I don't for a moment believe that there's a deliberate feature which causes iPhones to spontaneously reboot if they've been warehoused without a cellular connection. But now I definitely want this feature, and am going to try building it with Shortcuts. infosec.exchange/@josephcox/113443456856288328

RE: infosec.exchange/users/josephcox/statuses/113443456856288328

nostr:note1jlnuct8jv8gwppuzy4zhhcyp8p8zqmzhzy7qzc3kxhfmjmhelxcq6pq3m6 

 Whenever I wander around the neighborhood, I'm sure to spot at least one pickup truck which boggles my mind. I can stand in front of these things and not see over the hood, just face to face with chromed grille. I am 5'11" (180cm). I simply do not understand how anyone can operate one of these things and have even the slightest confidence that they're not going to flatten people every time they make a turn through a crosswalk. Seeing these things next to "normal" cars would be comical if it weren't terrifying. I've seen them protrude a foot or more into the roadway compared to the cars they're parked next to. I know that US cars have been growing for decades as a result of some decidedly misguided emissions standards. But seeing these things out there in the world is truly bizarre. It's like seeing a creative perspective-based trompe-l'œil, except that it's real and it can hurt you. 

 Happy Stanislav Petrov day to those who celebrate. 🫡 

 I made an appointment last week to get the seasonal flu vaccine and the updated Covid vaccines today. This was at a major national pharmacy chain (not the one which voluntarily pulled Plan B from its shelves). I was not successful at getting vaccinated. I'm grumpy about it.

I went to the location at which I made the appointment. They couldn't find my appointment in their system. They even went as far as telling me that my appointment was actually at another location. But they didn't actually have any vaccine in stock anyway. They were turning away other people with appointments.

[I went to the other location, and they were very clear that I did not have an appointment there, and actually printed out my appointment info so that I have something to show the first location. Though that location was also turning people away, saying that their appointments were at other locations, including the one which doesn't have any vaccine.]

And they didn't seem to have any way to efficiently reschedule. If they couldn't give you the vaccine because they didn't have stock, you're just out of luck. Make a new appointment online, I guess? Though do note that they're basically all booked up for the next two weeks — which is how far in advance their booking system goes.

So everyone who got their act together early to book their flu & Covid vaccines as soon as possible has their appointments pushed back by weeks, during a spike.

I called back the first location to ask if there were any faster way to reschedule, and they basically told me to pound sand and wanted to get me off the phone as fast as possible. They did say that they were expecting a vaccine shipment tomorrow. I think I'm just going to go back to the first location tomorrow morning and ask them to honor yesterday's appointment.

But what a mess. What utter nonsense. You shouldn't need an appointment to get a vaccine. You should just be able to walk in to any pharmacy anywhere and get it. But if there is an appointment system, people who make appointments should get vaccinated. It should be hard to avoid being vaccinated, rather than a challenge even if you do everything right. 

 The child tax credit cut child poverty in half in the US. As soon as it expired, child poverty went right back where it was. Poverty is a choice — a policy choice. We could end most poverty today by just giving people money — that's exactly what the child tax credit did.

Not all poverty can be directly solved with cash payments, but most poverty can. Far and away the number one cause of poverty is not having enough money. And when someone has other problems too, money makes those other challenges easier to face.

For decades — in fact most of a century since the early forays into a welfare state — our society has had the means to almost completely abolish poverty and deprivation. We just… keep deciding not to. The example of the child tax credit shows just how easily and quickly cash payments can end poverty. That choice continues to be available, and the implementation is so straightforward.

The number one cause of poverty is not having enough money. When we give people money, they stop being poor. We have the money, and we have the means to give it out. 

 Kurzgesagt: takes massive bong rip
Kurzgesagt: What if the simulation hypothesis, but make it science?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Stzj2_Rlo4 

 I love reading and learning, but my eyes spend so much time looking at bright screens. Sometimes I want to curl up with a good book and let my eyes relax too.

Not every book, paper, epigraph, or long blog post has an audio edition. This is especially true of obscure and technical material. I've found this to be particularly true of my favorite queer works and books about Judaism. Making audiobooks is an expensive professional endeavor! It absolutely makes sense not to commit those resources when just getting something published can be such an uphill challenge.

That's why I love Voice Dream. https://www.voicedream.com I really can't recommend it enough for people who use iOS & macOS for their main devices. Voice dream is like a little robot in my phone which can read aloud any PDF, ePub, or web page is truly magical. Even with specialist/technical vocabulary (or the weird proper nouns in that fantasy or sci-fi novel) you can add custom pronunciations. Everything runs offline on your device, but it supports iCloud to sync your documents and reading status between your devices.

You can select custom voices or use some of their incredible built-in options. I like Sharon from Acapela; it's incredibly clear even at very high speeds. That's another thing — listening to audio is one of the few methods consistently demonstrated to be able to increase your reading speed while maintaining comprehension & retention. And when I need to slow down the playback, that's a good signal that it's time to get ready for bed.

Still, even with the finest robots, human performances are so much better, especially for fiction. When someone has gone to the effort of recording an audiobook, I prefer to buy them from Libro.fm. They're a social purpose corporation, care about DEI, and let you support your local book store when you shop there. Most importantly, all your audiobooks can be downloaded as DRM-free mp3 files so you can archive them on your own, and use any audiobook player you like. libro.fm/referral?rf_code=lfm299420

My current audiobook app of choice is BookPlayer (apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998) which works great, and has a ton of flexibility and convenience. I'm thinking of migrating my book library to Plex and switching to Prologue (https://prologue.audio). I love the convenience of Plex as a potential single place to store & access my whole media library. Unfortunately, it's very much focused on TV & movies, with music & audiobooks second, and text books/documents completely unsupported.

I'm not saying that you have to buy audiobooks! Your local library almost certainly has a huge selection of audiobooks available through Libby and Hoopla and probably other services too. Most libraries I've used are also really good about getting even obscure books if you ask nicely. There's no need to limit yourself to one library either. In California, loads of local libraries are open to any CA resident, so you can really stack up those library cards to give you access to a huge selection of books.

Voice Dream supports every type of document. It's pretty easy to send webpages there to be read aloud. But it's very much, uh, book-forward, I guess I should say? The organization and library management seems to be oriented around the dynamics of like books and papers and longer form materials rather than thousands of short news articles.

For shorter material, I use Reader. https://readwise.io/read It's truly a fantastic combination of an RSS reader, read-it-later tool, and library manager. It even supports PDFs and ePubs, but kinda the inverse of Voice Dream, it seems more oriented around many shorter documents than like reading whole books.

Reader has built-in support for reading things aloud, and I use that all the time. Unfortunately, the voices they've picked don't work very well above "2x" speed — they just seem to skip words rather than actually speeding up. Their read-aloud system doesn't work offline. And there's no way to queue a couple of articles up for back-to-back reading as far as I can tell. Which is frustrating and makes hands-free reading pretty unsupported. But Reader is a pretty early product and they've been making huge improvements very quickly since release, so it wouldn't surprise me to see these foibles improved in months rather than years.

All of this is a huge accessibility step forward. I know that my vision isn't getting any better, so the more I can rest my eyes, the longer I hope to be able to use them. And I wear headphones roughly all the time to give me some semblance of volume control for reality. So it's nice to also use their audio playback features for something.

How do you read books? What are some of your favorite sources for DRM-free media? What accessibility, library-management, and playback tools make it easy for you to enjoy things and fit them into your life?