Bye, Allyson · She’s gone. She lived well. We’ll miss her ...
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Play My Music · When I’m away from home, I still want to listen to the music we have at home (well, I can live without the LPs). We had well over a thousand CDs so that’s a lot of music, 12,286 tracks ripped into Apple Lossless. Except for a few MP3s from, well, never mind. This instalment of the De-Google Project is about ways to do that with less Big-Tech involvement ...
[7 comments]  
The De-Google Project · My family, like most, depends on a lot of online services. And again like most, a lot of those services come from Big Tech giants in general and (in our case) Google in particular. And like many people, we are becoming less comfortable with that. So I’m going to try to be systematic about addressing the problem. This post summarizes our dependencies and then I’ll post blog pieces about updates as I work my way through the list. (The first is already posted, see below.) ...
[27 comments]  
Money Bubble · I think I’m probably going to lose quite a lot of money in the next year or two. It’s partly AI’s fault, but not mostly. Nonetheless I’m mostly going to write about AI, because it intersects the technosphere, where I’ve lived for decades ...
[13 comments]  
Social Photos · I like taking pictures, and I like sharing pictures wherever I hang out online. A problem with this is knowing that the pictures will very rarely look as good in other people’s browsers and apps as they do to me in Lightroom on a big bright 4K screen. Thus this piece, a basic investigation of how photos are processed and transformed on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads ...
[3 comments]  
Vision 1993 · I’ve plowed through the first wave of AVP (Apple Vision Pro) reviews, and it seems pretty obvious that, at the current price and form factor, it’s not gonna be a best-seller. But I remain a strong believer in Augmented Reality (the AVP is VR not AR, for the moment). As I was diving into the reviews, a little voice in the back of my head kept saying “I once read about what this is trying to be.” ...
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DC Again · For the second time this winter I’ve been to Washington and back. Herewith pictures and feelings. Everyone’s seen plenty of photos of The Capital City Of The United States so I’ve tried for fresh views. My feelings are more mainstream than my pictures, I’m pretty sure; the stories DC tells aren’t subtle ...
[3 comments]  
Lofree Flow · Back in 2008, I complained here about Apple keyboards. Apple still hasn’t addressed my complaint (hard to believe, I know). So, 15 years later, as in late 2023, I picked up a Lofree “Flow”, which I gather had a Kickstarter and advertises itself as “The smoothest mechanical keyboard”. I’ve been using it long enough to offer opinions ...
[5 comments]  
Mourning Google · On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google. The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I had escaped from the accretion disk the former Sun Microsystems was forming around Oracle, that blackest of holes. And Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work ...
[24 comments]  
Five Electric-Jag Years · I got a note from Jaguar advising that my free five-year “InControl Remote and Protect” subscription was expiring and would be $99/year (Canadian) going forward. That’s right, this month is five years since I picked up our 2019 Jaguar I-Pace and joined the EV tribe. Thus this (final?) visit to the Jaguar Diary series ...
[4 comments]  
Happy New Year! · Customarily, on this day we go for a walk by the sea. This year “we” was just me, because Post-Covid. I have pictures; subdued pictures, it was that sort of day. Herewith a few of those, and year-end ramblings on optimism, AI/ML, cameras, and social media ...
[3 comments]  
Planes, Cameras, Capitals · Since Covid started I haven’t traveled, except for a short hops to visit Mom in Saskatchewan. But I spent Monday and Tuesday in Washington DC workin’ for The Man (the man being Uncle Sam) and came away with notes on planes and hotels and cameras and people ...
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Recent Music Books · Seems that for the past few months most of the books I’ve read have been sci-fi (which I wrote up here) or about music. Herewith notes on four of the latter. The subjects are Philip Glass, John Cale, Cuba, and getting loaded ...
[4 comments]  
Recent Sci-Fi · Seems that for the past few months most of the books I’ve read have been sci-fi or about music (which I wrote up here). Herewith notes on the most recent sci-fi/fantasy. Featuring Emily Tesh, Martha Wells, John Scalzi, Sandra Newman, Vajra Chandrasekera, Arkady Martine, and P. Djèlí Clark ...
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Late Light · Late in the year, I mean. We’re hurtling toward the solstice and the photon flow in the short hours between official sunup and sundown hardly deserves the name “daylight”. But when the Pacific Northwest cloud and rain and fog let up, the always-slanting sunlight is very pure ...
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Mastodon Status Check · My social-media life has been Fediverse-first for a year now. I stick my head into Bluesky and Threads regularly, but visit Twitter rarely if at all. This piece takes a close look at Mastodon-land as things stand in late summer 2023. What’s working, what’s not, what are the alternatives?
[Originally published August 2023, updated November 27th for my one-year Twitter-exit anniversary.]
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Green and Brown Sauce · Here’s a simple dish that hits the spot as Winter’s chilly dimness comes at us from all directions. It’s a pasta sauce featuring crispy bacon and braised greens ...
 
Global Sensor Bandwidth · The photo-world is all agog over Sony’s just-announced (but not shipping till next year) high-end ($6K) camera, the ɑ9 III, because it has a “global sensor”. No, the “global” label didn’t mean anything to me either, when I first read it. The write-ups about it have explainers and cool pictures (PetaPixel, DPReview). I found myself wondering “What is this thing’s bandwidth?” and thus this note. I’ll toss in another little explainer so you don’t have to click on a link like a savage ...
[2 comments]  
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