Spectre 🍿

Relaxing on a quiet movie night.

Now that revisions are complete, I’m excited to announce my new book:

Humble Service: Leading Your Family as a Stay-at-Home Dad

The book will be released on November 26th, with pre-orders starting today.

Back in July, I got a pair of Beats Solo 3 headphones with our new iPad Air. I wrote a quick 24 hour review and I didn’t have nice things to say about the comfort factor.

I stuck with it, and a month later, they’re my primary headphones in the house. In fact, I’m wearing them instead of my AirPods when I’m inside. 
Let me back up for a moment, because I almost bought an earlier version of the Beats Solo headphones back in 2016.

I was in the market for new headphones for use at my computer. It was between the Beats Solo (or whatever it was at the time) and the Bose wireless headphones. I went to the Apple Store and tried on the Beats. They hurt, not unlike my most recent experience. So I went with the Bose. They’ve served me well, but I often get bluetooth interference at my desk. Something about my iMac, wireless keyboard/trackpad, would cause scratchy sound or input interference.

Back to today. Despite the initial discomfort, I kept wearing the Beats. After nine days of wear, I noticed the L/R indicators etched on the metal inside the headphones. Not easy to spot, but I did see that I’d been wearing them backwards the entire time. I turned them around, and there was an immediate change in comfort. 
To be clear, these headphones are very tight. Putting on my Bose headphones is like sitting down on a comfy couch. The Beats are more like sitting on a subway train. My ears have adjusted to them, so they aren’t painful or annoying anymore. I’m just used to the fit.

The sound is awesome. I’m not picky when it comes to sound quality, so I think for most people, they’ll do a good job. I really feel the music, which is great.

The killer feature, and why I won’t be going back to Bose, is the W1 chip. This is Apple’s custom chip that makes the headphones play very nicely with Apple hardware. Bluetooth has always been a struggle for me. The W1 makes wireless headphones work the way that I think they should. Switching between devices is seamless and quick. The connection is rock solid, no interference or dropping. The range is also excellent. I don’t spend any time trying to get the headphones to connect or switching between devices. It’s amazing.

I’m glad that we were able to get these Beats free of charge, because it’s not a risk I’d be willing to take based just on the in-store try on experience. Now that my AirPods are nearing end of life, I’m seriously considering getting the PowerBeats for wearing while exercising and working in the yard.

Beats should do something to improve comfort. But for those willing to push through a week or two of somewhat painful adjustment, a very good set of headphones is waiting on the other side.

Saturday morning means swimming lessons. 🏊🏻‍♂️

The team over at Lose It! do a great job iterating. Frequent updates with noticeable tweeks.

The Distraction-Free Phone – The Sweet Setup

It’s about only having things on your smartphone that are in alignment with your vision and values about how you want to use your device.

My weekend project.

Apple Music on the web is so cool.

I reactivated my iCloud email address (that I’ve had since the .Mac days). I switched my primary over to Fastmail in November.

I came back so I could be ready for Sign in with Apple. There were 840 new emails, 347 of which were spam. Thus why I abandoned it in the first place.

a:text-decoration vs. a:bottom-border. Duh.

As a reward for picking up all of their toys, my children were each given some bubble wrap to play with.

Update: I’ve found an easier implementation that preserves the link function for the dark mode version of your logo.

With iOS 13 just weeks away, I’ve been busy making sure that all of my websites are dark mode compatible. I should’ve been working on this over the past year, but there’s no time like the present!

I’m grateful to the Micro.blog community and all of the CSS junkies who have shared code to make it easy for us to enable dark mode on our personal blogs. It feels great to be at the bleeding edge of web design!

I’m using a custom version of the Kiko theme, which is mostly the original design with a few minor adjustments. I posted the snippets and instructions for how to enable dark mode on Kiko (even if you’re just using the built-in standard version) two months ago, but there was something missing.

I have a logo at the top of my blog. It’s my signature orange bow tie logo that I use on all of my work on the Internet, along with my name. On my blog, I have my name written in black, and it looks great on a white background! In dark mode, however, it looks really bad.

I turned to our old friend, CSS, to get me through this problem. First, I created and uploaded two versions of my logo: a light mode version and a dark mode version.

Now all I had to do was add the Custom CSS to overwrite the light mode logo hard coded into the HTML in the theme files with the dark mode logo.

Here’s my CSS:

 .masthead-title {
content: url(https://chetjcollins.com/uploads/2019/02c28d1ca2.png);
 height: 154px; 
 width: 560px; }

I added that CSS within the dark mode @media query and, boom! Now when a visitor is using dark mode in their browser, the same orange bowtie logo shows up, but this time, my name is much more readable.

This took a lot of work and trial and error, but as usual, when it clicked, it felt amazing!

Known issues: This substitution will break the home page link that Kiko gives your logo/profile picture. If this is a deal breaker for you, take a look at this method.

I hope that you find this helpful!

CSS is incredible.

Beautiful evening for a walk.

Two news stories I’m tired of hearing about:

• Brexit
• 737 MAX

Dishes, like laundry, can only be neglected for so long.

Apple Watch sleep tracking revealed: sleep quality, battery, more - 9to5Mac

When wearing the Watch during bedtime, if the user wakes up and starts their day before their alarm goes off, it will automatically turn off the alarm. The alarm will also play only on Apple Watch, using the iPhone as a backup. There will also be an option to use a silent alarm that only vibrates the Apple Watch. The new bedtime system will enable Do Not Disturb automatically when the user goes to bed. There will also be a new complication available for sleep tracking.

Yes to all of this!

The state of gaming on macOS is really sad. Almost every game that I bought on the MAS in the last four years is no longer available, even for redownloading. Not sure if Apple Arcade can rise to the challenge, but I’ll keep an open mind.

Bill McGurn, writing for his Main Street column in The Wall Street Journal.

the clarity of the pro-life proposition—the insistence that each of these lives is no less precious than any other human life

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking and writing about the universality of the dignity of the human person. Seeing every person for who they are, worthy of dignity and respect, is a powerful countermeasure to our worst inclinations.