Stephen Hackett makes a good case that Apple should make a cheap education-focused iPad:

Making the tablet more rugged would be at the top of the list for a lot of educators. I’ve heard numbers all over the place when it comes to accidental damage rates for deployed iPads in schools, but making an ePad that could take more abuse would be a winner in most people’s books, I’m sure.

When Apple introduced the iBook G3, Apple praised it rugged design, saying it would be great in schools and at home. I’m not saying an ePad would need curvy rubber-injected plastic around the back, but moving to something tougher than aluminum would be a win.

In the same way that the consumers pressured Apple to make the eMac available for non-education customers, I think the same thing would happen for a cheap and rugged iPad.

My toddler currently uses an old first generation iPad mini in a giant rubber case to listen to VeggieTales, watch Toy Story, and use the Bible App for Kids. His iPad only supports iOS 9, so it won’t get access to the new parental control features that are rumored to be coming in iOS 12.

The current $329 iPad would make for a decent replacement for it, but Stephen’s imagined ePad would be even better.

Tim Carmody’s post on Kottke.org on how Haiti became so poor is both illuminating and heartbreaking.

From a Johnathan Kats Twitter thread mentioned in the link:

Racists have needed Haiti to be poor since it was founded. They pushed for its poverty. They have celebrated its poverty. They have tried to profit from its poverty. They wanted it to be a shithole. And they still do.

David Smith has been tracking the adoption of newer models of Apple Watch by using stats from his apps.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the adoption of the Apple Watch Series 3 since its introduction last fall. From a development perspective the Series 3 is a delight to work with. It is fast, capable and LTE allows a wide variety of new applications (for example, the podcast support I added to Workouts++).

This stands in contrast to the challenges of working with the Series 0 (or Apple Watch (1st generation) as Apple would call it). It is just slow and honestly a bit painful to develop for. Even basic things like deploying your application to the watch can take uncomfortably long amounts of time. In daily use the Series 0 is probably “good enough” for many customers, especially with the speed/stability improvements added in watchOS 4, but as a developer I can’t wait until I no longer have to support it.

Which is why I’ve been watching the Apple Watch adoption curve within my apps (specifically Pedometer++ for this analysis) quite carefully. My personal hope is that this summer when we get watchOS 5 it will drop support for the Series 0 and free Apple to really push forward on what is possible for developers. But in order for that wish to be realistic I imagine Apple will need the daily use of those first watches to have died down significantly.

The numbers he got were encouraging. Based on his numbers, the percentage of users wearing the Series 0 Apple Watch are well below the Series 2 and 3.

My guess is that the actual numbers (which only Apple can get) are not quite as favorable. Using apps on the Series 0 watch is a pretty terrible experience, so I would guess that the percentage of Apple Watch users that use third party apps is higher on the newer watches than it is on the Series 0. If that is the case, there would be more Series 0 watches still being used than his numbers show.

However, I don’t think that his numbers being a little off necessarily have to change his conclusion that watchOS 5 is a good time to cut off support for the OG watch. If Series 0 users are not using third party apps in the first place, why make developers continue to support them?

Having the latest version of watchOS still support the Series 0 watch could also explain why Apple Watch development is still using WatchKit instead of something closer to UIKit. It would not surprise me if a new development framework for watchOS coincided with dropping the original Apple Watch from the list of supported devices.

Hopefully we see both this summer.

The guys over at Studio Neat just launched a Kickstarter for their newest product, a pen.

This is Mark One, in a nutshell:

• Minimal design. No superfluous details, not even a visible logo. Clean, simple, elegant, and it comes in two colors. 
• Durable. The entire pen is made out of metal, and coated with a robust ceramic polymer coating, which gives the pen a great feel in the hand. 
• Retractable. We wanted a click pen for our favorite refill, and we went to great lengths—including a custom mechanism—to make it happen. Satisfying as heck to click. 

This whole journey started when we discovered a fantastic refill, beloved in the pen world: the Schmidt P8126 rollerball. It quickly became our favorite, so we thought, “we should make a great pen for this refill.” So that’s what we did.

This will go great with my Panobook. I backed the $100 tier to get both colors immediately.

Maria Vagoda for Food & Wine:

I’m crying in a quick-service restaurant in Oklahoma City. Chalk it up to a long day of traveling, or chalk it up to this: I’m holding the perfect beef burger with sweet, cheese-topped fried onions, smashed between fluffy buns, the tang of pickle punctuating each note of rich, as mayonnaise becomes one with the mustard becomes one with the bread.

I’m at Tucker’s Onion Burgers, a local OKC franchise with four locations that specializes in one of the state’s most beautiful delicacies: the onion burger. People eat onions, fried or otherwise, on their burgers everywhere, but this—this one is different.

“In my mind, the most important thing to know about the onion burger is that, like a lot of Oklahomans who enjoy it—it’s a humble food,” said Cameron Coit, an OK-born New Yorker who worked in restaurant kitchens for years. “It was born from the depression, so it’s simple: Onions…meat…bun. That’s all you need. I personally take mustard and a little pickle on mine, but nothing else. Anything else, and it ceases to be an onion burger.

Burgers are, by far, my favorite food and Tucker’s is easily my favorite place to go eat one. I always knew that the onion burger was something that was popularized in Oklahoma, but I never knew the history of why.

In addition to Tucker’s, she mentioned Garage Burgers and Beers and Sid’s in El Reno. I go to the Garage about as often as Tucker’s, but I have never made trek out to El Reno.

The last line of the article describes her reaction when learning about Sid’s and it sums up my feeling perfectly:

Well, it looks like I have to go back to Oklahoma to taste for myself. This is my life now. And I could not be more pleased with it.

What a win for OKC. Beat the best team in the East that was carrying an 11 game win streak on the road. The Thunder are finally playing at the level they were when Andre went down. Peaking at the right time! 🏀

Finished off my single dad weekend by getting both kids up and to church. We were five minutes late and I forgot to fix Ollie’s hair, but we made it.

But now Momma is back home and all is right with the world.

My HomePod randomly played Numb/Encore by Linkin Park/Jay Z and now I am sad about Chester all over again.

Kevin Love for The Players’ Tribune:

On November 5th, right after halftime against the Hawks, I had a panic attack.

It came out of nowhere. I’d never had one before. I didn’t even know if they were real. But it was real — as real as a broken hand or a sprained ankle. Since that day, almost everything about the way I think about my mental health has changed.

Single Dad Weekend Update: it took two and a half hours, but both boys are asleep. Next up, the third boy – me.

My wife is having a weekend away with some friends, so it is just me and the kids at home for the next couple of days. She made sure we were prepared before she left.

I love that @shawnblanc is documenting the work he is putting into his new (to him) Jeep Wrangler. I would love to do something like this with my Bronco, but I don’t see myself being able to put any real work into it until it is no longer my daily driver.

I am excited to see what Apple comes out with at this education event in Chicago.

This may be a long shot, but I hope that the new Books app has better support for comics. I would love to ditch ComiXology.

Also, AirPower and new AirPods please?

In light of Stephen Hawking passing, Forbes did a story coving other scientists with disabilities. It features David Moran, a consulting meteorologists for WDT with Cerabal Palsy. It is worth a read.

Long story short, I decided to move my site from being built with Jekyll and hosted on Github Pages to being built with WordPress and hosted on Pressable.

Jekyll on Github

I originally picked Jekyll because I liked the purity of it: I like that my site was statically generated and that all of my posts were just plain text files. Hosting on GitHub was also obvious because I already used them for storing code and because their Jekyll hosting is free.

The first problem with that setup that I ran into was actually posting to the blog. I theory, it was easy: just push a new commit to my repo with my new post. In practice, getting all of the YAML front matter for every post needed up being pretty annoying. I made a little utility app that did the heavy lifting here, but there was still too much friction to getting my text from my devices to my site.

Another big issue with Github Pages is that they do not support SSL for custom domains. So they only way to get my site to severed via https instead of standard http would be to use the domain rosskimes.github.io instead of rosskimes.net. That was a non-starter.

The last problem I had was just performance. I post a lot of photos to my site and they were always pretty slow to load.

I could have fixed the SSL and performance issues by just moving my Jekyll site to another host but I figured if I was going to pay for hosting I should pick something that would fix all of my issues.

On to WordPress

After doing a little research, it was clear that WordPress did everything I wanted.

Posting is easy. For longer articles like this, I can post directly from Ulysses on my iOS or Mac. For shorter microblog posts, I can post right from the Micro.blog app. For my photoblog, I can use the new Sunlit app. I can even use Workflow for quickly posting specialized posts like photos and links. I also was able to start using MarsEdit to handle more in-depth posts on the Mac¹.

The host I landed on, Pressable, performs well and has built in support for SSL via Let’s Encrypt. It also includes a Jetpack for WordPress plan, which has some nice bonuses like site monitoring and stat tacking.

What’s Next

When I decided to move, I just wanted to get the site running as close to what I had on Jekyll. Now that I am done with that, I can work actually improving the design and adding some features. The first thing I plan on doing is making the homepage look a little nicer and adding in support for posting quick links with little commentary (this is inspired by the new Fresh Links section on The Newsprint, which is excellent).

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If you subscribe via RSS, old posts may show up again. I did my best to make sure all my URLs stayed the same so that wouldn’t happen, but it is hard to cover every case in big migrations like this.