A note for any macOS n00bs out there getting M1s: the first rule of having crazy-good battery life on a MacBook is to use Safari. Chrome and Firefox eat battery (and memory, and CPU cycles) like it's free. If you've not used Safari before, you may not realize how bad they are because you haven't seen an example of what "good" looks like. They're quite bad. The weak extension ecosystem kinda sucks, but you're stuck with it unless you like losing 2+ hours of battery life per day (believe it or not, it used to be worse) just for having FF or Chrome open in the background, instead of Safari. Perhaps one glorious day anyone whatsoever making any major software product will care as muh about power & resource use as Apple does. That day is not today.
Do this especially since you're probably not gonna be able to avoid using at least a couple resource-hog Electron apps, so you need to save your battery for them.
Also: Apple's first-party "apps" in general are pretty great. Preview is a religious experience. Terminal.app is one of the best GUI terminal emulators on any platform. Give them a shot if you're not used to bundled software being much good.
The Text/Shapes/Charts styling that make Keynote slides so consistently nice is also available with the same UI in Numbers (Excel) and Pages (Word).
With the ability to have multiple tables next to and around Keynote styled diagrams and notes on a single, giant zoomable sheet-canvas with all the usual spreadsheet functionality, Numbers quickly replaced my personal Excel usage.
Oh yeah, I love the "office suite". It reminds me of when I ran Linux and used some of the lighter, alternative office-type options (OpenOffice was so damn heavy and not all that pleasant to use) like Gnumeric, Abiword, et c., except... well, much better in almost every way. But I don't have to interop with MS Office very often so I'm not sure if they're much good at that. Certainly they beat the hell out of using resource-hog Google Docs tabs, though, plus they're way more pleasant (far less laggy, for one thing).
Notes is nice. I wish it had a 1st-party export solution. Markdown as an option for formatting would be good but it's not a deal-breaker. Being able to drag all kinds of crap, including entire PDFs(!) into Notes and have it Just Work is pretty great.
Preview is so, so good. Thanks to it, macOS is the only platform I've ever used where I don't hesitate even a second to open a PDF. Plus it's great at so many other things.
That they last so long (and, consequently, have high resale value even when they're several years old) is part of why Apple can charge so much in the first place. The resale-value thing also helps people justify those 2-3 year replacement cycles.
I have to disable most of the Touch Bar (set it not to change with context, and replace most of it with a blank "spacer") to make it usable. I tend to just barely brush it when striking number keys during normal typing (which happens a lot for parens and such when programming—and just now, in fact) which makes it do crazy stuff like open iTunes (because I "pressed" the media play button). Real buttons don't do that because you have to push down on them to activate them, not ever-so-slightly brush the bottom edge, which is why I'd never noticed, in my 25ish years of touch-typing, that I did that, until I used a TouchBar MacBook.
I also have to disable force-touch (or whatever it's called on there) on the trackpad, for models that have that, or else my drag-&-drop success rate is reduced from about 100% to more like 30%. Took me quite a while to figure out why that was happening. Luckily I have no clue why I'd want that feature in the first place, so I don't miss it. I don't have any kind of motor-function disorder, I just can't drag-&-drop while maintaining perfectly even pressure, I guess.
Agreed that iOS7 was a big UX downgrade. It went from being the only OS I'd be halfway-comfortable turning older tech-illiterate relatives loose on, to yet another OS that would leave them confused and lost much of the time. Discoverability and intuitiveness plummeted with 7.
Once you're above the grade of "cheese" that I'd suppose Europeans wouldn't recognize as such at all, even our low-end actual cheese in the US is incredibly expensive compared to (Western, at least, IDK about the rest) Europe. Not sure why.
1) physical kill switch for camera (as in, it breaks the power or data connection to it, physically) or at least a physical cover.
2) physical kill switch for the microphone
These are very much not "nerd" concerns, either. I see a lot of non-techies with stickers over their laptop cameras.
[EDIT] teachers in particular spread the "put a sticker over the camera" practice, in my experience, both before and during the pandemic. The last thing they need is to be responding to some student message late at night and accidentally snap a picture or start a video chat. That could easily be career-ending, and they wisely don't trust software safeguards to prevent that. Yet they do want the camera, sometimes. Not having a kill-switch or cover built in sucks.
In addition to a kill switch, it would be great to have a switch that affects 1) the physical device 2) the OS switch and 3) the Teams/Zoom/Webex switch.
Regularly we have people in meetings forgetting one of those switches (the physical switch being on the headphones) and trying to talk without being heard.
This is great -- most people skip over the last use case. But it seems like very useful to have.
It seems that option #1 is mainly used because it is easy, and we might not fully trust #2 and #3? (Not because of evil doing, but because of bugs, and unlikely case of hacks).
If you're on MacOS, open 'Audio MIDI Setup' and look at 'Built-in Microphone'. You can tick the 'Mute' box next to 'Master' and your microphone is now muted independently of Teams, WebEx, or whatever.
It's not a physical switch, but it's a good second safeguard. Teams is even polite enough to tell remind you that you're muted because it can detect this.
A slightly folded post-it note also works well as a camera cover that's easy to remove and easy to replace if you lose it. I also find that when I'm about to join a call and my video's dark pink (rather than black), it's a good reminder I have my 'shutter' in place and haven't noticed, despite it being physically in front of my face.
People's threat model isn't always some malicious hacker with access to their machines. The vast majority of the time people simply want to be sure that the video conferencing software they deliberately installed on their non-compromised machine isn't accidentally transmitting the sound of them eating lunch to the call they deliberately joined. I'm not sure pushing back on tips about how they can reasonably accomplish that because "software solutions can be hacked!" is particularly helpful.
Because it seems every day I read about some software hack draining away all the information on a "secure" computer. "Secure" software is a fantasy. Hardware switches are secure.
As much as I'd still like a physical mic kill-switch on MacBooks (if any company has its interests aligned with privacy-signaling, it's Apple), this is a very useful tip, thanks for sharing!
I want a mechanical microphone switch too. Being seen can be embarrassing but being caught saying something can end your career instantly. See that school board that all had to resign after they were caught badmouthing parents.
Just because something will end your career if overheard doesn't mean that it was something bad. Think of a lawyer on a long zoom call. What if they answer a client call and that conversation is pickup up by the zoom computer? Or what if someone in my office asks for login/account info and that conversation gets pickup by zoom? Or a system administrator sitting through a long zoom meeting about pension plans who accidentally has a side conversation about security issues on the production server. These are everyday acceptable office conversations that, if broadcast to zoom accidentally, can end a career far faster than looking unkempt on a webcam.
Sending a video feed that you don't want to send is not okay, even if it doesn't put you out of a job. The excessive severity is just exacerbating something that would be a problem anyway.
Sometimes people vent. While I am not aware of that particular situation, bitching to your friends about some situation is different than live broadcast
I don't know how a mechanical microphone switch would have helped in that case.
That seemed to be a UX issue. The board was on a call with other members, and didn't realize that there was another participant. Some news stories just called it a "hot mic" issue because it is easy to glance and get an idea of what the story is about, but that's not exactly what happened.
Although this might not be simple enough for typical users a (On)-Off-On toggle switch (momentary in one direction, latching in the other) would be perfect for this.
Not sure what incident you're referring to, but school board is an elected position. Politicians, of all people, should not expect job security and need to be transparent and accountable to the voting public. They don't deserve privacy at all, at least not in their professional capacity. I like privacy, sure, but I achieve that by not running for public office.
How people bond with their friends is by sharing confidences which builds trust between them.
They are not confidences if saying them publicly won't come back and bite you.
> everybody
I didn't say everybody, you don't need to turn it into an absolute to make your point.
I heard about an entertainer for kids who had a radio show back in the day. At the end of one session, he thought the mike had been turned off. But it was still hot, and he groused to the studio "That ought to hold the little bastards for a while."
The goalposts of what is considered career ending is always moving. Something you say today could not be career ending, but it could be career ending when somebody digs up dirt on you in 10 years.
Just look at the whole wokeness movement which has taken root in the last few years and compare what was acceptable to say in 2010 vs what is acceptable to say in 2020.
My work Laptop is an older ThinkPad and it has a physical sliding camera cover as well as the F4 key which functions as an all purpose mute button for the microphone. The F4 key even lights up when enabled. So these options definitely exist, to some degree.
One issue is that laymen know enough to not trust that switches are true kill switches, but don't generally have the skill set necessary to verify for themselves what their hardware has in that regard.
A piece of tape is a very low technical skill system that you know will cut off a video feed.
Transparent casing with the wires running to a slightly to large mechanical toggle switch that switches all wires. Then it looks like someone went out of his way getting it right.
Lots of companies distribute their employees laptops with a little plastic slider to shutter the camera, so it's further than not-just-nerds - corporate IT decisionmakers are recognizing the need too.
Trouble is, lots of laptops are subtly (or not so subtly) damaged over time by extra stuff being closed in the lid. Apple laptops, notably, but plenty of others too. It'd be much better for it to be built-in. Covers also ruin the (absolutely wonderful and hard to do without, once you're used to it) True Tone feature on Apple laptops, so they'd need some kind of secondary ultra-low-res never-exposed-as-a-real-camera color-temp sensor to properly support either built-in or add-on camera covers or kill-switches while still letting that work.
(I'm basically agreeing and elaborating, not correcting you, since your point isn't that that's a great solution, but that it's more proof that more than just security geeks and computer nerds consider this a problem)
In fact last year when it was okay to meet your benefits providers in person, one of them handed out plastic stick on webcam covers you could slide back and forth with their logo on it.
These items are so trivial and so obviously cause consumers angst by being missing that I can only presume the near universal lack of them is an intentional ploy to train people to be used to being on camera so that various additional invasive techno-gadgets can be introduced over time. A "market" would have produced "choice" but we have to stick with tape.
It was extremely obvious what they were doing when Google Glass was released without even a glowing video indicator.
The HP Spectre x360 line has had a physical kill switch for the camera for the last 3 generations. It's a slider on the right side of the laptop. The new gen ones also come with a system wide mute button although I believe that is software only.
similarly, the gentlest grade of painter’s masking tape avoids sticky residue too. electrician’s tape isn’t bad either (the black tape is also less conspicuous).
i believe all tape does some version of this eventually. i wasn't thinking it would be left on permanently, but possibly on the order of months before being replaced. in any case, something like scotch delicate surface tape[0] was what i had in mind when posting my prior comment.
The norm used to be never to post personal info online. Yes, some things could still be found out, and there were still attack vectors, but typing your real name in a web form, except maybe (and only fairly late in the time period I'm talking about) to pay with a CC on a well-known site? LOL no. Posting photos of yourself, and with your name and maybe even a location attached? Madness! Are you nuts!?
I'm convinced Zuckerberg's infamous "dumb fucks" comment was made in a state of puzzlement that all these n00bs just had no idea they shouldn't be giving him that info, and indeed, the dawn of Facebook and all the people it added to the set of folks posting information online ended the previous "no-one knows you're a dog" set of norms of the Web.
Now there's money tied up in it, so of course people insist they must be able to post all kinds of things under their real names so they can market themselves. Never mind that it remains a terrible idea.
This is the source of conflict, I think, between people who want more real names online and those who want none. The former are the new folks who think posting personal info online is normal, or even necessary (see again: personal brand-building and marketing) and believe that we need to be able to ID everyone to prevent abuse (i.e. be able to find abusers to punish them), and the latter are the old-school Web users (post-Eternal-September, pre-Facebook) who don't get why all these idiots are making themselves easy to abuse in the first place, who see more anonymity as the obvious cure.
> This is the source of conflict, I think, between people who want more real names online and those who want none.
I think there is a space for both, tbh. There is always business based on reputation, and for that you need to self-identify. I used to be a professional gigging musician, and there was absolutely no way to do that while remaining anonymous online, nor would I want to.
The difference being, I suppose, was business vs personal, but personal brand was a thing long before the internet (I assume).
I've started searching for "ethnic" recipes in their home languages, because the English-language ones are often so badly under-spiced that the called-for amounts aren't even useful as a rough estimate (for e.g. shopping or judging whether you have enough on-hand to make the dish), and sometimes are practically a completely different dish than the real thing. (if the dish has an English-language Wikipedia entry, clicking the link on that page for the dish's page in its native language is a great way to find the right thing to search for, and then Google Translate usually does an OK job on the recipe itself)
A lot of writing rules are of the "follow it until you know how and when to break it" variety. That way if you never learn how to break them correctly, your writing is still a lot better than it was. It's no surprise that studies of writing already known to be good will find much rule-breaking, as one is not surprised to find race cars on a race track moving faster than we'd want any car to, ordinarily.
> Prescriptivists never seem to add that clarifying nuance to their advice though.
They often do, in my experience. AFAIK it hasn't been common to attempt any kind of real, strict prescriptivism in English since the middle of last century (yes, I'm sure a few examples exist). These days it's mostly "write like this—until you know better" or "avoid X if your audience is Y, for such-and-such reason".
Do this especially since you're probably not gonna be able to avoid using at least a couple resource-hog Electron apps, so you need to save your battery for them.
Also: Apple's first-party "apps" in general are pretty great. Preview is a religious experience. Terminal.app is one of the best GUI terminal emulators on any platform. Give them a shot if you're not used to bundled software being much good.