Shabbat Mode (iOS)

Do you wish you could turn off social media during Shabbat? Here's how I did it on my iOS devices:

1. Go to Settings → Screen Time; scroll to the bottom and turn on Share Across Devices; do this on all your devices before you set up your allowed-apps list.

2. In Settings → Screen Time, under Limit, tap Always Allowed and add the apps you will allow to run during Shabbat. I'm including my list as a guide/reference: Phone, Messages, FaceTime, Maps, App Store, Authenticator, Blink, Boston Globe, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Docs, Drive, Find Devices, Find Items, Find People, Fitbit, Flo by Moen, Google Translate, Kindle, Lowell Sun e-Edition, Merlin Bird ID, Music, New Hampshire Union Leader, Notes, NYTimes, Overcast, Photos, Podcasts, Reminders, Sefaria, Sheets, Strava, Tasks, Venmo, Voice Memos, Wash Post, Weather, Workout, YouTube.

3. In Settings → Screen Time, under Limit, tap Downtime. Tap Customize Days. Turn all days off. Then turn on Friday from 6-ish pm to 12 am and Saturday from 12 am to 9-ish pm. Again, this is just an example.

You'll still be able to run apps you forgot to include, but to me it felt much nicer not having to press that button. Go back to Settings and add them.

One thing I didn't figure out was how best to use the browser. There were a couple times I needed to look something up, and I would have preferred white-listing certain sites to pressing the override button. Let me know if you know a good way to do this.

MARCHintosh Day #1: How Much Memory?

I should have done a better job keeping track of the memory that came installed in the Power Macs I recently bought.

Mac #1 is a 7100/66, it has four SIMM slots.

Mac #2 is a 6214CD with two SIMM slots.

I also bought 4 32MB SIMMs I figured I would split between the two new Macs.

So Mac #1 now has 64 MB plus two 8 MB that were leftovers, for a total of 80 MB. There must have been two SIMMs that were leftover, size unknown.

And Mac #2 now has 64 MB total. The sizes of its two leftovers are also unknown.

Let's see if we can figure out the size of those four SIMMs.

Or six. You see, there were a bunch of SIMMs in a shoe box, also of unknown size. I'd swear there were three, so maybe the 7100 only had one leftover? Who knows.

Here's the log of my analysis:

SIMM #	How many?	Total inc one 32 MB simm	Size of this SIMM
1	2	40,960 KB	8 MB
2	2	40,960 KB	8 MB
3	1	49,152 KB	16 MB
4	1	49,152 KB	16 MB

So the result is that I should have measured all of the memory before I re-cabled the 7100, which is a huge pain in the butt. But replacing 16 MB with 32 MB will give me a total of 96 MB in that system, which will be well worth the effort.

And I'd say MARCHintosh Day #1 was a success!

Back in the day, you could find my recipe for Sherry Noodle Soup on dave-net.com. Well that old domain is long gone. And sadly, I don't think you can even find it on The Wayback Machine!

But I found it on a hard drive and decided to cook up a batch. But nah, that recipe needed a little tweak here and there. So without further ado, here's version two...

This latest rewrite represents a simple change that made a huge difference. Cut up the chicken and mushrooms and let them marinate in the sherry. Mwah!!

Sherry Noodle Soup v3

Ingredients:

• A couple chicken bodies or one turkey frame, with a little meat left on (you'll want about two cups of meat off the bones later)
• 3 quarts, water (or 12 cups if you prefer)
• 2 cups, raw mushrooms (optional)
• 1 cup, dry sherry
• 2 tsp, kosher salt (if you really must)
• 1½ tsp, oregano
• 1½ tsp, thyme
• 1/4 tsp, ground black pepper
• 1 medium-large onion (chopped)
• 2 cups, chopped carrots
• 2 cups, chopped celery
• 1 lb, cooked pasta or rice - maybe make it diners' choice!

Combine meaty bones and water in a large pot. Bring to boil and then simmer for an hour or so.

Remove everything from the broth. Salvage whatever meat you can from the bones. Discard the bones and other yucky stuff. Set aside two cups of meat for later. The rest will make a nice sandwich! you can give to your dog!

Strain the broth. If you like, you can let it cool and skim the fat off the top.

Combine the chicken meat (diced) with the mushrooms and sherry. Let this marinate in the refrigerator until about 30 minutes before dinnertime.

Combine the broth, optional salt and herbs, and the vegetables. Bring it all to a boil and then simmer for 30 minutes, or until the carrots are al dente.

Add the sherry/mushrooms/chicken mixture and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Add the pasta or rice to each bowl as you serve it. Maybe set it out buffet style?

Enjoy!!

JDeveloper Font Size

Funny how two posts ago I was having trouble with font size in Emacs. The other day, I don't know what I did, I don't have a cat I can blame for walking across the keyboard, but I made the JDeveloper font size SO SMALL, I could barely see it. OK, it was like 7-8 point - still, VERY SMALL!!

So I did what you do, I quit JDev. Then today when I started it up, oh damn, I never did solve the font size thing. Clearly there is some keystroke that makes fonts smaller. I know there is, because I fell into a big bucket of that.

What I did find, though, is if you go to Tools -> Preferences and just search for "font" it's under Code Editor. I made it SO BIG, it's now a pleasure to use!!

There's nothing wrong with getting older that changing your font size won't fix!!

🙂

How to turn off Force Click and Haptic Feedback on MacBook Pro

Boy was this annoying:

Every time I'd make a big selection, I'd end up force-clicking and something odd and magical would happen. Don't need that. Don't want that. Gone.

Let me tell you a long story about... yeah, no.

Go to System Preferences. Tap Trackpad. Uncheck the box. Or check it. It's your Mac.

Emacs Font Size

 Emacs (on Mac OS) font size kept changing on me. I finally figured out what was causing it.

CTRL-OPT + two-finger swipe up/down

And the status line, where it shows the file type, actually shows +1, +2, etc when the font size increases by one or two steps, etc.

This was driving me crazy. I'm going to blame this, like everything else, on the enormous trackpad.

Generating Screenshots for the App Store

I don't usually just post links off to other sites, but here's one that
    a) I don't want to forget and
    b) the world needs to know about.

https://blog.winsmith.de/english/ios/2020/04/14/xcuitest-screenshots.html

It's been a while since I published an app to the App Store and either
    a) something has changed or
    b) I've forgotten what a pain it is to have to collect all the screenshots you need to include with your app submission.

And I've heard there is a service you could use, and I'm all for hiring experts to do difficult things, but why should that be necessary? Is this really that hard? No, it's really not. 

But I should let you find out from Daniel Jilg. I took the script he posted and needed to make a few changes to suit my environment. 

And it works great! It generated all the screenshots I need for the App Store! Thanks, Daniel!