Eurobloat #0104 • December 2018
December: the Court that grades members on their constitutional homework, a eurozone budget shrunk to a rumour, and a 5 million euro plan to tell you what is true.
Eurobloat
2018
106 posts
Reflecting on the year 2018
Reflection on the year 2018, checking progress of the goals, and some numbers.
Journal
The Little Drummer Girl
The Little Drummer Girl is a British-American limited series. It aired on BBC One and AMC from 28 October 2018. Park Chan-wook directed it. The show adapts John le Carré's 1983 novel. Florence Pugh plays Charlie, a young English actress recruited by Israeli intelligence to infiltrate a Palestinian bombing network in the late 1970s.
TV Series
Eurobloat #0103 • November 2018
The month Brussels marked a century of peace by demanding its own army, told Rome how to write a budget, and reached for the upload filters and the cotton buds.
Eurobloat
Merry Christmas
Christmas calls me to remember the basics with fresh eyes. The birth of Jesus stands as evidence of divine love.
Christianity
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari steps back from the deep past and the far future to ask what we should focus on right now in a world of fake news, lost jobs and rising tribalism.
Books
Bundles and Packages
The article clarifies the distinction between bundles and packages on Apple platforms, often confused due to overlapping use cases.
Development
CharacterSet
The article introduces CharacterSet, a Foundation type in Swift for manipulating Unicode scalar values, distinct from Set<Character> despite its name, as it conforms to the SetAlgebra protocol rather than storing Character values directly.
Development
Privacy Roundup #0148 • November 2018
November 2018 brought a wave of huge breaches, from Marriott to the postal service, alongside the first GDPR fines and a global reckoning with Facebook.
Privacy
Monthly update #0343 • November 2018
Monthly update 343 • November 2018 • 2018-11-01 - 2018-11-30
Monthly Updates
SecKey
SecKey provides one time passwords to be used with the two factor authentication of Dropbox, Google, Facebook, GitHub, Proton Mail and many more.
Projects
Past Tense by Lee Child
Past Tense follows Reacher to his father’s New Hampshire hometown, uncovering family secrets, while two Canadians face a deadly trap in a rural motel.
Books
Eurobloat #0102 • October 2018
The month Brussels sent a sovereign budget back unread, told the kitchen to surrender its plastic straws, and demanded an audit of a private American company, all while the Brexit talks it claimed to want went precisely nowhere.
Eurobloat
Locale
Internationalisation (i18n) means building your app so it can support many regions and languages. Localisation (l10n) means actually translating and adapting it for a specific market.
Development
The User Experience of Chatbots
I absolutely hate chatbots! So much that I added a rule to Quiet to hide/block chatbots from websites.
Development
Useful macOS defaults: System UI Server
Handy defaults write commands for com.apple.systemuiserver, controlling the menu bar and system UI elements.
Mac
What is ctkd?
If you see ctkd running on your Mac, here is what this smart card and security key process does.
Mac
Monthly update #0342 • October 2018
Monthly update 342 • October 2018 • 2018-10-01 - 2018-10-31
Monthly Updates
Cowboy in Paris by Jul
Lucky Luke escorts the sculptor Bartholdi and the torch of the Statue of Liberty across America, then sails to Paris to bring the great lady home.
Books
It is time to leave the Facebook universe!
I left Facebook on 1 January 2012. I never used Instagram and stopped using WhatsApp on 30 April 2017. I have not missed them for a second. People often ask why I abandoned these platforms.
Essays
Privacy Roundup #0147 • October 2018
October 2018 was dominated by the Facebook and Google+ disclosures, a string of airline, hotel and government breaches, and a louder push for tough privacy law.
Privacy
FileManager
On Apple platforms, the FileManager class in the Foundation framework provides a robust abstraction for file system operations like creating, reading, moving, copying, and deleting files and directories, using paths or file URLs.
Development
Eurobloat #0101 • September 2018
The month Brussels voted to filter the internet, demanded terrorist posts vanish within the hour, put Hungary in detention and announced it would abolish the clocks. The hour of European sovereignty, apparently, belongs to everyone except the nations that make it up.
Eurobloat
What is touristd?
If you see touristd in Activity Monitor or in a firewall log, here is what this macOS process does.
Mac
DateComponents
The article introduces DateComponents, a versatile Foundation type in Swift for representing either a specific calendar date or a duration of time, emphasising its use over hardcoded time intervals like 60 * 60 * 24 for a day.
Development