Here's something I never expected would happen. Apple says it plans to support RCS. Does this mean Apple is done with its dirty tricks in messaging and elsewhere? Of course not. It's a baby step in the right direction, though.
Don't get me wrong. I have a love-hate relationship with Apple. They build great products, but they also refuse to play nice with others, even admitting it's for their own selfish gain. As the article explains, software executive Craig Federighi once wrote in a private email that publishing iMessage on Android, let alone supporting an open standard, would “remove obstacle [sic] to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.”
“It doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right. Indeed, they tend to be particularly sure of it.”
In most music apps, I inevitably leave shuffle mode on for longer than I'd like. I might enable it when listening to a playlist. When I later listen to an album, I might get halfway through before realizing shuffle is still enabled and the songs are playing out of order.
This never seems to happen on Spotify, however. Spotify seems to automatically disable shuffle whenever it's no longer wanted. I don't know what heuristic Spotify uses to determine when shuffle should be disabled, and as a user, I don't really need to care. All I know is that shuffle never seems to be on when it shouldn't be.
“You can't deal logically with an illogical person.”
My dad developed this phrase after working in a psychiatric hospital, and it's always stuck with me. As usual, there’s no subtext here. I’m not trying to be mysterious or send someone a message. It's just something I think about often.
I subscribe to the daily Mutts comic by email. A recent message included a quote by Marc Bekoff which resembles something I wrote in Saying goodbye to Taggy.
I wrote the following:
All animals are conscious. All animals feel comfort and pain. In that way, we are equal.
Bekoff put it differently:
Although other animals may be different from us, this does not make them less than us.
I dreamed about Taggy last night. Taggy was a beloved cat who passed away recently. It feels wrong to call her a cat, really. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to call her a friend or a non-human person. In any case, I shared the longer story earlier.
I don't remember much about the dream, except that I was so relieved to see her again. I also remember other black cats approaching me, to my annoyance. I find it beautiful that, even in my dream, I was able to tell the real Taggy from the impostors.
Do we really connect with other souls in our dreams? I don't personally think we do. I would like to believe it, though. I'd like if Taggy had really been there with me, making her true self known.
It is my opinion that Windows, macOS, and other desktop operating systems should not allow users to save items to the desktop. Saving to the desktop is the equivalent of carelessly throwing papers on a desk. It also inhibits learning. Why use bookmarks, folders, or search when everything can just be thrown on the desktop?
Whatever convenience or advantages the ability offers, it's not worth the confusion and frustration it inevitably creates. As just one example, I know someone who has a half-broken monitor and who could replace it, except that a new monitor with a different resolution would cause the desktop icons to move, a price he's not willing to pay.
The flip side of this complaint is a tech tip: If you want to get better with digital file organization, make a commitment to stop saving files to the desktop.
The new blink-182 song Dance with Me is extremely catchy, but it can't really be added to playlists or played at the gym, for example, because of the sexual joke at the beginning of the track. I mean, the whole song is about sex—fair enough—and individual sensibilities do differ. Still, the spoken part is so jarring that I wouldn't want to play the song in polite company.
I've encountered this problem before, usually with bonus tracks that play after several minutes of silence. They can be great songs, but there's no great way to add them to playlists, and there's no way to add the first song without the silence and the bonus track. It would be trivial for an app to implement a technical solution to this problem: just let the user choose an offset of some number of seconds and apply that offset whenever the song is played from a playlist. However, it's not clear if that would be worth the added user interface complexity. Most people would never use the feature, and they might be confused if they saw a menu item for it somewhere. Perhaps the easiest solution would be for publishers to release alternate cuts more often. Let's get a version of Dance with Me without the joke. Let's get Maybe I'm Just Tired without the bonus track.