Category: Apple

Overcast 4.2: The privacy update

Nice informational post by Marco Arment about how the new Overcast 4.2 protects your privacy while listening to podcasts.

One of the ways publishers try to get around the limitations of the current model is by embedding remote images or invisible “tracking pixels” in each episode’s HTML show notes. When displayed in most apps, the images are automatically loaded from an analytics server, which can then record and track more information about you.

This is the first time I heard about tracking-pixels and I am horrified by the idea. As much as I am fascinated by data-analysis, I think this is just plainly wrong, one shouldn’t aquire data like this and I am convinced that these recent developments in podcasting are misguided.

Scientific Python on macOS X

After some frustrating experience with MacPorts regarding failed builts and outdated versions I decided to setup my python development environment anew and do some things differently. Basically I followed Joern Hees’ fantastic blog post to switch away from my old environment with MacPorts and Conda and onto a fresh install using homebrew and virtualenv and pyenv.

A Word to the Wise

set up some taps and update brew
brew tap homebrew/science # a lot of cool formulae for scientific tools
brew tap homebrew/python # numpy, scipy, matplotlib, ...

The taps mostly don’t exist anymore or are deprecated, doesn’t matter too much though, since most of the packages have been migrated to the homebrew core tap.

pip install virtualenv

Of course virtualenv does exist, however there are some compatibility issues regarding the macos graphics backend and the usage of tensorflow; therefore one can either change the graphics backend to TgAgg or use pyenv instead.

An Additional Tip

Switching environments can be a hassle and therefore I suggest implementing a little bash function into your .profile file like this:
sc() {
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
source ~/venv/science/bin/activate
}

To be honest, I am quite happy with how this solution worked out and sadly the hardest part was to get rid of all the old stuff I had installed previously, but I won’t get into detail here; luckily with this new solution that won’t a problem.