Through AJ Bourg’s site, I recently become aware of the impossible list:

A bucket list is focused [on] what you do before you die, the impossible list is focused on how you live.

I’ve always found bucket lists to be a bit morbid, so this clicked with me. I like the idea of achieving the impossible. Stretching for things that seem out of my reach. And then triumphantly crossing them off and dreaming ever bigger.

So I made one of my own.¹

I spent some time this morning emptying my brain of the pie-in-the-sky goals I’ve been pushing off to a dark corner in there. There will certainly be more, and I’ll update the list, and write about them, as I continue to dream and achieve the impossible.

Ever find that your cursor is acting sluggish on screen? Maybe it jumps around slightly but you can’t figure out why. Nothing in software seems to be the issue, and you already tried shaking the pointing back and forth in a vain attempt to knock some sense back into it.

Try something for me real quick: Flip over the mouse, look closely at the little aperture that reveals the laser and lens housing, and pull out the little hair that’s gotten stuck in that hole and is currently obscuring some part of the tracking mechanism. Place the mouse back on your desktop and mouse away in unencumbered glory.

Tips

Following in the footsteps of Tom Whitwell, this past year I bought a house, completed climbing goals, said goodbye to beloved family members, and learned a few things:

1. The proper way to do a kick turn when ski skinning uphill is to (1) Turn your uphill ski to a 90-degree angle to your other ski with the tail at your other ski boot, then (2) shift your weight onto that uphill-turned ski, and (3) swing the downhill ski around as close to the uphill boot as possible. Then, voilà, you’re facing the new direction. [Schorsch Nickaes & Dynafit // youtube.com]
2. If you’re spelling out numbers, you won’t use the letter ‘c’ until you get to one octillion. [@HaggardHawks // twitter.com]
3. Truckers are typically paid by the mile, without overtime pay, which means that inspections, traffic jams, bad weather delays, and cargo loading go uncompensated. [David Zipper // theverge.com]
4. Those beautifully delicate ice tendrils coming from the ground and stems are called frost flowers. [gardendesign.com]
5. Pete Schoening saved five of his climbing partners from falling off K2 in 1953 using a hip belay and an old ice axe. That ice axe is on display in a museum and known as “the holy grail of mountaineering artifacts.” alpinism. [Grey Satterfield // americanalpineclub.org]
6. The gallbladder is a lot higher in one’s body than I expected. [wikipedia.org]
7. Chameleons in the desert will turn half their bodies black and the other half white to regulate their temperature by reflecting the suns rays on one side while absorbing heat on the other. [Muntaseer Rahman // acuariopets.com] (Via Tiny World)
8. Gravity on Earth is different depending on where you are in the world and it also changes by the month. [Laura Naranjo // earthdata.nasa.gov] (Via Hard is Easy)
9. The shortest postal address available in the UK might be just a number and postal code. Also postal codes sound more sensible there. [vladh // microblog.vladh.net]
10. Hand dryers feel cold at first because of the evaporation. xkcd.com
11. There are terms for roles in conversations — givers and takers — and how they interact with each other can lead to engaging conversations or ones that just fizzle out. [experimentalhistory.substack.com]
12. 1 in 20 Americans own an assault rifle. This means in my relatively small, quiet town of roughly 5,000 people, there could be 250 military-grade weapons of unthinkable destruction in the hands of God knows who. It’s a sobering and terrifying fact. [washingtonpost.com]
13. The Lindy effect is the idea that the longer something has been around, the more likely it is to stick around. i.e. The pyramids have been around for much longer than the building down the street and are likely to outlast it. [wikipedia.org] (Via Thoroughly Considered)
14. The ZIP code wasn’t introduced in the US until 1968. [guides.loc.gov] (Via Matt Birchler)
15. “The ‘brown’ in brown noise is not a colour, but a reference to sound that mimics Brownian motion, the movement pollen makes in water, identified by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827.” [Emma Beddington // theguardian.com]
16. Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime. [thoughtco.com]
17. The biggest snowflake ever recorded was a whopping 15-inches wide! Can you imagine a storm with flakes that big?! [Khushboo Sheth // worldatlas.com]
18. Netflix’s DVD mailing service account(ed) for 1.3% of all mail in the US in 2009. [USPS // link.usps.com] (Via The Verge)
19. Fear Factor, a show I used to enjoy as a kid, was initially hosted by Joe Rogan. Yes, that Joe Rogan. [en.m.wikipedia.org]
20. “Eternal return is a philosophical concept which states that time repeats itself in an infinite loop, and that exactly the same events will continue to occur in exactly the same way, over and over again, for eternity.” [wikipedia.org]
21. Lasers are cloned photons all traveling at the same frequency. [Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell // youtube.com]
22. The atmosphere rotates with the Earth, which is why airplanes don’t fly faster or slower depending on if they’re going with or against its rotation. (I conceptually knew this, but having an explanation for why helped it click.) [Mark Rober // youtube.com]
23. NYC’s skyscrapers are so heavy that they sinking the city by 1-3mm per year. Not great when sea levels are also rising. [Sebastián Rodríguez // theverge.com]
24. Frogs’ spit is a non-Newtonian substance. [@simplebiologist // instagram.com]
25. The very first podcast feed enclosed a Grateful Dead song. [Eric Nuzum // podnews.net]
26. Hugh Laurie provided Lin-Manuel Miranda with the inspiration for the “You’ll Be Back” song in Hamilton. [goodreads.com]
27. In Bulgaria, shaking your head up and down vertically means “no”. That kind of breaks my brain. [Keith Broni // blog.emojipedia.org]
28. Way more actors make less than $40,000 per year than the general public. And way fewer actors than the general population make as much in each annual income bracket until you get to $160,000+, but even still it’s about even with everyone else. [American Community Survey]
29. Not yawning can indicate a lack of empathy for other people. [Jennifer Golbeck // psychologytoday.com]
30. The USA has over a billion square feet of unused office space. If put into a single skyscraper, it was extend past the atmosphere and northern lights. [Dorothy Neufeld // visualcapitalist.com]
31. Some of the first turn-by-turn navigation devices were made on turntable-like discs that rotated along with the direction of your vehicle. [Larry Printz // arstechnica.com]
32. It might take 40,000 years for a photon to escape from the sun even to just begin its interstellar journey. [Via kottke.org]
33. The climate crisis has cost $16 million per hour in the last 20 years of disasters. [Damian Carrington // theguardian.com]
34. There have been approximately 4.5 x 10^27 (4,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) animals ever on Earth. [livescience.com]
35. You can’t laser etch color into aluminum because it’s a raw element but you can with steel because of the iron in it, which will etch at different colors depending on the temperature of the laser beam. [WIRED // youtube.com]
36. Companies will put images of more fragile items, like flat-screen TVs, on their shopping boxes to encourage more delicate handling by delivery workers. [Paul Kafasis // onefoottsunami.com]
37. A “mackerel sky” is the one that looks like a thin, barely-there layer of clouds dotting the sky like a ceiling. [wikipedia.org]
38. 1 out of 4 animals we raise for food are never eaten. To the tune of 18 billion animals as food waste every year. [Kenny Torrella // vox.com]
39. Earth’s human population crossed 8 billion people this year. [axios.com]
40. There is a gas-powered compressor bolted to the sheer face at the top of a Patagonian mountain. [ragnilecco.com] (Via Climbing Gold)
41. Some TV stations switched from black and white to colored video while live on the air. [Back to the Past // youtube.com]
42. Instead of growing in popularity as the synthetic meat industry advanced, it’s actually seems a sharp decline lately. [Megan Hernbroth // axios.com]
43. Someday, oceanic explorers will be able to go visit the wreckage that once was the (currently operating) International Space Station at Point Nemo in the South Pacific Ocean. [Katie Hunt // cnn.com]
44. Every letter in the English alphabet can be silent in a word. [dictionary.com]
45. Shipping things to Puerto Rico should cost the same as shipping to other states, but some businesses categorize it as “international” which means residents pay more unnecessarily. [Jose Munoz // heydingus.net]
46. Apple literally buried thousands of dollars worth of Lisa computers rather than sell or support them after the Macintosh came out. [William Poor // theverge.com]
47. Replacing a light switch is way easier than I expected it to be. [Lutron Electronics // youtube.com]
48. You might be able to calm your cat down for a successful grooming and nail trimming session by holding their scruff. [vet.osu.edu]
49. New Caledonian Crows make intricately-shaped stick hooks for pulling out bugs from inside logs. [Ze Frank // youtube.com]
50. A double-loop bowline on a harness makes an excellent and redundant rappel extension. [John Godino // alpinesavvy.com]
51. People have made adaptive legs to replace lost limbs, but specially engineered to be great for rock climbing — such as ones with the ability to stand on dime edges. [climbinggold.com]
52. The ocean’s saltiness comes from minerals dissolved from land rocks by slightly acidic rain and are delivered by rivers. [Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell // youtube.com]

If you’ll allow me a moment of introspection, I’d love to offer my thanks at the end of the year to anyone and everyone reading these words. I’ve been writing here on HeyDingus for three years now, but it’s only been in 2023 that I feel like finally hit my stride. I wrote the most posts yet in a year (by a lot!), and, back in November, I crossed 500 total posts written.

Getting to offload my weird thoughts, opinions, ideas, and creations out to the world is a privilege, and for some reason, many of you decide to read them. So many that I reached a completely arbitrary goal — one I made long ago — at the end of this year: over 10,000 views on my site for each of the last two months! 😮 I don’t write to chase those numbers, but I won’t lie — I think it’s pretty cool to reach so many people. And it feels good to meet that goal and move past it, in every sense of the phrase. 🎉 The best part is Tinylytics tells me that my home page has consistently been a top destination. I love that people still visit home pages to read their sites.

No, the actual best part has been the conversations and connections I’ve been fortunate enough to make through this site. If you’ve ever sent me an email, know that you made my day. If we’ve chatted on Micro.blog or Mastodon (or, yes, even Twitter when it still was), know that you’re part of a community I’ve come to cherish.

Thank you for your service, 2023. And here’s to 2024. May it be our best year yet. 🥳

Blogging

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

1️⃣ 22

2️⃣ 28

3️⃣ 7

4️⃣ 3

5️⃣ 38 15

6️⃣ 42

7️⃣ 69

Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

Presented without sanitization or explanation.

Adios, 2023! 🎉

Gear

I’m chatting with Austin for the PenPals project this month. Here’s a peak at our final exchange, as summarized by ChatGPT:

Austin expresses his preference for refraining from online conversations if he doesn’t have something constructive to add, emphasizing the potential implications for employment. He discusses geopolitical developments and advocates for knowledge over impulsive action. Regarding his skills, Austin considers software/business consulting due to his ability to evaluate ideas. He clarifies his stance on the term “enthusiast” and describes his interests as broad but not deeply committed. Reflecting on the cease-and-desist experience, he acknowledges its role in leading him to platforms like Mastodon and Matrix. In his response, Jarrod shares his approach to online interactions and highlights the benefits of Micro.blog’s conversational focus. He appreciates Austin’s understanding of the term “enthusiast” and discusses how challenges, like the C&D from Facebook, can lead to positive outcomes. Jarrod concludes the pen pal exchange, expressing gratitude for the depth of conversation and wishing Austin the best in 2024.

If you’d like to be a penpal for this project, please reach out! I’d love to get you on the schedule.

PenPals

Holy smokes, I can’t believe I never thought about doing this before. Probably because I never thought I would know how to write a bookmarklet. To be fair, I still don’t, but ChatGPT does!

Update (2024-01-02): Thanks to @zsbenke on the Club MacStories Discord, I’ve got a even better version that skips opening the new tab and just opens the URL directly.

javascript:(function() {
  var currentPage = window.location.href;
  var encodedURL = encodeURIComponent(currentPage);
  var newURL = "shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=[Insert%20Your%20URL%20Encoded%20Shortcut%20Name%20Here]&input=" + encodedURL;
  window.location.href = newURL;
})();

You can copy my version that runs the ‘Save for Later’ shortcut, and I’ve also updated the ‘Get URL to Run Shortcuts’ one that creates a bookmarklet out of one of your own shortcuts.

TL;DR

I made a bookmarklet that runs a shortcut and uses the current webpage’s URL as input.

Here it is:

javascript:(function() {
  var currentPage = window.location.href;
  var encodedURL = encodeURIComponent(currentPage);
  var newURL = "shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=[Insert%20Your%20URL%20Encoded%20Shortcut%20Name%20Here]&input=" + encodedURL;
  window.open(newURL);
})();

Here’s a plain text file example with a version that runs my ‘Save for Later’ shortcut.

Here’s how to install it:

1. Copy this bookmarklet link.
2. Edit the bookmarklet and replace the [Insert%20Your%20URL%20Encoded%20Shortcut%20Name%20Here] bit with a URL-encoded name for your preferred shortcut. Or, just use this shortcut, freshly updated in my library, to select a shortcut and generate its bookmarklet all in one go.
3. Add the URL as a bookmark in your browser. You might have to bookmark a random webpage, and then go back to edit its address and paste in the bookmarklet link/code that you copied before. That’s what I did. (It’s a real shame that Shortcuts doesn’t have any bookmarking actions.)
4. Optional: Give it a cute floppy disk emoji (💾) for its name, like I did.

NLE;TMM

Not Long Enough; Tell Me More

Three things lined up today to inspire this new creation. First, I read Jonathan Reed’s story for the Club MacStories Weekly newsletter about how he’s created quite advanced Javascripts in full using nothing but ChatGPT. Second, I was changing up a shortcut and wanted to be able to quickly test it as I iterated on it, and I quickly grew wearisome from the multiple clicks or keystrokes it usually takes to launch a shortcut on a Mac. Third, with a cursory search, I couldn’t find an extension for Safari that would allow me to pick a specific shortcut so that I could just have its icon in my Safari toolbar. And that’s when I realized that a bookmarklet would essentially be that.

You see, it’s still far too difficult to run a specific shortcut with a specific Safari URL as its input on a Mac. Apple’s native method, using the share sheet, is to…

1. Click the share button.
2. Select the Shortcuts icon from the (weirdly tiny) list.
3. Scroll down the (much bigger) list of any shortcuts enabled for the share sheet that accept URLs, text, or Safari webpages (for me, a LOT). Or you can start typing the first few letters of a shortcut’s name and it might be highlighted, but there’s no real search function.
4. Select the shortcut you want to run and click ‘Done’ (or double-click the shortcut).

Or, with this bookmarklet saved to your Favorites Bar, you can…

1. Click on the bookmarklet.
2. There is no step 2. It’s already done!

(Granted, you will have to give the webpage permission to run the shortcut the first time, but you can select ‘Always Allow’ so that you’ll not be bothered by the prompt again…for that website at least.)

ChatGPT Makes a Great… Copilot 😏

With confidence inspired by Jonathan Reed’s article, I fired up ChatGPT and made a single request with an example:

Can you write me a bookmarklet that builds a new URL out of the page it’s currently on and then opens it?

For example, if I’m on https://heydingus.net/blog/2023/11/playstation-ethernet-connection and run the bookmarklet I want it to open the URL shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Save%20for%20Later&input=https://heydingus.net/blog/2023/11/playstation-ethernet-connection

These LLMs’ superpower is that you can ask and direct it using the most conversational of language. I didn’t specify what language it needed to use. I didn’t tell it what browser I was using. I see now that I forgot a comma (😱). I included raw URLs in my example with very little explanation.

And, by golly, it nailed it in one:

Certainly! Here’s a bookmarklet that constructs the new URL and opens it:

javascript:(function() {
  var currentPage = window.location.href;
  var encodedURL = encodeURIComponent(currentPage);
  var newURL = "shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Save%20for%20Later&input=" + encodedURL;
  window.open(newURL);
})();

The icing on the cake was that ChatGPT provided me with instructions on how to use it too, even though I hadn’t asked for that:

To use this as a bookmarklet:

1. Copy the entire code block.
2. Create a new bookmark in your browser.
3. Edit the bookmark and paste the code into the URL field.

Now, whenever you’re on a webpage and click this bookmark, it’ll generate a new URL and open it using the shortcuts://run-shortcut scheme.

Color me impressed!

Okay, but why?

For me, there are a few shortcuts that I run on URLs from Safari all the time. My ‘Amazon Affiliate Linker’ shortcut, and my ‘URLs Menu’ shortcut (a catch-all menu for a bunch of link-related shortcuts) to name two. But my favorite is my ‘Save for Later’ shortcut. That one is configured to be a traffic controller of sorts. Based on the type of URL passed into it, it decides whether the link should be saved to Play (YouTube and Vimeo links), MusicBox (Apple Music links), as a Things task (Amazon links), or to my read-later app (anything else, so pretty much articles or other webpages). And because I change read-later apps like other people change their underwear, I can very easily swap in a different Shortcuts action to start saving links to my newest article saver.

Now, being the intrepid web explorer and Mac power user that you (probably) are, you’re sure to be quick to point out that there are many ways to launch a shortcut and give it a specific URL. And you’d be right! In fact, I actively use many of them. For instance…

• I could click on the address bar and select one of the shortcuts I’ve configured into PopClip.
• I could click on a shortcut that I’ve saved to my Dock that looks at the frontmost page in Safari to get the URL it needs.
• I could copy the URL and then use any launcher (built-in keyboard hotkeys, Spotlight, Raycast, Alfred, etc.) to run a shortcut that looks at the clipboard if there’s no input passed into it.
• I could even drag the URL from the address bar in Safari onto a shortcut that I’ve saved to my App Grid in Dropzone.

The options on the Mac are, admittedly, effectively endless.¹

But there are a few advantages to using a bookmarklet as opposed to any of those other options.

1. Once it’s in your bookmarks, it should sync to all your other devices and be able to be used from their browser.
2. One click versus multiple clicks, taps, or keystrokes.
3. Confidence about the URL that’s getting shared into the shortcut. Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes I’m not sure that I’m getting what I mean to into the shortcut with some of those other methods.

But most of all, it was just fun to create a new thing. And realize that a tool I have in my toolbox, ChatGPT, is way more useful than I initially gave it credit for.

Shortcuts Scripts Tips

If you, like me, are considering a switch from 1Password to iCloud Passwords & Keychain, you should definitely check out Indie App Santa right now. Today’s deal (Friday, December 29) is a FREE $80 (see update below) one-time lifetime unlock for the Secrets app. The skinny: Its feature set, which includes shared vaults, usually goes for around $100. Today’s discounted unlock works across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, plus it’s available to the other members of your Family Sharing group, so only one of you needs to go get it and do the in-app “purchase” right now.

You might be asking, “If you’re switching over to iCloud Passwords, why are you recommending that I download a second password manager app?”

Great question! It’s because iCloud Passwords doesn’t allow for website-less logins, or other random sensitive info like bank account numbers, licenses, and other stuff that you probably need easy access to but still want to be secured. For the past few months, I’ve been saving these items to an Apple Note. But there are several downsides to that method:

• No quick-copy function.
• You’ll want to have that note locked for extra security…
• But locking it prevents it from being shared with a spouse or other trusted partner.
• And, more troubling because of recent revelations regarding your iPhone’s passcode, you don’t need biometrics (Face ID or Touch ID) to view the note — your phone’s passcode will unlock it as well.

A Sidebar on Why Having a Biometric Authentication-Only Option Is Crucial These Days

You might not realize it, but your passcode is the primary unlocking mechanism to your phone. Not Face ID or Touch ID, which you use more often, but the 4+ digit passcode (or alphanumerical password if you set that up). It’s required when your phone restarts, for example. And it works as the failsafe when Face or Touch ID doesn’t unlock for some reason. That’s all well and good, but passcodes are easy to steal and fingerprints and 3D scans of your face are not.

If you don’t know why this matters, I encourage you to read Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen’s reporting for the Wall Street Journal (News+ link) concerning how bad actors are using social engineering to learn your phone’s passcode before stealing it from you. It’s not as dramatic as an interrogation and a mugging. No, this typically happens at a bar or somewhere they can get buddy-buddy with you and then offer to take your group photo or connect on social media. But — ah shoot — your phone is locked so they can’t get the shot. You willingly offer up your passcode because, hey, you’re never going to see them again so what could it hurt? But then, later on, they pickpocket you and now they have both physical access to your phone and your passcode.

This sounds bad because now they can look at nearly anything on your phone including private photos, passwords, banking apps, peer-to-peer payment apps, and more. But in fact, it’s worse. Because so many people forget their critical Apple ID password, Apple has made it possible for you to reset that password with only your iPhone’s passcode. So an enterprising crook can go in and change that password, effectively stealing not just your physical phone, but everything associated with your Apple ID. Messages gone. Photos gone. iCloud backups gone. Apps and purchased media gone. And no way to get it back.

[Stern recently did a follow-up on this report by interviewing a man convicted of this very crime.]

The good news is that Apple is going to introduce a new (optional) feature called Stolen Device Protection with the upcoming iOS 17.3 software release. With Stolen Device Protection turned on, there will be additional safeguards to prevent the passcode from having so much power. Your iCloud Keychain passwords will require Face ID or Touch ID to be viewed — no passcode failsafe. And, crucially, your Apple ID password will also require two biometric unlocks with at least an hour-long buffer between them.

Apple has done a thorough job thinking through the threat models and I think they’ve come up with a reasonable and fairly elegant solution. But I’m left with one particular worry:

Since iCloud Passwords doesn’t offer a way to store non-website credentials, where are people putting their bank account numbers, their license numbers, their Social Security numbers, and their credit card numbers?

My guess? Probably in Apple Notes which, as we have already established, allows for a passcode override if Face/Touch ID doesn’t work. And that’s if the user ever bothered to lock the individual note to begin with!

I don’t believe that iOS 17.3 changes any behavior in Notes, but you can bet that I’ll be checking when that update is released.

Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe

All of that is to say, I’m really glad that with the Secrets app, you can require biometric authentication to unlock the app and you don’t have to allow a passcode as a backup.

I’ve happily moved over the data that I was storing in an Apple Note (one that I had titled ’Secrets’, funnily enough) into the Secrets app. Secrets, while not the most polished app, appears to be a solid contender in the password manager space. It at least checks off all the shortcomings of using an Apple Note:

✅ You can quick-copy items from the list view (long press to get a context menu) or in the item view (tap on the field to reveal a ‘Copy’ button).
✅ The app is locked by default, you can choose to have it unlock with biometrics only (or with a passcode or passphrase if you want — but don’t), and how quickly it locks again when you exit the app.
✅ Vaults can be shared (and making changes to a vault’s settings requires an additional unlock) so you can make different buckets to share items with family, friends, colleagues, etc.
✅ And the data you save is all encrypted and synced via iCloud. No third-party syncing system is required. Not that third parties do a bad job as a rule, but I trust Apple to have top-notch resources and engineers to secure my data.

One More Unresolved Threat

There is, unfortunately, at least one more way that criminals could still really screw you over if they have access to your phone and passcode: Too many apps don’t offer any sort of authentication protection, and those that do almost always allow for your passcode to work in place of biometrics. For example, if I cover up my face and open up my bank app, after a few fails it just offers to let me type in my phone’s passcode to open it.

When Face ID fails for PayPal, it lets you log in using the PayPal username and password, which can be accessed with your phone’s passcode right now, but come iOS 17.3, will be fenced off by biometrics specifically. 👍

I’ll give kudos to both the Cash App and Venmo, which allows you to set a separate 4-digit PIN to use in case of biometric failure. So don’t set it the same as your phone’s passcode! I’ve gone ahead and made new ones for them and saved them to — you guessed it — Secrets.

I’m focusing on financial apps here because they are the most obvious way that a criminal is probably going to try to continue to steal from you. They’ll empty your bank account to theirs. They’ll take your account numbers to make purchases. They’ll request money from your friends.

But honestly, I think Apple should cover all their bases here and offer a way to lock access to any app, system-wide, behind discreet authentication. They can even follow Secrets’ lead here by giving users the option to lock an app behind biometrics and/or a passcode/passphrase. And you know what? Build in those same locking delay options we saw above as well.

I should be able to prevent anyone from freely jumping into my photos app, my notes app, SnapChat, Discord, or anything that they could, intentionally or not, do some damage if I hand them my phone. And I shouldn’t have to wait for every app developer to build the feature and then go hunting for it in every app. Having a way to lock the important ones right from the Settings app is the way it should work. And I happen to know such a feature would be a godsend for parents of young children. A few years ago, my sister specifically asked me if I knew how to lock apps because when she handed her phone or iPad over to her kids for a little screen time they were deleting things by mistake or getting into ones that they shouldn’t.

Apple has the opportunity to solve this headache in one fell swoop. Sure, there will be edge cases to work around — like what happens when someone locks themselves out of every app by mistake? — but I believe Apple’s engineers are up for the challenge. They’ve proven with their approach to Stolen Device Protection that they can come up with a solution that balances security and convenience for most people, most of the time. The fact that they addressed passcode theft so head-on gives me hope that attending to these related problems is next on the to-do list.

In the meantime, don’t forget to download and unlock Secrets before the Indie App Santa discount expires in just a few hours. I think you’ll be glad that you did.

Update: It appears that the Secrets team changed their discount at some point today. What was a 100% discount on the Editing + Sharing purchase is now a $20 discount, bringing the one-time purchase price down to $80. It could be worth that $80 to pay only once (as opposed to 1Password’s $60 per year for a shared plan), but $80 is steep to jump in on a whim.

Sorry about that. 😕

Apps Tips

1. I’ve got some time, I’ll write up a few of those blog posts on the back burner!
2. [Starts writing and then — bum bum bum — hits a small speed bump in the workflow] I bet I could write a script to make that better real quick.
3. Oh, that was a clever solution! I should share it real quick.
4. Well, in order to use it, you really have to do some customization. I’ll just write out the instructions in a blog post real quick.
5. Oh, but what if you used a shortcut to create the script itself?! I’ll just make that super quick.
6. Hmm…I’ve actually already made a shortcut like this before. Maybe I should just combine them into one real quick — it’ll be more useful to people that way.
7. Shoot, I never moved that shortcut over to my site’s library. I guess I should update it and get it on my site while I’m in here so that it’s all done. Real quick?
8. This little thing is turning into a whole thing. It’s kind of funny how these projects always seem to spiral out of control. It would actually make a pretty funny blog post.
9. [Writes, edits, and publishes this very blog post.]
10. Haha, that was great! Now, uh, what was I doing?

Update: 11. Literally reads through this very blog post to follow the breadcrumbs back and figure out that I left off with… Ah yes, including the newly updated shortcut in the blog post about the script I wrote so that can be published and I can, maybe, if there’s still time tonight, write one of the many blog posts on my to-write list. 😅

Blogging