech giant. While the company reported a 1 percent year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue, reaching $81.8 billion, it managed to achieve a 5 percent increase in quarterly earnings per diluted share, reaching $1.26. These results indicate a certain level of resilience, particularly when compared to the previous quarter, which saw a more substantial decline.

A noteworthy highlight is Apple’s impressive performance in the Services segment, where it achieved an all-time revenue record during the June quarter. This growth was driven by surpassing the milestone of 1 billion paid subscriptions, demonstrating the company’s ability to retain and engage its customer base. Additionally, the robust sales of iPhone in emerging markets contributed to the positive performance.

Financially, the company generated substantial operating cash flow of $26 billion during the quarter, enabling it to return over $24 billion to shareholders. This reflects Apple’s ongoing dedication to rewarding its investors while continuing to invest in long-term growth plans.

Overall, Apple’s fiscal third-quarter results demonstrate a mix of challenges and successes, with notable growth in services and a strong cash flow position.