512 Pixels

I’ll just come out and say it. I’ve always wanted to carry a more minimal wallet than the Costanza-inspired beast I’ve used for years. When you’re a dad and own two companies, there’s no end to the cards you end up carrying around.

I’ve tried a couple of slim wallets over the years, but I couldn’t whittle my life down to three or four cards, no matter how hard I tried.

Then I saw Tom Bihn’s spin on things and decided to try again. In short, we have a winner.

I ordered the awkwardly-named “Nik’s Minimalist Wallet #3” in “Cloud 10 Ballastic,” which is the nice gray you can see in the photo above. Black continues to be back-ordered, so I opted for this instead. As it turns out, I really like the color, and not being black makes it a little easier to spot in my backpack or truck.

The #3 variant of the line has two interior pockets and one outer pocket. One of the interior ones is covered in clear urethane, making it easy to show your ID to someone without needing to take your driver’s license out. The outer pocket is great for folded-up bills and receipts. The width and height of the wallet are just big enough to hold a credit card; there’s no extra material here to bulk things up.

The Tom Bihn website says this about storage options:

All four versions of Nik’s Minimalist Wallets can fit up to about 6 credit cards or 3-4 credit cards and 4-6 ID, health insurance, or membership cards or similar (the raised text and numbers of credit cards take up a little more space and the thickness of other cards can vary slightly) and a few folded paper bills of any currency.

I took this spec sheet as a challenge to really cull what I was carrying with me every day. Here’s what I have in mine now:

Pocket 1:

• Driver’s license (under the clear window)
• Personal debit card
• Personal credit card
• Hackett Technical Media debit card
• Relay FM debit card
• Relay FM credit card

Pocket 2:

• Gym membership card
• St. Jude meal card
• Health insurance card
• Dental insurance card
• Two car insurance cards

I left behind a second, rarely-used credit card, my library card and three memberships cards to various places around town. For all but the first, if I forget the card at home and I need it, I should be able to show up at the place in question, tell them I don’t have my card, and be looked up in their systems and allowed to proceed.

I can live with that.

Thanks to the amount of fabric between the pockets, it is easy to slide the contents of one of them out without disturbing the other. When you’re done putting things back, the whole thing stays shut with a nice elastic band that is easy to operate, but tight enough to hold the wallet securely shut.

While it’s not made of high-grade leather, and it’s not the most handsome wallet on the market, but that’s fine. Nik’s Minimalist Wallet has struck a balance between minimalism and usability that really works for me, especially for the $30 price tag.

Dwayne Brown and Karen Fox at NASA:

Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on Nov. 5. This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium. Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.

Voyager 2 now is slightly more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth. Mission operators still can communicate with Voyager 2 as it enters this new phase of its journey, but information – moving at the speed of light – takes about 16.5 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. By comparison, light traveling from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.

These sorts of stories always break my brain a little bit. The press release goes on:

The most compelling evidence of Voyager 2’s exit from the heliosphere came from its onboard Plasma Science Experiment (PLS), an instrument that stopped working on Voyager 1 in 1980, long before that probe crossed the heliopause. Until recently, the space surrounding Voyager 2 was filled predominantly with plasma flowing out from our Sun. This outflow, called the solar wind, creates a bubble – the heliosphere – that envelopes the planets in our solar system. The PLS uses the electrical current of the plasma to detect the speed, density, temperature, pressure and flux of the solar wind. The PLS aboard Voyager 2 observed a steep decline in the speed of the solar wind particles on Nov. 5. Since that date, the plasma instrument has observed no solar wind flow in the environment around Voyager 2, which makes mission scientists confident the probe has left the heliosphere.

Simply amazing.

Busy night in my studio.

Fifty years ago, Doug Engelbart held what is now known as the “Mother of All Demos,” at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. In his talk, Engelbart, quite frankly, showed off the future:

This weekend, several people noted the anniversary. Here is Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica:

On December 9, 1968 at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart showed off the first inklings of numerous technologies that we all now take for granted: video conferencing, a modern desktop-style user interface, word processing, hypertext, the mouse, collaborative editing, among many others.

Klint Finley at Wired writes about some of the specifics:

The oN-Line System was the first hypertext system, preceding the web by more than 20 years. But it was so much more than that. When Engelbart typed a word, it appeared simultaneously on his screen in San Francisco and on a terminal screen at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. When Engelbart moved his mouse, the cursor moved in both locations.

The demonstration was impressive not just because Engelbart showed off Google Docs-style collaboration decades before Google was founded. It was impressive because he and his team at SRI’s Augmentation Research Center had to conceive of and create nearly every piece of technology they displayed, from the window-based graphical interface to the computer mouse.

Steve Dent at Engadget:

“If in your office, you as an intellectual worker, were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you have, how much value could you derive from that?” Engelbart asked. “Well, this basically characterizes what we’ve been pursuing for many years in what we call augmented human intellect research center at the Stanford Research Institute.”

It’s amazing how spot-on Engelbart’s vision of the future ended up being. He was either a time traveler or one of the greatest minds the world has ever seen. Maybe both.

Apple Support:

Placing a device that contains a magnet under your Mac notebook computer or on its palm rest might cause your computer to sleep.

A new book from Rosemary Orchard and Ryan Dotson all about one of the most powerful task managers on the market. I’m looking forward to diving into it.

When Apple bought Beddit, I figured they were done for, but as Zac Hall reports, the company is very much alive:

The first revision to the Beddit Sleep Monitor since Apple bought the sleep tracking company includes a slight design change to the actual hardware, and the iOS app for managing the sleep monitor has a new version as well. All mentions of Android support are also removed from the Beddit website as far as we can tell.

The Beddit Sleep Monitor 3.5 isn’t a radical change from the previous 3.0 version. It’s still a 2mm thin strip that you lay above your mattress and power via USB. It connects to an iPhone app for sending sleep tracking data to the Beddit app and Apple’s Health app (with permission), and it’s still advertised as not requiring a “wearable” like the Apple Watch — although Beddit has an Apple Watch app for tracking naps.

Great release number; even better features.

If you want to use an iPad Pro as your main computer, start here.

Zac Bowden at Windows Central:

Microsoft today confirmed plans to rebuild its Edge browser using Chromium, in a move designed to improve web performance and app availability across platforms. Windows Central reported earlier about the shift in strategy and now it is official.

The new version of Edge is expected to start shipping as a beta in the coming months, and will run on Windows 7, 8, 10 as well as macOS. With Chromium under the hood, users should can expect a better and faster browsing experience than Edge or IE before it could ever offer.

Microsoft Edge coming to the Mac will be the first time Microsoft’s flagship browser has been on the platform since Internet Explorer 5.2.3, 15 years ago

— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) December 6, 2018

This week on Connected, we’re all back together:

Myke, Federico and Stephen talk about their use of Shortcuts, Apple Music heading to the Amazon Echo and a bit of BREAKING NEWS.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Away: Travel smarter with the suitcase that charges your phone. Get $20 off with the code ‘connected’.
• Pingdom: Start monitoring your websites and servers today. Use offer code CONNECTED to get 30% off.
• Luna Display: The only hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless display for your Mac. Use promo code CONNECTED at checkout for 10% off.

It costs $39 and looks pretty good, but why wasn’t it available at launch?

Update: John Gruber has one and has reviewed it:

Feel-wise it’s sort of half plastic-y, half rubbery. Plastic-y enough that it doesn’t stretch from the edges of the phone. Rubbery enough that it feels nice and grippy without being too grippy — it slides in and out of a jeans pocket easier than an Apple silicone case. Unlike any of Apple’s other iPhone cases, there is a very slight lip around the camera cutout on this case. I don’t know why, but it means the phone doesn’t quite sit flush back-down on a flat surface. My best guess is that the case is so thin it needs the lip lest the camera bump jut out.

He closes with this:

It’s so good it makes me wonder why Apple doesn’t make clear cases like this one for the iPhone XS and XS Max.

Myke said the same thing on Connected yesterday. I think a clear case on the gold iPhone XS would look sweet.