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Jim Brunner: State Attorney General Bob Ferguson said he will file a federal lawsuit Monday seeking to invalidate key provisions of President Trump’s executive order temporarily barring all refugees and immigration by citizens of seven majority Muslim countries. I’ve been particularly proud of how Washington State politicians are reacting to Trump. From the Governor, to…
Jim Brunner:
State Attorney General Bob Ferguson said he will file a federal lawsuit Monday seeking to invalidate key provisions of President Trump’s executive order temporarily barring all refugees and immigration by citizens of seven majority Muslim countries.
I’ve been particularly proud of how Washington State politicians are reacting to Trump. From the Governor, to the Seattle Mayor and now the AG.
Philip Bump: My colleague Aaron Blake has a running tally of where Republican members of Congress stand on the most immediately controversial of those issues: the immigration travel ban. We’re going to take that a step further. Using the Sunlight Foundation’s tool to identify legislators by Zip codes, we’re detailing where the people who represent…
Philip Bump:
My colleague Aaron Blake has a running tally of where Republican members of Congress stand on the most immediately controversial of those issues: the immigration travel ban. We’re going to take that a step further. Using the Sunlight Foundation’s tool to identify legislators by Zip codes, we’re detailing where the people who represent you have stood on the vote to limit Obamacare (part of a budget bill passed in mid-January) and Cabinet picks (if in the Senate). On top of that, we’ve rolled in Blake’s list of who is where on the immigration ban.
Fantastic.
Managers, why aren’t you using an iPad Pro already?
I wrote this one a few weeks ago, and this is the first week I didn’t have anything else to write about, enjoy it.
## Executive iPad
This is one of those posts I have had on my list to write from the moment I decided to write weekly iPad Pro articles. My idea has always been that if you are an executive, or a manager in general, the only level of computer you need is an iPad (or [for some](https://anxiousrobot.net/the-iphone-7-plus-is-my-only-computer-489947cc126c#.q9aqjwre6), an iPhone).
I allude to this idea often in my posts, and it rubs a certain subset of people the wrong way. It’s the same group who thinks that “people like me” only write for a blog, or only administer a simple website. There are a couple of things I can say here: I *am* a writer for a blog, but that’s a hobby more than it is a job. Day to day, I’m the COO of MartianCraft — which is how I know the iPad Pro works fantastically well for managers, because it is all *I* use.
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Aaron Bycoffe: The Trump score is a simple percentage showing how often a senator or representative supports Trump’s positions. To calculate it, we add the member’s “yes” votes on bills that Trump supported and his or her “no” votes on bills that Trump opposed and then divide that by the total number of bills the…
Aaron Bycoffe:
The Trump score is a simple percentage showing how often a senator or representative supports Trump’s positions. To calculate it, we add the member’s “yes” votes on bills that Trump supported and his or her “no” votes on bills that Trump opposed and then divide that by the total number of bills the member has voted on for which we know Trump’s position.
One way to get politicians to act is to not reelect those who stand idly by — this Trump Score metric is a great way to hold their feet to the fire.
One thing people seem to have missed is that “make American great again” doesn’t mean the same thing to Trump as it does to literally anyone else in the world. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
One thing people seem to have missed is that “make American great again” doesn’t mean the same thing to Trump as it does to literally anyone else in the world. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Michael Nutter: We see all of these purposely hurtful, distracting and egomaniacal tactics for what they are — publicly available literature would indicate that you may apparently be displaying signs of malignant narcissism and narcissistic leadership . Apparently?
Michael Nutter:
We see all of these purposely hurtful, distracting and egomaniacal tactics for what they are — publicly available literature would indicate that you may apparently be displaying signs of malignant narcissism and narcissistic leadership .
Apparently?
This is terrifying. And no, it’s not talking about removing power from fuckface.
This is terrifying. And no, it’s not talking about removing power from fuckface.
Quick note about a great app.
It has been quite some time since I last tested Textastic, but it popped back up on my radar this past week as I needed a specific feature I had heard the app possessed. Specifically the ability of Textastic to open a document from another app, edit and save back to that location without actually having to import it to the app.
This isn’t the crazy Silicon Valley prepped post everyone has been sharing, no this is a far more realistic take on the matter. Michael McGrath for GQ on his Bug-Out-Bag: My BOB organizes my anxiety; it gives shape and focus to my dread. It reminds me not to take things for granted, and underlines the…
This isn’t the crazy Silicon Valley prepped post everyone has been sharing, no this is a far more realistic take on the matter. Michael McGrath for GQ on his Bug-Out-Bag:
My BOB organizes my anxiety; it gives shape and focus to my dread. It reminds me not to take things for granted, and underlines the difference between necessities and luxuries.
Humorous post all around.
Jamelle Bouie: This isn’t just cause for schadenfreude; it is an important revelation: constant, high-profile criticism works. Protest works. Yep, you should see my two year old freak the fuck out when I just keep telling her “no”.
Jamelle Bouie:
This isn’t just cause for schadenfreude; it is an important revelation: constant, high-profile criticism works. Protest works.
Yep, you should see my two year old freak the fuck out when I just keep telling her “no”.
My love note to the future of OmniOutliner.
Yesterday I read The Omni Group’s look back at 2016 and look forward at 2017 plans. OmniOutliner is well featured in that post, much to my delight. OmniOutliner is one of my favorite apps for the Mac and something I truly love.
OmniOutliner on iOS, though, has always been hit and miss for me. It’s easily — and I have been looking — the best outlining app you can get for iOS right now, but it feels like it is stuck in the past. The entire document picker is tedious at best to use. With thumbnails for each file, and what good does that do when it is an outline, and no way to search it feels old and doesn’t scale well for someone like me who has hundreds of files.
Oh, the frustration is real.
Here’s how my Monday went at “the office”:
The post to Slack was after a trying for an hour to print a sheet of labels from a CSV file I had. No joke, I couldn’t do it. I downloaded a ton of apps, I even tried web services. I went to Screens to try and create a PDF file on the remote Mac mini, but would have had to install way too much software.
Ken Case: One of the ways in which we can do that is to improve the way we interact with the apps to have a more efficient user experience. For example, we can make better use of iPad Pro’s larger screen by replacing some of the popovers in our interface with slide-in panels on the…
Ken Case:
One of the ways in which we can do that is to improve the way we interact with the apps to have a more efficient user experience. For example, we can make better use of iPad Pro’s larger screen by replacing some of the popovers in our interface with slide-in panels on the left and right (as in the screenshot above), so you don’t have to keep opening and closing them every time you want to use them. (This will debut later this year in OmniGraffle 3 and OmniOutliner 3 for iOS.)
I am so looking forward to OmniOutliner 3, I think OmniOutliner is the best product The Omni Group makes. It is also, by far the best outlining app on iOS.
But it has quite a way it can go.
Marius Masalar on OmniFocus users: The second group of people manage their tasks like monks manage their religion. Completing tasks is almost an unhappy occurence for them, because the more they get done, the less they have to tag, file, order, annotate, schedule, and otherwise micromanage. As far as I can tell, this second group…
Marius Masalar on OmniFocus users:
The second group of people manage their tasks like monks manage their religion. Completing tasks is almost an unhappy occurence for them, because the more they get done, the less they have to tag, file, order, annotate, schedule, and otherwise micromanage.
As far as I can tell, this second group are who OmniFocus works best for.
Spot on.
Supremely comfortable pants.
These pants were launched on Kickstarter as “the best hot weather travel pants” you can wear and they have all sorts of “travel features” to boot. I wanted them for the look, I have a pair of light gray jeans that I love to wear in the summer, so I thought I would pick these up to replace those pants.
The pants are a blend with a cotton and a bunch of other things with a goal of making them durable, comfortable, breathable and all the other things you hear about travel focused pants. I’ve had these pants long enough now that I can speak a little more to how they feel to wear.
I really want that Westworld tablet/phone thing. Also some follow up on Workflow.
## Some F/U
In the [last iPad Report](https://brooksreview.net/2017/01/ipad-report-011617/), I talked about building a small app within [Workflow](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workflow-powerful-automation/id915249334?mt=8&uo=4&at=1l3v36d). One of the issues I cited was the inability to pull from something like a `csv` for my lists, and instead needing to build the list again inside Workflow. As I feared, I was wrong and this can be done, it’s just that — like with most things Workflow — it’s rather opaque. (Workflow needs someone working there full time explaining how to build things, they would double their sales.)
Ari Weinstein (co-founder of Workflow) reached out to me on Twitter to tell me just how to do it. He provided [this sample Workflow](https://twitter.com/AriX/status/821074770141642752). The Workflow pulls from iCloud Drive and then parses the text file as a list (with new items being on their own line). This should be able to work with a `csv` too, but I’ve modded my `csv` too much to test, but I did try with a text file and it was magic.
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Protecting your privacy with full time VPN, and a massive amount of annoyances.
I watched the Snowden movie a little while back now, and after watching it I had that paranoid itch. Being iOS only there is very little I can do to make my systems more private and it seemed that the one gaping hole was my web connection itself. Which spurred me to think about getting a VPN service to run full time while I used my devices, even when I am on my home network. Both to encrypt my data streams, but also to better anonymize the web traffic.
So for the past few weeks I have been testing through three different setups:
PIA was the only one new to me, but it gets very high marks for quality, speed, and privacy — so I figured I better test it. My server encrypts the traffic, but does nothing about anonymizing it — in other words instead of coming from my device, it’s coming from a server I clearly own. Cloak is one of the easiest systems to use, works well, and while not being privacy minded, does what I label a “solid job” with it.
Staying informed is now becoming a job.
A large part of my morning routine, as it likely is for most of you, is to catch up on the news I might have missed the night before. A few years ago this felt like a much simpler task: some RSS, some Twitter, done. I felt well informed using just a few tools and getting news which was highly tailored to me, or what I thought mattered to me.
Fast forward to 2017, and my routine has changed greatly. I can’t use Twitter for news — hell I can hardly stand to read it. Twitter is a cesspool of bullshit, attention grabbing links, and it’s not where you get quality news — rather Twitter is where you get the same bullshit you would see on cable news.
Let’s talk about scripting on iOS.
## Building an iOS Workflow App
One thing I used to do a lot on my Mac was to build small apps inside Keyboard Maestro which would help me accomplish really tedious shit. That’s something which is considerably harder to do on iOS — requiring you either use [Pythonista](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pythonista-3/id1085978097?mt=8&uo=4&at=1l3v36d), and thus learn Python, or use [Workflow](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workflow-powerful-automation/id915249334?mt=8&uo=4&at=1l3v36d) and deal with a clunky UI and a limited tool set.
*I’m not bitter, I’m just disappointed.*
Still, I wanted to build one of these little apps this past week — both to see if I could actually build it, and secondly to help me out with a fun little idea I had. The idea was very simple: I have three different lists of things and I want to be given a random items off of the specified list. Nothing earth shattering, and something I could easily do on my Mac.
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Kevin Kortum follows up on his tweets to me showing how to reprogram the MiniVan: I apparently wasn’t the only person as Ben Brooks spoke about his troubles and I offered some assistance knowing how frustrating it can be if you just misunderstand a single step in what is provided by The Van Keyboards programming…
Kevin Kortum follows up on his tweets to me showing how to reprogram the MiniVan:
I apparently wasn’t the only person as Ben Brooks spoke about his troubles and I offered some assistance knowing how frustrating it can be if you just misunderstand a single step in what is provided by The Van Keyboards programming guide. I decided to put something together that goes into a little more detail than those tweets so hopefully anyone can do it without too much trouble.
Fantastic. As a buddy said to me on Twitter, setting up your computer to reprogram takes more time than anything else. One thing I would add, is that on the MiniVan keyboard hex making tool, you’ll need to right click the keys to change them around. There’s some special options there which I wasn’t aware of, and caused me a lot of frustration.