My legal and publishing aspirations could co-exist if I’d just get over my insecurities and leap… So I lept.
Over the years, David and I have talked many times about our personal struggles with our “good jobs” and our desires to take more control of our own destinies. With David’s new law firm he’s going to be better able to balance his legal practice with those geeky interests that his lawyer friends don’t entirely understand.
David’s piece about his decision sure rang a lot of bells for me. Going out on your own is terrifying, especially for risk-averse children of depression-era parents, which both of us are. But as I said to David this morning as we were walking back to the parking lot, “I don’t know if I’ll succeed or fail at doing this, but I know that I won’t be looking back with regret at never having tried.”
This week on my pop-culture podcast The Incomparable, we’re introducing a new recurring segment that we call “Rocket Surgery,” in which we watch an unappreciated science fiction movie from the past and then talk about it.
For our first installment, we watched the 2003 film “The Core,” starring Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo, and Bruce Greenwood. Yes, this is a movie about people riding a spaceship (of a sort) down into the core of the Earth in order to blow it up with nuclear bombs because reasons.
My guests this week are John Siracusa, Dan Moren, and Tony Sindelar. Our discussion topics include the science of birds, peaches as metaphors for the Earth, friendly whales, the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the powers of computer hackers.
Get excited! This week’s Six Colors sponsor is Meh. I already bought two remote-control helicopters from a Meh deal this week. It’s been a Meh kind of week.
The founders of Meh left Woot and started their own awesome deals site, which posts new deals every day at midnight Eastern.
I don’t think Adam Engst’s new (ish) holiday is going to take off, but Friday the 13th is as good a time as ever to remember that you should back up your data, that RAID is not a backup, that having an on-site backup won’t save you in case of a disaster that hits your home, and other boo-scary things. Boo! Scary!
The security feature adds an extra layer of protection against hackers trying to access users’ accounts. After logging in with their usual name and password, two-factor asks account holders to use a second security code to verify their messaging and video chat accounts.
I’m a big proponent of two-factor authentication, but I don’t love the way this is implemented. Rather than requiring a verification code, as happens when you try to log in to your iCloud account, FaceTime and iMessage will instead prompt you for an app-specific password (essentially a randomly generated one-time password) when you try to login. To do that you have to go to a website, log in, verify that login with a two-factor code, and then get the app-specific password and paste it back into the originating application. Seems like it could be a little less clunky.
App-specific passwords are good because they’re disposable and you can always revoke them and create a new one if an account is accessed, but they can be a pain to manage. Most people don’t want to spend their time keeping track of all the different one-time passwords they’ve created.1
All of that said, it’s good to see Apple taking proactive steps to ensure security on its many services, instead of playing catch-up after the fact.
My Google account currently has 28 app-specific passwords associated with it, at least half of which are probably out of date, but is it worth my time going through and trying to figure out which are which? ↩
This week we take a look at the looks at Photos (http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7982517/apple-photos-mac-iphoto-replacement-explainer-faq).
Lex is getting a new dog (https://twitter.com/lexfri/status/564570865787211776). This is a tech podcast.
Despite the initial excitement about extensions (http://www.macworld.com/article/2684894/ios-8-extensions-how-they-work-and-why-they-matter-to-you.html), we’re not using quite as many of them as we thought.
Then we get back to our recurring topic: Apple Watch fan fiction. Dan notices a disturbing thing about the crown, about which he has now written something (http://sixcolors.com/2015/02/whats-up-with-apple-watch-editions-digital-crown/).
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Something odd struck me recently as I perused the Apple Watch product pages. Several pictures of the Apple Watch Edition—aka the Super-Fancy Gold-That’s-Better-Than-Gold Spectacular model—show the center of the Digital Crown as different colors: I count black, white, navy blue, and red. Generally they seem to be color coordinated with the strap shown in the picture.
Okay, sure, that makes sense. After all, the Edition is a piece of jewelry that most people expect is going to cost in the thousands of dollars. Naturally you’d expect a little design flourish here and there.1
I’m mainly curious about the logistics involved: Is each accent color model a different SKU? Can you buy one where the color doesn’t match the band? What if you buy multiple bands? Are the dots interchangeable—are they perhaps little magnetic pieces that click into place? Are the crowns themselves interchangeable? What if the center of the crown is actually a miniature LCD screen that changes color depending on what band you attach?!2
Reel it in, Moren, reel it in. Okay. Let’s go with the simplest solution: you’ll probably pick the accent color when you buy it, and then basically be stuck with it, no matter which band you choose. The thinking perhaps being that most people will stick with a single watchband, viewing the whole watch-plus-band as a single unit (like most fancy watches).3 Cool as swappable crowns would be, I’m hard pressed to imagine that the crowd Apple wants this model to appeal to—the fashion-conscious market—is going to be keeping track of or swapping out replacement dots/crowns.
This contrasts with the Apple Watch Sport, in which the crown is the same color as the case—silver or space gray—and the standard Apple Watch, where the crown is always black. ↩
Full credit to my Rebound co-host John Moltz who suggested this particular crazy theory during our most recent episode. ↩
Unless, say, they’re swapping to the plastic one for working out, in which case maybe they don’t care if it matches? ↩
[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.]
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
One feature that came up repeatedly in comments about last week’s Wish List item was Control Center. First introduced in iOS 7, Control Center was a welcome improvement to dealing with a number of common functions: enabling and disabling Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Do Not Disturb; adjusting volume and brightness; and quick launching of apps. But we’re never happy with what we have–hey, that’s the whole premise of this column!–and readers weren’t shy about letting me know via Twitter and email how Control Center could still be improved.
Wi-Fi Networks: This was the suggestion that spawned this week’s column, given the topic of my previous Wish List. Being able to turn Wi-Fi on and off without having to take a trip to the Settings app is great. But what would be better, several readers suggested concurrently, would be the ability to select a specific Wi-Fi network right from Control Center. Tapping and holding on the icon could present a choice of the strongest networks detected, and let you switch on the fly.
As someone who often finds that he’s ended up on the wrong network, or that a given network isn’t working up to par, I give this feature a big old emoji thumbs up (ðŸ‘). Admittedly, it makes Control Center’s UI a bit more convoluted, but as the AirPlay and AirDrop items already provide pop-up menus, it’s hardly unprecedented.1
Bluetooth Devices: Perhaps no technology frustrates me as much as Bluetooth. Egads, the pairing, the unpairing, the connecting, the disconnecting.2 Ugh. Having access to paired Bluetooth devices via a similar press-and-hold feature would be a great improvement, since it otherwise requires a lengthy trip into the Settings app.
Custom Quick Launch: Okay, you may want to watch the skies for flying pigs if this one ever materializes, but the ability to choose which apps or features make their way into the quick launch section at the bottom of Control Center would be great. In the same way that we can customize our iOS device’s Dock, it would be fantastic if we could, say, swap PCalc in for Calculator. Granted, there are security concerns here, since Control Center is available from the lock screen. If, for example, you put your mail app into Quick Launch you need to make sure that people aren’t going to be able to pick up your phone and access your account without having to provide some form of authentication.
A few third-party apps have tried to add Today widgets with this sort of launcher feature, but Apple has put the kibosh on those–and as of yet there’s been no reversal on those decisions, as in other cases of widget rejection.3 I get that the company likes to control the experience and ensure security, but this is another place where customization could make a big deal in the lives of power users without necessarily impacting your average iOS device owner.
Other: There are undoubtedly a few other places that Control Center could be improved. Overall, a modular system, Ã la the customizability of some of the Apple Watch faces would be a very welcome improvement, and way to bring a little more control to Control Center.
Two different styles of pop-up menus, to boot. On the iPhone, AirPlay’s pop-up is a sheet that takes up the entire screen while AirDrop uses a multiple-button style of pop-up menu. ↩
It boggles my mind that iOS does not let me disconnect from a Bluetooth device. If I want to use my Bluetooth speaker with another device, I have to either “Forget” it, or turn off Bluetooth altogether. My Mac, on the other hand, simply lets me disconnect from that device–via the Bluetooth menu bar item no less!–without then having to re-pair it later. What gives, iOS? ↩
Do you suffer from widget rejection? Consult your physician today! ↩
[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.]
The second-generation Nest is the best smart thermostat for the second year in a row, which we confirmed by using the top three thermostats for more than a month. It integrates with more smart devices than its competitors and has attractive, well-built software paired with our favorite on-device interface.
The Nest is still in the lead, but the gap has closed dramatically. Ecobee’s ecobee3 and Honeywell’s Lyric are both strong competitors.
Given all that, I think it’s awesome that the latest update to my bank’s iOS app adds its own built-in biometric security.1 You get your choice of two different types: face recognition or voice recognition.2
But the best part is that clearly someone at the vast institution that is my bank–someone in a position of some authority no less–is a nerd. Because when you enable voice recognition, it asks you to record a phrase. Namely, this one:
Look familiar? If you’re a fan of one of my favorite movies, the 1992 Robert Redford techno-heist flick Sneakers–as all right-minded people should be–then you’ll remember that it’s more or less the same phrase used for a biometric voiceprint door in the lead up to the film’s climactic finale.
That said, I’m not sure how much I’ll end up using the voice authentication–the face-based version or the standard PIN entry seem like they’ll still be faster. It’s a little surprising to me that the app hasn’t yet added support for Touch ID, but I know the bank is investigating it–given that they have an Android app as well, I’m sure they have to consider cross-platform implementation issues.
Regardless, I’m relieved that my bank security is now good enough that all I have to worry about is going on an awkward date in a Chinese restaurant with a woman I met online who is secretly trying to record my voice and claims to love the sound of the word “passport.”
My bank is remarkably good at adopting advanced security methods. I had two-factor authentication set up there well before any other site. ↩
Biometrics weren’t available in Massachusetts at launch, but they showed up today; I believe they’re being rolled out across states gradually. ↩
[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.]
Though I’ve never watched the original TV series on which this is based (starring the great Robert Vaughn), I have a deep fondness for spy movies of every stripe. And despite his missteps, I also quite enjoy the work of director Guy Ritchie–in particular his earliest work. Add in Henry Cavill, who felt particularly underutilized in Man of Steel, and Armie Hammer, who deserves a hit after the by-all-accounts execrable Lone Ranger, and you certainly have one of the handsomest casts around. Sure, I’ll buy a ticket.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
[This story was updated on April 8, 2015. If you want to know more about Photos for Mac, you should pre-order my ebook. If you order it now you’ll get the first half of the book immediately, even as I’m writing the second half!]
After my Photos for Mac overview appeared on TidBITS, I’ve been pelted with questions about Apple’s forthcoming replacement for iPhoto and Aperture. Presented here, then, are quick answers to simplified questions about Photos for Mac.
I keep my existing iPhoto/Aperture library on an external drive. Will the program continue to use that location automatically?
Yes. Photos automatically detects if you’ve got an iPhoto or Aperture library and if you have only one on your system, it’ll use it as the basis for its new library without duplicating the media. If you’ve got more than one library, it’ll ask you which one you want to convert and set as the system library.
What happens to my old library?
It’s still there. The next time you try to open it, iPhoto or Aperture will remind you that it’s been migrated to Photos, but that’s just a reminder—you can keep using iPhoto as usual if you want. However, changes you make in libraries after they’re imported do not sync to the other app. You can’t import an iPhoto library to Photos, then edit something in iPhoto and expect to see it also edited in Photos. It doesn’t work that way.
What if I want to convert my library and save it in a different location?
Library conversions always happen in the same folder, for the very reason you specify. If you want to move the library later, that’s fine—if it moves to a different volume, that data will copy and the hard links will be disassociated. It’ll just be a regular library.
Can I have more than one Library?
Yes. Hold down option when launching Photos to pick a library or create a new one. Only one library can be designated as the System Photo Library. That’s the one that syncs with iCloud.
Can I organize my photos myself, in folders on my hard drive, and still use Photos?
Yes. There’s a “Copy items to the Photos library” setting in the General preferences tab. If you uncheck it, then Photos will consider the canonical version of that photo to be the file you dragged in. (This is signified by a small alias icon in the lower left corner of the image.) If you delete that photo later, Photos will no longer have access to the full-resolution image. However, referenced media files don’t sync to iCloud.
Will Photos support extensions to expand its capabilities?
Apple suggested at much when it announced Photos, but beyond support for sharing extensions there are no signs of addition extensions in 1.0.
Is Photos a direct replacement for iPhoto?
Yes. It’s basically iPhoto X — a reworked iPhoto that drops some iPhoto features but will feel quite familiar to iPhoto users.
Is Photos a direct replacement for Aperture?
No. It’s a step back from Aperture, and people who use Aperture to the fullest will probably be frustrated by this version’s limitations. People who didn’t take advantage of most of Aperture’s features might like it, though.
How does the new iPhoto handle burst mode pictures? Does it auto stack/group them?
iPhone burst mode photos come in as stacks. If you take 50 photos in a very short amount of time with an SLR, though, those seem to just come through as a whole bunch of individual pictures.
I don’t want to use iCloud with my photos. What do I do?
Just keep iCloud syncing turned off. That’s it. iCloud syncing is optional, not required.
I gave up and moved my library to Dropbox along with all my photos. Is there any reason to move back to iCloud?
The big advantage of Photos is that you don’t need to have your entire photo library anywhere except in iCloud. My iMac’s hard drive isn’t big enough to hold my iPhoto library, so I can’t sync it with Dropbox on this iMac. But I could open that same library in Photos, because almost none of the images would need to be stored locally.
If you’re someone who wants all your photos on your hard drive at all times, you could do that with Dropbox and Photos rather than iCloud.
Is sync to iCloud ‘all or nothing’? What I want is the ability to choose which photos sync from the Mac.
You can sync everything in the system Photos library, or nothing. That’s it.
iPhoto’s still on my Mac. Can I delete it?
Sure, if you want. Apple keeps it there just in case you want to get your iPhoto libraries in order before importing them. There’s no harm in keeping it around for a little while, but you can delete it if you need to. Keep in mind that deleting imported iPhoto libraries probably won’t save you much space.
Can I still sync photos to my iOS devices via iTunes?
Yep. It works just as you’d expect—choose Photos as the app you’d like to sync from, then you can sync everything, just certain albums, only favorites, or even all the photos from a recent period like the last week or last month.
The Photos import process is friendly when it comes to disk space — it doesn’t duplicate the photos it imports from iPhoto and Aperture, so you don’t lose precious storage space.
What is this magic? How can it not duplicate the photos, yet not risk losing all your data if you were to throw away your old iPhoto library?
I had an inkling that this was all happening due to a feature of OS X that I believe has previously only been used by Apple in Time Machine, and prodded by TidBITS reader Bryan Walls, I confirmed it this morning. Photos uses Unix-style hard links when importing iPhoto libraries.
Mac users are probably more familiar with the concept of soft links, also known as “symbolic links.” Mac users would recognize the idea of a soft link from the long-time Mac concept of aliases1. In both of these cases, there’s something that looks like a file or folder/directory that’s actually just a reference to the real version of that file somewhere else in the filesystem.
Hard links aren’t like that. The best way to think of a hard link is that the contents of a file appear to exist in more than one location. If a file has two hard links, and you delete one, the file isn’t deleted—because it’s still linked to from another location.
That’s what the iPhoto import inside Photos does2: It creates hard links to the contents of your iPhoto library inside the Photos library. If you delete your iPhoto library, the files that were hard-linked from the Photos library still exist in the Photos library and aren’t deleted. For Mac users used to the a-file-is-a-file approach of the Finder, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher.
Time Machine uses this approach to create full backups while saving disk space. When you delete an old Time Machine backup, any files that are still hard-linked from subsequent backups remain intact. Any files that no longer have hard links elsewhere are deleted. iMovie apparently uses it, too, from time to time.
You can actually see if a file is hard-linked by using the Terminal. Before I imported my iPhoto library, here’s what an image deep inside the iPhoto library package looked like:
jsnell% ls -l
total 5968
-rw-r—r—@ 1 jsnell staff 3054588 Jun 10 2013 WWDC13_0910.JPG
The 1 just before “jsnell staff” lists how many hard links exist to this particular file. One link, the one we’re looking at.
But after I import this iPhoto library into Photos, here’s what that same directory looks like:
jsnell% ls -l
total 5968
-rw-r—r—@ 2 jsnell staff 3054588 Jun 10 2013 WWDC13_0910.JPG
Now there are two. To find the location of the two links, I find the unique ID of the file in question:
jsnell% ls -li
total 5968
10652722 -rw-r—r—@ 2 jsnell staff 3054588 Jun 10 2013 WWDC13_0910.JPG
And then another Terminal command shows me where those two links are:
When Photos migrates an iPhoto library, it changes the file extension on the iPhoto library package to .migratedphotolibrary.3
On import, Photos makes a hard link to all iPhoto media assets in its own library package, using the same directory structure as iPhoto.
So what happens if you edit one of those files? Something very clever, it turns out: If I open the JPEG image from the migrated iPhoto library in Photoshop, edit it, and save it, that version is indeed altered—but the version in the Photos library is untouched. Basically, modifying that file causes the link between the two versions to break. They’re different, and no longer connected.
I can also confirm that Photos is pretty comprehensive when it comes to its iPhoto import. Both Albums and Smart Albums are imported, and the Smart Albums remain “smart.” Smart Albums based on deprecated data like star ratings still work—since star ratings are converted to keywords, Smart Albums based on star ratings are converted to search for the equivalent star keywords. Descriptions, titles, flags, and geotagging from iPhoto are all picked up as well, and iPhoto Events are imported as Albums.
If you’ve edited a photo in iPhoto before importing, Photos will display that edited version—but the original has also imported behind the scenes, so you can revert back to it if you need to.
Pedantic note: OS X aliases are not the same as unix symbolic links. But in general terms they do more or less the same thing: connect a “real” file to a separate representation of it. ↩
It doesn’t seem to do this when you just drag images into Photos—in that case, it copies a version of the photo into its own Photos Library package. ↩
It also uses the iPhoto library’s name as the basis for the imported Photos library’s name, which is why my “An iPhoto Library” was imported as the amusingly wrong “An Photos Library.” ↩
It’s impossible to visit the new Apple World Today site and not think, “This is like TUAW, except not owned by AOL.” Because that seems to be exactly what it is. It’s a new site from former TUAW staffers Steve Sande, Dave Caolo, and Kelly Hodgkins.
I know the pain of losing an old brand and starting something new and fresh. It lets you refocus your efforts. Welcome to the world, Apple World Today!
Last night Carell—nominated for an Oscar, thank you very much—brought it up on “Late Show With David Letterman.” He even name-checked the site, getting it wrong as “teevee.com,” though Letterman later said “teevee.org” under his breath.
David Letterman. Said “teevee.org.” Out loud. On his show. Good grief.
(By the way, Pete says that he never got a call from Colbert offering him a job—that’s something he and Carell are misremembering. Not that Pete would have accepted. He has always been an incredibly talented writer—he was our sports editor at the UCSD student newspaper and then my managing editor there, and I do believe he could’ve gone on to a successful career in journalism if he had wanted to. Instead, he went to law school (which is how he managed to see horrors in a morgue) and has a successful career with the Justice Department.)
The entire internet decides to look at one famous butt at the same time. One man has to ensure that the website hosting Kardashian butt pictures doesn’t crash. The sheer terror and joy of solving that problem.
The interview forms a high-level overview of Paul Ford’s profile of the Kim Kardashian butt photos, and how my pal Greg had to set up the servers that were due to serve them.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
For a long time I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a game show podcast for The Incomparable Network. We’ve done a few game-show episodes and many of our regular panelists—I’m looking at you, Dan and David and Glenn—are big fans of NPR and BBC style panel shows. These shows are a great mix of humor and personality and playfulness, which is actually the thing I loved about panel game shows like “Match Game” growing up.
Everyone on the Incomparable mailing list liked the idea, but none of us could really commit to doing something weekly or even fortnightly. Maybe once a month, but no more. So I started to ponder the possibility of creating a podcast that featured a “wheel” of different shows, alternating throughout the month. You know, like the old NBC Mystery Movie1.
What I wanted to create, then, was a podcast with subcasts inside it. That way, people could subscribe to the main podcast—let’s call it The Incomparable Game Show—or if they were particular fans of only one spoke of the wheel, they could subscribe to a feed containing just that show.
Podcasting content-management systems like those used at 5by5 or Relay FM are great at streamlining the production of individual podcasts. What drove me to work with Greg Knauss on an insane Movable Type-based system at The Incomparable was the desire to have more flexibility—to build an index of topics to start, and then do more things to explore this new medium of podcasting.
When the “wheel” idea came up, I realized I’d need Greg’s help to realize it, and he put together some modifications to our system that allowed the Game Show to become a reality. The first episode just dropped, featuring Dan Moren’s “Inconceivable!” panel show. It’s a lot of fun, and while there’s a lot of tightening up to do on the technical side, Inconceivable! has its own home page and feed, in addition to being part of Game Show.
I haven’t decided yet if giving people options—like the ability to subscribe to a main feed or a sub-feed—is more trouble than it’s worth. But I wanted to give it a try, just to see. In future weeks we’ll be launching several more spokes on the game-show wheel, with a goal to have four different monthly shows (and perhaps the occasional one-off) feeding the main Game Show podcast. I have no idea how it’s going to work. But that’s part of the fun.
You can subscribe to Game Show on iTunes or via RSS. C’mon, it’s fun!
I’m pretty sure David Loehr is Columbo in this scenario. ↩
The plan is for me to write a Take Control “Crash Course” ebook about Photos, so if there’s anything about Photos you’d like me to examine while writing it, let me know.
