I really enjoyed reading John Gruber’s iPhone XR review this morning. I am thinking of waiting for the initial buying rush to wear off, and taking my wife to the store to buy her one.

I just ordered a new Chromebook for my daughter, based on Wirecutter’s recommendation. It was a lot more expensive than I thought Chromebooks sold for, but I bought a decently-speced one for the battery life, screen, and RAM.

I’m not sure what to expect when I have to set it up. I am not even sure what a Chromebook is anymore, now that ChromeOS runs Android apps. I was an owner/user of the original Cr-48 (the prototype Chromebook from Google). I loved CromeOS when it was just a browser, but Google started to loose me when they adding windowing. Now that the Play Store is available, it just feels like another Windows-type platform. I would prefer the “just a browser” version I had before. Perhaps I will soon learn, once the Chromebook arrives, that it still can be run that way. I have been away from it for too long at this point to know.

I’m debating whether I should pay for AnyList Pro again, just to use the Apple Watch app. I paid for a year a while back, and the Apple Watch app did not work very well. It kept crashing or getting killed, and would not stay in sync with my iPhone. None of the other paid features are interesting to me. I like the rest of the app’s features, though, and I’m getting the new Apple Watch in about a month, so maybe it will work this time. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Thomas Finch’s iOS 7+ Icon Generator is a nice, little utility. It takes a square app icon and masks it to match the rounded corner shape of modern iOS icons.

I picked up 1Blocker X based on this review from John Voorhies on MacStores.

The first thing you will notice when you set up 1Blocker X on an iOS device is its 7 toggles in Safari’s Content Blocker section of the Settings app. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher at first until you realize that this is what allows 1Blocker X to expand beyond the confines of its predecessor.

You see, iOS limits the number of blocking rules that can be implemented by an app to 50,000. That’s a lot of rules, but sadly not enough given the amount of junk on the Internet these days. As a result, it’s a limit that 1Blocker began to run into not long after it launched in 2015.

Finding a way around that hard limit required a rewrite of 1Blocker from the ground up. The result is 1Blocker X, an app with around three times as many blocking rules, room to grow, and enhanced flexibility for applying those rules.

I don’t think I really needed to replace the content blocker I had been using, but it hadn’t been updated in a really long time, so I’m not sure it’s blocking rules are up-to-date.

Much of the work these things do is invisilble. It’s easy to see if ads are blocked, of course, but not so with trackers and malware, which I care more about. At home I also block ads at the DNS level using Pi-hole, running on an old Raspberry Pi. I heartily recommend setting up a Pi-hole (it’s easy; there are tutorials to follow). I miss having it when I’m out of the house, which is why a content blocker is helpful, too.

So far, 1Blocker X has been working just fine. I’ve noticed no decrease in speed from Safari, despite the crazy amount of blocking rules I have enabled.

I thought my AirPods batteries were already aging out of their useful life span, due to quick draining on numerous hour long phone calls today and last week. It turns out, talk time is only “up to 2 hours”, while listening time (my main use case) is 2 1/2 times that.

Per Apple:

AirPods (single charge): Up to 5 hours listening time,(2) Up to 2 hours talk time(5)

So…phew! I’m more worried about having to replace them after less than two years due to a battery issue than about shorter battery life on calls.

🚀 I finally installed Rocket on my Mac. It’s a lot nicer to use than Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space) to drop emoji into text boxes.

Adding my Nest thermostat to HomeKit via HomeBridge has made my life a little better. I do have a suggestion for Apple, though: “Hey Siri, set thermostat to 70º F and let no one in my family change it, ever, for any reason.” Maybe I don’t need a smart thermostat after all.

Based on my podcast listening for the week, I’ve concluded (and I’m being half serious here) that Amazon Alexa’s key feature, and Siri’s key shortcoming, is support for multiple named kitchen timers. That seems like an easy gap to fill. When Apple will finally ship that feature?

People on Reddit are bitching tonight about Apple’s “bug fixes and improvements” iOS and watchOS updates. I must be uncool or something because those kinds of updates are my favorite kind.

Is it awful that I kind of want a HomePod? When I first watched the product announcement, my impression was “too expensive: hard pass” but now I kind of want something that sounds really good and just works with my iPhone.

Unpopular opinion: Calendars 5 is better than Fantastical. I have had both on my iOS devices for years and finally chose just one today. I prefer how Calendars 5 handles tasks and how it displays the results of natural language parsing, which is just as good as Fantastical’s.

Dear Apple Music: Just because I listened to Sixpence Non The Richer’s cover of “There She Goes” (originally by the La’s, and arguably about heroin, for goodness sake), doesn’t mean I want to listen to Christian music in all my personalized mixes. 🙄

I hope I set up mirroring to GitHub correctly. It is a geeky feature, for sure, but I’m not 100% sure if I set it up correctly.

I like TweetBot a lot more than I like Twitter.

I don’t love how en-dashes (–) and em-dashes (—) look identical in Ulysses. I know it is because I use monospace fonts. I just wish Ulysses did something to differentiate them. I don’t know/trust that macOS is inserting the correct symbol when I type (dash) (dash) (dash).

I’m demoting TweetBot to page 3 of Spingboard. I’m not sure how long that will last.

I bought Castro 2 this week because I like the design and it was on sale for a pittance. I am not sure I will switch to it from Overcast, though. Castro 2 has a better UI and better product focus, but Overcast has the better audio engine, which really is the most important thing.

Twitter is abuzz about UIKit, perhaps, going to the Mac late next year. We’ll see. I would love to code a new version of my todo.txt app, SwiftoDo Desktop, in UIKit rather than AppKit. The different table view model is a big factor in that, though UIKit’s window and split view controls are, of course, different, too. WWDC will be especially interesting next year.

Jannis Hermann’s blog post about developing full time on the iPad Pro is fantastic. I’ve heard about others using his approach: offload development tools to a server and connect to it using Mosh. I wish I could set something similar up for my programming hobby, but it wouldn’t apply very well to Xcode. Still, Jannis’s blog post inspires me to figure out a better way to update my non-Wordpress-based websites via my iPad, which is just something I haven’t tried yet.