Mar 10, 2019

📱💻 Finer Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺 - Issue #52

By David Chartier • Issue #52 • View online

Hello all you Finer Readers! In this issue I have a good round of tips for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. There are also some great non-news reads for your thoughtful musings.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue or if there’s something you’d like to see covered in the future. If you know people who would enjoy this newsletter, I’ll owe you a beverage if you share this signup link and my Patreon link.

💡 Tips

📱 Readder for Reddit can email you a daily digest of top posts

While I generally prefer Apollo for Reddit on my iPhone and iPad, Readder is a decent client in its own right with a few unique features. One is the option of a daily email that contains the top posts from your subreddit subscriptions. It’s a useful way to keep up with what you care about on Reddit for those times when you don’t want to get sucked into the rest of the community.

💻 1.1.1.1 VPN app can pause your VPN for a set amount of time

The 1.1.1.1 VPN app for iOS can pause your VPN session for a set amount of time

In our modern times of omnipresent surveillance capitalism, intrusive tracking, and poorly secured websites, using somekind of a VPN (virtual private network) is arguably a necessity to protect your activity on the web.

There are plenty of solid, affordable options to choose from, one being 1.1.1.1 from Cloudflare. It’s easy to set up for your Mac and other desktops, but it also has a dedicated app for iPhone and iPad. One perk of this app is a big on/off switch that is easy to toggle. This switch also offers the option to automatically resume the VPN in 15 minutes, an hour, or when you switch WiFi networks.

It’s a handy trick for when you do tasks on an iOS device that benefit from low latency, such as playing competitive games.

📱 A refresher on useful iPad gestures

25 iPad Multitasking Tips - do you know them all? [9to5Mac]

The iPad has a strong variety of gestures that make it easy, dare I say even more enjoyable to use. If you pick up a model that ditched the home button, I consider most gestures downright necessary. Some of my favorites include:

Swipe left and right with four fingers to switch between apps
Bonus tip: If you keep your fingers on screen, you don’t have to completely switch to the next app. You can swipe just a little bit to keep at an adjacent app, then reverse back to your current app. It’s a handy way to check on the progress of a download or your place in a podcast
Pinch in with five fingers to quickly switch to the home screen
Pinch in just a little with five fingers until you see the multitasking view, then let go to see the app switch grid of other recent apps. It might take a little practice to get the muscle memory between the app switch and going home
Swipe up from the bottom of your screen just a little to show the Dock
Swipe up farther to go to the home screen

You can learn may more gestures in this YouTube video, embedded above, from Jeff Benjamin and 9 to 5 Mac.

📱💻 Quickly search all open tabs in Safari

If you toggle the Tab Overview in Safari, you can start typing to search the page title and URLs o all open tabs (sorry, not page content, at least as of iOS 12 and macOS Mojave). Here’s how to do it on each device:

iPad: Tap the tabs button in the top right of Safari, or two finger pinch on a webpage. With a hardware keyboard, you can just start typing. With no keyboard, tap the search box in the upper left
iPhone: The only option I can find is to tap the tabs button, scroll to the top of your tabs, then pull down a little more to reveal the search box (similar to showing search in Mail)
Mac: Click the tabs button, two finger pinch on a web page, or use View > Show Tab Overview. Then start typing
Watch: You can’t

🔗 Good Links and Food for Thought

On Being Useless: A Daoist Reflection

Utility, or usefulness, is an invisible thread that runs through and organises every aspect of our society. It is a basic, universal and inescapable measure of all worth in modern lives. This is obvious in our attitudes to work and education.

iai.tv • Share

I found the Beyond Bionics video below fascinating, although I wish they had explored what is possible with alternative types of limbs. As one of the interviewees said, “what if I don’t want a hand? What if I want… a tentacle? I could do that.”

Beyond bionics: how the future of prosthetics is redefining humanity

One of the good quotes from the people they interviewed below: “A lot of the emotional work I’ve done is trying to distinguish myself from this money.”

Financial Windfalls: 15 Stories of the Money That Changed Everything

Winning the lottery. Having a long-lost relative put you in their will. Selling your TV show. For our Money issue, we interviewed 15 people—and asked writer Ijeoma Oluo to contribute an essay—on the subject of windfalls.

www.topic.com • Share

🤩 Thanks for reading

How did you like this issue? Was it useful and bite-sized enough? Are there certain kinds of tips or apps you’d like to see here? Let me know what you think, and please help me spread the word about supporting Finer Things in Tech!

Did you enjoy this issue?

By David Chartier

Quick tips to help you get more out of your apps and Apple devices, served with a side of non-news good links across tech and culture.

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