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The Lost-Ground Edition Friday, March 3, 2017

Apple’s Devices Lose Luster In American Classrooms, by Natasha Singer, New York Times

Over the last three years, Apple’s iPads and Mac notebooks — which accounted for about half of the mobile devices shipped to schools in the United States in 2013 — have steadily lost ground to Chromebooks, inexpensive laptops that run on Google’s Chrome operating system and are produced by Samsung, Acer and other computer makers.

How A Typo Took Down S3, The Backbone Of The Internet, by Casey Newton, The Verge

On Tuesday morning, members of the S3 team were debugging the billing system. As part of that, the team needed to take a small number of servers offline. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended,” Amazon said. “The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.”

The subsystems were important. One of them “manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region,” Amazon said. Without it, services that depend on it couldn’t perform basic data retrieval and storage tasks.

Stuff

Bare Bones Software Sunsetting TextWrangler, Focusing Fully On BBEdit Text Editor Development, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

With TextWrangler going away, Bare Bones instead points users to their main text editor product BBEdit which now has the same feature set without requiring a license.

Why I Finally Replaced Evernote With Bear, by Casey Newton, The Verge

But after months of use, I’ve come to love Bear for the way it tackles just the right number of tasks, and accomplishes them in a way that feels effortless. I kept waiting to miss Evernote, but I never have.

Notes

Tim Cook Introduces Al Gore’s New Movie ‘An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power’ In Silicon Valley, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Cook gave the introduction for the film, talking about climate change as a whole and initiatives currently in place to combat it. The Apple CEO explained that countries are coming together to push towards a cleaner environment and that there are a lot of reasons for optimism.

Bottom of the Page

Didn't Apple use to ship iPod charging cables that had a 30-pin connector on one end, while having both USB-A and FireWire connectors on the other ends? Maybe the new charging cables that comes with this year's iPhone still have a Lightning connector on one end, but have both USB-A and USB-C connectors on the other end, and maybe this is why this cable is confusing the heck out of all the rumor-mongers?

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I am, in general, satisfied with EverNote. I do want to use this note-taking app on macOS, iOS, and Windows, and EverNote is probably ahead of many competitors in terms of supported platforms. The main problem I have, though, is that user-interface on macOS, iOS and Windows are all different enough that I feel I am not as productive as I want to be.

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Today, I am extra careful when typing in Unix commands at work.

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Thanks for reading.