Playing the Apple Cycle, Chapter Umpteen

Apple's stock price shot up in July upon announcement of their AI initiative ("Apple Intelligence"), which was expected to drive a massive rush of upgrades, as consumers scrambled to ensure their devices could run these catchy new features.

Two problems:

1. Apple Intelligence won't be so groundbreaking. We're all sick of Siri's miserable inadequacy, but the new Siri is expected to be incremental improvement, nothing radical, and the rest seems a bit servicey and milquetoast...at least for now.

2. iPhone 16 wasn't super alluring (and iPhone 15 pro can run Apple Intelligence), so unofficial initial reports say that sales have been "meh".

None of this is top-line news yet. Experts know this, so the smart money does, too (hence the 10% drop from its peak). But the mainstream - and thirsty clickbait media - haven't quite processed these factors to realize that the expected profit surge (still somewhat priced in even now) likely won't happen in a tumultuous rush. So the general public hasn't been massively gloom-sprayed quite yet. And when that day comes (soon, I'd imagine), day traders will start shorting, and grandma will sell her shares (buy high, sell low!), stoking the familiar vicious circle.

All of which is good news! I sold my shares at $230, and would be very happy to buy anew at the next drop, which will be, as always, hyperbolic.

Long term, Apple Intelligence will improve, Siri will improve, and future devices will be tastier. So while owners of iPhone 13s may not be drooling over the new iPhone 16, at some point Siri frustration will inevitably push them into upgrading. There may be no furious stampede to the Apple Store, but Apple will absolutely pocket everyone's money in the end. So when its stock drops to $200 or below, a 20%+ gain should be easy for patient investors (patience is also rewarded by low taxation of long-term gains).


Per above, an eventual rebound to $237 is justified by what we know now. But new developments will add value. A new Mac Mini is to released next month that's intriguingly tiny and powerful and festooned with USB-C ports. Not as sexy as iPhones, but it could spur a genuine upgrade stampede (though we won't hear even unofficial stats until 2025, leaving plenty of time for gloomcasting in the meantime). And Apple will eventually create a lighter, cheaper version of Vision Pro, which transcends the severe limitations of desktop/laptop/table computing (I discussed those limitations here, though I never actually sprang for Vision Pro for reasons explained here).

Apple $232

So when Apple's new improved Siri comes out next year and some problem with it gets tons of press, and the stock price falls below $200, you'll all buy shares without my pushing you into it, right?


On the one hand, it takes patience to wait out these long Apple cycles. On the other hand, taxes are awfully low on long term capital gains!

And, speaking of cycles and patience, the stock market is white hot right now. When everyone is losing their mind buying hand over fist, the smart move is to sell. And vice versa. Selling now ensures you'll have the cash to pick up bargains in the coming downturn.

Bathroom Door Locks

I've been wrong about something. I love when that happens! In fact, this is Jubilant Blunder week, between this and my recent change of heart on Vision Pro.

Digression: Discovering my wrongness feels like gliding a missing puzzle piece into position with an easy snap, beholding the aesthetically soothing result. Nothing else feels quite so right as uncovering one's own wrongness.

At least for me. Nearly everyone else appears to invest much of their vital energy into hiding from their wrongness. You can be smart, or you can feel smart, but not both! Smart-feelers self-insulate from truth and correction.

Criticism (even friendly, non-condescending criticism) only became anathema because this is a world of smart-feelers, for whom truth is like sunlight to vampires.

Focus Mode is an iOS (and now, MacOS) feature where you pre-configure certain environments where your device tunes out certain people, apps, notifications, and distractions. So if I were to create a Slogging focus mode, it might block out all texts, emails, phone calls, and app notifications, and lock my screen into single-window (I use HazeOver for this). Here's a terrific eleven minute summary of Focus Mode by the delightfully nasal MacSparky (see footer for more on him).

This sort of approach always struck me as feeble and childish. Silly bathroom locks. After all, I can undo any of the restraints. If I want to check my damn mail, I'm gonna check my damn mail. I have been trained over the decades to persist when my computer, for whatever reason, thwarts my will.

But then I remembered something. I slogged about it once, titling it, only semi-ironically, "The Greatest Lesson Ever Taught". So you'd think I'd bear it in mind. But, no! I'm painfully slow, fuzzy, and blurry (all my clarity channels into these postings). Here it is in its entirety:

Earlier this year I bought a cover for my second car, an old Miata, to keep the birds from crapping all over it. It takes just one minute to easily uncover the car, and another minute to easily replace the cover after I get home.

I have not driven the car once since.

The MacSparky video is a hidden link, only for subscribers to MacSparky Labs. I'm revealing it with permission, plus offering a 10% discount to any Labs membership (I get nothing if you sign up) via code FRIENDSOFJIM, good until March 4, 2024).

David Sparks is not the most technically expert or widest ranging of Mac pundits, but he's an unapologetic nerd who takes highly tactical and obsessive immersions into various areas of interest. To learn everything about automation on a Mac, he's the guy. Same for Obsidian (which I wrote about here). These and other topics are exhaustively covered in his various Field Guides, the sine qua non for realms most Mac users barely scratch. This MacSparky Labs thing offers incremental updates on his various quests. Lots of quick videos of David breathlessly exulting in some new shortcut he just found or whatever. Worth a few bucks a month.

How I Earned $3500 with the Click of a Button

A few weeks ago I explained why I - normally a super late adopter - planned to order Vision Pro.

And then I did! But I will cancel. Because I can't, after all, use it for the three Big Purposes I explained in that posting:

1. Inability to use a decent-sized monitor away from home (I can't write comfortably on laptop screens)...which makes travel feel austere and pulls me to go home. VisionPro will let me write on a 27" - or 75'! - virtual monitor anywhere (headset weight will limit endurance, but even so).

2. Inability to view movies and shows on a decent-sized TV away from home...which makes travel feel austere and pulls me to go home. VisionPro will seat me in a ginormous panoramic movie theater wherever I am. Even at home!

Three problems with travel: size, weight, and theft (and not the weight issue you think!).

Size I figured I'd throw this into a bag and bring it on the road. No. The thing is huge, and its carrying case may or may not fit in (i.e. totally dominate) a carry-on. This isn't like a laptop you sling over your shoulder. It's more like bringing along a nephew.

Weight I've been taking cheap budget RyanAir and EasyJet flights around Europe, and their weight limits (on both carry-ons and checked) are insanely low; much more so than on American flights. I simply can't transport this thing!

Theft I am more or less ok, albeit leery, traveling with a laptop. This costs double that. Not necessarily a deal-killer, but the OMG nature of a Vision Pro at this particular juncture - with hotel maids, fellow transport passengers, and just random eyes out there - is profound. I'm not interested in this as a status object, but high-status it is, which makes it not just a theft target; it makes me, generally, a far greater theft target. And, per above, it's not like I can hide it.

Bringing this thing on the road would be like transporting a giant movie camera, or several gold bars, or a donated live heart. It wouldn't be about getting myself from point A to point B; it would be about getting the damn headset from point A to point B. And that's ridiculous (and sure to improve in future - i.e. smaller/lighter/cheaper - versions).

3. I'll finally be able to watch my favorite film in 3-D, which is how it must be watched, without investing in some 2005-era 3-D TV setup. I've been flailing for workarounds, and all are crappy/pricey. VisionPro will be like watching it in a theater. Maybe even better!

Media management is still T.B.D., but, regarding 3-D content, specifically, it looks like it needs to download only - as of now, from Apple or from Disney. And neither is likely to carry my obscure artsy flick.

And there's no ability to hook the thing up to a blu-ray player, nor does it seem like I can rip my blu-ray into Vision Pro-ready format. I'm not 100% sure it will be impossible, but it will be far more likely with a later Vision Pro version.

As for the notorious weight of the thing (and, therefore, its short endurance window), I knew this would be the thing everyone harped on, and, sure enough, it is. Meh. I'd have sucked up that negative as an unavoidable v.1 thing. Too big/heavy/expensive is the perennial ante for getting in early on new tech.

Apple and Vision Pro

Predictions: Apple's VisionPro will blow out all expectations. It will sell out its entire first run in short order, and endlessly raise its profile as a blockbuster product as revisions appear. Even at $3500, a price pundits and analysts consider prohibitive.

I'm getting one. Not for status. Not because I'm an early adopter. It's that VisionPro solves three of my most long-standing insoluble problems:

1. Inability to use a decent-sized monitor away from home (I can't write comfortably on laptop screens)...which makes travel feel austere and pulls me to go home. VisionPro will let me write on a 27" - or 75'! - virtual monitor anywhere (headset weight will limit endurance, but even so).

2. Inability to view movies and shows on a decent-sized TV away from home...which makes travel feel austere and pulls me to go home. VisionPro will seat me in a ginormous panoramic movie theater wherever I am. Even at home!

3. I'll finally be able to watch my favorite film in 3-D, which is how it must be watched, without investing in some 2005-era 3-D TV setup. I've been flailing for workarounds, and all are crappy/pricey. VisionPro will be like watching it in a theater. Maybe even better!

I have never bought the pricey v1.0 version of any hardware. But I will buy this in a hot minute. No question. Take my money.

And here's the thing. Since selling my startup to a Fortune 500 company, I've repeatedly found myself locked out of a slew of unaffordable products, services, and experiences. Certainly, more is available to me now than when I was a NYC trombonist making $30,000/year, but I cannot tell you how many times I've had to pass on stuff which tons of normal-seeming people seem easily able to afford (Tesla; business class; heedless AC and heating; renovations just 'cuz; etc.). I always mutter the same questions to myself: "Who are these people? Did they sell, like, two or three startups to Fortune 500 companies? Where do all these people get all this money?"

If I can pay $3500 for VisionPro, loads and loads of people can easily do likewise. If I can afford it, it is not priced out of contention!

There have been rumors about a better cheaper VisionPro slated to launch in 2027. WOW, YOU DON'T SAY?!? I'm gonna go out on a limb and predict that an even better even cheaper one will come out in 2028. And the VP4 will put that one to shame in 2029! This is, duh, the way of gadgets, and none of it affects initial launch prospects, because those who miss out will need to wait 3 years for anything remotely like this device, which does things a great many people have long thirsted for. (You too, even if you don't yet realize it. The average person figures this is just another dorky Google Glasses thing. Nyuh-uh. Not at all.)

Apple's stock is down again (it endlessly cycles for no meaningful reason). It may drop further. The press and analysts love to jump on a bandwagon, figuring they'll look prescient by pure momentum (and their glom-on ensures self-fulfilling prophecy). As usual, phalanxes of geniuses piped up to pitch gloom the moment the stock price trembled. Soon it may return to the $160s and we'll enjoy another safe, easy opportunity for another 20% gain as it returns to $200. And Vision Pro, IMO, will take it far above.

That last part, however, is opinion; conjecture; speculation. $200 is closer to a sure thing. Or at least an immensely safe bet on a nearly sure thing.

Investment Updates

When Covid hit, cruise ship stocks fell to pennies on the dollar. It was assumed by otherwise smart people that no one would ever get on a cruise ship again. Figuring this was hogwash, I bought a bunch of shares of the leading cruise company, Royal Caribbean, at $37/share. It's now up to $119, within easy reach of its pre-COVID high of $133.

I bear firmly in mind that I'm not out-smarting anyone. The moment one imagines oneself smarter than the geniuses will be recalled as the initiation point of one's inexorable ruin. I don't imagine for a second that I'm the only one who saw this play. I'm just one of the very few who played it.

Why? Because I'm not a professional money guy under insane pressure to show huge results each and every quarter. Nor am I a spastic day trader chasing home run returns this week. My superpower, for the nth time, is patience. When I bought in Spring, 2020, I had no idea when the snapback would occur, which meant parking my money for uncertain lengths of time, incurring opportunity costs. Very few people will do this. Only shitty small-timers. SSTs!

Unpressured, non-greedy, and not maniacally enthralled with my own savvy, I could mulishly let the investment simmer for a few years. And I did, scoring a 221% profit. That's less impressive given the 3.5 years of waiting, but it's more than good enough for a SST like me.

I'd let some of that investment ride, but I know nothing about cruise ships. It may reach $133 or even $1330, but I would not be plying my patience advantage, and raw ignorant hope is no investment strategy. So I'll sell here.


In other investment news...

Monkeypox is on the ups again in Asia (here and here). The disease is survivable, but it's an ugly affair that can leave you scarred. SIGA has made frustratingly little advancement in positioning its indisputably safe and effective smallpox drug for treatment, though doctors in the know have full faith in it. Here is the CDC nearly breaking decorum to wink, nod, and strain to convince practitioners to use SIGA's drug for monkeypox despite its sorrowful lack of approvals.

I recently predicted that Apple would obviously go to $200. Almost there! But if you bought this year, I'd urge holding for the long term gain (i.e. lower tax bill)....even if it means waiting for the cycle to repeat itself. Apple never fails to take random silly dives, but it also never fails to recover and shoot beyond before the next random silly dive.

Nth Spiel About Apple Stock

Apple's stock is at $168. And I'd imagine there's hardly an investor in the world who'd deny they'll eventually reach $200 and beyond. If/when it does, that's a 20% profit from current price. So why aren't people buying?

1. Trees/Forest
Sales of this or that may be sluggish this quarter. Chinese uncertainty. Supply chain constraints. Exchange rates. Whine-whine-whine "THE ANTENNAS!!!!!" or whatever. All the petty trivial burps and coughs that temporarily, incrementally tilt the weather vane make people who stare at their Bloomberg terminals all day gulp another 30 antacid pills and scream SELL into their phones, but mean absolutely nothing in the long run for a company this big, successful, and profitable. Apple's not going to die the death of three cuts.

2. Conformity
Humans have false confidence in the wisdom of the crowd. If the price is low, someone must KNOW something. If the market isn't buying, it's SCARY, and we don't like to be SCARED.

Me, I know for certain that the best food is not covered in the local newspaper food section or blogger survey of The Best Food. I know how shallow and irrational conventional wisdom often is. Consider all the shallow irrationality listed right here!

I'm not nonconformist on this because I feel shrewder than the smart guys (like I said up top, the smart guys would all concede that Apple's destined for $200!) It's that I enjoy a towering advantage over them: patience. I don't know when I'll get my 20%, but it suffices to know I'll most likely get it. Pressured professionals and twitchy day traders don't/can't think that way. I wield my superpower!

3. Buy High/Sell Low
Bargain-priced goods seem less attractive. This means lulls persist irrationally. If the stock were to meteorically soar - making it a horrible buy with far less than 20% potential return - people would buy hysterically, with both fists. Shit's crazy!

4. Greed
I.e. "I want more than 20% profit (or I want it faster)".

Ok, groovy. Me, I’m just a little guy. 20% in a year or two sounds great. As for speed, I don’t want to pay short term gains tax, anyway. And if $200 does arrive too soon, so I miss it, and even if it subsequently drops again, all these same tenets will apply then, too. Apple's not a startup awaiting some singular revenue event, e.g. drug approval.

5. Doubt.
I.e. "What if it DOESN'T go to $200?"

Ok, say this prediction, which very few people would poo-poo, is wrong. This turns out to be the moment where Apple begins its inevitable decline, and it never reaches $200, staying more or less where it is for a while before slowly drifting downward. Or maybe even starts slowly drifting downward now. (I doubt it. Personally, I thinkVision Pro will be a smash once they eventually perfect price, headset weight, and supply chain issues...but of course that's just speculation.) Those unlikely prospects fail to terrify me with their ludicrously assymetrical risk. But what about a death spiral?

Apple sits on a cash hoard of $166 billion. They can buy literally any gigantically successful company in the world - or two or three or four big, prosperous ones, or innumerable large-ish successful ones - and begin working some angle that's more profitable than the current one gracing them with hundreds of billions of dollars annually....and still have cash leftover to take a year off to retool.


So: Apple presents a terrific opportunity for 20%+ profit for those with patience. There's an unlikely chance you'll fail to gain (or will gain less), but you also won't lose much. And unforeseen disaster's always possible, but in this case it would most likely mean macro conditions had degraded to a point were money's imperiled in most any vehicle.

IMO, it would be irrational not to buy here. It may go lower before it goes higher, but it's a mistake to equate "buy low/sell high" (which is possible) with "buy bottom/sell top" (which isn't possible). 20% sounds good to me!


Note: Yeah, $168 -> $200 is 19% (god, I love percentagecalculator.net). But Apple dipped to $166 yesterday, which does translate to 20%.

MacSparky's Obsidian Preview Video

In yesterday's posting, "The Unsolved Mystery of Storing Notes and Data Scraps on Computers", I mentioned that MacSparky was about to release a huge guide to the app. That seems to be a week or so away, but, meanwhile, he's released this generous free 43 minute preview video explaining the app, comparing it to other tools, and demonstrating the basic set-up process. It's shorter and considerably less irritating than the epic 2 hour tutorial I also linked to.

The Unsolved Mystery of Storing Notes and Data Scraps on Computers

I recently bumped into the hardest question in current day personal computing. I needed to store two chunks of data somewhere:

• 1. FedEx International Connect Plus has the best international shipping rates.
• 2. Santa Susana is the darkest place for stargazing on the Setúbal peninsula.

Where do I put them???

In olden days, they'd have wound up scrawled onto sticky notes. But we foolishly expect computers to liberate us from such hell.

I certainly didn't want to create new folders on my Mac titled "Shipping Rate Tips" and "Portuguese Astronomy Tips". I've been down that road. Because my interests are very broad, I've built immense arrays of virtual filing cabinets stuffed with folders each containing exactly one moldering, forgotten item. It's a horror.

This stuff's non-heirarchical and non-linear. Much of it connects, but only in a helter-skelter web style of connection that doesn't lend itself to tidy conventional filing schemes.

Programmers, trying to solve this, have created a class of app with many names. "Gutbucket" apps. "Shoebox" apps. "Personal information managers". Options range from baroquely complex, expensive, feature-stuffed, unusable software like DEVONThink or Roam Research to dauntingly free-form, open-source unusuable software momentarily championed by geeks who, despite their raves, inevitably soon move on to some other trendy competitor.

Really, developers are damned if they do or don't. Sleek easy apps lack the power to tame huge hairballs of info. And the more the app tries to assist me, the more assumptions (inevitably false) it's making about the help I need, so I feel pushed around. So there's got to be a learning curve. And if you give me an open playing field to do as I like with, I'll throw up my hands in confusion. We users are impossible!

Obsidian is starting to win the war, at least for non-Geeks. A high learning curve is inevitable (per reasons above) for any powerful/flexible information manager, so I'm resigned to it. And this category of apps only prove their worth after months of dogged use (which explains why the crowd keeps moving on). So this is like recommending a binge watch of a TV series that gets good in season 8...but you have to watch it all to follow the plot. Like all these apps, Obsidian requires dogged tagging, which does not come naturally to me. One day, shortly before I expire, AI will be empowered to suck down all my notes and make ordered sense of it all. But I'm starting to accept that, barring such help, tagging and all the other laborious aspects are necessary hurdles for a gutbucket app to work - to integrate my stuff so it doesn't wind up forgotten and inaccessible, filed, one-item-per-folder, in a jillion virtual filing cabinets. Or adrift on a curling sticky note.

---

References

I follow MacSparky, who's about to release (this week or next) a "field guide" to Obsidian with a slew of video tutorials. Worth watching for (here). Here's a generous free 43 minute preview video explaining the app, comparing it to other tools, and demonstrating the basic set-up process.

Note that Obsidian is VERY aggressively developed...so it keeps changing. Aside from general overview (like the older MacSparky material in the previous link), avoid any tutorial or guide over six months old. This two hour epic tutorial is pretty recent, and only somewhat irritating.

But I get a feeling that TiddlyWiki might be the best of all. Maybe a notch or two over the geeky line for most users, but the extra power/flexibility seems worth the learning curve. For one thing, while Obsidian, under the hood, generates thousands of text documents (easily exported, but only Obsidian owns their context and connections), TiddlyWiki (if I understand correctly) builds a single-paged wiki, so your stuff is really really consolidated. Also: much stronger and more flexible interlinking.

Grok TiddlyWiki is the canonical get-started guide.

Here's a list of newbie resources from the TiddlyWikitters themselves

Mehregan is an interesting variant of Tiddlywiki

I'm sullenly un-wowed by apps claiming to offer a graphical layout representation of YOUR MIND, man! Sure, babe. So I almost discarded Tangent, but took one last look, and had to admit this implementation might be useful in an info manager app. And Tangent, itself, looks interesting, at a glance.

In the end, the Obsidian vs TiddlyWiki decision is a larger issue of Note Taking Apps vs (Personal) Wikis as a Personal Knowledge Store

Leaps in Text-to-Speech

I wanted to get through this NY Times article on the history behind the Oppenheimer film, but I had some tasks to take care of. So, with misgivings, I asked my iPad to read it to me. And it was as bad as I'd feared. Here's a short paragraph:

With its depth of historical re-creation, its cast of famous figures given tantalizingly brief appearances, its scientific, political and sociological threads running away in multiple directions, a movie like Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” doubles as an encouragement to read more deeply into the history it portrays.

Welcome to 1975. Jesus.

But then I remembered all the work being done on AI reading thesedays, so perhaps some upstart can do a better job. I quickly found NaturalReader, which (alone among the upstarts) lets me use their service without needing to log on (at least for a while). And check it out:



It's not without its quirks. It gets stuck a good long while on the comma after "directions", and, like Apple's voice, the "away" in "running away" gets hollered for some reason. But it's usable!


In Apple's recent earnings call, Tim Cook testily disavowed the notion that they're lagging on AI. Between this and the still-awful Siri, the problem seems clear.

Apple Vision Pro

Apple's "Vision Pro" - the AR headset just announced an hour ago - looks fantastic, but misses a lot of potential.

Tim Cook reads his mail, so fwiw I just sent this (framing-oriented) suggestion:

Fantastic job. But you’ve missed half the potential.

You’ve contrived fantastic things to look AT, but ignored the background - the looking “from”.

AVR tech maps audio/video of current-room locale. Save that data so when I’m in a hotel, I can feel like if I’m using the platform from my couch back home. Or from the mountain cabin on my last vacation. Or any other setting where I previously used AVR and mapped that data.

Sure, such environments could be foregrounded. “Capture and relive memories”. But I don’t want to look AT my living room from a Best Western; I want to do work, check email, and watch movies FROM my living room (aurally/optically). Background! AVP could let me return to anywhere I’ve previously used it, so I an work/play from a familiar, transportive, and/or nostalgic vantage point.

The value grows geometrically over time. 5, 10, 20 years into this platform, I’ll enjoy an expanding funnel of mapped background data to call up, so I can “hang out” in - not LOOK at, like a photo, but actually exist within - cherished inaccessible locales. Obviously, keeping/managing this stored data (plus creating fresh vantage point “experiences” for users) would be a “Service”.

Apple Announces M2 Computers. Buy M1!

Remember when I reported that computers are now fast enough? I.e. you will not notice the slightest difference between a current computer and one from 2/3/4 years ago (unless, of course, you do tons of compiling or rendering)? And that Apple's own M1 chip plays so beautifully with the operating system and with the rest of the hardware that the fahrvergnügen is off the charts?

After Apple's recent announcement of new M2 Macbook Pros and Mac Minis, Amazon has discounted M1 Macbook Pros (both sizes) by $500. Buy one. I promise you wouldn't notice the speed difference versus M2. Even though it's hefty. Because computers are fast enough (no one is reporting this, because neither computer companies nor the media covering the industry have any reason to encourage the complacency these products rightfully inspire. But anyone in the know would acknowledge it).

So if you're going to buy a laptop, buy these M1s right now. I'm typing on a bottom-of-the-line M1 MacBook Pro, and the display is dazzling, the keyboard is solid, the Fahrvergnügen is high, and the speed is adequate(1).

(1) - If you missed the reference, Rolls Royce never disclosed the horsepower for their Silver Shadow, advertising it as "adequate."

If you need a desktop computer, and own a 5K monitor, get the prev-gen M1 Mac Mini. If you don't own such a monitor (as I reported in link above, 5K has never really hit, and prices remain crazy) buy a refurbished 27" iMac 5K from Apple. The same monitor alone, sold separately by Apple, costs hundreds more! Caveat is that this iMac uses an Intel chip, not Apple silicon. You won't notice speed lag versus M1 (or even M2), but it won't feel quite as buttery.

Apple is due to refresh iMacs (and, for that matter, studio displays) soon. But I own the very same iMac (I'll sell this MacBook Pro once it arrives via slow boat), and am very happy with it. It's the best monitor, with a very fast not-quite-the-best computer, for less than the price of the monitor alone. Irresistible, and any other route will cost you more than a grand more.


Video reviews by the great Marques Brownlee (more on him), below. Bear in mind that he does a lot of video rendering, so he does need the extra speed/power. But, if you listen carefully, he's saying what I'm saying.

the new M2 MacBook Pro

M2 Pro Mac Mini

Mac Magic Trick

A new magic trick: Command-comma opens preferences within most Mac apps!

30 years of fervant Mac use, including hours spent pouring over lists of obscure keyboard shortcuts, and I never knew this! It's a new day!


I love nothing more than being shown my gaps. My ignorance, my short-sightedness, my wrongness, my illogic. You can do me no greater favor than showing me that my favorite taco place is nothing special (by revealing how good tacos can actually be!), or that my conclusions are based on faulty assumptions. Of course your logic - and your taco - has to be on the money!

For one thing, this helps me course-correct, so I can be even more of an obnoxious know-it-all. But that's not the ultimate reason. It's that nothing great ever comes from knowing. The real treasure is leeched out of the ether by the enormous vacuum power of my yawing ignorance.

Possibly the greatest moment of my life came when I stepped up from being the best player in the bad middle school band to the worst player in the good one. I improved 1,000x every minute in the new setting, ecstatically discovering how complacent I'd been in my own wretched mediocrity.

It was an Awakening, but you can only wake up by realizing (and fully conceding) that you were previously asnooze. So I'm eternally thirsty for evidence of my own somnolence. Heaven's where I'm the very dumbest, wrongest, most limited, ignorant, blinkered, mulish sonofabitch.

Here's the big problem: I reflexively follow the Golden Rule, which is ruinous when you're the only person who enjoys being done unto a certain way.

Docs at Long Last Tamed

Among my myriad sloppy life queues (books unread, recordings unheard, to-do items undone, etc) are a slew of miscellaneous bytes of e-reading material collected over decades.

The oldest are text files and word files. Then there was the flood of saved web pages and various DOC attachment types. Then a blizzard of epub and mobi files which were imported into Kindle or Apple Books ("The Great Forking" which launched my persistent sense of fragmentation).

At one point, I even resorted to publish-on-demand, funneling it all into a word doc and printing a one-off 900 page bound softcover book titled "Catch-Up Reading". So hopeful! So young! But the formating was too wretched to read, and I never even cracked it open.

Then arrived iPad, filling me with unification dreams. But the document-reading apps, aiming to handle all formats, were kludgey, annoying, hard to synch, and generally maddening.

But it's gotten better!

At this point, the old gutbucket e-reader apps seem quaint and moldy. The action has coalesced around the victor format PDF, which seems likely to dominate for years (and remain backward-compatible long thereafter). Also, it's super easy to convert practically anything into PDF as a top-level feature on any platform.

And there are excellent PDF readers for mobile, benefitting from specializing in the single format. I use Readdle's much-loved PDF Expert.

Problem: it overlaps confusingly with Readdle's "Documents" app. If you have both on your device, it's like trying to catch a basketball passed back and forth by two 7 foot tall Harlem Globetrotters. You can't tell which app will open your document, or which you're even in.

Advice: tolerate the confusion and try both. They're a bit different, so choose your favorite (PDF Expert helps you annotate better, Documents has more presentation options) and nuke the other to eliminate confusing confusion.

Both apps offer a panoply of flexible options without interfering with the nice, clean presentation. It's finally a mature field.

So here's what I did:

I opened my txt and doc files and "printed" them into pdf (you can automate this process via scripting or shortcuts), and lobbed the PDF exports into a gutbucket folder.

Same for saved web pages: I opened in-browser, "printed" to pdf, and tossed in the gutbucket (also automatable if you'd like). Epub and mobi files and other kooky archaic ebooks formats go into Calibre, a freeware converter, which interprets them into PDF. The conversion can be done in batches (i.e. convert many ebooks at once). Note, I dimly suspect Calibre could have converted all those txt/doc/html files, too, but I'm not claiming to offer the perfect workflow, just explaining how I did it.

As I went, I trimmed away blank or useless front and back matter (while "printing" to PDF, select a custom page range, leaving off crap pages at either end, e.g. you might "print" only pages 2-54 of a 57 page document). If I failed to clean up every last one, I could go through later, re-"printing" (using that same custom page range trick) to a new, sleeker PDF. Garbage reduction is essential for making device-reading feel less sacrificial. Steve Jobs was right; sleekness helps you feel/work/think sleeker. Be kind to your future self!

I gave each PDF a thoughtful title, and organized them into sub-folders ("Fiction", "Sci-Fi", "Short Stories", "Politics", "Funny", "Nerdy", etc), and then shot the whole crop up into The Cloud. Then I set my mobile reader app to draw from the highest-level folder, and....that's really that. From there, you're pretty much good to go. PDF Expert and Documents quickly index your stuff, and it looks great (if your titling was smart, and you diligently removed garbage pages).

Within the reader apps, you can do further organization - adding tags, amending file descriptions, and otherwise screwing around with the docs, all without touching the actual pdf files. This is both awesome and horrendous. Awesome, because there's no "lock-in"; you can still use those same docs with any other reader app that ever shows up; all the changes were internal to the app. Horrendous, because if you do switch apps, you'll lose that metadata. This is one reason to be super thoughtful about titling the PDFs, and to smartly arrange them in sub-folders. Give yourself a fighting chance!

I have, alas, not yet reached The Singularity. Whole books bought as Kindle books still live in Kindle (the device as well as the app). And I still keep a long queue of web bookmarks in Pinboard, and some of those are flagged for online reading via Paperback. This is my remaining doc fragmentation, and I'm not sure whether to process that writing into PDFs, or to turn all my PDFs into Paperback links. I need to find a fourteen-year-old to consult with; can anyone rent me their kid for an hour?

Minor remaining fragmentation aside ("split in two" is better than "shattered into a zillion pieces"), I no longer need to dig into the Science/Astronomy/To-Read folder of my Mac to find astro stuff I've been meaning to read. Everything's on my iPad. It feels good. I feel sleek!

The State of the Mac

I've always used Macbook Pros docked with external monitor, keyboard, and mouse at home. It offers the best of all worlds; maintaining a portable option without sacrificing full desktop comforts at home.

But then iPads got better (I'm still using this setup from ten years ago), and I found myself taking my laptop with me less and less often. So when it was time to upgrade to a new machine, I had a choice: 1. pay up for a Macbook Pro with a fancy expensive retina screen I'd never actually see as I used it like a Mac Mini, or 2. buy a Mac Mini. The latter cost half the price, making it a no-brainer. So I sold my Macbook Pro and bought the Mini (either used or refurbished, I can't remember; I never buy this kind of equipment new).

I kept using my excellent 4K monitor (link above) with the Mini for a while, but, compelled to give my aging eyes every advantage, began researching 5K monitors. I learned that the only affordable route was to buy a 2020 iMac Retina, with built-in 27" 5K display. The thing was so bafflingly cheap that the computer essentially came for free. So I sold my Mac Mini and monitor.

The iMac's 5K display is astounding, though the computer, while considerably faster than the Mac Mini on specs, didn't deliver any discernible speed improvement. No computer does anymore. As I wrote earlier this year, computers are now fast enough…though I’m apparently the only one who’s noticed. My 2015 Macbook Pro, my 2018 Mac Mini, and my 2020 iMac felt more or less equally fast, though their specs vary widely. So fast as to be essentially instantaneous for normal tasks. Fast enough!

I'm headed to live in Portugal for a while, and, having researched options for bringing iMacs on a plane, decided to put it on the slow container ship that’s bringing the rest of my stuff. After much scheming, here's how I'll bridge the gap: I bought a 2021 MacBook Pro (open-box on eBay), and will use that until my stuff arrives in Portugal in the Spring. Then I can sell the Macbook Pro in Portugal for more than I paid for it, and return to the comforts of my luxurious 27" 5K iMac screen (note that all Apple devices are dual voltage).

I'm averse to small screens - even the comparatively huge 16” screen of this Macbook Pro. When I first started writing (on a Mac Classic II with a 9" screen) a more experienced writer - I think it was David Lindsay - mused to me about how writers suddenly all seemed to be stamping out 9" chunks. There'd be great coherence within each tiny block, but the beginnings of paragraphs/chapters/articles/books and their endings often felt oddly disconnected, as if they'd been crafted with blinders on. Which they were!

I've embraced larger displays whenever I could afford them, and each leap improved my writing coherence. It's painful for me to revert to a laptop screen. A big part of what feels like "home" to me is a large display. And while I'm plagued by anxieties re: chunky coherence, and thirst for the day when I can unfold a business card-sized slab of magical material into a semi-rigid 27" screen anywhere I want, this temporary screen size demotion is a concession for the move.

For the moment I'm still typing on my 2020 iMac, and the screen is fantastic. It remains nearly impossible to find an affordable separate 5K display. Advancement isn’t a given! In fact, Apple discontinued this 27" iMac, so you might want to look for it on eBay (again: computers are fast enough™, so you won't take a processor speed hit by reverting to two year old hardware).

I just received the 2021 MacBook Pro 16" M1 Retina (note that an M2 version is due soon), and it's terrific, display dimensions aside.

Sometimes a computer "feels" great. I remember, after buying a Performa 630 in 1995, emailing my friend (and programming hero) Bill Monk to rave about it ("I haven't had to restart it in days!"). It was impossible to say what made the 630 so creamy delicious to use, but it's less of a mystery with this MacBook Pro.

It's got the custom M1 chip, designed by Apple not just for MacOS and Mac hardware, but specifically for recent MacOS and recent hardware, so it's not tasked with serving all scenarios. Most chips support a funnel of legacy hardware and software, but this thing's positively bespoke, so the usability - the Fahrvergnugen - is off the hook.

I described the Performa 630 as more solid than any Mac computer I'd ever used, though the touchy-feely notions of “solidity” and "usability" are surely nonsense. Hardware differences are easily quantified via drive and processing speeds. Beyond those stats, it either works or it doesn't - though, sure, poor hardware will torture you as errant operations touch errantly upon errant points of failure.

Yet no one buys more credulously into the "usability" myth than hardcore computer geeks - the ones you'd expect to be super rational. I remember Bill being genuinely excited to hear how buttery good the Performa 630 "felt".

On those same terms, the MacBook Pro is doce de leche. It's fast, but all computers are fast now. Bespoke architecture, fahrvergnugen, impressive build quality, crazy nice 16" screen. And Apple's finally put keyboard-gate behind them (notoriously crappy keyboards for several generations of Macbook Pros). This may not be my favorite keyboard, but it's good, and the built-in TouchID relieves pain I didn't know I’d been suffering on the iMac. I’ll say this, though: my 5K iMac display at half brightness looks like stadium lights compared to this laptop at max. 

One real speed benefit, courtesy of the M1 chip: boot time is under 20 seconds. Not that I often reboot.


I particularly enjoy talking and writing about Apple tech, because, while I've been very avid about it for a very long time, the topic gets buried beneath my more public-facing interests. Really, I could write full-time about this stuff. Prior Apple writings (including, sorry, lots of posts about AAPL stock) here. Don’t miss ”Massive Mac Info Dump.”

Stock Muttering Summation

I forgot to offer a needed summary beneath my recent "Stock Mutterings" posting. So I added it there, and will reprint it here for your convenience. For more details about the stocks mentioned, see, of course, the above-linked posting.


To review:

AAPL at $138 offers an extremely tempting opportunity for a 45% gain at absurdly low risk (by "risk", I mean the chance of losing money). That's an extraordinary proposition, and I can't understand why everyone wouldn't jump at it. The stock may dip lower before it turns around, but not even the gloomiest bear would imagine it won't eventually reach $200. It's just a matter of time (hopefully it will happen about a year from now, making it a long term capital gain!).

TXG offers a very good opportunity for a 4x gain without tons of risk...though it might take a while (remember: patience is the little guy's investment super power).

Even a smidge of moderately positive news might lift CRIS from the populous slurry of biotechs parked and awaiting grandeur. If so, a 10x gain would be pretty easy (the $7s aren’t exactly gangbuster territory). With bigger news, which I don't expect anytime soon, sky's potentially the limit.

Stock Mutterings

Sorry for the lack of links to my previous write-ups on these topics. The Slog's search box is your friend!


I've never felt more morbidly ashamed than the last two days spent feasting my eyes on the news of an incipient monkeypox crisis. It's been, perversely, fantastic for my shares of SIGA, a company I invested in (at circa $2.50) in a previous century, which has developed, approved, and begun selling a highly-effective anti-viral (not a vaccine) for smallpox and other poxes (the EU approved it for monkeypox). My first thought is that I don't like being in a position to profit from misfortune. But my second thought is that I helped bring a drug to market that will make this impending crisis far less harmful. But I'm trying to keep my delight levels duly low.

So Apple's falling back down again. Once it bottoms out (the lower the better!), buy it. Even if you're scared it might go lower. Even if it goes lower (you needn’t nail the nadir). Even if analysts predict further drop (analysts always predict further dropping when a stock drops and further rising when it rises; that's their clever little trick). Even if the market's falling apart and you imagine no bright day will ever come. That's the suppressive perspective that keeps people irrationally unable to spot the opportunity of fantastic value at firesale prices. One day AAPL will drop and fail to ever snap back, but you will not lose all your money. Apple will not go to zero. They have enough cash on hand to stop making iPhones and iPads and Macs and just go buy Goldman Sachs and Starbucks....and still have $17B leftover in case they want to start an airline or whatever.

I bought TXG at $50, where it was severely undervalued, and it rose to $200. Now it's back to $50, and nothing fundamental has changed. This isn't some speculative play; they are doing substantial business, and are well-known as a serious player in their field. All that said, TXG is nowhere near the solidity of Apple. But Apple doesn't have the potential of quadrupling (at least not anytime soon).

Still more undervalued, and still less solid, CRIS shouldn't be priced anywhere near its current 75¢. The only explanation is "market's down and biotechs are really down". That's not a substantive rationale (note that there were some trivial testing issues which might have justified a 5-10% haircut). If you have a few bucks lying around you'd like to use to take a speculative flyer (and wouldn't mind losing all, because, again, this is NOT Apple, and it COULD go to zero), CRIS would be a fine choice. Even if its peak of $15.60 (where I should have sold) was fluffy, the stock is pretty clearly worth seven-ish, which makes it a hell of an enticing bargain here. Though I could be wrong. Like with Parker.

I'd be surprised if Parker ever revives. I can't be angry at Andrew Tobias for recomending it; he's right more often than than he's wrong. But I still haven't sold. Maybe if I finally sell my SIGA shares and need to take a loss to offset the gain for tax purposes....

To review:

AAPL at $138 offers an extremely tempting opportunity for a 45% gain at absurdly low risk (by "risk", I mean the chance of losing money). That's an extraordinary proposition, and I can't understand why everyone wouldn't jump at it. The stock may dip lower before it turns around, but not even the gloomiest bear would imagine it won't eventually reach $200. It's just a matter of time (hopefully it will happen about a year from now, making it a long term capital gain!).

TXG offers a very good opportunity for a 4x gain without tons of risk...though it might take a while (remember: patience is the little guy's investment super power).

Even a smidge of moderately positive news might elevate CRIS from the populous slurry of biotechs parked and awaiting grandeur. If so, a 10x gain would be pretty easy (the $7s aren’t exactly gangbuster territory). With bigger news, which I don't expect anytime soon, sky's potentially the limit.

Technology, Creativity, Hacking, and Risk Assessment

My iPhone's been bugging me to update its apps. Scores of them. So I let it "Update All". Then, a few minutes later, I asked it to update to the latest iOS. I was cognizant the OS update would require the device to restart, interrupting the other process - the app update. Was this a problem?

"No," I quickly determined. But I noticed my mind doing a bunch of things to reach this conclusion.

My first thought was that both these iPhone processes have been largely unchanged for a decade. If they played badly together, it would have been noticed and fixed.

My second thought was that App Update was designed to roll with interruptions. Power interruptions, connection interruptions, restarts, etc. Knowing how programmers think, I understood that the two processes don't need to talk to each other. App Update will simply assume its subservient position when the gnarlier OS Update seizes control of the device. It will duck out of the way, and continue later...or, come to think of it, maybe not. App updating might not resume upon restart, but I can always resume it later.

What won't happen is my winding up stuck with zombie half-updated apps from an interrupted process. If that were a thing that happened, iPhones wouldn't work. So that potential peril point had surely been addressed eons ago. I know that the device doublechecks newly downloaded apps to ensure their integrity. And, again: App Update gracefully gets out of the way. My only downside would be needing to complete App Update later. Ni problema.

My next thought was more complicated, and more ominous. There was a minute risk of a freak condition no engineer had thought to address. App Update and OS Update each contain multiple user-invisible processes, and there is a sliver of a chance that some vulnerable component of App Update might collide with a vulnerable component of OS update, confusing the phone and creating Problems.

It's unthinkably unlikely. These processes are close to fully assured for safety because there's so little a user can do to surprise them (and, again, they don't need to ever talk to each other, anyway). Each is triggered by a simple start/stop command, like a light switch, so there's little terra incognita - potential interference or unpredictably shifting conditions.

I'll note, parenthetically, that you actually can mess up a light switch if you use it surprisingly - e.g. violently mashing it on/off over and over, especially if it's a cheap or old switch. And maybe you could burn out the bulb faster if you stood there flicking on/off/on/off 10,000 times. Even the simplest process can fail if you surprise it with behavior its designers hadn't anticipated.

Creativity is about defying expectation and behaving in unintended ways. So creative people perennially make themselves edge cases, conjuring surprises that designers never anticipated, which means they break stuff a lot - both deliberately and accidentally.

This makes us terrific software testers. In fact, that's a hobby of mine. I've helped programmers uncover problems with their code by mashing their switches 10,000 times, or pushing the down-volume button when they wouldn't have expected it, or dunking the device in chocolate milk, or a zillion other surprising moves normal users don't normally do. This helps them make their apps more robust. A programmer once told me, with great admiration, "Gosh, Jim, you could break anything!"

See here for how this all ties in with creativity, Groucho Marx, Banksy, and Kali the Goddess of Death.

The start/stop commands for App Update are non-physical, so an iphone, unlike a light switch, doesn't care if you sit there punching at it all day. And there's little confusion or surprise one can introduce into such a simple process. Rigid constraints and simplicity ensure predictable user behavior.

Turning this around for a moment, if you've ever watched engineers use technology, you've noticed that they do so carefully, like walking a tightrope. They have a deeply engrained sense that stepping off the path of normal operation (to any degree and in any way) might provoke crisis. A layman might conclude that engineers are oddly frightened of technology, but that's not it. They're immensely cautious because they know that everything is held together by spit and wires, designed to surprisingly narrow purpose.

In that last link, I wrote:  

"There is risk in making yourself an edge case. Parking lots, for example, are designed for slow driving. Those who navigate them at high speed will tend to have drivers crash into them, because anticipating really fast cars while backing out of parking spaces requires more violent neck-craning than most people apply."

So this isn't just a tech thing. It's true of any designed system. It might work out fine for a night or two to sleep on an air mattress perched upon your kitchen countertop, but it's risky, because there are potential failure points never anticipated by the designers of the air mattress nor the designers of the countertops. And the severity of failure is inherently unpredictable. Anywhere from mild annoyance to the implosion of the galaxy. At least theoretically.

As a child I loved it when calculator batteries ran low and began reporting that 2 + 2 = 0000101010 or whatever. Good times! That spirit is what made me (I hesitate to use the English language's most misunderstood word) a hacker. I don't steal data, I don't break into the Pentagon, I don't change all my grades to "A" in the school computer, and I don't wreak revenge on adversaries. Those are activities of criminals with tech expertise, some of whom might also be hackers. Hacking is a simple and beautiful thing. It's the mindset of being unable to resist using technology in unintended and surprising ways. Creativity + technology = hacking. In earlier eras, we called it "tinkering." And, hey, as in any human realm, assholes gonna asshole.

I'm hacking right now. I'm repurposing this "Blogger" platform to create a whole other thing. Do I really strike you as fitting the "blogger" mold? No, I've got something else in mind - something hard to name or to pin down - while I squat gleefully in this hokey environment like a virus subverting its host.

I was hacking in 1997 when I repurposed the still-new tools of web publishing for the supremely odd purpose of chronicling my eating ("What Jim Had for Dinner"). These days half the world blogs about food (the first popping kernel doesn't make the other kernels pop), but the first time's always a hack, inevitably perpetrated by a hacker. So stop hating on hackers! You need us! We blaze the trails!

There is absolutely good reason - and a long and storied tradition - of willingly making yourself an edge case...and breaking stuff in the process. That's what art's about (or should be about). Creativity is inherently destructive!

All these strands, god help me, run through my head as I decide whether it's ok to run App Update and OS Update concurrently. I recognize that it's almost surely safe; and that the less important process, App update, will probably be interrupted, but surely recover gracefully; and that, yes, there's a minuscule chance that obscure aspects of both processes might coincide to make my phone play only Mr. Magoo cartoons for all eternity (or, more likely, transform into an expensive and stylish brick), because I'm doing a somewhat less common thing, which inescapably leaves me on marginally thinner ice. But I chose not to worry about it.


Being intensely curious, I begin to consider how other types of people might approach this same question. I turn my hacker's eye toward their mental operation.

Novice: "What, you mean the phone's doing two things at once?"

Average User: "Better cancel the App Update. It's not worth taking the chance. Tech can be unpredictable. I've been hurt before."

Power User: "I trust Apple on this one. Both processes are highly iterated and work beautifully, and App Update is designed to robustly handle interruptions of various sorts. So whatever OS Update does to the phone, App Update should gracefully get out of its way."

Engineer: "Mostly agree with Power User, but she failed to recognize that some unanticipated portion of one process might conflict with some unanticipated portion of the other process, creating problems with no hard limits (i.e. phone bursting into flames is ridiculously unlikely but not completely impossible). Best to be safe, and not make yourself an edge case."

CEO Type: "Technically possible catastrophe is not a pragmatic risk when odds are this low. Don't sweat it."

I know people who still disinfect groceries because, early in COVID, a scientist demonstrated that COVID can survive a day or two on surfaces. The study shook up laymen, who didn't understand that detecting some small quantity of virus under laboratory conditions is an exceedingly far cry from contracting covid from an egg carton. The research didn't conclude that the world is crawling with potential infection. It merely delineated the range of what's technically possible. It should have surprised no one that cooties transfered to a slab of plastic or paper don't immediately vanish in a puff of smoke. This doesn't place us in a Michael Crichton thriller with deathly supervirus lurking positively everywhere.

The risk is virtually zero. You'd need a ragingly infected stock boy to recently smear gobs of snot all over the item you bought, and for your fingers (unwashed and un-disinfected) to pick up sufficient viral load AND transfer that load directly into your nasal cavity (didn't your mom teach you not to pick your nose?). And even then infection isn't assured, nor are symptoms inevitable if infection does arise. So it's more like your phone bursting into flames from updating apps while updating OS. Theoretically possible, but not a pragmatic risk.

I'm not super curious about the conclusions of novice, average user, power user, engineer, or CEO. Nor am I particularly interested in their reasoning. What fascinates me are the various perspectives. All are looking in completely different directions!

Novice views from the baseline perspective of "me and my cool but unfathomable device," with a hazy expectation that it will always work.

Average User views from the perspective of distrust. Bad experiences with technology have instilled a visceral unwillingness to refrain from getting "fancy". A burnt hand forever recoils from hot stoves.

Power User views from a high-level perspective.

Engineer views from a low-level perspective.

CEO Type views from a managerial perspective, broadly scanning the horizon - all component factors - to identify likely SNAFUs and assign a risk level. Focus is on the potential for individual minor human failures to aggregate, creating chaos....while avoiding the engineer/scientist's professional fascination with pragmatically irrelevant edge-case scenarios.

That last more nuanced style of consideration involves myriad agile reframings of perspective, whereas the novice, average user, power user, and engineer remain mostly fixed in their perspectives.


A lithe perspective staves off addiction, depression (also this), and can even save your life. But it also allows you to view the world more holistically by nimbly swiping through a multiplicity of framings impacting a given situation.

This facility underpins my chowhounding prowess. While others stand before restaurant windows poring over the menu, or querying Yelp for ratings, or hustling departing diners for their assessment, I'm less specifically immersed, considering the evidence and mentally swiping through jillions of micro-decisions (of design, of branding, of lighting, of pacing, etc.) by the forces behind the operation. I'm sensitively probing their perspective in order to gauge my risk level in venturing in for a bite!

My Annual Post on Transcribing Voice Recorder Memos

I have more thoughts than I can remember (not necessarily a good thing), so I really depend on voice recorder apps.

I'm a big fan of RecUp, an iPHone app that gives you a big red button to hit for on/off, and that's it. When you stop a recording, it automatically uploads an MP3 to DropBox. The simplicity is fantastic. (I've heard NetMemo+ is similar for Android). I also rigged up an IFTTT process that watches the RecUp folder in my DropBox and sends me an email whenever a new recording arrives. FYI I first mentioned RecUp in this iOS app survey.

Transcribing can be a chore. You can do it yourself (using this Mac transcription app to fastforward and rewind or this free web app which does the same). Or you can pay a service gobs of money to hire people to laboriously transcribe your stuff, which takes days. Or you can settle for semi-crummy automatic translation, which will be riddled with mistakes.

Automatic is the sweet spot, because while you'll need to edit the transcription against the original audio, a decent transcription will be accurate enough to completely fix in one single pass, with very little pausing. It's viable.

Having carefully tested/compared all major automatic transcription services, I've discovered they're definitely not all the same. Best and cheapest by far is TranscribeMe. They offer pricey human translation, but I use their automatic service, which costs 7¢ a minute, and doesn't add up much even if you use it extravagantly (I bask in the delights of The Future).

Other services make you pre-buy bundles of expiring minutes, but TranscribeMe lets you micro-pay as you go. Easy-peasy. And it effortlessly handles dumps of multiple audio files (I let them pile up and then blitz through all at once). Sole problem: their site loves to show you forever-spinning cursors as you upload and order transcription. Just reload the page!

Milking the Apple Money Machine

I'm glad I bought a bunch of Apple shares when the stock went down to $251 on March 12. Today it closed at $425. Buying Apple during its periodic troughs is the gift that keeps giving.

I've explained my theory on this over and over. Here's one of those explanations.