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A few weeks ago I got an iPad Air. I love using this including writing my blog posts on it, but did not have an easy way to post to my blog, which uses a programmer centric site generator called Jekyll to create the HTML that is then hosted on GitHub Pages. It turns out using the GitHub API and Apple Shortcuts this problem was not hard to solve.

As I sat in our hospital room with my wife and newborn son, I was a little bit trapped. The computer the nurses had been using now displayed an error message. Our morning nurse came by and asked for whatever paper records they had left in my son’s bassinet. Our hoped for early discharge was waylaid not by a foreign actor or expert saboteur but by the very software meant to protect the hospital from these threats. Straight out of the 80s the backup discharge plan involved our doctor painstakingly hand scribing our son’s medical record. So much time had been spent trying to prevent disaster yet not nearly enough time and effort had been spent planning to recover from it.

Yesterday the MBTA announced that come August 1st they will finally accept contactless payments from credit cards and smart phones. This project took over six years and billion dollars. The retrospectives and reports will no doubt show the money was used in useful or productive ways, or wasted with a vendor who is blamed for the mistakes. Nobody will be held accountable for prospectively putting together a project with a budget so large it was doomed from the start. The only reason it had to take six years is it can be a challenge to spend a billion dollars in a single year.

Yesterday Vanguard, despite having two security keys enabled with their account, randomly forced me to enable a less secure factor on my account with them. Later that day Facebook would not let me login using the “Security Key” button on their iPad app and instead required me to approve my login using another logged in Facebook instance from my mobile phone. Even these large allegedly smart companies fail a basic security maxim that any method that is less secure than your most secure factor lowers the security of your account and opens a new attack vector.

A year or two ago Gulikit, a Chinese electronics manufacturer splashed onto the scene with a new kind of joystick replacement for Nintendo’s joy-con controllers that claimed to resolve the stick drift problem. Nintendo famously had to offer free repairs to its customers as the joysticks on its smaller controllers would wear out over time. In public interviews Nintendo said they improved but would never be able to resolve the joy-con stick drift. Gulikit claimed to have solved this problem, and in addition to its joy-con replacement kits released the King Kong 2 controller with the same hall effect joystick technology. I tried the King Kong 2 and had mine fail with a software update. After waiting for reviews and for Gulikit to release a new version of the controller with improved back buttons, I picked up the King Kong 3 Max.