Tag: Skim

Work-Arounds to macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) PDF Rendering Problems (Skim)

Cognitive Productivity reader, Richard Holmes, notified me that macOS 10.13 (“High Sierra”) worsens the PDF rendering problems Apple introduced in macOS 10.12, Sierra, that I blogged about earlier. The problems are in Apple’s PDFKit used by third party developers. Apple seems to be using a private API to work around these problems in its Preview app and Safari. (In beta’s of macOS 10.13, however, Preview and Safari had PDF rendering issues.) Fortunately, Richard has discovered some work-arounds, which I describe below. That’s important, because, this issue aside, Skim is the most cognitively potent PDF reader for macOS.

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Spinning a Swirly Solution to Skim’s Slow PDF Content Rendering Issue

Skim.app My Cognitive Productivity toolkit makes heavy use of Skim, the ironically named PDF delving app for macOS. Unfortunately, however, in its release of macOS Sierra, Apple introduced major problems for third-party PDF rendering apps like Skim, problems that Apple itself somehow worked around in its Preview app (suggesting that Preview uses some non-public APIs, tsk! tsk!).

The problem causes PDF to be rendered extremely slowly, sometimes taking over a minute!, and inconsistently. I logged a bug on Skim’s Sourceforge project in December 2016.

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Jon Stewart Skewered Stephen Harper on the Daily Show: Illustrating Cognitive Productivity with Twisted Canadian Politics

The Globe & Mail published an article yesterday morning by Lawrence Martin called “We need Jon Stewart to set Canada straight“. He wrote “Too bad [Stewart didn’t cover Harper]. Imagine the fun he could have lampooning this place?”

As it happens, on June 3, 2015 I sent Comedy Central an email urging them to cover Mr. Harper and to invite Mr. Mulcair or Mr. J. Trudeau to The Daily Show.

Well, it can be said that Jon Stewart did cover the Conservative Government of Canada —in his own way.

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Ten Tips for “Getting Things Learned” with Anki, Skim and Cognitive Productivity

David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done (GTD®), provides many useful productivity tips. I use several of them myself. However, it’s not specifically tailored for cognitive productivity.

The last principle of Steven R. Covey’s excellent book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, is to “Sharpen the Saw®”. This is a matter of preserving and improving ourselves, including the mental dimension through reading great literature. Covey’s book doesn’t delve very deeply into learning, however. It was written before the web, when cognitive science was much younger.
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