A good question to ask to start off the New Year.
Syncing third-party calendars from Google to iOS
I center my email and calendar activities around Gmail and Google Calendar. They feed the Mail and Calendar programs and apps I use on my iMac, iPhone, and iPad.
I’ve encountered the following issue a few times: a new calendar I’ve added or imported into Google Calendar does not appear on my iOS/iPadOS calendars.
Most recently, it was importing the ICS link from my workplace’s Outlook Web app into GCal. I could see my workplace schedule on my Google Calendar but not on my other devices.
Troubleshooting this was maddening. I’ve selected the right calendars in Google, the calendar connections to my iMac and iDevices look fine – why am I not seeing what I KNOW should be there?
I found the answer in this 2015 blog post from Online Tech Tips. The writer correctly pinpoints the problem to third-party calendars that show up under Other calendars.
And he identifies the solution – a specific link that “for some ridiculous reason…does not appear anywhere on any page while in Google Calendar…However, this page is key to getting those other calendars to show up in the Apple calendar app.”:
[https://calendar.google.com/calendar/syncselect](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/syncselect)
And indeed – my workplace calendar was unselected in the list. Ticking the box, clicking Save, and checking my iPhone later showed that the new calendar was now there.
File this under “yet another 20-second solution that took two hours to find.”
WEIRD - An acronym used in academic literature to identify possibly biased results:
Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic
What acronym could accommodate those + “young” and “male”? Thinking here of diet and exercise studies, or studies of online behavior, where the results are hard to generalize due to the limited demographics of the study population.
Evernote "dashboard" gallery
A boggling collection of different startup ‘dashboards’ for Evernote users on Evernote’s community forum. Some interesting ideas here, some familiar ideas dressed differently.
Looks like the contributors are mostly men, which makes sense considering we love tinkering with our environments under the illusion that we can control what happens to us.
John Simon, R.I.P.
John Simon was a critic I read voraciously for many years, mainly in my 20s when I reviewed movies and theater as a reporter for a small-town newspaper. Simon’s breadth of material was astonishing; his movie and theater criticism were expert, though as my friend Scott observed, he seemed to have no feel for American artforms like the cartoon or slapstick.
I found Simon’s opera and poetry criticism more interesting because those topics were more unfamiliar to me; I could feel his love for those artforms shine through. I think he loved them more than theater.
Simon was a relic of a different, lost world of print and publishing, the way George Jean Nathan represented the sort of Broadway reviewer represented by George Sanders in All About Eve. I subscribed to New York magazine solely for his theater reviews and Peter Davis’s music reviews. And yes, I subscribed because Simon’s takedowns and insults were so entertaining. But when Simon loved a work – and his collected reviews tended to finish with an unalloyed positive appraisal of a book, movie, or play – his writing would soar and it made me want to see or read the work that elicited such praise.
I needed a keyboard shortcut in Evernote to duplicate a note. I was about to load Keyboard Maestro to do that when I remembered the Keyboard System Preference panel. Presto! So easy to forget the built-in tools sometimes.
Forbes's "Should You Upgrade iOS" column
If one lesson can be learnt by all this it is to stop blindly leaping to every new iOS release.
Gordon Kelly is a frequent critic of Apple so I have always taken his iOS update reports with a grain or three of salt. But with the recent 13.x releases, I now wish I’d listened to him and held fast to iOS 12.
My SE, which usually held a good battery charge all day, drains down to 5% within an hour simply sitting on my desk.
My SE is 2+ years old so, on the off-chance, I’m having a new battery installed this week. If I still see a drain, I’ll know it’s iOS.
I have turned off automatic updates and am holding fast, for better and worse, at 13.2.1.
Update, 2019-11-13: Took my iPhone to an Apple certified service shop. The repair guy hooked my phone up to his diagnostic computer and it said the battery had gone through 600 recharge cycles; Apple says the battery has a lifetime of 500 cycles. So yeah, the battery was shot. The Battery Health setting is an OK criteria (mine was at 88%) but not the decisive one; it’s the number of cycles that is decisive. But the user cannot see the number of recharge cycles a battery has gone through, only a technician. Charging the phone up now; hoping for good times ahead.
Dr. Drang tells us about a triffic iPhone setting to Silence Unknown Callers. New in iOS 13. Hurriedly enabled as soon as I read that post.
Bull Moon Rising festival in Durham tonight.
Best fun Halloween movie for all ages has to be Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein: a great send-up of the grand old Universal monsters, whose great days had sadly passed by this time.