Just as a follow up to my post about digital vaccine cards, I was pleased to hear this week that my home state, Massachusetts, is now following in the footsteps of California and offering digital vaccine records for all residents.
The new My Vax Records service lets any Massachusetts resident enter their name, phone number or email, and birthdate to retrieve their vaccine records online. While the page says it can take up to 24 hours, I received a text immediately, allowing me to not only view my records but download a SMART Health Card that can be added to my iPhone’s Wallet.
While I’d already done that in my previous piece, this has the advantage of also showing my booster shot, which I received at different location from my first two vaccine doses. Also, it doesn’t require me to fill out a form and email it to someone so, you know, that’s also a win. (It also shows me vaccine information besides my COVID-19, so I can tell that I’m up to date on my flu shot, as well as the Typhoid vaccine I got several years back before traveling abroad.)
Kudos to Massachusetts for rolling this out, especially before more cities in the state are starting to require proof of vaccination for indoor locations like restaurants, museums, gyms, and more. Here’s hoping that more states quickly follow suit.
Apple said it plans to provide an alternative payment system at a reduced service charge compared with the current 30 percent charge, as the tech giant turned in its compliance plans to the Korea Communications Commission (KCC).
The company did not provide the exact date of when the policy will take effect or the service fee to be applied but said it plans to discuss with the KCC on further details.
“We look forward to working with the KCC and our developer community on a solution that benefits our Korean users,” Apple said in a statement.
The details of such an implementation are going to be interesting. In the U.S., Apple’s victory over Epic seems to not only have solidified the company’s position, but also more or less tacitly acknowledged that even if alternative payments were allowed, Apple would still be within its rights to collect a commission from developers. But that’s according to U.S. law, and the South Korean law has its own restrictions.
It’s probably going too far to view how Apple handles this as a blueprint for how it might deal with a similar law enacted in the U.S., but it will at least give us some idea of how the company adapts to a significant change to one of its most criticized services.
We discuss why it’s useful to take time every once in a while to pull back and look at the big picture instead of getting bogged down in the day-to-day grind. Also, Jason built himself a tool to make his life easier, Apple may be gearing up for its next event, and listeners have lots of questions about Apple displays.
Once upon a time, you could watch a keynote presentation from any major computer chip company and rest easy in the confidence that the name “Apple” would never pass the lips of any presenter. The message always seemed to be, as per the classic Mad Men meme, “I don’t think of you at all.”
But oh how the tables have turned. With the transition to Apple silicon well underway, and the debut of the high-powered M1 Pro and M1 Max chips last summer, major players in the silicon market are hastening to not only mention Apple, but to prove how much better their latest products are than that computer company that nobody used to care about.
This past week’s Consumer Electronics Show was a news cavalcade for the likes of Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, all of whom took their time to reassure the vendors that rely on them that, yes, they could play in the same league as Apple.
And yet… I bought one in June after hearing about it on the Connected podcast, and… I kind of love it? You’ll need to make your own decision about whether it’s worth it.
The NightWatch is a clear lucite bubble designed to fit your Apple Watch. You push an Apple Watch charging puck into the back of it, set it on your nightstand, and at night, you drop the Apple Watch in and it charges. But more than that, the curved plastic bubble serves as a magnifier. If you use your Apple Watch in Night Stand mode—and I do, my Apple Watch now serves double duty as my alarm clock—you’ll be able to see the time a little bit larger.
The makers of NightWatch say that it also has some sound channels to amplify the sound of the Apple Watch when it makes an alarm in the morning. I haven’t really noticed much difference, since my Apple Watch is pretty effective at waking me up regardless.
For a couple of years I used elago’s Classic Mac-themed Apple Watch stand, and it was just fine. It costs $14, quite a bit less than the NightWatch. I like the NightWatch—which is solid, hard plastic, not squishy silicone—better. Do I like it $70 better? I don’t know about that, but I didn’t return the NightWatch, so I guess maybe I do.1
If you want a nice way to hold your Apple Watch on your nightstand, the NightWatch will give it to you. The rest is between you, your wallet, and this Amazon link.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Kolide connects device security and Slack together in a clever way—by sending people important, timely, and relevant recommendations about securing their devices via Slack.
For example, Kolide can instruct developers to set passphrases on unencrypted SSH keys, find plain-text two-factor backup codes and show users how to store them securely, or even encourage employees to uninstall gross browser extensions that sell data to marketers.
It’s a great tool for any company that wants to move beyond the traditional “lockdown model” to one focused on educating and informing employees about security and device management while fixing nuanced problems.
Six Colors readers can try Kolide on an unlimited number of devices with all its features for free and without a credit card for 14 days.
January 7, 2022
Zoom and FaceTime are weird. Apple and the home (again). The G4 iMac turns 20. It floated above your desk like a VESA-mounted iMac.
As the best-selling Mac of all time, the original iMac set a standard for Apple that’s tough to top. To stand a chance, the design of any follow-up iMac would have to be just as bold, as remarkably different as the original. Apple has succeeded–its new pivoting two-piece flat-panel iMac is a triumph in terms of design, computing power, and value.
I’ve noticed that folks who write about cord-cutting tend to be maximalists: “How can I get the most of all the things available?” Fair enough. A lot of people like lots of TV.
But I am not them. I am but a humble fan of classic moves with a less-than-12-hours-per-week TV habit. I’m also budget-minded, which some people might call “cheap.” Since we cut the cord a few years ago, I’ve simply done without access to TV, outside of streaming services. But recently, I’ve been on a journey to figure out how I can get the TV morsels I want, at a reasonable cost.
What I care about is the back catalog—classic movies, arthouse fare, restorations, and the odd vintage TV show. And live news. In that last interest, I’m not alone. Live news and sports are big reasons people stick to cable, or add an over-the-top service to their lives. The leading provider of classic movies is Turner Classic Movies (TCM). It’s not simply that TCM plays films from the 30s forward, but that what you find there is often not available on streaming services, or even on physical media. I dig both the volume and the rarity of what TCM does.
What I Really Really Want
In December, I decided to pull the trigger on an over-the-top service. I had two primary TV goals: bring TCM back into my house, and keep monthly subscription costs below the approximately $90 a cable subscription would have set me back.
And so, I limited my search (Suppose is Jason’s go-to tool for this) to services that offered TCM. You can get the channel is as part of YouTube TV, Hulu Live, DIRECTV Stream, and Sling TV. The first three will sell you a big collection of channels, including TCM, for between $65 and $70 per month. So far, their advantage over a cable subscription – for my purposes – is the ability to watch on lots of platforms. They do each offer local channels, which is a nice bonus.
Sling TV is another kettle of fish, and the one I ended up choosing. Like the others, Sling gives you a fixed basket of channels plus add-on channels, plus DVR. My package, including TCM, costs $45 per month. Here’s how I did it.
To get Sling, you must either buy Sling Orange, promising 30+ channels, or Sling Blue with 40+. There is some overlap, but Orange has more sports and Blue, more news. Each package is $35, or you can buy the lot for $50. I picked Sling Blue, and along with news, I got lifestyle and some movie-focused channels. But not TCM. It’s not part of Sling Orange or Blue—but you can add it with the $6 per-month Hollywood Extra package. I also got FXM, CinéMoi, the Sundance Channel and six more movie-focused offerings.
But here’s the thing: I got way more than that, both in the base package and the Hollywood extra. My channel guide lists 130+ channels, including dreadful single-franchise wastes of space, but also delightful surprises like the Film Detective, Heroes & Icons, Shout Factory and lots more.
All this for $41 per month, leaving plenty of headroom if I decide I’d like the 200-hour cloud DVR instead of the free 50-hour one, or if I want to add other special-interest channel packs. A podcast I’ve been doing lately has gotten me interested in Hallmark romance movies, for instance.
One downside of Sling is that access to local channels is limited. I’ve got exactly one.
Eye of the Beholder
Sling on iPad.
I’ve loaded Sling onto my Roku box, Apple TV and iOS devices, and added the Tizen-native app on my Samsung TV. With the Blue package, I can watch live TV on up to three simultaneous screens—which is plenty in our two-person household.
I don’t have any option to create profiles for family members. If I had kids, or a spouse who liked to watch motocross and cooking shows, I might be pretty unhappy about that. You can set parental controls, which are locked down by creating a PIN that’s needed to access specific channels or programs with content ratings you want to lock kids out of.
I find Sling’s interface cluttered and busy. You can’t choose which rows of content to show or hide. The Spotlight row, Recommended for You row, and Trending Live row, are all mixed up with my favorites and DVR content. I’m not a fan of algorithmic TV recommendations. Just give me the channels I’ve favorited and the shows I’ve recorded! Or give me a choice to hide recommendations.
That interface is rendered slightly differently on various operating systems. For example, on my old Roku system, I can filter channels by category, filter by favorites, list them alphabetically, or switch from a grid to a row of thumbnails. Those options don’t appear on the Apple TV version.
Not So Accessible
The Sling apps for Apple TV, Samsung Tizen, Roku and iOS work with each operating system’s screen reader features, speaking the interface and content labels aloud. That’s not a given with TV apps, many of which ignore OS accessibility altogether.
Visually, there’s not much you can do to customize the Sling apps. The gray background provides good contrast with the images and white screen text, but there’s no option to change those colors or increase text size, even on the Apple TV, which provides native support for larger text. Sling not only supports closed captioning, as you’d expect, but has a slew of options for customizing the color and style of text.
Can I Keep It?
I have really, really missed TCM. Getting my movie comfort food via Sling is affordable and flexible. Still, the small amount of time I spend watching each week might tempt me to save the $40 monthly.
It’s the quirky surprises, like the Film Detective channel, and serendipitous encounters with more modern movies that tip the scales in favor of staying subscribed. For now.
Last year I decided I was spending too much time doing jobs because I could do them, not because they were an essential part of my job. (My friend Myke Hurley would, in the spirit of his podcast Cortex, call this my “Year of Essentials.”)
So I resolved to, among other things, stop editing weekly episodes of The Incomparable. Since 2010, I’ve spent most Saturday mornings editing that podcast. And while I enjoy having complete editorial control and using that regular editing session to try out new techniques, it’s not an essential part of my life and my friend Steven Schapansky can edit it just fine.
But giving up editing meant that I’d need to relay any issues that need to be smoothed out in editing to Steven—and that was a problem. I’d file mental notes about stumbles, interruptions, digressions and the like, and then play them back when I was editing the podcast. When someone swore, I’d switch to the Finder, make a new folder, and give that folder a name like “poop1 23 min”.
This is an untenable situation if I’m going to hand over editing duties, so I needed to resolve to make a change. (Especially about making notes in folder names—one of the weirdest and saddest acts of desperation, and yet one I keep doing a decade later.) I needed to fully commit to taking edit notes while recording the podcast, so I could pass those notes on to Steven.
The logical thing to do is what Myke and my friend Antony Johnston both do, which is keep a paper notebook handy and mark down these events in writing while the recording session is going on.
Myke Hurley’s notes.
I have several pens and several Field Notes notebooks on my desk, and yet I almost never use this approach. Part of that is my general aversion to pens and paper—they’re just never my first choice—and part of it is that to make a good podcast editing note, you need to note the time that the problem happened—and the act of looking at the time on my recorder and writing the result down on paper is distracting, time consuming, and not particularly accurate. (Even my folders in the Finder are pretty vague in terms of timing, since by the time I’ve clicked and made a new folder, quite a bit of time has passed since the crime was committed. Was that “poop” at 23 minutes? Probably more like 22:15 or 23:40. Somewhere in there. Good luck.)
The final result: two Stream Deck buttons I can push.
And so, realizing that using paper was probably not going to be an approach that would work for me, I decided to spend a few hours in late December building a script that would help me automate the note-taking process, aided by some Keyboard Maestro macros and tied to buttons on a Stream Deck macropad.
Before I describe what I did, I should point out that other people have built tools to handle this very issue. Dave Hamilton of The Mac Observer detailed his approach, which is similar to mine, but relies on a manual timer that you set when you start recording. It’s a totally valid approach—if you remember to reset the timer, that is.
What I wanted was something a bit more foolproof. I use Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack to record podcasts, and those recordings save right to my Desktop, so I wrote an AppleScript script that looks at the Desktop and finds the creation time of the most recent podcast recording. (This could be based on a file name or type—in my case, the names of all my podcast recordings include the current date in the format YYYYMMDD, so I can search for all files matching that pattern and then find the newest one. Once I know the file’s creation time, the rest is just math—subtract it from the current time, and you’ve got the current time code of the file.
When my script runs, it appends a line to a file on the Desktop (creating one if necessary) that includes the current time code, as well as any text I’ve passed to the script.
To trigger the script, I created two Keyboard Maestro macros. The first one displays a list of common issues, so I can quickly select “cough” or “swear” and it’s appended when I press return. (If I just press return, no text is passed to the script.) The second one displays a text entry field, so I can add anything I want as a note. I assigned both macros to individual buttons on my Stream Deck.
Keyboard Maestro runs the script.
The note file generated by the script looks like this:
Nothing too inspiring, but very useful if you’re a podcast editor looking out for issues!
I tried this approach with a podcast I recorded on New Year’s Day, and it worked really well. My plan is to use this on all the podcasts I hand off to others, as well as the podcasts I edit myself, from now on. Only time will tell if it sticks, but I’m optimistic that this simple approach—hear issue, push button—will win the day.
How we turn our digital photographs into physical media, our experiences with external monitors, our thoughts on an audiobook service from Apple, and the AR/VR headset features that would appeal to us.
We spend our first episode of 2022 discussing what we think Apple will do this year. Is it finally time for an Apple product you put on your face? Jason and Myke also discuss changes they’re planning on making in their working lives for the new year.
My friend David Sparks has been leading a double life for a while now. To his law colleagues and friends, he has had a strange side hustle writing and talking about tech. To the rest of us, he’s a Mac expert who still practices law, too.
So here goes. No longer do I split my time between two careers. For the first time since 1992, I will have complete control of my schedule. No longer will a client emergency force me to set aside the work that has become my calling. I’m all in, and I have big plans.
I know David agonized over this decision, but as someone who has been talking about career stuff with him for seven or eight years now, it feels like the logical next step. I think he’s going to be a smashing success, and I’m excited that the rest of us will now get David’s full attention.
You can join David’s new membership program, MacSparky Labs, if you want to help support this career transition.
The “long” type allows for values up to 2,147,483,647. It appears that Microsoft uses the first two numbers of the update version to denote the year of the update. So when the year was 2021, the first two numbers was “21”, and everything was fine. Now that it’s 2022 (GMT), the update version, converted to a “long” would be 2,201,01,001 – which is above the maximum value of the “long” data type. @Microsoft: If you change it to an ‘unsigned long’, then the max value is 4,294,967,295 and we’ll be able to sleep easy until the year 2043!
Dear @msexchangeteam. The FIP-FS “Microsoft” Scan Engine Failed to Load. Can’t Convert “2201010001” to long.
Some predictions are like sweet denim jackets or A-Ha’s “Take On Me”: they never go out of style. As 2021 draws to a close, you’ll see tech pundits from across the Internet carefully calculating their predictions of what exactly is going to happen in the year ahead. Many of these will be right, but they will also be boring.
But where’s the fun in that? I too can tell you Apple’s going to make a 27-inch iMac or an iPhone 14 or that Tim Cook will start an event with “Good mooooorninnnng,” but none of that is any more surprising than telling you that Apple will make a hojillion dollars.
So instead, I welcome you to the first installment of my Perennial Predictions. You know, the ones we make every year which never seem to come true. But even an iPhone screenshot is right twice a day, so when the clock does tick over to 9:41, you’ll look like a genius. So prepare to be amazed, as I tell you what will transpire in [insert year here].
Apple will revive the AirPort. I’ve just about had it with these monkey-fighting routers on this Monday to Friday Internet! Look, my Eero is all fine and dandy, but I long for the days of my wonderful AirPort Extreme, a device that worked so well that I almost never had to configure it (which was good, since even the slightest change meant you had to restart it.) In short, that thing was bulletproof. I’m telling you, I shot it like four times and it was totally fine.
The next iPhone will fold. And have a USB-C port. Or no ports. Finally, this will be the year that Apple gets into the foldable phone market. This after the company pioneered the bendable phone back with the iPhone 6, but clearly it was ahead of its time. As for the port situation, well, it’s clear that USB-C is the new standard and the good news it that any cable you plug into it works perf— wait, what?
Apple Park will open again to employees. After years of working remotely, this is the year that it finally happens! At last, the giant donut will no longer just be a ghost town, with echoing hallways only suitable for Eddy Cue and Lisa Jackson’s weekly electric scooter races.
Apple will debut its own cryptocurrency. Called “Moofcoin” in honor of the old company mascot, it will work with your Apple Card and the App Store, including—twist!—third-party payment processors like the Epic Game Store. Apple’s gotta wet its beak somehow, friends.
Tim Cook will retire. That’s it, people. That’s all the man wrote. Cook’s had a good run, no doubt, taking over in the wake of Steve Jobs and leading Apple to unprecedented success and profitability, but after closing his rings for the millionth time, he’ll finally step down…only to return as the newest Apple Fitness+ cycling trainer!
Apple is doomed! Doooooomed! Yes, this year will be the last year of Apple. After the immense failure that is the Apple Boat, investors will abandon the company like rats from a sinking ship and now you also know why the Apple Boat failed. Ultimately, the company will close its doors, release its staff into the wild, and Apple Park will ascend slowly into the heavens like the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but without the cool John Williams score. I guess on a long enough timescale, even Michael Dell is right eventually.
Just remember, when these events do inevitably come to pass, you heard it here first.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
We conclude our 2021 Favorites series with this list of books we loved this year. You might know this about us, but we read a lot. These were the cream of the crop.
Piranesi
My favorite book of the year was Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It’s not a sequel, not the start of a series. It’s a short, standalone novel about a man called Piranesi who lives in the most unusual of places: a house with an infinite number of rooms, all lined with classical statues. On the lower levels, the sea roars in, sometimes flooding entire sections of the structure. Birds occasionally fly in. Piranesi thought he was the only person in the world, until he met the Other. But there are also the bones of people who have perished in the house, which Piranesi looks after. How did this state of affairs come to be? And who is Piranesi, really? Is this all a metaphor for something, or is it real? All questions are answered, eventually. Sometimes in surprising fashion.—Jason Snell
The Galaxy and the Ground Within
The last installment of Becky Chambers’s loosely connected1 Wayfarers series, The Galaxy and the Ground Within was my favorite of the bunch. Five characters from disparate species who happen to be at the same space pit-stop are stranded together when a disaster hits. What follows is a lovely story of camaraderie, cultural exchange, and friendship forged in the darkest hours. One of Chambers’s strengths is the fully realized characters she creates, and this novel is no exception. You might even find yourself tearing up a bit. I hear.—Dan Moren
Black Sun
I’ve enjoyed Rebecca Roanhorse’s previous books, but Black Sun is the best of the bunch. It’s the first book in a series, and be warned: it doesn’t have an ending so much as a cliffhanger. It’s a fantasy story with lots of Mesoamerican mythological elements about an outlier priest in a sun cult who might just be a patsy for a revolution. Meanwhile, a mother turns her son into a tool to fulfill a prophecy—if he can just get to the sun cult’s city in time for the total solar eclipse. The captain of the ship tasked with taking him there is a lesbian pirate who might just have surprising magic powers. Everything comes together in the inevitably worst way. It’s a heck of a ride. I want the sequel now—but I have to wait until April like everyone else.—J.S.
Nightwatch on the Hinterlands
A fun, fantasy/sci-fi mash-up, with a murder mystery thrown in to boot. K. Eason’s Nightwatch on the Hinterlands continues in the same universe as some of their previous works, but you can get by just fine if you haven’t read any of them. The world was reminiscent to me of the Mass Effect series of video games, with a fun dynamic between the two main characters that feels like many of the cop/not-a-cop TV shows I’ve enjoyed.—D.M.
Divine Cities trilogy
After having Robert Jackson Bennet’s trilogy recommended to me by several of my friends, I used my local library to buy the first book in the series, City of Stairs. I couldn’t put it down, and quickly bought and read the other two books in the series. It’s an urban fantasy set in a crumbling city that was once the apex of civilization—until the people that civilization had subjugated for centuries turned the tables and killed all their gods. Now the tables have turned, and all the magic of those gods is supposed to be gone, but… maybe it isn’t? And what does that mean if your job is to hold an entire defeated empire in check? The whole series is atmospheric and gripping, with so many great characters that three of them take turns as protagonist.—J.S.
The Mask of Mirrors / The Liar’s Knot
Fans of Scott Lynch’s Gentlemen Bastards series will probably enjoy The Rook and The Rose, a fantasy series by M.A. Carrick, set in the complex city of Nadežra. Con woman Ren is infiltrating the wealthy Traementis family, but gets more than she bargained for when she discovers the family has troubles of its own. There’s magic, romance, secret identities, politics, humor, and swashbuckling. The books are long, but so immersive that you’ll quickly lose track of page count. And if you’re skittish about unfinished fantasy epics, don’t fret: The third and final installment is already written and will be released next year.—D.M.
Witness for the Dead
Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor was one of my favorite books of the last decade. She decided to revisit that book’s rich steampunky fantasy setting with the standalone novel Witness for the Dead (now apparently the first book in a series!) featuring a minor character from the previous novel. But at its heart, this is… a murder mystery? The main character’s job is to talk to the recently deceased and put them at rest, but when a woman’s body washes up on the side of a canal, he’s duty bound to solve the murder. He’s basically Elf Columbo, aided by visions of the dead.—J.S.
Leviathan Falls
After nine years, nine books, a TV series (now on its final season), and a handful of novellas and short stories, James S.A. Corey’s masterful sci-fi series, The Expanse, came to a close this year. Leviathan Falls wraps up the ongoing plotlines while also providing a satisfactory story in its own right, though the last three books definitely form a trilogy of sorts within the series itself. If you’ve been waiting to see how things shake out for Holden, Naomi, Alex, and everybody’s favorite sociopath, Amos Burton, strap in and turn on the juice; it’s going to be quite a ride. And the epilogue made me laugh out loud in delight.—D.M.
A Desolation Called Peace
Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire was my favorite book of 2020. This year brought its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, and it delivered. It’s a wide-screen Space Opera about a galaxy-spanning empire—with our main character being an outsider who is close to the empire, but not a part of it. As a good sequel, it follows up on some of the threads left by the first book, while also introducing a new threat—an alien presence that the human empire doesn’t seem to understand. This is modern SF at its best.—J.S.
The Hidden Palace
I thought Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni was one of the best books of the last decade. Its sequel, The Hidden Palace, picks up right where the original left off, and continues the sprawling story of two nigh-immortal supernatural creatures among all the early 20th century immigrant communities in New York City. Since the first book was published, Helene has become a friend, and I was happy to interview her about this book and the process that led to it.—J.S.
The Quiet Americans
How did the CIA come to be what it is today? That’s the story of Scott Anderson’s The Quiet Americans, an exploration of the intelligence agency’s Cold War origins. Lawrence portrays the controversial organization’s rise through the lens of four influential figures in places from the Philippines to Berlin. It’s a collection of fascinating tales from the earliest days of the agency, when things often seemed to be run on a shoestring. I particularly enjoyed one operative in post-war Italy whose cover involved a non-existent movie studio.—D.M.
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
If I’m going to read a story about how messed up the response to the emergence of Covid-19, I want it to be Michael Lewis doing the storytelling. The Premonition is a short book about a complete systemic failure, making it a thematic follow-up to his previous book, The Fifth Risk. Lewis is the best at what he does. All his books are required reading, even—especially?—if the subject is as painful as this one.—J.S.
