My friend Stephen Hackett wrote a great post about net neutrality a couple days ago. It’s worth a read, as well as a watch of the CGP Grey video embedded within.

This part by Stephen really hit home for me:

Here’s the thing: I’m not special for making my living online. The Internet has allowed countless businesses to blossom, creating an untold number of jobs. These companies provide goods and services for millions of people, and not just in America.

Allowing a handful of the most powerful companies on the planet to control how information flows on the Internet is reckless at best. Considering ISPs spent $42 million from January to July this year on lobbying, reckless may be the wrong word.

Evil may be a better choice.

Everybody’s favorite Italian, Federico Viticci, asked me to share my iPhone’s home screen for this week’s edition of his weekly newsletter, MacStories Weekly.

This is the first time I’ve been asked to share my iPhone 6 home screen, so if you’re into that sort of thing, do check it out. As an added bonus, my dear friend _DavidSmith also has his home screen featured today.

Plus, because Federico is Federico, the rest of this week’s newsletter is excellent too. I use nearly all of the apps that he featured; they’re great.

A school outside Boston has installed “active shooter” technology, which can detect the presence and location of gunfire:

In the live demonstration, the “gunman” entered the school armed with an assault rifle, opening fire with dummy rounds first in the school library then rampaging through hallways and classrooms. But he had only a few minutes to wreak havoc.

Smoke alarm-sized sensors installed in classrooms, hallways and other points throughout the building were activated by the sounds of gunfire, and police officers were immediately able to track his movements and quickly subdue him.

The technology was apparently developed for the military and is sold by the appropriately-named Shooter Detection Systems.

I find it absolutely stupefying that we’ve gotten to this point. However, the real kicker for me was this quote from the local police chief:

“Unfortunately, with school crisis situations, it’s about mitigating loss.”

I’m glad that we’ve gotten to the point that saving our children’s lives is now being described as “mitigating loss”.

UPDATED 12 November 2014 4:30 PM: As pointed out to me on Twitter, the “loss” referred to in the quote above is actually time, not lives. Oops. That makes me feel far better about the quote, but no better about the necessity for a shooter detection system.

I promise this blog won’t turn into a shrine to Declan, despite my every desire to do precisely that.

However, this picture I couldn’t resist sharing. Though I need to establish some context first.

Normally when a child is born, the child is placed directly onto the mother’s bosom. Shortly thereafter, the child breastfeeds for the first time, if he or she will be a breastfed baby. When Declan was first born, he was placed on Erin’s chest, but almost immediately, he was taken away to be examined.

Declan’s breathing was clearly labored and he wasn’t wailing like he should have been. Naturally, both Erin and I immediately started freaking out, though I tried to lock it up as best I could. Seeing a little newborn gas mask on Declan, and eventually a tube placed down his trachea to clear the fluid out, was challenging.

Welcome to parenthood.

As it turned out, Declan had inhaled a lot of amniotic fluid during labor. A visit from two NICU nurses, the aforementioned mask and tube, and an hour later, he was breathing better and was placed on Erin’s chest for “skin to skin”.

This picture was taken seconds after Declan was returned to Erin.

If you look closely (or click to enlarge), you can see the tear running down her cheek.

For the rest of my life, I don’t think I’ll be able to look at this picture without crying. It is, and very likely will remain, the best picture I’ve ever taken.

A few days ago, /. (yes, I still read /.) linked to a wonderful remembrance of HyperCard. It is a lovely article, that brought back quite a few memories.

Despite being an ardent Apple user today, I wasn’t until 2008.

Before that time, as a child of an IBM’er, I grew up on ThinkPads. Some of the machines I had as a kid I still remember extremely fondly. The “butterfly” was a gimmick, but a wonderful one. My T30 was my home server until I got my Synology around a year ago. Erin rocked my T60 until I recently bought her a MacBook Air.

This post isn’t about ThinkPads, though. It’s about HyperCard.

When I was in grade school, it was the time of Oregon Trail on the Apple ][. Moving on to middle school, the Macintosh was the de rigueur computer of the time.

Those Macs came with HyperCard.

As a kid with a keen interest in computers, but who had — at most — written a few lines of BASIC, HyperCard was amazing. I remember being mesmerized by it. As a middle schooler, I was able to write seemingly-complex programs stacks, all because of how easy and logical HyperCard was. The choose your own adventure games I wrote in HyperCard were surprisingly complete and pretty. (Later, I’d repeat the process using new tools with new friends.)

HyperCard was the perfect way to dip your toe into the pool of writing software. From the article:

HyperCard represented perhaps the bravest part of this ‘computing for the people’ philosophy, as it enabled users to go past the pre-built software that came on the machines, and to program and build software of their own.

Not to be pigeonholed into being a tool for amateurs, HyperCard was used in many professional settings. One of the most popular games of all time, Myst, was written in HyperCard.

If I were to pinpoint the genesis of my career as a developer, fumbling about with HyperCard may have been it. Well, that or reading the PC-DOS manual and then making bitchin’ menu systems in batch scripts.

It makes me very sad that either there isn’t a modern equivalent of HyperCard, or if so, it’s so well hidden that no one really knows its name.

Declan is nearly a week old today. Erin and I are surviving and quite enjoying parenthood. By most measures are sleeping way more than can reasonably be expected, but, of course, less than desired.

Some thoughts:

• My patience has gone through the roof.
• I’m more comfortable with my baby than I’ve been with anyone else’s. That feeling of confidence started the moment I set eyes on him.
• Everyone in the world has advice for you; sometimes solicited. Sometimes not.
• Everyone’s advice — including healthcare professionals’ — tends to conflict in minor or even major ways.
  • Speaking of advice, don’t look for advice on the internet
• I’m taking a lot of pictures. 474 in six days; 80 pictures a day. At this rate, by the time he graduates high school, there will be:
  • Half a million pictures
  • 4.25 terabytes of photos, assuming we never upgrade our camera
• Resisting spamming Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook with baby pictures nonstop is more difficult than I expected.
• Every new thing Declan does, and every new discovery of something that reminds me of Erin or myself, is a gift worth cherishing. Every day brings more of these gifts.
• Fatherhood is awesome.

Declan James Liss. Born early yesterday morning. He weighed in at 8 pounds, 6 ounces and was 20 inches long.

Finally.

Mom and Declan are doing well.

I’m over the moon. Eventually I’ll be able to look at him without weeping, right?

What with due any time now, Erin and I thought it was about time we got ourselves a proper camera. Since we only have one chance to grab pictures of baby-, we wanted to ensure we did so using a decent camera. I consider this purchase an insurance policy against hearing or saying “Gosh, I wish this picture was clearer” in the future.

After much deliberation, we settled on the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Micro Four/Thirds camera — the kit version — and the Panasonic 25mm f/1.4 lens. The camera came highly recommended from not only professional reviewers, but also my friend Shawn Blanc.

Having had the camera for a little while now, I’ve noticed a few things I’ve not seen called out obviously elsewhere. Like my iPhone 6 quick impressions, these will be brief.

WiFi

As Shawn discussed in his review, the WiFi connection seems super janky at first, but quickly becomes a very useful feature. The E-M10 does not allow for connections to a network; rather it is designed only for peer-to-peer connections with a phone. Once you’re connected, you can use the Olympus OI.Share app to control the camera, download pictures, or add data to existing pictures.

Having the WiFi connection is actually super handy simply for downloading pictures, as you don’t need a $30 cable to get pictures off the camera while on the go. While not necessarily a common problem, it’s great to have the flexibility.

GPS and EXIF

Part of the reason I settled on the E-M10 is that it supported semi-automated addition of GPS coordinates to the photos it takes. The camera doesn’t have a GPS radio within it, but it can have a WiFi connection to a phone that does.

However, the process was not terribly obvious to me. I had assumed that you would connect the camera to the phone, and then snap away. As it turns out, that’s almost exactly the opposite of the actual procedure.

Instead, the procedure is:

1. Open the OI.Share app.
2. Turn on GPS logging by turning on the switch at the bottom of the screen.
3. Take a bunch of pictures.
4. Connect your phone and the camera via WiFi.
5. Use the app to add GPS coordinates to the pictures on the camera, using the log you generated in step #3.

As you can see, rather than adding the GPS data as pictures are snapped, you instead add them in bulk when your session is over.

Bokeh

I never realized how much I want to have bokeh in all my pictures until now. Bokeh is, without question, my new favorite thing.

When I heard about Yosemite back at WWDC, I was overjoyed and then devastated. At first, I was thrilled about Continuity, which would allow my iPhone, iPad, and Mac to work more closely together. I was devastated to find out, however, that Continuity requires Bluetooth Low Energy, which my Mac is too old to have.

Then I saw this tweet:

@tapbot_paul @iconmaster Handoff/Tethering/AirDrop: proximity (BTLE) SMS: both on active network Phone: same network (WLAN, LAN)

— Michael Jurewitz (@Jury) October 21, 2014

I cannot effectively describe how excited this made me.

Here’s how you turn on “SMS Relay” with iOS 8.1 and Yosemite:

1. On your iPhone, Settings > Messages > Text Message Forwarding
2. On your Mac, open Messages
3. Back on your iPhone, turn on the Mac you wish to enable
4. Wait a few seconds for the confirmation message to show up (shown to the right)
5. Enter the code on your iPhone

I tried it immediately after enabling it, and it worked no problem.

Last week I stepped out of the tech bubble and slipped back on a pair of comfortable shoes that I hadn’t worn in a while. I recorded a car podcast.

The folks at White Roof Radio, a Mini-themed podcast, asked me to be their guest on this week’s episode. On it, we talk about some of my history with cars, my thoughts about Mini, some industry news, and more.

I had a ton of fun recording with them, and it was a blast to stop thinking tech and start thinking like the car-obsessed guy I’ve always been. If you were at all a fan of Neutral, you’ll probably enjoy this.