[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] A few years ago, I wrote a post describing how I asked ChatGPT to solve a couple of elementary beam bending problems and how its answers were persistently wrong, even after I...

I mentioned last week that some wording in a news article struck me as odd. A similar thing happened when I read this Scientific American piece (that’s an Apple News link—I don’t have a SciAm subscription). In this case, I didn’t even have to read the article; the oddity is right there in the headline: “A SpaceX...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Earlier this week, I saw this article in Apple News. It’s from the San Francisco Chronicle and discusses a recent report on the safety of the Golden Gate Bridge. The report is...

After yesterday’s post, I got an email from reader Ron Sprague outlining two ways to block sender addresses from the list view in iOS Mail. Both of these methods are efficient, and neither starts with choosing a command with a stupid name like View Contact Card. I knew about one of these methods but not the other;...

Complaints about Apple’s design choices usually involve transparency, color, and other legibility concerns. These criticisms are legitimate, but the poor design choices that usually set me off are the ones involving the mechanics of commands—what I have to do to get something done. I think of these as the “design is...

I meant to write this last week, shortly after I finished listening to Episode 612 of Upgrade. But things didn’t work out the way I hoped, so now I’m rushing to finish these few paragraphs before this week’s episode comes out (they’re recording as I type). I have nothing to say about the Tim Cook/John Ternus news...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] In this morning’s blog/newsletter,1 Paul Krugman included a couple of unusual graphs that I want to talk about. It took me a little while—longer than it should have—to figure...

During my seven-week Spotlight trial, I was reminded of how easy it is to make file and folder launchers in Keyboard Maestro. In case you’ve also forgotten, here’s a short post on how to do it. There are three items that I open quite often and that Spotlight was slow to find: My blog-stuff directory, which is where...

I started using launchers shortly after returning to the Mac (from Linux) in 2005. The first one I used was the great Quicksilver. I’m sure I learned about it from Merlin Mann, who was Quicksilver’s biggest advocate, but I can’t point to which of his many posts on QS got me started. When Nicholas Jitkoff (Alcor)...

Yesterday’s post included some behind-the-scenes calculations that I figured were worth talking about. They were all done in Mathematica, and here’s the notebook I used: The first calculation works out the days of the vernal equinox in every year from 1961 through 2026. The key function for this is FindAstroEvent, a...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] In its continuing attempt to teach us how calendars work, Scientific American has an article (Apple News link) up today that goes through Gauss’s algorithm for calculating the...

Back in January, I complained about the Apple Watch’s Timer complication being too complicated. A couple of days ago, Dan Moren told me on Mastodon that my complaint had been addressed in watchOS 26.4, which was released earlier this week. After a surprisingly quick update of my watch (I had already updated every...