I’m really looking forward to latkes all of a sudden.

🎵 Album of the Day: “Designer” by Aldous Harding. It is a quiet, intimate, folksy album that reminded me a little of Hope Sandoval from Mazzy Star.

Abby Goodnotes reports in the New York Times:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday struck down a central provision of the Affordable Care Act, ruling that the requirement that people have health insurance was unconstitutional.

Who didn’t see this coming? Surely not the Republicans in Congress who removed the ACA tax penalty for not having health insurance.

Bobby Oliver posted a profile of one of my favorite current musicians (songwriter, producer, collaborator, and band leader), Jack Antonoff:

Antonoff is an overwhelming, chameleonic presence and an easy pick as New Jersey’s most dynamic and prolific artist of the 2010s — no local musician has created so much or touched so many corners of the industry. His extensive impact is felt at the Grammys, on the radio and deep within whatever streaming service millennial listeners call home.

I can’t agree with this more.

I bought my ticket to “Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker” and can’t wait until Friday night to be disappointed by it. 😅

Peggy Orenstein’s article in The Atlantic exploring the sorry state of musculinity, as experienced by the American teenager, is well written and worth reading:

Feminism may have provided girls with a powerful alternative to conventional femininity, and a language with which to express the myriad problems-that-have-no-name, but there have been no credible equivalents for boys. Quite the contrary: The definition of masculinity seems to be in some respects contracting. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent of male respondents in the PerryUndem survey said honesty and morality, and only 8 percent said leadership skills—traits that are, of course, admirable in anyone but have traditionally been considered masculine. When I asked my subjects, as I always did, what they liked about being a boy, most of them drew a blank. “Huh,” mused Josh, a college sophomore at Washington State. (All the teenagers I spoke with are identified by pseudonyms.) “That’s interesting. I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.”

In order to make masculinity less toxic, we (men especially) have to define it in positive, attainable attributes. To be masculine should mean (1) to have self-discipline, (2) to take responsibility for your actions (even when you are wrong), and, most importantly, (3) to care for people (friends, family, community, and those who are vulnerable) with your words and actions. Masculinity should be about using your strength-both physical strength and, more importantly, inner strength-to preserve and protect people, society, and nature, as best you can. I don’t think this is a new definition of masculinity, though. I think it is a very, very old one—one whose traits do not stand in contrast with femininity, but, instead, they overlap and support femininity—and feminism too.

🎵 Album of the day: “U.F.O.F.” by Big Thief. I found it on several “best of 2019” lists. It’s a quiet folk-rock album, with ruminative lyrics and a sound that borders on dream pop in places. I’m not sure if it really speaks to me, though.

I’m releasing updates of two of my apps this week, with very minor updates. I have found it hard to sit down and work on new features or the next version of any of my apps for the past couple months. One thing that keeps happenings that I get caught up in indecision about what to do, how to design it, and how to code it. I’m hoping to move past this phase and get back into a flow state soon, but first, I have to push forward.

If I were smart, I would listen to every album on this massive list-of-lists, over the next few months. I kind of like the idea of all the critics' top albums in one place a lot better than a single, definitive list.

LogMeIn is being acquired by a private equity firm. I hope this doesn’t make LastPass, which LogMeIn acquired in 2015, worse or more expensive.

🎵 Today’s album: “So” by Peter Gabriel. It’s a masterpiece. I kind of forgot that, and had not listened to it in several years. I barely know what else to say.

Maybe I am unplugged from things because of my age or something, but it seems to me that hardly anyone is excited about the new “Star Wars” movie coming out this week. I’m not excited either, but I want to see it eventually. I’m wondering if the drastic tonal shifts in “The Last Jedi” killed fans' enthusasiam the franchise.

I have reached the time of year in which my hands are so dry that fingerprint sensors no longer work for me.

I really like this video in which audiophile YouTuber DMS describes all the jargon you need to know to decipher hifi headphone reviews. I wish I had seen this six years ago or so when I first got into good headphones.

📺 “Watchmen”, which ended last night (spoilers ahead if you read the linked article) is easily the best sci-fi/fantasy show I’ve since since “Westworld” season 1. I actually hope HBO either (1) doesn’t make a season 2, or (2) gives several years for something that equals it to be developed, because “Watchmen” was just perfect.

The reviews for “Frozen II” might be lackluster, but I really liked it, and think that the songs, though few in number, are great. I think I preferred them before I saw the movie, but that’s just me.

🎵 Today’s listen: Hawksley Workman’s “For Him and the Girls”. The songwriting is strong and eclectic, some of the hooks are really catchy, and he played all the instruments and recorded it himself. The top track for me is “No Sissies” though I’m not sure how well its title has aged.

The real problem with robocalls, contrary to what is in The Verge today, is that they have undermined the usefulness of the telephone. Do you pick up the phone for “unknown caller”? I usually don’t. All phone calls have become suspicious for me, unless they are pre-scheduled meetings.

Van Halen’s “1984” is a great album and still holds up today, I think, even with all those synth lines. It certainly sounds great all the way through. It’s a shame about rock being dead and all…😅

Plex is a great music player on iOS. I’m playing lossless tracks (from my old CD rips) stored on my home server, over the network, over AirPlay, controlled by my iPad. I love seeing the song’s waveform on the progress bar, and reading the rich metadata about each album I listen to.

I’m spending some time pruning my music collection, which I barely listen to anymore, but is higher quality (all CD rips or 24/96k files!) than Apple Music. It has been so long, though, that I forgot most of my file renaming and converting tricks.

It looks like FreeNAS is, eventually, going to run on top of Debian Linux, not just FreeBSD. VP of Engineering Kris Moore posted today:

[…] we’re going to be hard at work in 2020 to make our 12.0 code portable across multiple OS platforms. The middleware at the core of FreeNAS is already pretty portable today, and we want to start extending its reach.

That’s pretty cool. Good on them to unbolt their software from the underlying OS. I think it will give them a lot more flexibility going forward. I don’t know if I will run FreeNAS on Linux anytime soon, though. I learned to adore BSD’s stability and simplicity from running FreeNAS, but it has made it harder to virtualize and/or run some useful services on my hardware.

Kris Moore went on to clarify:

FreeNAS as it exists will continue on FreeBSD for 12.0 and beyond. This will be bringing some of the same software-base to Linux to unveil some new products that are Linux-based in the coming months. If you currently are happy with FreeNAS as it sits today, you can expect to keep updating it on BSD going forward.

All of this sounds good to me. FreeNAS has been a great platform for me for many years now.

Social media is a scam. Who knew?

Davey Alba reports in the New York Times:

[…The] report also brings renewed attention to an often overlooked vulnerability for internet platforms: companies that sell clicks, likes and comments on social media networks. Many of the companies are in Russia, according to the researchers. Because the social networks’ software ranks posts in part by the amount of engagement they generate, the paid activity can lead to more prominent positions.

No kidding that engagement is fake. Paying for fake “Likes” is the same kind of thing as paying for fake clicks, which is a scam performed to goose online ad revenue.

Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University, said easy social media manipulation could have implications for European elections this year and the 2020 presidential election in the United States.

“Fake engagement — whether generated by automated or real accounts — can skew the perceived popularity of a candidate or issue,” Ms. Bradshaw said. “If these strategies are used to amplify disinformation, conspiracy and intolerance, social media could exacerbate the polarization and distrust that exist within society.”

Of course, paying to amplify a message will, indeed, amplify it, even if that message is false or destructive to the fabric of society. It’s too bad that social media is so addictive. It is cause so many problems.

Our dishwasher broke over the weekend. I washed dishes for hours Saturday and Sunday, and we are still behind on it. I’ve got my fingers crossed that it can be fixed today. I’m tired of, and don’t have time for, this drudgery!

The rumor that Apple’s 2021 iPhone will have no ports disturbs me for one big reason: CarPlay. No cars that I know of support wireless CarPlay (did that even ship?), and phones often need a charge on a long car ride. Apple could solve those problems with some kind of adapter, but who wants yet another dongle?