CL XLIV: Long Tree Lenses · We had our first real recreational visit to the cabin on the May long weekend. I pointed lenses at trees and came away with pictures that charmed me but are unsatisfactory. Which offers an excuse for a bit of camera geekery. No, even better, lens geekery ...
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Antifascist Ethics · Dear America: Please forgive this Canadian offering reactions to what’s going on south of our border. Because I struggle every day to avoid sinking beneath the waters of rage, and I need to offload. Here goes: Please meet my Uncle Allen Scott, an anti-Fascist ...
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Blog Previews · When you put a Web link in a Mastodon post, sometimes you get a nice little graphical preview, sometimes not. Before today, links to the blog you are now reading were, well, meh. Just a blank white box with the URL. So I put in the Open Graph Protocol prettification voodoo and the previews are nicer. Yay me ...
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Easy Cameras · I just enjoyed reading Have you considered using a camera? by Joe Rosensteel over at Six Colors. It says many smart things about photography with a phone as opposed to a real “camera”. Also, it’s funny; I recommend it. But then down toward the end it made an assertion that was so shocking that I had to stop and read it twice, then again: That shooting with a phone is easier and faster than with a camera. Because I believe the opposite is true ...
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Bluesky Facts and Opinions · The Fediverse has exploded in discussion of Bluesky, now that it’s launched a beta and harvested a few celebrities. Quite a lot of Fediverse voices have been angry and hostile, pointing out that several years of intense effort have produced a working ActivityPub-based federated monopoly-resistant conversational social network, and asking who are these dweebs ignoring that work and re-inventing the wheel, probably in an attempt to enrich Jack Dorsey?! ...
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Amazon Q1 2023 Financials · In recent years I’ve posted a quick analysis of Amazon’s results each quarter in a Twitter thread. I don’t use Twitter much any more, and Mastodon doesn’t make it easy to post threads, so the blog it is; this is the second outing. Summary: Amazon’s retail business loses money (as usual) but the AWS and Advertising businesses are huge, throw off loads of cash, and continue to grow fast. They subsidize the money-losing retail operation in a way that seems deeply unfair to me ...
2023 TV Update · We just bought a ChromeCast 4K with Google TV and it does what it says on the package, adequately well. I’m posting this TV-setup piece because (to my surprise) every time I write about TV, I get a lot of reaction; apparently others care. Also because I figured out a couple of non-obvious things about the ChromeCast that should be online so others can find them ...
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Girl Groups · This is a reaction to parts of three evenings watching Coachella 2023 and motivated by the fact that more or less all of the music that grabbed me featured females. This notably included Blackpink, the biggest Girl Group in the world. But they weren’t the best women artists there, not even close. Spoiler: boygenius was ...
Working Well · Humanity’s institutions on this planet are generally not working that well just now, which is depressing. By way of cheerfulness, and maybe education, here are two counterexamples; professional interactions from my own day-to-day life where things go about as well as one could want. And maybe there’s a lesson in that ...
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Tweeting Effectively · Since I bailed out of Twitter last November, I’ve continued to use it in (nearly) write-only mode, usually to promote things published elsewhere, most often Fediverse/Mastodon stuff. Recently I learned a way to do this more effectively, where by “more effectively” I mean “more people see it.” Tl;dr: Don’t put any hyperlinks in your post — if you need them, post a thread with the links in the trailing tweets ...
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Fediverse Cheesemaking · Starting sometime April 7th you can call me a CoSocialist, because my new social-media handle is becoming @timbray@cosocial.ca. CoSocial is yet another fediverse outpost running Mastodon and with a blog. What’s different is that it’s Canadian, and a member-owned co-operative. Both of those matter to me, but the co-op part is the real story ...
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Sober Carpenter · I was drinking an glass of excellent Sober Carpenter “West Coast IPA” at lunch when I ran across Even moderate drinking is bad for us. Enter nonalcoholic beer in the Washington Post. Drinking less seems to be A Thing just now and I suppose alt-beverages too, so here’s my experience ...
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Rolling-mill Oops · The world being what it is, feels like a little humor is in order. Here’s a story from my misspent youth, when I was a co-op student at a steel mill and had a Very Bad Day ...
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First Warm Day · This was the first day of 2023 when it was pleasant to be out in just a couple of light layers, and we have flowers, and I have a camera and a blog, so obviously flowersharing is gonna happen ...
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Herodotus · For some time now, Herodotus’ Histories, in the Aubrey de Sélincourt translation, has been my bedside book, and I just got to the end; this is my second time through the Histories, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I visit it again. I think there’s lots in here for just about everybody, but anyone who cares about history in the large would I think be mesmerised. I’ll describe the book briefly and outline some of the reasons I like it so much. Also I’ll trace a line of descent into some excellent contemporary fantasy writing, and wonder about parallels with the current Middle East imbroglio. [Reposted for your amusement on its 20th anniversary.] ...
Porn Spam: Zero to Zero · This is a true story: in 1992 I single-handedly knocked AOL off the air. What brought it to mind is, I just now took my once-daily look at the junk-mail folder and wiped a few dozen pornospams with a single keystroke, and there were none in my inbox; antispam is getting good enough that I may never see another, and I remembered, lo my righteous wrath and the awful consequences when I got my first one. [Reposted for your amusement on its 20th anniversary.] ...
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The LLM Problem · So far I’ve had nothing to say about the LLM chatbot frenzy. My understanding of the technology is shallow and I’ve no sense for its functional envelope, and lots of other people have had smart things to say. I hadn’t even conversed with any of the bots. But I fell off the wagon a few days ago and put time into GPT3 and (especially) the new GPT4-based Bing chat. I got off Bing’s waitlist a few days before the recent general availability, so I have more hands-on than most people. Plus I caught up on background reading. So, question: Are LLMs dangerous distractions or are they a glowing harbinger of a bright future? (Spoiler: I’m dubious but uncertain.) ...
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Stream Automator · I have a problem, and I think I’m not alone: Getting TV is too complicated and too expensive. I know what a solution might look like, and if someone can build it and charge just a little bit for access, they might become very wealthy ...
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Two ongoing Decades · Today is the 20th anniversary of the first-ever public post on this blog (Spoiler: Not that interesting). Some posts mark milestones: Is This Thing On? (one day), One ongoing Year, 730 ongoing Days, Thirty-six ongoing Months, and for the ten-year mark, Birthday! ...
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More Monos! · Our story thus far is here. Tl;dr: I looked at a bunch of monospace fonts and recommended a few. The piece went kind of nuts, way past 50K views as I write this, and a flood of comments here and on YCombinator, nearly all of which took the form of “You left out my favorite font, which is X!” So I harvested 14 values of X, and let’s have a look at them! I’ve enjoyed this little project enough to pay actual real money for three of these ...
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