Malcolm's Geek Blog

Category: Apple

  • More on that custom widget – more about data analytics and researching stuff

    More on that custom widget – more about data analytics and researching stuff

    Let’s talk about lay research, one of the cornerstones of science, and reproducibility, another, and   doing one’s research and homework before putting something out in the world when developing even trivial things like iOS Shortcuts-driven Widgets.

  • Writing/Customizing/Automating a Custom Widget in Apple’s iOS 14

    Writing/Customizing/Automating a Custom Widget in Apple’s iOS 14

    (NOTE: These are the life and times of a geek – we do this kind of thing for ourselves or our loved ones. It’s part of what I do to make a living, sometimes. Or just to impress neighbors or even help them sometimes. But that’s why this is in the Geek-as-a-Trade series.) So I…

  • Adventures in Home Automation

    Adventures in Home Automation

    For me, it started with the Nest Protects (Smoke and CO detectors), then a Nest Thermostat, then more Protects, now some cameras, and some other products: A WeMo (Belkin) smart outlet plug, and now a Philips Hue bridge and two lights. It’s a slippery slope. A gateway drug. But it’s also a huge technical PITA.…

  • MacBook Pro slow shutdown (macOS Sierra)

    Just a quick tech note. If you have macOS Sierra and you’re a coding/geeky/programming type and your OS is taking a huge amount of time to shut down, update your MySQL to 5.7 (I had to reinstall Homebrew to do that). If you’re not, maybe tweak your ExitTimeOuts (or get your pet geek to do…