On computer history, personal.

I used to be a die-hard Windows-and-especially-DOS-are-the-way-and-the-truth Computer Guy. I did things to my computer like disk compression from the DOS command line in elementary school, back in the nineties. There was, in fact, good reason to be contemptuous of Apple’s products at the time, because it was the nineties, and they were run by buffoons who had no idea how to do anything right, and (though I didn’t really realize it at the time) Windows 95 did a good enough job of copying Mac OS with the serial numbers filed off that it seemed the right option, because frankly it was at the time.

Fast-forward to college (including the frankly-embarrassing self-superior condescension toward Mac users one associates stereotypically and, honestly, pretty accurately with anyone who knows a lot about computers, plays a lot of computer games, or, on rare occasions, someone who actually does both). Mac OS 10.4 shows up with x86 support, and as I am by this point someone with a track record of installing OSes for fun (literally — I tried Linux for a while before getting sick of the need to babysit it constantly to prevent pointlessly frustrating things like Mandrake’s 20,000-pixel-wide system settings window bug), I find out that Mac OS has been modified for installation on commodity hardware. I figure, hey, this seems like a good chance to confirm my biases and my deep-seated belief that Windows XP is the One True Operating System, now and forever, amen. I fire up the installer, put that OS on a fresh partition, and am INSTANTLY blown away by how much better the experience of simply using my computer is than the suddenly-extremely-primitive-feeling XP (this was after Vista came out, but also after everyone sort of agreed that nobody in their right mind would deliberately use it). It was UNIX that could dress itself in the morning. It was an operating system with things like security policy consisting of something other than the extremes of “sure, whatever” or “HALT WHO GOES THERE AND DARES TRY TO ADJUST THE VOLUME SETTING,” and it appealed very much to the part of me that wanted to use my computer like an adult, to actually PRODUCE things, instead of like the kid who broke and unbroke Windows for fun and called that “being good at computers.”

This is of course leaving aside entirely the later discovery that computer hardware could likewise be something actively enjoyed and a source of delight, rather than merely tolerated (anyone else remember back when laptops were creaky plastic, before everyone decided that whatever Apple does is the only option and started making metal-body laptops? That is sort of an industry trend of late, really).

So yeah, there’s a reason a lot of people (take a look at any given photo of a programming conference and do your best to find even HALF as many laptops without glowing Apple logos as with) decide that maybe there’s something to be said for buying a new Camry instead of a ‘94 Geo, even though they both have four wheels (identical specs!) and go from point A to point B.

When you spend a lot of your time using something to do work, sometimes it pays to not just go with the cheapest option, but rather one made by people aiming to please those who understand that it’s even possible to be pleased.

Cool facts you might not have known about Apple’s Lightning connector.

• The Lightning connector has eight pins on each side of it, but there’s no paired set of receiver pins inside the port for it — only on the one side.

• The Lightning connector is rated to safely carry 10V, double the 5V Mini-USB and its ilk are rated for.

• The Lightning connector specification actually calls for the connector itself to be essentially waterproof.

• The Lightning connector is designed to be able to withstand a direct blow from a hammer, and at the factory no fewer than 15% of all Lightning cables are tested by hammer-wielding workers.

• The Lightning connector is so named because of its ability to produce the electrical charge needed through amplification (this is why the iPad Mini doesn’t need the larger charger).

• The Lightning connector is so carefully designed that data transfer and electrical charging rates actually accelerate as it is used in a given sitting.

• The Lightning connector specification originally, before finalization, called for the central part with the data transfer pins on it to be made from, quote, “sanded-down frozen treat sticks.”

• The Lightning connector doesn’t have to take any of your guff.

• The Lightning connector is made from materials so rare that they actually have to be mined from the air itself.

• The Lightning connector demands your fealty, and will systematically destroy one other cable per day from the drawer you keep it in until shown the proper respect.

• The Lightning connector’s favorite band is Van Halen, though it had a phase where it got really into Coldplay.

• The Lightning connector donates a great deal each year to charitable causes, but insists upon only ever doing so anonymously.

• The Lightning connector refuses to drink alcohol as a matter of principle, up to and including that used in cooking or cough medicine.

• The Lightning connector once saved a frontier town from a group of bandits who would attack the farmers, and in doing so learned the true value of friendship.

• The Lightning connector is only one or two stages away from getting a perfect 100-point score on every level of Yoshi’s Island for the SNES, and insists that one day it’ll “get around to finishing that.”

• The Lightning connector is sneaking up quietly behind you.

• The Lightning connector plug actually contains a processor that detects which side’s pins are in use and routes data signals through them.

On Keynote wizardry.

Or: how to hack Keynote builds to do even cooler stuff

So for a while I found myself wanting to do things like actions DURING build-ins and the like. You know, things like simultaneous movement or scale along with the actual build-in animation. Keynote usually says it’s impossible (sort of like making an object grow more than 200% as an action) but it turns out that there’s a workaround (sort of like making an object grow more than 200% as an action).1

So here’s how you do it:

  1. Build in for your desired item with a cool animated build-in.
  2. Build in for a dummy or other item of some sort that is faster (if you’re using a dummy object, you can just set it to “appear” since that’s fastest). This is set to “Automatically with Build 1.”
  3. Desired Action for your desired cool item. This should take long enough for the two to overlap to some degree. What is crucial is that you set this to “Automatically after Build 2.” This is the hacky bit where you fool Keynote into thinking the original build in is already done.
  4. [optional] If you want to do a build-out for your original item, you can do a “disappear” build-out for your dummy here, set to “Automatically with build 3”
  5. In that case, put your build-out here for your original item, set to “Automatically after Build 4,” though you’ll probably want to put some sort of delay on it. You can figure this out.

Have fun!

  1. The secret to this is that you’re going to need one of the gesture-supporting trackpads, and then you just keep on unpinching and unpinching for all you’re worth until your object has reached whatever ungodly size you were aiming for. Just don’t try to adjust it manually in the Inspector, or it’ll just go straight back down to 200%. ↩

On Terrible Japanese Comedy Films.

The nicest thing I can say about the movie Swing Girls is that it is not literally the worst movie I’ve ever seen, though it’s pretty close.1 The second-nicest thing I can say is that the Japanese market Region 2 DVD contains English subtitles, though unfortunately that robbed me of the excuse that I was simply not familiar enough with their accent when the movie turned out to make virtually no sense at all.2

Everyone is constantly a terrible human being to everyone else, in the fashion of a 1990s sitcom. There are no actual characters; there are only lazy-Japanese-writer stock high school caricatures and clichés. Virtually nothing happens for any reason at all other than “because the script calls for it to,” and a number of storylines are simply abandoned outright, presumably because the scriptwriter simply forgot about them. It is a movie that utterly lacks denouement, with credits rolling literally at the climactic scene. It is a movie where a group of girls appear to learn how to play musical instruments primarily by clapping. Imagine fairly unexperienced college students writing and putting on a stage play, except with cameras, if you want an idea of the level of quality we’re talking about.3

Most of the alleged comedy appears to be intended to come largely from “they’re from up north, so they talk funny,” with no actual humor involved (with perhaps two major exceptions: one being reasonably well delivered with actual comic timing, the other being physical comedy so unimaginably inept that I had to rewind the movie simply to see it again4). Most of the time, everyone just says horrible things at everyone else, including strangers, and we are supposed to laugh at this for some unfathomable reason. Even the much-vaunted soundtrack was a massive disappointment, with there being precious little actual big band jazz played during the movie (despite the name and premise).

I could only recommend this movie to someone for one of two reasons: 1. “It is the second piece of pop culture to contain the song ‘Mexican Flyer,’ and explicitly references the first.”5 2. “It is a movie so unthinkably bad that you absolutely must see it for yourself, because it’s often hilarious but never for the right reasons.”

If I were to sum it up in a sentence, I would probably describe it as something like “School of Rock, except bad in every possible way.” It is up to you to decide whether that sounds like a good way to spend 100 consecutive minutes. As for me, it is a movie that was so unremittingly awful that even now, a full day after watching it, I am still thinking about it constantly.

  1. That dubious honor would probably have to go to Spider-Man 3, a movie so aggressively mediocre that even RiffTrax couldn’t render it possible to slog through. ↩

  2. The third-nicest thing I can say about it is that GEO only wanted ¥80 for the rental. ↩

  3. The movie had a total budget of ¥500,000,000, or about $5,000,000 at the time. This is perfectly all right, because it’s not like throwing more money at it would have made the writing any better. ↩

  4. The latter, if you’re keeping score, is the scene with the Stock Fatty Who Is A Fatty And Has No Other Personality Traits eating ice cream on a hillside for no reason, when a bicyclist slams on his brakes after going behind her, for no reason, and then the rear end of the bike jumps up for no reason, and then everything else for no reason. There is literally no reason for the scene. Literally no reason. Needless to say, this was probably my favorite part of the movie. ↩

  5. “Mexican Flyer” is perhaps now better known as “the theme song from Space Channel 5.” ↩

nedroidcomics:

Today over on Twitter I presented many facts about owls. I hope you find them informative (click the images to see the respective facts).

Unsure if this works better as a series of thumbnails where you click through to see the “facts,” or the other way round. Either way: delightful!

The Tragedy of the Hardcore

As someone who is fairly infamous for being outspoken about things he’s fond of, I’ve gotten a reputation as someone to consult when interested in buying something that I myself am interested in,1 and that seems to have worked out pretty well for those who have done so overall. Looking into a new computer? Unless you make money by using your computer, the MacBook Air is almost certainly right for you!2 You know, that sort of stuff.

There are, however, some situations where the advice that I, myself, would give to others conflicts with the decisions I’ve made. In some cases, it’s simply 20/20 hindsight, especially when comparing past options with present options.3 The more difficult situations to rectify dissonance with come when I’d give advice to someone getting into a field, fresh, that I’m familiar with and just ever so hardcore.

It is for this reason, for example, that as much as I adore my Canon 7D, I’d never recommend that anyone just getting into photography even really consider going with Canon, nor Nikon for that matter. I’d at least strongly suggest that they give Panasonic and Olympus’s Micro Four Thirds mount offerings a very solid look, because they’re well enough designed that I’ve found myself at times tempted to switch over. I generally find myself telling myself, “if only they just offered that one lens you want, then it’s worth considering making the switch,” but I know deep down that I’ll probably just stick with what I’ve got and am familiar with. The main benefits involve being smaller and lighter, and the 7D hasn’t caused any permanent damage to my body yet.

But really, that’s just another case of past vs. current options. There’s also the matter of learning how to distinguish personal preference from objective superiority. A while back, I picked up and became very fond indeed of a Kyocera ceramic knife, and I couldn’t be a bigger fan. That said, it’s also not something that I’d ever actually recommend to someone nowadays who doesn’t know enough about cooking to have independently considered it at some point. I’d be much more likely to recommend, say, something (everything?) made by MAC Knives,4 because they’re just objectively better in many regards. They’re incredibly good all-rounder knives; what I like about my ceramic knife is that it isn’t an all-rounder, but is instead skewed dramatically toward sharpness, hardness, and lightness. Unlike the camera and computer examples before, this is one case of diverging preference and recommendation that I have absolutely no regrets about; I’d even expect, in the future, that I would probably wind up owning another MAC knife or two, but still keep the ceramic knife around for what it’s good for.

One other particular interestingly difficult situation to make recommendations about, as it turns out, is when people say they’re interested in getting into fighting games (i.e. Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Marvel vs. Capcom, and the like) and ask for a good place to start. As big a fan of 3rd Strike: Street Fighter III as I am, I would never recommend it to anyone who isn’t already fairly hardcore, because it’s just a brutally competitive game, and the competition is generally only getting stronger. As a result, I find myself having to make the sort of recommendations that I myself don’t follow.

Of course, this is partially circumvented by the fact that there is now the card game Yomi, which so brilliantly boils down essentially to “enjoy dealing with the mindgames and opponent-prediction of fighting games, but without having to worry about any reflexes or execution skills whatsoever.”

I suppose I need to start making more recommendations of that game to more people, so I get more chances to play it.

  1. Interestingly, I would argue that, despite what I’ve heard a number of people say in so many words, someone who used to work selling a given product probably isn’t a better source of advice overall, because they’re more familiar with the techniques of getting others to buy the products, rather than necessarily being intimately familiar with using them themselves. By no means is this meant to be a comprehensive discrediting of salespeople, both former and current, as a source of advice, but the advice you’re likely to get is at least liable to contain some degree of upselling bias. ↩

  2. Unless, of course, an iPad would be even more “right for you,” as is very demonstrably the case for both of my parents and my grandmother. ↩

  3. I own a 13” MacBook Pro, the Most Useless Mac™. More money than the white plastic MacBook available at the time, but same specs outside of being 10% lighter and having an SD card reader built in, which I can’t even take advantage of because my camera uses CompactFlash cards. I’m not really sure what I was thinking anymore, because I frankly should have either gone with the 15” model or the regular plastic MacBook. C’est la vie. ↩

  4. My bias toward recommending their products has nothing to do with the name, despite how obviously it may appear at times that I derive all, or nearly all, of my self-worth from Apple products. ↩

On iOS 6 security.

I’ve yet to see this written up anywhere on the internet, so I figure I may as well make a note of it.

If you’re using iOS 6 on an iPhone 4S (or, presumably, 5, because this involves Siri), then you may be aware of the newly added Find My Friends integration with Siri. However, I seem to have discovered an interesting and moderately (though not severely) concerning bug that allows a degree of privacy circumvention by circumventing the need to actually type in a password in order to see your friends’ locations:

  1. If you’re set up with no passcode to unlock your phone, Find My Friends requires a password entry each time you start it up. If you try to ask Siri, say, “Where are my friends?” or “Where’s such-and-such,” it’ll tell you that it can’t search for them because you aren’t logged into Find My Friends.

  2. From the fact that FMF is 100% opt-in for tracking, we can assume that this is just because Apple wants to protect the privacy of your friends, should someone else grab your phone and want to take a look (or, perhaps, something more dangerously private, be it political or amorous in nature). As a result, Siri requires that you log in to FMF from the app itself in order to answer questions about people’s whereabouts. This renders that feature sort of useless, frankly.

  3. It turns out there’s an exploit to get around this limitation, and it’s absolutely trivial both to do on iOS 6.0.0 and, presumably, to fix in 6.0.1. On your passcode-less iPhone, go into the Settings an enable any sort of passcode in there, without logging into FMF first. It can safely be the four-digit simple passcode once every four hours, just so long as you’re enabling some sort of unlock protection on your phone. The important thing to note, here, is that this is something that can easily be done by someone who has access to a dropped or borrowed phone.

  4. Simply by enabling any sort of unlock password/passcode, Siri suddenly considers you to have logged into Find My Friends, and will gladly answer questions about your friends’ whereabouts that seconds before it would not, without your ever having to actually log in to the service. While you can’t actually get into the app itself without typing a password at least the first time you run it with a passcode on, you can still pull up fairly detailed maps of your friends’ whereabouts without any password.

This could almost certainly be trivially fixed in 6.0.1 by having Siri actually check your logged-in-or-not status in Find My Friends, rather than simply assuming you are the moment an unlock passcode is enabled. For the time being, though, this is something to either be aware of (in case you find it a tremendous pain to repeatedly log in to Find My Friends) or to be very careful about (in case you have permission to track anyone whose location could be sensitive information if your phone fell into the wrong hands).

An actual Windows RT hands-on!

You really do have to watch the video.

I was really hoping to see Microsoft NOT screw this one up with Windows 8, given the reliance on Classic Mode on what’s nominally meant to be a “tablet computer,” but this is absolutely shameful (though Samsung does share in some of the blame in this case — there’s no accelerometer in this one, so get a load of the steps required to rotate the screen on this hardware). Ballmer’s history as a marketing guy is starting to show through with the lack of any sort of tough decisions they’ve been willing to make about WIndows 8, instead opting for a “throw it all at the customers and let them try to find something that works” approach.

I’ve lost any faith that Microsoft can pull this off, because they’re still, at at least the management level, too convinced that “tablet computer” just means “a regular laptop with a touchscreen and software keyboard,” and that insistence on a design that just cries out for being put on a desk, with a keyboard and mouse, is what will eventually doom their efforts. I’m still convinced that the reason the iPad has been so successful among Regular People (i.e. people who don’t read and then optionally post “check out how much worse I can make humanity seem” comments on tech sites) is that there IS no “actual computer” to it, down to the “default” orientation being like a piece of paper instead of a computer monitor.

I guess there’s always Windows 9, by which point maybe you’ll actually be able to do even fairly simple settings-related stuff in the Revolutionary New Interface.

On branding, horrid.

The Rolly Brush is probably the best example I’ve ever seen of something that’s a really clever, really great product, yet the makers and sellers are doing everything within their power to make it unappealing, from the scary hopefully-badly-photoshopped licking lady near the bottom of the page to the hospital-gown-and-dentist-bib green color everywhere to the fact that the product shot looks like something out of a microbiology textbook’s scanning electron microscope photo. It looks like a green blood cell1 or something.

  1. Like a red blood cell, but faster and with more HP. ↩

On the mental traits of successful programmers.

People who enjoy studying foreign languages tend to make good programmers, but not for any of the more obvious reasons. Some people acquire languages more quickly than others, but anyone who succeeds at it has developed the remarkable ability to be more-or-less happy while being stupid.

It sounds like the main reason I’ve never really become a programmer is because I’ve never really been confronted with a problem that needed fixing with code. Really interesting little essay.

Assorted Facts I Realized at an Embarrassingly Late Age.

  1. Soap and toothpaste don’t magically make things clean; they simply increase the effectiveness of the friction or solvent action that does the actual work.

  2. People don’t really notice when you screw up at things unless you draw their attention to it, and the way you draw their attention to it colors their reaction. If your reaction says that it’s no big deal, nine times out of ten so will theirs.

  3. All those rules about knife safety (like holding the food with your fingertips bent way in, or holding your knife by the sides of the blade instead of by the handle like you’re going to stab someone) are rules for a reason, and god help the person who uses a kitchen knife with their index finger along the top edge like a conductor’s baton. Yes, Japan teaches kids to hold knives that way. Japan also apparently teaches drivers that headlights are only to be switched on in complete darkness. I have a scar on the tip of my left ring finger from where I nearly filleted the end of my finger, and I will freely admit that it happened because I was sloppy with my knife. It was probably too dull, too, but nevertheless.

  4. Just because it agrees with what you believe and want to hope doesn’t actually make it true.

  5. Just because I want to be antisocial and not go out and be around people doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea.

    Corollary: It can be helpful at times to guilt yourself into doing things that you know intellectually are probably a good idea, even if you don’t want to do them on an emotional level.

  6. That stuff in the sink isn’t going to wash itself.

  7. Getting married doesn’t actually change anything important in healthy relationships.

  8. Cold-brewed iced tea — unsweetened — is just about the greatest thing ever in the summer. Use more tea than you think you need, because you’re making five to ten times as much as you do when it’s hot.

  9. A person who writes a compliment anonymously is just shy. A person who writes a complaint or derogatory comment anonymously is just an asshole.

    Corollary: Only positive anonymous comments count or matter.

  10. No person has ever been persuaded by a political argument, nor has anyone ever started one in a good-faith effort to persuade. They are meant to provide a primitive our-side-their-side fight to angry up the blood.

    Corollary: Anger is rarely, if ever, a useful emotion, and almost invariably leads to bad decisions. It is, however, addictive, so it’s best to treat it like any other harmful physical addiction.

  11. A flawed protagonist is more interesting than a perfect Boy Scout. An antagonist with realistic, understandable motivations is more interesting than a mustache-twirling supervillain. See Quentin Tarentino’s movies for good, believable villains.

  12. All people with enough appreciation of creative endeavors to be good at one of them always envy all people who are good at any creative thing that they aren’t. Writers admire artists admire musicians admire sculptors admire photographers admire videographers admire writers. None of these are inherently “better” than any other, because the scale is almost invariably calibrated in each person’s case such that the thing they’re already good at is the least valuable in their eyes.

  13. Growing up is more a matter of what you could do but choose not to than a matter of what you actually do. I’m prouder of the choice to write a comment on a web site and then not post it than of what I’ve actually written in many cases (see above re: anonymity).

  14. Cooking really isn’t that hard! At least not basic stuff. It can be a pain if you’re only making a single portion for a single person, but if you’re okay with leftovers that simplifies matters. Being able to cook something — anything — that doesn’t have instructions printed on it (which consist mostly of “add X” and “add Y” and “heat”) should be regarded along the lines of “I can dress myself.”

  15. It turns out that you earn your living by being able to do something that will be of enough value to someone that they will be willing to give you money for it. I know, right? I myself am still working on that part (where I can provide enough value to an employer to be worth paying tens of thousands of dollars or equivalent annually) for the future. Self-employed people have the same difficulty, but they generally have a lot more people whom they have to impress enough to get their money.

  16. Ever seen the business card scene from American Psycho? That’s secretly how every foreigner living in Japan treats meeting another foreigner living there. Most of the time, people are too polite to simply get it over with, but it is a general thing that cultural awareness, linguistic ability, and the like will be quietly and subtly checked and tested, even though we all wish we didn’t do it. Anyone who actually doesn’t do it is a legitimate saint.

  17. Listening to an interesting podcast or audiobook is a great way to make housework or commutes something to look forward to, or at least not dread.

  18. That plan that the good guys are working on to finally defeat the bad guy at the end never actually works out, and that thing that they’re trying to prevent always winds up happening. It still doesn’t matter if the writing’s good, though.

    Corollary: Rosebud was his sled, yes, but that has absolutely no bearing on the story of Citizen Kane when you’re watching it. Incidentally, go watch it. It’s a great movie that’s aged pretty well. The fact that it’s one of the first movies to not treat film as a recorded stage show will be lost on us as a modern audience, but that doesn’t stop the story being told from being worth your while.

    Corollary: A good story is about events. A great story is about characters. Dead Poets’ Society was a huge hit in markets where people had no familiarity with the context of the American educational system, because the story being told about the characters was universal enough for audiences anyway.

  19. Anything that Will Totally Happen One Day, be it “this tablet is gonna be an iPad killer once the update comes out in six months,” “I’m definitely gonna pick up contact juggling once I buy the right sort of ball,” or “I need this kitchen tool because I am gonna make SO MANY ____,” never winds up happening. If you’re buying something computer-like, if it isn’t great when it’s released it never will be (with the sole exception of the PS3, it seems). If you’re planning on picking up a hobby or kitchen tool, spend money AFTER you’ve found something you’re so into that you’ve already found ways to do it without the right equipment just in order to get your fix.

    In other words, “I’ll do X once I buy Y” never works, but “I already do X all the time, so I should buy Y to make it easier/faster/better” almost always does. And as a general rule, avoid any kitchen tool with the name of a specific dish in its name.

  20. There’s little, if anything, to be gained by not trying to help people understand things that you understand, they don’t, and they want to. As a bonus, explaining things helps you solidify your understanding of it too.

  21. Virtually every major Nintendo franchise hit its peak of creativity and quality on the SNES. Every Zelda game before Skyward Sword was fundamentally A Link to the Past: 3D Edition, you can’t top Super Mario World, and Super Metroid is just in a class of its own. Every major gameplay element and item pick-up that now defines each of those was introduced by the time the SNES one came out.

    Main exceptions: F-Zero X and GX, and perhaps Super Mario Kart

  22. Most NES games were actually complete garbage. A little context and knowing what to look for that was done right can go a really long way in appreciating said garbage.

    Corollary: The real threat to gamers that comes of emulation is that it becomes a lot harder to bother actually playing through any games when you can download them seven hundred at a time and it’s trivial to switch without getting up.

  23. Video games that you get better at by actually getting better at them are far more satisfying than ones that you get better at by getting an item that changes a number and thus makes the game easier. The downside is that the former tend to be competitive games, and they require a healthy community surrounding them to really work.

    Corollary: It turns out that I didn’t necessarily outgrow JRPGs so much as that they all became the same game around 1995.

  24. The technical complexity and difficulty of doing something (music, food, etc.) has little to no bearing on how much it will actually be enjoyed by the audience.

  25. It’s incredibly silly to let someone convince you that you don’t like something that you do like. On the other hand, it’s nearly always worth giving someone a chance to convince you that maybe something you didn’t like isn’t all that bad.

  26. Any CD or DVD that you label before you burn it will inevitably not burn properly.

On typographical nerdiness in Mac OS and iOS.

So it turns out that if you’re really anal about typography — like, in an unhealthy sort of way — there are ways to avoid ever typing a generic ’ or ” again, keeping only to the proper ‘’ and “” quotation marks, among other things. You also needn’t ever type two hyphens when you want an em dash, or a hyphen or asterisk when you want a proper bullet (•).

On a Mac

First off, go get Character Pal from Taco Widgets immediately in order to get a better idea of what you can accomplish with the option key. It’s pretty great! - For quotation marks, you can use option-[ and shift-option-[ for “ and ”, respectively. Option-] and shift-option-] will give you ‘ and ’ if you need those. - For an en dash (generally used to indicate ranges, like “5–10 minutes”), type option-hyphen. For an em dash (generally — like this — used to indicate a break in narrative flow), use shift-option-hyphen. - For a bullet, shift-8. Add the shift key and you’ve got the “degrees” sign (°). - You can also do things like diacritics, too, but that’s a little more complex. If you’re running Lion and have your keyboard set to US English, I’m PRETTY sure that you can also just hold down a letter and it’ll bring up a little menu showing it to you with various diacritics on it (e.g. å, á, ä, à, etc.)

On an iPhone or iPad

Even easier than the Mac end, although apparently Lion does mimic a lot of the behaviors (which is kind of cool). - For quotation marks, just press and hold on the apostrophe or double-quote buttons, and you’ll get a little pop-up menu with each variant shown there. - For dashes and bullets, press and hold on the hyphen button. - For the “degrees” sign, press and hold on the zero button. - Diacritics are just a matter of pressing and holding the letter you want to apply a diacritic to, and then choosing the one you want. - Cool bonus: as of iOS 5.0, the default currency symbol on the symbols page of the US English keyboard changes from the dollar sign to whatever your region is set to (so in my case it’s changed to a ¥), but either way you can view a bunch of common currency symbols by pressing and holding on it.

All that’s left now is to go overboard and use the “typing shortcuts” feature to manually insert the proper apostrophes into things like “we’ll” instead of having it just display “we’ll” and calling that a day.

Incidentally, this post was typed with exquisite care given to the quotation marks. After even this small amount of command-[ and shift-command-[, I am just about ready to give up entirely on those guys. On the other hand, I’ve come to reflexively use the proper en and em dashes, even on my iPhone, without even needing to think about it. Your mileage may vary.

Top