The website of Jed Hartman
Sigh. The annual subscription price for Evernote is doubling, so it’s time for me to migrate. I’ve been using Evernote as my main notetaking app since around 2013, and have mostly loved it during that time. I got worried a few years ago when the product was sold to a company called Bending Spoons—but then the new owners made a bunch of improvements to it, so I stuck with it. I don’t love how much…
My previous update-on-what-I’ve-been-up-to post was written six weks ago, even though I didn’t post it until two weeks ago. So here’s a followup with more-recent notes about what I’ve been doing. (…I wrote most of this shortly after posting the other one, but then didn’t get around to posting it for another two weeks.) Traveling—spent a couple of weeks out of town. Baking sourdough every couple of…
I wrote the below post sometime around June 11, but didn’t get around to posting it until a month later. Been quite a while since I’ve posted anything about what I’ve been up to lately. Some assorted notes on that topic: Kam and I went whale-watching on Monday [June 8], in Monterey. Alas, the only marine mammals we encountered were orcas (two matriarchial groups, hanging out together—a total of…
Some thoughts about the TV show Star City , a spinoff from the alternate-history-of-the-Space-Race show For All Mankind . Includes major spoilers for all of For All Mankind so far (through the end of s5), and for the first two eps of Star City . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irina Vasilievna Morozova is a Soviet character who first appeared in For All Mankind s4e1. She’s been a more or less ruthless…
My sourdough-making journey started with a bread machine. (I should note that I’ve never been good at cooking, and I never baked anything on my own before 2025.) A year or so ago, I was sad that my favorite bread (Oroweat’s Honey Wheat Berry) had been discontinued a couple years earlier, and I wasn’t loving most of the other bread options available to me, and what with one thing and another I…
Today I learned that iPad and iPhone have sound controls for notifications (separate from the device volume), which also applies to things like tapping FB controls. (Note: Please don’t tell me to switch to non-Apple devices. That’s annoying and not helpful.) I’ve known for a long time that device volume was context-dependent; using the volume-control buttons in a given context doesn’t necessarily…
Oh, neat! (I said to myself): Within Sigil (an ePub checking/editing tool), you can add a plugin to run Ace (an accessibility checking tool)! …What’s that? (I said to myself.) The plugin doesn’t work on Mac? OK, fine, I’ll try it in Windows under Parallels. [Insert lengthy process of getting Parallels to run on my new computer here. It worked fine on my old computer, but you know how these things…
I recently read a complete-Hemingway-short-stories book. (Spoilers here for a few Hemingway short stories.) There’s a story fairly early on in it, “The End of Something” (1925), in which Hemingway’s semiautobiographical character Nick Adams goes fishing with his girlfriend Marjorie. Then they go sit on the beach and make a campfire, and Nick breaks up with Marjorie, for no clearly stated reason.…
I read or skimmed or glanced-at-and-then-gave-up-on only 60 books in 2025, down from around 120 in some recent previous years. I think the reduced number was mostly because I’ve reached the point in my unread-books project where much of what’s left is giant omnibuses and collections, where even if I skim a given book, it takes me a while to get through. As usual, I read very little that was…
I watched 44 movies in 2025. My favorite was a rewatch: the original Moana . My second-tier favorites were all new to me, though only one was new in 2025: Happy Death Day (2017) Totally Killer (2023) Wake Up Dead Man (2025) Wild Robot (2024) …And the first two of those are in a subgenre that I was previously unaware of: time-loop or time-travel slasher movies. I usually strongly dislike slasher…
Here are the organizations I’m donating to in 2025. Most of this list is repeated from 2021 (and earlier years), but since that last post I’ve removed a few organizations and added a few others. The list is categorized for ease of scanning, though the categories are somewhat arbitrary in some places. Some items are listed under multiple categories. Donations to almost all of these organizations…
Update: I wrote a long post here about generative AI and SFWA’s survey, but a couple of days after posting it, I decided to take it down for now. At some point, I may rework it and repost it. (I’m replacing it with this update text rather than just deleting it, in case anyone saw it and is wondering what happened to it.)