I'm an iOS developer and a longtime Apple fan, but I'm having trouble finding a reason to upgrade from my iPhone 6S (even though Apple's offering me $200 in trade-in value for it).

Honestly, the lack of a headphone jack is a big thing for me. I listen to music all day at the office with my iPhone and an expensive set of headphones. It's a simple use case. No reason why I should have to bother with dongles or batteries.

"For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?"

Boo hoo hoo.

- Former Netscape engineer

If Apple sold a reasonably-specced computer (either a mini or a tower) that let me upgrade the memory, storage, and video card whenever I desired, I'd click 'Buy' on that immediately. Since they don't, they're forcing me to question whether I really need to continue using macOS.

Right now my desktop is a Hackintosh that I built in 2011. Over the years I added more memory, upgraded the HD to an SSD, and upgraded the video card a few times. I boot into Windows for games, and into macOS for most everything else.

But frequent rebooting back and forth is a pain. Recently I've been getting into VR (HTC Vive) and have been thinking about building a new computer with current parts ... and I've been putting thought into how much I really need macOS, given that so many of the apps and services I use are online and cross--platform. Do I want to continue dual-booting? Or do I want to run macOS in VirtualBox (which apparently has problems with sound, and FaceTime and iMessage don't work)? Or do I want a Mac mini, or to build a small Hackintosh with an ITX-based PC, so I can remote into it from Windows with VNC? Or do I want to wean myself off macOS entirely?

My realization is that I use macOS for lifestyle stuff. Using the Safari web browser is nice because it has access to the same bookmarks I have on my iPhone and iPad. Photos is a good library app for the photos I take with my iPhone. macOS is generally easier to get around in ... though it absolutely sucks for games. And so I will continue to need to run both operating systems for now.

And don't even get me started on Mac laptops.

Yeah, because freeing someone from a moral framework and letting that person exercise his power as best he sees fit has worked so well in the Star Wars universe.

Watched the video. I never noticed before that the shots of Boba Fett in Jabba's lair are mirror-imaged - he's suddenly left-handed and the rangefinder is on the left side of his helmet.

I've been a Mac fan for a long time, but I use the latest MacBook Pro for work and I don't like it - useless Touch Bar, poor keyboard, poor battery life, no USB-A or HDMI ports, high price (starts at $2400 with a dedicated graphics chip), &c.

I recently played with a Razer Blade 14 and I was impressed; $1900 from Amazon for better specs. (Windows 10 is tolerable enough and unobtrusive enough for my tastes.) Though, the Razer reviews are extremely hot or cold; some people love them, others have had endless problems with hardware failures and recalcitrant tech support. Looks like this is the price of high-end Windows laptops at the moment.

My next laptop might be a Razer Blade. Change my mind.

You have a point.

The StackExchange sites have a weak spot for late answers. The voting and sorting system reward mediocre answers that are posted early over great answers that are posted months or years later. That means that the best answer is sometimes half way down the page and may never reach the top.

It is often problematic that the person who asked the question gets sole control over which answer is at the top via the green check mark that "accepts" the answer. I've seen them choose some really bone-headed answers as accepted on occasion. There is just no way for the community to over-ride them, even with at 10:1 ratio of votes on some other answer.

My other pet-peeve is the large number of separate StackExchange sites with somewhat overlapping topics. It is almost impossible to figure out where to post a question sometimes. Most of the sites have non-obvious rules about what is off-topic. You are likely to ask in the wrong place and get your question closed the way it is set up. For example if you have a question about the security of Google Analytics for your WordPress website running on IIS. You might ask it on Security, WordPress, Webmasters, WebApps, or Server Fault. Most people seem to just ask it on StackOverflow because it is the one they know.

An email system that's impervious to spam.

Or, at least, that doesn't happily send a single spam message to millions of recipients.

Wasn't SnapChat's confusing interface deliberate, though? I thought I read somewhere they meant for it to be confusing, and many features to be hidden or unintuitive to force users to talk to each other about it and share tips/tricks. I can see kids liking that their parents don't understand it; lots of videos kids grabbed of their parents confused about how the lenses worked, for example. I never liked that mentality; thought it was self-defeating. Once Instagram came out with their "stories", I think it was the beginning of the end for SnapChat. They must be trying to draw the novices the initially spurned.

My home, like many, has a low-voltage panel where the incoming cable signal from the outside world is routed to the rest of the house . All the coax cables from every room in the house are connected to a splitter here.

The trick, though, is that cables run signals in either direction. When I ditched Comcast, I put an antenna (Clearstream 2V) in an upstairs room facing towards the broadcast towers. I added an inexpensive signal booster, connected this to the coax wall jack, and then in the low-voltage panel this became my source - I disconnected the "outside world" line, moved the line from the antenna there, and now all the rooms in the house can get a signal from that antenna for free OTA HDTV. This is perfect for a cord-cutter.

Same exact thing happens to me. People think my email address is theirs, and they sign up for all sorts of things. I reset the password and close the account where I can, lecture the source on not trusting email addresses before verifying them if I'm feeling particularly annoyed, and otherwise add them to my spam filter.

Funny thing, though: the two sources I have the most trouble with are banks and phone companies. If one of their customers signed up with my email address, then I get sent all sorts of their personal information in my email - their phone number, bank account number, bank balance, SSN, postal address, &c. If I then try to contact the bank or phone company and say "yo, stop sending me your customer's PII," they often require me to provide an additional piece of information such as the customer's mother's maiden name before they'll listen to me. And of course I have no idea what that is.

And when I am able to finally convince them that they're sending their customer's information to the wrong person, often they tell me they're not allowed to edit the account and fix the problem without the customer's consent. "We need to contact the customer and ask him to update his information," they say.

And then a few minutes later, I receive an email in my inbox, asking the customer to please verify his email address...

It gets much more complicated once there is a load balancer involved. I end up redirecting the acme-challenge directory to a subdomain that gets hosted without a load balancer, generating the certificate there, and then having scripts push it to the load balancer.

The other problem I have is that certbot is not idempotent. Certbot doesn't check if the deploy scripts actually succeed or not, it just assumes they did. If they didn't, they will never get called again. Just running certbot auto-renew is not enough. You have to compare locally available cert to the live installed cert to know if a deploy is needed.

With all those extra check, it works, but it is several hundred lines of scripts.

This really sucks for customers of StartCom (StartSSL):

• Your website suddenly stops working with no warning.
• There is no equivalent alternative to StartSSL

Basically Google (and to a lesser extent Firefox) have handled this really badly. I found out about this issue when I got a new certificate and it wouldn't work: StartSSL certificate gives SEC_ERROR_REVOKED_CERTIFICATE in Firefox and ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID in Chrome

• The browser error messages are cryptic and inconsistent. None of them say what the problem actually is. None of them offer links to the blog posts or bugs announcing the revocation. The only way to figure out the issue is through searching.
• Google is killing existing certificates without making any attempt to contact webmasters. Google should be putting alerts in Google Search Console for every site that will be brought down by this change. At least Firefox limited the scope such that all existing certificates were grandfathered in.

StartSSL was the only certificate authority at its price point. You didn't have to pay by the certificate. You didn't have to pay for the automated process by which you validated ownership of domains. You only paid for validations of who you are and who your company is. Once you were validated, you could issue as many certificates as you wanted for any domains you own. For a flat fee of $200 per year, I could get all the certificates I needed.

The only alternative that I have been able to find is LetsEncrypt. While it is completely free it has some major disadvantages:

• LetsEncrypt doesn't offer wildcard certificates. I have a domain with about 60 subdomains. The lack of wildcard really hurts for me here.
• LetsEncrypt only offers the most basic level 1 certificates. They only validate that you have control over your domain. They don't offer level 2 that validates who you are. They don't offer level 3 that validates who your company is. They don't offer the level 4 extended company validations that give the green bar in browsers.

I enjoy the calls from Windows Technical Support. I treat them like a game - how long can I keep these people on the phone (often while I'm doing something else)? I can usually tie them up for about a half hour, but I'm not going to give them remote access to my computer, and there's only so long I can pretend to have trouble letting them in until they give up. I've always wondered what they would do if they actually could get in...

Then I remembered: Microsoft makes free images of Windows installations available! They're intended for testing Internet Explorer and Edge, but they are full versions of Windows. The only limitation is that they're not activated, so they will stop working 90 days after first use, but that's not a problem. So here's what to do:

1. Download and install VirtualBox, which is free. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
2. Download one of the Microsoft VMs for VirtualBox. Pick whatever version of Windows you want. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/
3. In VirtualBox, create a virtual machine with the VM that you downloaded. Make sure it's not configured to share files from your primary operating system. Before you boot it, make a snapshot of the VM.
4. Boot it up and make sure it works. You'll want to change the wallpaper so it's less suspicious (the default wallpaper has instructions about how to use the VM), and you may also want to remove the evaluation watermark that shows up in the bottom-right corner of the desktop (there are sites with instructions on how to do this).

Now you're all set! The next time a Windows Technical Support scammer calls you and wants you to install something on your computer to give him access, go for it! He can wreck your honeypot all he wants - install viruses to it, even encrypt the files. VirtualBox even has a video capture feature that can create a movie file of everything he does. He shouldn't be able to get out of the honeypot (unless you have fileservers with weak passwords on your home network, but that's assuming he even looks).

After he's done, or if your VM reaches 90 days old, just revert back to your snapshot to reset everything. Now you've got a clean VM and your 90 day timer is reset.

Have fun!

That's an interesting made-up story.