justin․searls․co

How to fill Apple Passwords without constant Face ID and Touch ID prompts

Having recently begun the long, arduous journey off 1Password and onto Apple Passwords, one of the biggest annoyances is how much friction it adds to the drudgery of signing into a service to have to reach behind my monitor to scan the Touch ID sensor or to ensure I'm sufficiently camera-ready for a Face ID check to pass.

Turns out, you can just turn this off altogether! I would have preferred a reasonable time-based settings like 30 minutes or an hour, but I expected the answer to be, "go pound sand," and this is indeed better than that.

TIL that in recent versions of macOS, most stock apps can't be deleted by the user. Want to delete News? LaunchPad won't let you. Command-Delete ain't it. It'll bounce right off the trash.

What gives? It's because they're not really in /Applications anymore. They're installed in /System/Applications and that's a read-only APFS partition. Neat.

Evidence I've changed as a person: someone just stopped me on the street to say, "I'm sorry I just wanted to say you have an incredible energy and I wanted to hand you my card. Your chi is beautiful." And she clearly meant what she was saying. And seemed to be of sound mind.

First time for everything.

Possibly TMI: just me, or do socks and shoes fit more comfortably after trimming your toenails?

I'm not talking massive lengths here—even just a few millimeters and walking around in socks feels way more comfortable. Can't tell if this is just me having some hypersensitivity disorder.

Does anyone even work at Peloton anymore? On hold for what seems like forever listening to the same muzak loop endlessly.

Reactivating their shitty bike resulted in their backend creating two concurrent subscriptions on a single account. What a garbage product.

Breaking Change artwork

v25 - Ghost Engineering

Breaking Change

I left the country for a few weeks to get that taste out of my mouth but now I'm back and as salty as ever. Brace yourself.

I made a pretty strong appeal that you should e-mail the show at podcast@searls.co, so I won't repeat myself here. DO IT. DO IT NOW.

Hopefully I'll be back at least once more before we call it for 2024. Stay tuned. 📻

Show those show notes…

Train fare in Japan isn't cheap, but one way Japan gets people to choose it anyway is by directly exposing drivers to road infrastructure costs through steep highway fees.

In 8 days I drove 613 miles and racked up about $130 in highway tolls. Would have been more expensive to take trains, but just barely.

How to add a headrest to a Steelcase Leap chair

The Steelcase Leap (v2) is a good office chair in a world of mostly bad office chairs. I've been using it since 2020 and I don't love it, but I definitely hate it less than every other office chair I've ever owned. That's one reason I find myself vexed that Steelcase does not offer an after-market headrest for the chair (and no longer seems to let you configure one with a built-in headrest). In fact, so few office chairs offer headrests that I was briefly tempted to buy a "gaming chair" (do not buy a gaming chair).

And if you're reading this and identify as an Online Ergonomics Expert, I know you're champing at the bit to tell me, "headrests are bad, actually."

But if you're like me and have an incredibly large and heavy head, and/or you spend most of your time at the computer leaning back and pondering what to do next between furious-but-sporadic bouts of typing, then I'm happy to report I have a solution for what ails you.

I tried four different DIY solutions for slapping a third-party headrest onto the Steelcase Leap that were dreamed up by randos on Reddit, but only one of them worked. And the best part is that the winning thread only requires the headrest and a couple of zip ties, meaning that this approach shouldn't void your warranty by requiring you to drill into the back of the chair.

All you need:

  1. This exact headrest made by Engineered Now
  2. These heavy-duty zip ties
  3. These images and maybe also these images that more-or-less tell you how to secure the headrest with the ties to the chair itself

If you're visiting here from a search engine or an AI assistant's generous citation, I hope you find this helpful! I can only speak for myself, but I am quite glad that I didn't have to buy a new chair just to keep my 15-pound head upright at the end of a long day.