good app for finding files/folders, been using it for years
I’d like to change the Finder text font size system wide. “Use as defaults” doesn’t seem to work as I thought it might. Anyone know how to do this?
I’ve had a general negative attitude towards gamification for two reasons. First, I think that it’s often done as a way of trying to manipulate people, as opposed to trying to enable people to achieve their own goals. I think that’s particularly common in stuff targeted at children. Second, I think it’s often really badly done - basically amounting to just getting a bunch of merit badges or gold stars for doing stuff someone wants you to do.
I think you can take a different perspective though. Like consider Apple Watch rings. Those are kind of a gamification thing. But part of what they do is make progress more perceptible. You can’t really see exercise progress from a single session, typically, in terms of getting strong or faster or more flexible or whatever. It takes longer than that. But you can see tangible progress on your rings. So the rings break what could be a very long term big project down into goals where you can see if you’ve achieved or not achieved what you set out to do every day. So I think there is some value there.
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good changes imho
Plex is a digital media organizer/streaming tool that is pretty popular but somehow doesn’t natively support sped-up video playback (you can use video speed up tools in the browser, but you can’t speed stuff up in e.g. their iOS app).
I found a post on their discourse forum requesting this feature. The post is over 7 years old and has almost 300 posts, including some recent ones…
Wonder what’s going on there…
Nifty macOS keyboard shortcut to hide/unhide hidden directories: cmd-shift-period
Footnote in Popper’s “On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance” in Conjectures and Refutations:
I appreciated the part that I have I highlighted. Noting that something isn’t in a particular edition (that people might want to look for it in if they don’t have the other edition handy) is quite optional for a citation, but also quite nice.
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People complain about their devices becoming obsolete, planned obsolescence, and so on.
But I’ve also seen complaints that the new iPad Pros aren’t worth it cuz there’s no software that takes advantage of the computing power…which basically means that people’s current (old) iPads are fine for the software that exists and not obsolete.
I’m pretty confident some people complain about both things…
go to macOS Notes/Preferences and slide Default text size TO THE RIGHT!
chrome extension tells u if u can borrow a book at your local library when you’re browsing it on amazon, audible etc
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand, Chapter 8 (emphasis added, italics in original):
All knowledge is processed knowledge—whether on the sensory, perceptual or conceptual level.
I think that her inclusion of knowledge on the “sensory” and “perceptual” levels indicates that Rand is making a very broad/sweeping statement here.
An “unprocessed” knowledge would be a knowledge acquired without means of cognition. Consciousness (as I said in the first sentence of this work) is not a passive state, but an active process. And more: the satisfaction of every need of a living organism requires an act of processing by that organism, be it the need of air, of food or of knowledge.
Consciousness is active.
Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper, revised edition, Appendix 1, Section II (page 342 in my copy):
In science it is observation rather than perception which plays the decisive part. But observation is a process in which we play an intensely active part. An observation is a perception, but one which is planned and prepared. We do not ‘have’ an observation [as we may ‘have’ a sense experience] but we ‘make’ an observation. [A navigator even ‘works’ an observation.] An observation is always preceded by a particular interest, a question, or a problem—in short, by something theoretical.
Rand says consciousness is active. Popper says observation is active.
Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper, Chapter 2, Section 18 (pages 71-72) (italics in original):
Because all our dispositions are in some sense adjustments to invariant or slowly changing environmental conditions, they can be described as theory-impregnated, assuming a sufficiently wide sense of the term ‘theory’. What I have in mind is that there is no observation which is not related to a set of typical situations—regularities—between which it tries to find a decision. and I think we can assert even more: there is no sense organ in which anticipatory theories are not genetically incorporated. The eye of a cat reacts in distinct ways to a number of typical situations for which there are mechanisms prepared and built into its structure: these correspond to the biologically most important situations between which it has to distinguish. Thus the disposition to distinguish between these situations is built into the sense organ, and with it the theory that these, and only these, are the relevant situations for whose distinction the eye is to be used.
Rand says “All knowledge is processed knowledge—whether on the sensory, perceptual or conceptual level.” Popper says all our observations and even our sense organs have some kind of theory behind them. The theory is what’s doing the processing part - if we’re trying to observe a shooting star, we might complete ignore/not notice other things (like a fly buzzing around), cuz they are not relevant to our theory. And when we use our eyes, we can’t see certain wavelengths (without using technological tools), cuz our eyes have a kind of “theory” which disregards those wavelengths as irrelevant.
I agree with what I think your point is: that Rand and Popper are in agreement on this.
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Ya that was my point. I was actually gonna give that post its own thread, and put my point in the title, but then decided to post it here, and thus lost some important information lol. Whoops!
I discovered that the Infuse app, which can connect to Plex, does 2x playback. Infuse • Video Player on the App Store
I started reading a bit of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. She’s strongly opinionated and goes against what she says is the conventional wisdom in her field in various ways. I appreciate that, though I don’t think I agree with her about everything (though I think she often has some kind of point).
Some stuff I like so far:
- She thinks you should have high standards and “aim for perfection”.
- She thinks there are general principles of good tidying up that broadly work and don’t depend on variables like someone’s personality type.
- She thinks that major progress is possible given the rigorous application of pretty simple steps.
I don’t like that she seems to be against gradual progress. This attitude seems to be based on the fact that when people try to make gradual progress, they try to do so at an insufficient rate. For example, they may try to throw out like, 1 thing a day, when they buy 3 new things and have thousands to organize and potentially discard. So their cleaning up efforts don’t make an appreciable difference. Then they “run out of steam” and give up the project, and never get a sense of the concrete difference cleaning up could make. So Kondo advises doing a major special event type cleaning to get started where you throw out hella stuff.
She talks about trying gradualist method here:
“Don’t aim for perfection. Start off slowly and discard just one item a day.” What lovely words to ease the hearts of those who lack confidence in their ability to tidy. I came across this advice when I was devouring every book about tidying that had ever been published in Japan, and I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. The momentum sparked by my epiphany concerning the power of tidying was beginning to wear off, and I was starting to feel jaded by the lack of solid results. These words seemed to make sense. It seems daunting to aim for perfection from the beginning. Besides, perfection is supposedly unattainable. By discarding one thing a day, I could get rid of 365 things by the end of the year.
Convinced that I had discovered a very practical method, I immediately followed the book’s instructions. I opened my closet in the morning wondering what to dispose of that day. Seeing a T-shirt that I no longer wore, I put it in the garbage bag. Before going to bed the next night, I opened my desk drawer and discovered a notebook that seemed too childish for me. I put it in the bag. Noticing a memo pad in the same drawer, I thought to myself, “Oh, I don’t need that anymore,” but as I reached out to pick it up, I paused at a new thought. “I can save that to discard tomorrow.” And I waited until the next morning to throw it away. The day after that, I forgot completely, so I got rid of two items on the following day.
To be honest, I did not last two weeks. I am not the type of person who likes to plug away at something, one step at a time. For people like me, who do their assignments on the very last day right before the deadline, this approach just doesn’t work. Besides, casting off one object a day did not compensate for the fact that when I shop, I buy several items at one time. In the end, the pace at which I reduced could not keep up with the pace at which I acquired new things, and I was confronted with the discouraging fact that my space was still cluttered. It wasn’t long before I had completely forgotten to follow the rule of discarding one item per day.
So I can tell you from experience that you will never get your house in order if you only clean up half-heartedly. If, like me, you are not the diligent, persevering type, then I recommend aiming for perfection just once.
I think for gradual method to work, you need to make progress at a decent rate and actually follow through. 1 item a day strikes me as way too low if you have a cleaning/organization issue. But like 5 or 10 might be fine.
First impressions of these earbud tips is that they are a big upgrade for Airpods Pro:
The seal is better so better sound quality and noise cancellation. They also stay in my ears better while exercising or laying back (normal eartips start to feel like they’re gonna fall out if i am not upright).
Downsides are price + the fact that memory foam eartips disintegrate over time.
Kondo says discard first, then put stuff away. I think that makes sense - you don’t wanna waste time putting stuff away you might throw out.
She says it’s important to concretize your tidying goal in way more detail beyond “I want to live clutter-free”. She suggests going 3-5 questions “deep” in terms of asking yourself why you want stuff - e.g. maybe you want cleaner space because you want to have room to exercise. Okay why do you want to exercise? So you can look nicer? Okay why do you want to look nicer? Basically, figuring out the details of what you actually want in concrete, specific terms will help you achieve your goals. I agree.
She says her spark joy criteria for what to keep is based on the idea that (bold in original)
“we should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of.” That makes some amount of sense to me, but I’m not quite clear on how the question “Does this spark joy?” straightforwardly applies to e.g. a hammer.
She says to do one category at a time - e.g. clothes - instead of by room, cuz often people have the same stuff in two or more places and it’s important to get a big picture sense of how much of some category you have. Makes sense.
She says start with easy stuff, so NOT mementos (bold in original): “The best sequence is this: clothes first, then books, papers , komono (miscellany), and lastly, mementos.” Makes sense to me.
More comments on Marie Kondo stuff:
I think people often keep stuff cuz they bought it with some purpose in mind, and that purpose wasn’t quite fulfilled or realized, and they don’t want to admit they made a mistake. By clinging to the vague hope that the thing might be meaningfully useful in the future, they can evade thinking about their mistake, and about possible patterns of mistakes in their shopping habits. So some “hoarding” boils down to IRL physical consequences of evasion, basically.
The passage below is basically Marie Kondo trying to address this kind of issue by helping people find a way to be okay with letting an item go. She does this specifically by trying to say that it’s okay if an item doesn’t fulfill some grand purpose you bought it for - it still served some kinda purpose, you got something from it, can learn from it, and just move on and it’s fine.
When you come across something that’s hard to discard, consider carefully why you have that specific item in the first place. When did you get it and what meaning did it have for you then? Reassess the role it plays in your life. If, for example, you have some clothes that you bought but never wear, examine them one at a time. Where did you buy that particular outfit and why? If you bought it because you thought it looked cool in the shop, it has fulfilled the function of giving you a thrill when you bought it. Then why did you never wear it? Was it because you realized that it didn’t suit you when you tried it on at home? If so, and if you no longer buy clothes of the same style or color, it has fulfilled another important function—it has taught you what doesn’t suit you. In fact, that particular article of clothing has already completed its role in your life, and you are free to say, “Thank you for giving me joy when I bought you,” or “Thank you for teaching me what doesn’t suit me,” and let it go.
Every object has a different role to play. Not all clothes have come to you to be worn threadbare. It is the same with people. Not every person you meet in life will become a close friend or lover. Some you will find hard to get along with or impossible to like. But these people, too, teach you the precious lesson of who you do like, so that you will appreciate those special people even more.
When you come across something that you cannot part with, think carefully about its true purpose in your life. You’ll be surprised at how many of the things you possess have already fulfilled their role. By acknowledging their contribution and letting them go with gratitude, you will be able to truly put the things you own, and your life, in order. In the end, all that will remain are the things that you really treasure.
To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose . To get rid of what you no longer need is neither wasteful nor shameful. Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a closet or drawer that you have forgotten its existence? If things had feelings, they would certainly not be happy. Free them from the prison to which you have relegated them. Help them leave that deserted isle to which you have exiled them. Let them go, with gratitude. Not only you, but your things as well, will feel clear and refreshed when you are done tidying.