My opinions are my own and don’t represent those of anyone else. Not that anyone would want them :)
I started the challenge using a new Lamy ABC with a Lamy Blue cartridge, a new Pilot Kakuno demonstrater with an M nib and filled with Pilot Iroshuzuku Murasaki-Shikibo, and an eye-droppered Platinum Preppy Crystal 03 with Pilot Iroshizuku Momiji (Autumn Leaves). I dropped the Preppy on a tile floor two minutes after filling it. The body cracked. It’s a hairline crack I can feel but not see, but…
I’m going to emulate Ana of The Well Appointed Desk and accept Derek of dwrdnet YouTube challenge to use only starter fountain pens for a week. Ana used Platinum Preppies and a Platinum Prefounte. You can read about Ana’s starter pens only week. I have a number of potential pens I could use, but I settled on a newly purchased Lamy ABC with a Lamy Blue cartridge, a new Pilot Kakuno demonstrater…
Apple has released the Kraken macOS 26/Tahoe, as well as iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, all featuring Apples new UI style and design language, Liquid Text. I am not a fan. It honestly seems to be change for the sake of change. The use of gray for UI text and tic marks on sliders makes it very hard to see them. Yes, I have vision issues, but using Accessibility settings on previous UIs worked well for me.…
Regarding Judge Gonzalez Rodgers. United States District Court Northern District Of California Case No. 4:20-cv-05640-YGR EPIC GAMES, INC., v. Apple, Inc.: As Judge Gonzalez wrote: Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a…
Current commercial LLMs (aka AIs) use bots or Web crawlers, to crawl and scrape or copy Web sites, to build their corpora. If data is accessible, they assume they can make local copies. One problem with the way LLMs obtain their data is that LLM bots frequently ignore robots.txt (en masse; c. f. Perplexity). Web Crawlers and Bots I used to run a large, venerable forum for writers. I was constantly…
I bought a Kindle Paperwhite in 2017. I like my Kindle Paperwhite far more than I ever thought I would. The Paperwhite is lightweight, has a surprisingly readable screen, and has been hugely important since I have no acess to physical book stores or libraries. I’ve used my Kindle Paperwhite almost daily, and definitely got my money s worth. But the Paperwhite’s battery, which once lasted for…
Robb Knight in My Computing Origin Story and Kev Quirk in My computing History have both written posts about their computing history as part of WeblogPoMo2024. I thought I’d write about mine. I didn’t have my own computer until I had used computers for several years. My older brother got a job working for Instant Software when I was in high school. He often brought Apple IIs, Exidy Sorcerors,…
January 22, 2024 is the 22nd anniversary of this blog, originally focussed on instructionl technology in Humanities, because I was the IT coordinator for the Humanities at UCLA. I started blogging on Blogger, posting to my extant domain and Web site, then moved to the now defunct Radio Userland, then to MoveableType , then to self-hosted WordPress, where I’ve been since February of 2008. IT is…
Many New York City public libraries offer a $50.00 / year digital library card to anyone in the world who wants to borrow digital resources. Those include ebooks and audio via Overdrive s Libby app for iOS/Pad OS and Android, Web access, and Kindle and Kobo access, and support for Adobe s reader app. It also includes some databases and periodicals, ebooks, audiobooks and video via Hoopla, and…
The existence of the sensor was noticed two years ago. Next week s update should include: Apple has updated its website for the HomePod mini to advertise the temperature and humidity sensor for the first time. Previously, the company had not even acknowledged the existence of this sensor. Apple touts the temperature and humidity sensor as one of the ways the HomePod mini can serve as a “smart home…