kaolinite

It’s interesting to me how quickly I’ve soured on the concept of open banking, which on paper sounds fantastic and originally I was very much in favour of. And which I’ve used personally to make it easier to extract my own data for my own use.

However more often than not now I’m seeing it used for really invasive applications. Such as when I rented my most recent apartment and they asked to use open banking to verify our finances, which as far as I know would have given them access to every single transaction going back a decade or so. The agent was confused as to why I wouldn’t go ahead with it and ultimately let us opt out, but I do worry that at some point I won’t have much choice but to accept.

I’ve also seen credit scoring companies that suggest you’ll get a better credit score if you use open banking to hand over your transactions. I have no need to use that but I suspect others who are desperate to increase their chances of getting a mortgage, etc, won’t have much of a choice.

“Everything old is new again”.

Not always inaccurate, but often used to overlook nuance.

My partner and I had been working with a personal trainer up until the lockdown hit and had sold most of our exercise equipment before we moved to London, so without the gym we were a bit stuck. Thankfully we did have a rowing machine and some dumbbells so have been using those with an app called FitBod. You enter the equipment you have and it builds a workout based on that. It also has body weight exercises too. Once we’re out of lockdown I suspect we’ll skip the personal trainer and keep using FitBod, just at the gym instead.

Yes, the company I’m contracting at currently has done exactly this. We’ve kept Slack around for calls and for monitoring alerts, but other than that it’s all in Basecamp.

It has made an incredible difference. As a remote worker, I always felt stressed if I didn’t respond to a message straight away as it might appear as if I’m slacking off. With Basecamp, a delay is expected, so I finish my tasks before taking a look through my Basecamp notifications. I’m vastly more productive and far less stressed.

In addition, the proposals and comments on Basecamp are in far more detail and conversation is typically better thought out.

Could not recommend it enough.

Killer feature for me is being able to cmd+click on file paths in the terminal to open them. I use this constantly. There are plenty of other features too such as being able to reopen a tab you closed accidentally.

Creating a checklist for my morning routine has been such a great time-saver and anxiety-reducer for me. I have everything on there, even the most obvious items such as "eat breakfast", and all I need to do once I wake up is tick things off from start to finish. I haven't forgotten to take my umbrella or laptop charger since, and it's relieving knowing that - because I've checked everything off - there's nothing left for me to do. No more worrying about having forgotten something.

Not saying that these are valid reasons however two that spring to mind are thickness (USB-C is fairly significantly thicker) and elegance (one could argue that Lightning is a more beautiful and slightly more pleasant to use connector).

In addition, Apple controls Lightning completely so when you buy an accessory that uses Lightning, as long as it isn't counterfeit, it has been tested by Apple and is guaranteed to work. They can't guarantee that with USB-C.

That said, it's an awkward situation. Overall I'd like USB-C on my phone however if they were going to do it, surely it would have been with the iPhone 7. It wouldn't be great if they announced it with the 7S after people had gone out and bought Lightning headphones.

I'm on mobile so not sure if anyone else has pointed this out but Apple mentioned in the keynote that the escape key is still present when using the terminal. There is also a way to bring up the full row of function keys.

Personally I think this is the great advantage of the touch bar. The only app that I personally use the Esc key in has it available, but all other apps use the space for more appropriate shortcuts. Plus it can be customised too (finally I can add a screenshot button!), although not per app yet, as far as I can tell.

Interestingly I was getting occasional black screens (i.e. the entire screen, status bar and all) in Safari on iOS 10. Not seen that on any other site before.

I used to use this excuse to justify ridiculous levels of spending. My time is valuable, etc. It's definitely true for some people but probably not most and certainly not me. Unless you actually are earning more (and saving it too, not just spending it) as a result of this mindset, I'd recommend reconsidering.

Rails doesn't execute the query until you actually use it in some way, by which point it knows you've added a limit clause.