From the Couch of Ben Johnson

Father, Principal Engineer at Prodigy Education, serial hyperbolist.

✴ From Kindle to Bear

I was looking for an easy way to import my Kindle highlights into Bear, as I’ve been using Bear as my knowledge management system (Zettelkasten). I want to be able to put my highlights in the same place as the notes for the books I read.

Two things made this really easy:

  1. Bookcision is this amazing bookmarklet that can take the Kindle highlights from Amazon’s highlights page (read.kindle.com) and dump it into a text file, or XML, or JSON so you can save it. This is good in case the Kindle site ever goes away, and it gives us a document we can work with. No matter where you’re putting your…

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Reason my 4-year-old is furious with me: I won’t buy him a huge live-in camping trailer for our car.

This post on Apple vs. XBox Game Pass is fantastic. Gruber has been crushing it recently. Between Dithering and writing like this, he’s on a tear. (Don’t miss the footnotes.)

Acorn is an incredible image editor for the cost. My version of Photoshop no longer works with 64-bit, and so I switched to Acorn. Keyboard shortcuts are almost exactly the same. Amazing.

Sometimes McSweenys just nails it: An Open Letter to the T&T Supermarket Clerk Who Was Told to “Go Back to China” as Part of a Customer’s Racist Tirade in Mississauga, Ontario

✴ The NYT Article About the Election Delay Tweet Could Be About My 4-year-old

Reading this article I can’t help but think of a preschooler who desperately needs a time-out.

Mr. Trump is facing about as dire a run-up to a presidential election as any incumbent could imagine: the worst quarter in the economy on record, an unceasing health crisis, protests nationwide and a country paralyzed by the lack of a financial recovery plan with no solution in sight — all compounded by his own inability to curtail his behavior.

Sometimes 4-year-olds find curtailing their behaviour challenging.

Aides have described him as pained by the widespread rejection he is seeing in public…

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Pesto, Mozzarella, Romano in the Roccbox. Starting to see some progress with the extreme heat.

When I imagined being a parent, I never expected that one day my search history would contain “My son has started to speak like the Hulk”.

How has no one rebooted Captain Planet yet?

Was woken up in the night by the kiddo while I was in the middle of a dream about updating the firmware on my Bluetooth headphones. Thrilling.

Finished a whole 20kg bag of flour. Never thought it would happen, but much bread and pizza was enjoyed.

A reminder to all those trying something new: give yourself permission to suck at first. In unrelated news, my first baguette:

For all the complaints about Apple’s current software quality, Keynote on the iPad is a work of art (especially with the pencil).

Guilherme Rambo wrote the definitive guide to CloudKit. If only Apple’s own docs were this good.

I’m really impressed by the look and feel of this WWDC. If they did this from now on I wouldn’t mind at all. It’s a better experience for those of us who have always watched from home.

I was wrong! Actual Developer Kit Mac Mini Hardware for the ARM transition.

I wish newspapers like the NYTimes or the Globe and Mail would let you pay a little more to turn off all the ads. Paying for “Unlimited Digital Access" but then also getting ads is a bit of a slap.

Lots of people are talking about what Apple is going to do with ARM test hardware. My bet: iPad as an XCode build target with a custom version of Sidecar (or a reverse Sidecar). Still a Mac app but it can borrow the processor in the iPad.

Yeah, Apple is on the wrong side of this fight with Hey. Requiring this insane degree of nuance in the rules is not a good look. There’s no way Basecamp could have guessed this would be an issue.

My son has been falling asleep with help from the sounds of Dark Noise. For some reason, the sound he likes the most is Lawn Mower. Siri has gotten wise. 🤦‍♂️

They’re renaming Aunt Jemima and Uncle Bens. I honestly can’t believe that this took 130 years. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.

This is a really good post from Andrew Canion on replicating some of the features of Hey.com in Mailmate. I’ve been using Mailmate for years but still feel like I’m just scratching the surface.

The thing about my philosophy degree that has stuck the longest is the ability to see and empathize with all sides of an argument. This is a blessing and a curse.

I’m a sucker for any behind-the-scenes-of-business-during-a-crisis story, but this one is even about baking! Inside King Arthur Flour, the Company Supplying America’s Sudden Baking Obsession 🍞

Whoa. The Amazon iOS app now lets you purchase Kindle books. I guess the deal with Apple extended beyond Prime Video…