The clipboard manager has been available in Alfred for long enough that I regularly forget to use it. A recent project had me working in a large TaskPaper document. I wanted to collect several lines into one block and then move them to the end. There are several ways to do this, but of course I had to go down a rabbit hole on Alfred to solve it. Make sure the Alfred clipboard manager is enabled:

Living in a country with the second best espionage infrastructure in the world, I like to think I’m prudent. Be that as it may, there’s always more to consider and I’ve shared this site with many of my friends. It’s a good primer on securing your devices and personal infrastructure. This is a topic I regrettably think about a lot. I’m not even close to an expert though. You can get a pretty good summary of my position on the privacy episode of Nerds on Draft.

From Brian Krebs: That’s because in addition to compromising the download page for this software package, the attackers also hacked the company’s software update server, meaning any company that already had the software installed prior to the site compromise would likely have automatically downloaded the compromised version when the software regularly checked for available updates (as it was designed to do). Read all the way to the bottom for the updates.

This just tickles me. I love these solutions that are really just an opportunity to learn. This gave me the idea to score a pair of anagrams according to how many chunks one had to be cut into in order to rearrange it to make the other one. On this plan, the “cholecystoduodenostomy / duodenocholecystostomy” pair would score 3, just barely above the minimum possible score of 2. Something even a tiny bit more interesting, say “abler / blare” would score higher, in this case 4.

Dr. Drang moved back to Apple Mail (for now). While I still use MailMate everyday, I pretty much agree with all of his comments. MailHub could feel like magic and I still miss its intelligence. I wrote about my affection back in 2013. I’m sticking with MailMate because my muscle memory wins over the convenience functions of Apple Mail plugins (for now).

Python 3.6 adds a new module for creating random values for cryptographic secrets. For example, this call: secrets.token_urlsafe(16) generates this unique string: ‘5t_jLGlV8yp2Q5tolvBesQ’ Now, if only I could get all of my scripts moved off of Python 2.7 I’d be in business.

Good children’s television is hard to come by. I mean, an actually tolerable, enjoyable by an adult, children’s TV is as rare as an honest toy commercial. But, this past year my family has discovered several new shows that we’ve all enjoyed. Here’s the top 5. Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street (Amazon) is one of the best young adult shows I’ve ever seen. The acting can be cheesy and the stories a bit predictable but the overall two season story arc is endearing and grows the characters in surprising ways.

A new study out last month from the Pew Research Center show that americans understand the security risks online but are pretty bad at protecting themselves. The survey also finds that Americans are not always vigilant in the context of mobile security. For instance, 28% of smartphone owners report that they do not use a screen lock or other security features in order to access their phone, while around one-in-ten report that they never install updates to their smartphone’s apps or operating system.

I haven’t been this giddy in many months. Chewy brings a tear to my eye.

Patrick Soon-Shiong seems like a Perfect fit for the new administration.