Pre-Cambrian squirrels are yummy

Also: the frustratingly competent Apple security ecosystem, and CRA COVID write offs for Canadians

Think what you want about Apple’s security, but I am here to tell you that if you don’t know the PIN to get into an iDevice (iPad, iPhone, etc) then you are completely out of luck. There is literally no way to reset a lost PIN. The only “recovery” method that works is to completely reset (erase) the iPad and then restore a backup of your stuff. Virtually every other company has some kind of recovery process, Apple is alone in saying “tough shit, you lose all your stuff, sorry not sorry”. This is a hard position for me to be in because as an infosec worker, I really appreciate the fact that it would be really hard for someone to break into my Apple devices. But, in this case, I am in a situation that probably occurs several times a day within the Apple customer ecosystem and it’s hard for me to understand why Apple would design a system like this knowing that a typical Apple user is not very technical.

The Death Binder (TM)

The solution is what it always is - have backups. Back up your iThingy to iTunes frequently so that you have a fallback if you forget your PIN. Or, as is more likely the case, to allow your survivors to get into your iThing, if you so desire that after you pass on.

The other solution to this is to create and maintain a Death Binder (TM). Not really a trademark. I have a binder hidden away that only one person knows about. It has information about how to access everything I own if I suddenly become…unavailable. Far and away, it is easier for your survivors to access your accounts if you just give them your passwords and information about how to boot up your stuff and where your 2FA tokens are, etc. So make a Death Binder and include all your insurance policies, wills, and passwords in it. And if you’re a cryptographic enthusiast like me, include your passphrases to unlock your keys.

There are much more complete and formal Death Binder templates you may wish to use.

Note that I am not a lawyer; it’s probably illegal to impersonate a dead person where you live, so this is not a long term strategy and possibly not a good strategy at all. But it will help your survivors make sense of the pieces you’ve left behind and hopefully help them recover meaningful things like pictures. Even if your survivors aren’t terribly technical, they may be able to enlist one of your friends to make sense of the information you’ve left behind.

Non-animal meat

With few exceptions, the word meat means animal flesh. We’ve been eating meat ever since Grog ran across a smushed pre-Cambrian squirrel and thought that it looked tasty (full disclosure: I have no idea what fauna if any, existed during the Cambrian era). His cohorts agreed and started experimenting with trapping and eating all sorts of animals and, eventually, in a lunge out of the hunter-gatherer phase of societal development, started farming animals specifically to eat them. This is the basic history of the Montana restaurant chain and vegetarians worldwide think the whole thing is just gross.

There are a lot of reasons to avoid eating meat. Some are health-related; meat is “calorie-dense” which is science talk for “it makes you fat.” Some of it is moral objections; animals are treated just terribly. I mean, let’s face it, even “free-range” chickens are literally bred to be eaten which is…well, just gross. And some of it is that livestock farming is terrible for the environment.

Livestock production accounts for 70 per cent of all agricultural land use, occupies 30 per cent of the planet’s land surface and is responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide.

But don’t lose hope if you’re a carnivore; the playing field is about to undergo a dramatic change. For those that have moral objections, how does non-animal meat sound? Does meat grown in a lab, not on an animal, assuage those moral objections? I’m not signing off on lab-grown meat yet because it also sounds like it will be gross for different reasons than animal meat, but at least no animals were harmed growing it. I am going to give it a try when I can and Singapore is one of the first countries to put lab-grown meat on the supermarket shelves.

Canadian COVID tax credits

I have run many businesses over my lifetime; at one point there were three businesses running out of my house and I learned a lot about what types of things the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) allows us to write off. Most of that knowledge isn’t very useful these days now that I am back to being a “T4 employee” (meaning, I just have a regular old job and no self-employment income) but with COVID, some of the knowledge I have about home-based write-offs is becoming useful again.

In general, the CRA allows two types of write-offs: those that you need to keep receipts for and therefore you can claim the actual dollar amount of those expenses, or those that use a “quick” method which is not as accurate but doesn’t require you to keep receipts. With so many people unexpectedly working from home during COVID, the CRA has introduced write-offs which can be calculated in either of those ways, whichever method you’d like to use. You can claim a credit of $2 per day you worked from home to a maximum of $400, or you can claim more if you can provide the receipts for things you otherwise would not have had to pay for if you weren’t forced to work from home. Here are the very simple guidelines and calculator from the CRA site. Go forth and claim!