Reggy Bear is a clever app by @hyperjeff for testing regular expressions.

I vividly remember saying shortly after the 2016 election that I was not sure this country in its current form could survive a Trump presidency.

Three years later, I am still not sure the country can survive in its current form.

Rough start to the day. My car is in a repair shop five town away, getting a new alternator and battery. I am waiting to hear back from my plumber because the heat in my house is not working.

Current status: waiting for tow truck.

The Washington Post: McConnell tells senators he doesn’t yet have votes to block witnesses in Trump impeachment trial

If you have Republican senators, call and put pressure on them.

I wonder if a better approach to multitasking on iPad would be to let the user effectively divide the screen into two or three different iOS devices. Each would have its own app or SpringBoard window and its own software home indicator. Resizing could work as it does now.

I deleted a post from this morning. After hearing the recording referred to in this article, I think I was wrong about Trump’s intent.

Would I be crazy to move to California just so I can vote for Adam Schiff?

Reuters: Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained - sources

via MacRumors

The Washington Post: Gary Starkweather, inventor of the laser printer, dies at 81

Magnet is a great window manager for macOS. Magnet lets you move windows to predefined locations via global keyboard shortcut.

My favorite Catalina feature is the native Find My app. It is convenient for quickly locating my phone.

At the Providence Bruins game.

I had a performance issue that I alleviated by porting some Swift code to Objective-C. That code needed to repeatedly access large dictionaries that were generated by Objective-C code. I think accessing the Objective-C dictionaries from Swift code was a culprit.

Fabián Cañas documented some quirky behavior around Swift and Objective-C interoperability related to non-optionals and nil values.

Looking forward to this evening’s CocoaHeads Boston meeting.

I installed Front and Center.

It is too early to tell whether I will find it difficult to go back to the Classic behavior, but I have missed it at times.

We are in a war that any other President would have avoided.

Relieved to finally fix a nasty bug that hounded me for too long.

I have been using my 16-inch MacBook Pro for almost two months. I wanted to share some thoughts on the computer. For context, I updated from a 2012 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro. I never had a computer with a butterfly keyboard. This is my first computer with a Touch Bar.

This machine is nice and fast. It compiles Unread about 1.9x as fast as my 2012 did.

I hear the fans spin up periodically, but they seem to spin up less frequently than they did on my 2012.

I initially felt indifferent to the keyboard. But now when I use the keyboard on my 2012 it feels a bit clunky to me. I do think the keyboard on the 2019 feels better than that on the 2012.

Thus far I have not used the Touch Bar much. I think this is primarily because my eyes are almost never focused on it. Its capabilities are discoverable, but I rarely look at the Touch Bar to discover them. Since I typically work at my desk with an external keyboard, it would be difficult for me to get into the habit of using the Touch Bar anyway. If Apple decides to push the Touch Bar forward, making an external keyboard with a Touch Bar would help.

I really appreciate Touch ID and Face ID on iOS devices. Touch ID is handy on the MacBook Pro, but I do not find it nearly as beneficial as I do Touch ID on iOS devices. I can type a password much faster on a MacBook Pro keyboard than on an iOS software keyboard, and if I am using an external keyboard I have to reach to tap the Touch ID button on the MacBook Pro.

Initially I was annoyed by the combination of switching to USB-C and the reduced number of ports. On my 2012 I would use the MagSafe connector for power, the Mini DisplayPort and the HDMI port to connect to two monitors, one USB port for my keyboard and mouse, and one USB port for an iOS device. After buying the right cables and adapters, I could connect everything to the four USB-C ports. Eventually I purchased a dock that allows me to connect my computer to everything on my desk by connecting one cable. The dock also allows me to connect to my network via ethernet and to connect to two iOS devices simultaneously. An additional benefit is that the Apple power cable and brick now reside in my backpack. When I need to go somewhere with my computer I can unplug the computer from the dock, put the computer in the backpack, and I am ready to go.

The major downside to this device is that I get occasional kernel panics when connecting to external displays (FB7493774). Some combination of disabling Automated Graphics Switching, setting Turn display off after to Never, and installing macOS 10.15.2 appears to have significantly reduced the frequency of these kernel panics, but I still see them about once a week. I hope Apple is able to address this with a software update soon.

Donald Trump on November 14, 2011:

@BarackObama will attack Iran in the not too distant future because it will help him win the election.

Next week’s CocoaHeads Boston meeting will include:

• Allie Mellen describing threats in mobile security. Allie is a security researcher and author at Cybereason.

• @danielpunkass describing the work he did to support accessibility in Black Ink 2, his crossword puzzle app.

I started off the year by reorganizing and tidying my office.

I probably need a new year’s resolution a little more ambitious than “fix this stupid bug”.

Now that I have a Mac with USB-C, I wish for a phone with USB-C. One cable could connect my Mac to power, my phone to power, or my phone to my Mac.