Love hearing stories like this about unfiltered, unfettered (and slightly insane) childhood play. Parents today don't even let their kids walk 2 blocks to school unsupervised, lest something terrible happen.
The danger in that story is pretty off the charts. That could have _easily_ led to death, like maybe 1/100? That's something parents _should_ stop. It could have been redirected to safer versions, you can have a lot of fun with lower voltage DC, or at the very least safer setups.
I was once playing with mains (220V) and got distracted on the phone with a friend. I literally took with each hand one cable (they were crocodile terminals) I just could not let go, the current makes impossible to let go. I reacted like 5 to 10 seconds later, by letting me fall backwards, which disconnected the leads from the plug. I was 15 or 16…
I should have gone to the hospital, but I didn’t.
So, I do bot say it is not dangerous, but it is not like it will kill you in 1ms.
I once shorted 380V with my little finger (testing industrial electric motors for overheating). It was like someone hitting the finger with a sledgehammer.
The most I ever got shocked with was 560Vdc @ 10mA I know it was 10mA because it popped the safety breaker on the lab power supply. I was testing a clamp circuit for a high power solid state RF matching network. I had been so careful the whole time using only one hand, but I got complacent for one second and BOOM, hand-torso-hand circuit.
It felt like I got kicked in the chest. Was sore for a few days after.
So lucky I was using the lab supply with a good breaker.
Oh I did not mention it, but the hands kept hurting one or two weeks after that. Really not funny. But 380v is another level of danger, energy goes ^2 with voltage!
Well it was really just the pinkie (and the arm a little bit), but it felt more like a kinetic hit then a electric-shock, pretty terrifying, the pain lasted for like a week (damaged bone marrow?)
Would have been a bad time to find out you had a heart condition. Grabbing with both hands (and being distracted) is indeed very dangerous, which is why the comment you replied to mentioned taking care. Many electricians will do small tasks without cutting off the power and it’s entirely possible to do things reasonably safely if you take some basic precautions.
I don't get the "note data is stored in a proprietary format" hate. There's a dozen different open source tools you can find which will one-shot export your Apple Notes to markdown, when you want to leave the ecosystem. Its not like Notion where the exports are messy, non-bulk, and destructive; they're proprietary, but parseable and sitting in a file on your MacOS filesystem.
I've never had iCloud Sync display any weird behavior in Apple Notes, and I've got thousands in there. I have, absolutely, seen Obsidian Sync delete notes I did not delete, and fail to upload notes; both of these were generally remediable via their recycle bin, but still very concerning.
All of these complaints are of the nature of "I don't actually have anything valuable to write down so I'd rather worry about the nature of the tool than what I'm writing". And, to be clear, I think this is why Notion is so popular, just for different reasons than your's; it looks great, and makes you feel productive because you've got amazing cross-referenced tables and hyperbacklinks and h1h2h3s and then wait where's the content?
Counterpoint, I have seen sync issues on very popular large note, cloud-based solutions that use proprietary formats - Evernote comes to mind.
When you have tens of thousands of notes, it's hard to even know if at some point, the note has been suddenly changed, reverted, or modified in a way that you didn't even realize occurred.
With an open format, specifically a text based one like Markdown, I can sync all my notes to a git repository in a diffable manner that I can quickly review.
Agee with you! I use a shortcut to send voice notes directly into Notion. I only use apple notes when I'm in a location I can't speak, and move them to Notion the next time I'm on my mac.
Great points i also agree with. That's Apple being Apple. I'd want an open format for sure.
Thing about Apple Notes is in spite of the open ideals, if you're in the apple ecosystem, it's just easily there, on all devices, very unassuming and simply, and that's so so very valuable.
It's the long view that gets me. Over the last 20 years, if i'm in the Apple ecosystem, notes are there, synced across everything, and it's just text. and it's simple.
I wrote this as a simple way to block and manage the annoying monthly nags that pop up when apps request screen capture permissions on macOS 15. I'm talking about messages like
"Foo" is requesting to bypass the system private window picker and directly access your screen and audio. This will allow Foo to record your screen and system audio, including personal or sensitive information that may be visible or audible.
So a timestamp per app bundle (name) is being saved somewhere on disk apparently. Anyone know where? Rather than muck around with my system clock (which can cause other problems I'd rather not deal with) I'd love to just poke the right values into whatever sqlite db they are probably storing this in.
What a miserable change this is. Apple is having its "Vista" moment.
Update: there's a simple unencrypted plist that controls this. Apparently "fixing" it is as simple as writing the app path along with a date far in the future using `defaults write`... eg
This is a Python program to back up messages from a Fastmail mailbox via JMAP API to a local or network-attached directory.
Standing on the shoulders of the great work of Nathan Grigg[0], I've updated and extended it with a few new features. The README contains instructions for running it locally, or via Docker if you prefer.
Hope it's useful to someone, let me know if you encounter issues.
This made me chuckle.
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