SpamSieve 3.3 is an update of my Mac e-mail spam filter that includes lots of changes to improve the filtering accuracy: Much of this is automatic: SpamSieve is better at analyzing the message structure, HTML, and URLs within messages. The other part is helping customers help themselves. If SpamSieve is continually letting spam messages through, […]

Nick Heer: NASA has put a few hundred photos on Flickr with some awesome views — and I must emphasize how the word “awesome” undersells these images. I am using this one as the wallpaper on my iMac right now, and it feels like a pretty good use of a big, high-resolution display. Previously: Default […]

Logan Kugler (via Hacker News): To ensure those wrong answers never reach the spacecraft’s thrusters, NASA moved beyond the triple redundancy of traditional systems. Orion utilizes two Vehicle Management Computers, each containing two Flight Control Modules, for a total of four FCMs. But the redundancy goes even deeper: each FCM consists of a self-checking pair […]

Marcin Wichary, at Unsung:

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.”

Then, at any moment, you can hold Control and swipe with two fingers (or use a scroll wheel) up or down to zoom the entire screen.

I’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…” so you see individual pixels better.

This is one of the very best MacOS tips. No third-party software. Built into MacOS for several (many?) years now. Incredibly useful.

But I had no idea it existed until last June at WWDC. It was Monday, after the morning keynote and just before the afternoon State of the Union. Beautiful sunny day at Apple Park. I ran into my old friend Cabel Sasser, and, maniac that he is, he’d already installed the first Tahoe developer beta on his MacBook Pro. So I sat next to him and we started examining the UI changes in detail. And Cabel was zooming in and out instantaneously. I was like, “Whoa, how are you doing that?” And Cabel was like, “You don’t know about the Accessibility Zoom gesture? Here, let me show you!” And my mind was blown. Cabel emphasized the importance of going into the “Advanced…” dialog to turn off “Smooth images”, and I agree. This is a fantastic feature, but Apple has the default setting wrong for smoothing (a.k.a. blurring) the zoomed image. I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would want the zoomed image blurred.

Anyway, then we both laughed ourselves silly and made ourselves a little queasy examining, in detail, just how bad the Tahoe UI was. And I thought to myself, I need to post this as a tip on Daring Fireball.

Well, it took 10 months, but Wichary posting it on Unsung reminded me that I never posted about it here. [Update: Actually...] Turn this on, start using it, and you’ll find yourself using it every day if you care about design details.

Bonus tip: Subscribe to Wichary’s Unsung in your RSS reader. He’s only been posting there since early December, and it quickly became one of my favorite blogs in the world. One of those blogs where I’m excited every time I see there’s a new post. I would read a post from Wichary describing what it’s like to watch paint dry, because I know he’d only write about it if he noticed something interesting and nuanced. Because he’s only been writing Unsung for a few months, you can catch up on the whole thing.

Hannah Murphy, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, but Ars Technica has a no-paywall syndicated copy):

The company recently began prioritising a Zuckerberg AI character, three of the people said.

The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI, which could offer conversation and feedback to employees, according to one person. They added that the character is being trained on the billionaire’s mannerisms, tone and publicly available statements, as well as his own recent thinking on company strategies, so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.

This is so straight out of every dystopian sci-fi film about an evil corporation that it’s hard to believe.

Top comment on Hacker News, from “flibbityflob”:

How will a machine ever replace his famous warmth or empathy?