jslabovitz

Ugh, so sorry to hear that. But I've had the same.

I recently got a grip for my phone (TELESIN Master Grip). It gives me a physical shutter button, as well as a much better ergonomic hold on the phone, and a tripod thread to attach my old reliable wrist strap. That, plus Lightroom Mobile configured for high-quality yet editable shots (eg, DNG), allowed me to build what felt like 80% of a proper camera — and yet with far, far less public obviousness.

I won't give up my rangefinder, but now I feel I have two choices: phone+grip for places where I don't feel comfortable with the camera, and then the camera everywhere else.

As someone with a workshop full of DeWalt tools, this was a bit concerning!

However, looking into the Dewalt situation (dunno about the other brands), it seems like only certain higher-end tools have Tool Connect+ built-in. (Dewalt's website isn't working right for me, so this isn't definitive.) For other models, it seems you can buy a locking dongle to add it to a given tool.

It seems to be primarily a Bluetooth tracker, which has to be enabled/configured in order to work.

Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't look like this is the kind of thing (like, say, HP printer carts) that will phone home and disable itself.

Looks great! I've subscribed.

This looks great, but honestly without an RSS/Atom feed, I wouldn't use it.

Also, please add a light mode. Some of us have visual disabilities that make such a high-contrast dark mode unreadable.

I think this vague term of 'use' isn't being very helpful here. Does that mean actively posting original content? Commenting? Liking? Sharing? Just scrolling/reading? Seems all those modes have a much different involvement, and likely quite different measures.

I don't use FB myself (in any mode), so this is second-hand... but my younger friends (< 30) use FB only as a necessary, lowest-common-denominator tool to keep in touch with less-close family/friends. It's low-effort ambient connection, not passionate interest or obsession. (I'm in a rural area with fairly low online/tech interest, which might affect things too.)

I've used Averia (Serif Libre, specifically) for at least a decade as my primary font for email, web pages in 'reader' mode, writing long-form text, etc. I find it extremely legible, and even calming.

Ironically, I've been a typographer for decades, both for print and online. Averia might seem an odd choice for someone intimately familiar with typographic theory/history and the vast catalog of possible fonts. But there's a certain pleasure and comfort in a font that is not trying to stand out or do anything particularly special.

A few weeks back I was messing around with Claude and some sample prompts, and happened to use the term 'xyzzy', and other terms from the classic ADVENTURE. Out of the blue, Claude started presenting itself as the game. I started a brand-new conversation with the prompt "Let’s play Adventure!"... and ended up having two joyful hours of exploring. Granted, this is kind of the opposite of the posted article — in this case, I was the adventurer, not the LLM — but it was still amazing. Try it out!

———

Let’s play Adventure!

WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.

Obvious exits: NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST

What would you like to do?

...

Having this author as a travel companion would be a nightmare.

In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking.

How utterly strange! I can't think of a city I've lived in which I've not explored extensively by walking. The idea of simply moving to a place and never seeing it as new and strange, never having the urge to learn it by exploration, feels completely alien to me.

I suppose that's why I ensure I avoid this particular type of person when traveling... :-)

I traveled there in 2008, and had that precise experience! I always wondered whether I'd just been there on a particularly excellent night, or if it was a normal happening. I'm so glad to hear it's the latter!

This sounds wonderful!

This is exactly how I did design my education, back in the 1980-1990s: self-driven, curiosity-based, highly experiential, with (informal) advisers and mentors. I never got a degree at all, and have never regretted it.

After reading over the website, the only thing I'd add to the program values is historical context and philosophy/ethics of technology. Doesn't have to be super-heavy, but I think there's a big problem today where people not only reinvent the wheel (which is sometimes appropriate) but aren't even aware the wheel existed before.

Dometic used to have small absorption fridges. (I had one in a tiny house, and it was totally silent.) Not sure if they do nowadays. (Peltier effect fridges have taken up some of the steam these days, but I'm pretty sure those have constant-running fans.) I think Dometic is still big in the sailboat community, which is another good place to investigate.

Most propane fridges are absorption style. I don't know if they're up to code for running inside a house, but they'd probably be fine on a porch or in a garage.

Check out Lehman's (https://www.lehmans.com/category/gas-refrigerators-freezers) for a lot of alternative technology.

Otherwise, google for 'propane refrigerator' or 'gas refrigerator or 'absorption refrigerator.'

If you really want to get creative, and enjoy processing food, there's lots of fridge-free ways to preserve food, depending on the climate you live in. It's also a fun area to research and experiment with.

Oh, one more thing -- chest freezers can be converted to chest fridges with a simple thermostat-switch. As most cheap chest freezers are manual-defrost style, they tend to run their compressor less, and for whatever reason, aren't as noisy as standing fridges. I personally still wouldn't want one in my main living quarters, but as they tend to be pretty cheap to buy, it might be something to try.

I don't have hyperacusis or tinnitus, but I am extremely sensitive to noise, especially fans, engines, pumps, and anything else that makes percussive or resonant noise. I am fortunate to live quite remotely in the countryside, with no human sounds nearby. I have a personal policy that nothing that makes continuous noise is allowed in my house. I installed all my appliances in another structure (a root cellar) a short walk from my house. It's made all the difference!

If you live in the typical American configuration of a house with a garage that is near the kitchen, consider putting your fridge/freezer out there. Sure, it's a few steps of inconvenience, but you'll find the lack of noisy appliances a true consolation. If you really need quick access to something refrigerated, put a cooler in a corner of the kitchen, and make ice with the freezer that's in the garage.

Truly silent refrigerators exist, but you won't find them at your typical home improvement box store. (Ask me why I know this!) Look into Amish appliance suppliers. Or the tiny-house folks who've found quiet, compact absorption-based fridges.

Over decades of travel, I've found that one of the best ways to experience a culture and a place is to learn how to cook the local food. I guess you could do that through cooking classes, etc., but I've found a whole new dimension of traveling by staying in Airbnbs/etc. that have kitchens, and going to the market down the street to find ingredients.

For more experienced & long-term travelers, having some way of preparing food (maybe just breakfast, or breakfast + lunch) often means you have the budget to stay in a place longer and get to know a place better. And you can take a day or two off to recharge if you've exhausted yourself, and know that you won't go hungry or be forced to go buy crappy to-go food at a convenience store or the like.

I agree, and I'm American, not Japanese. That segment was surprising, disturbing, and quite upsetting to me in its unnecessary violence. I literally ended up putting my hands up to my eyes, like I do when I reach a disturbing scene in a horror movie.

It feels a bit ironic that an acoustic guitar was destroyed... yet a few minutes later, the Logic Pro segment shows a music production studio with multiple guitars, carefully stored in guitar racks, and obviously intended to be used creatively, rather than destructively.

'A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars'

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g...

Less about the specifics of the battles being mentioned, but rather:

1. Battles can be real even if they don't involve actual physical fighting. If I, like the author of this post, am a pacifist, it's best if I try to stay disengaged or uninvolved.

2. Many people play a certain role in a battle, and it's helpful to understand what role a person is playing as you interact with them. That is, are they a soldier, a general, or a diplomat?

I work on a lot of projects related to vintage/obsolete technology. It's not at all uncommon for me to research something and find that all the links are broken, and the data is long gone. So developing a sense of information fragility is a useful skill, so you can get a sense of whether to save something.

Specifically about Alan Watts: There's a great podcast called 'Being in the Way' that I believe is produced by his son. One of their goals is to have a canonical & permanent archive of Watts' talks. Might be a good thing to practice your archiving skills on. :)

https://beherenownetwork.com/category/alan-watts/

Anecdotaly, we have several friends who cannot digest homogenized milk, but do well with raw milk. We are not sure if this is due to the makeup of the milk fat or due to the (usually harmless) microbiota in the milk.

I'm very interested in this, as it's true for me too! I don't have access to raw milk in my state, but I can find 'creamline' or 'cream top' milk at my farm stand, and that works great for me. Oddly, so does dry/powdered milk, of pretty much any type.

I've tried to research why homogenized milk is different (besides the obvious), but keep running into dead ends. I'd love to read any further info you have.

From the article:

We can advise patients that the diet on the day before a colonoscopy may include the following foods: cheese, eggs, milk, white bread, olive oil, butter, beef, chicken, fish, white rice, vanilla ice cream, and plain yogurt.

<anecdote> I've always had a terrible time with intense food restrictions, such as the typical colonoscopy diet. When I tried, I could tell within a few hours it was just not going to work for me, and I'd likely end up canceling and never trying it again. (I have a bad case of oppositional defiance regarding modern medicine.) Instead, I spent a lot of time researching exactly what the purpose of the liquid diet was. Once I understood it was basically to cut out fiber and other solids, I reckoned I could probably eat bland white bread, eggs, and yogurt for a couple of days, instead of going liquid-only. I admitted it to the doctors at my visit; they gave me a heavy stink-eye but did the procedure anyway. Everything went fine. </anecdote>

Also, there are several types of laxative. Most people get the terrible stuff by default. If you tell your doctor you're not likely to be able to handle it, they may be able to prescribe you the alternative type that is far easier to deal with. I did this, making that part of the prep the least annoying bit of the whole process.

The excellent book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (Harold McGee) has sections on major food groups, along with some incredible stories of how those foods have been preserved in the past — many of which involve some sort of fermentation. I recall one story about birds being encased inside a dead seal, which was then buried for a time (looking that up now, I think it's Inuit 'kiviak'). It's a great book all around, if you're interested in how food works.

I've been using Void for a couple of months now on a Raspberry Pi-based project. I'm impressed by its balance between simplicity and functionality. Namely, it doesn't have systemd (rather `runit`) so it's a lot easier to understand what's going on without a whole other level of complexity. (Caveat: I'm running a headless/server setup, so can't comment on anything related to GUIs using Void.)

Second up would be Arch, which encourages somewhat manual installation and configuration, yet does include systemd.

I highly doubt there's much genuine 'design' being done on these kinds of UIs, and certainly there's no value in trying to universally coordinate UI choices (minus, perhaps, the global '1/0' symbol for ON/OFF). I reckon the values being followed are instead that of cost-savings, both in materials (fewer switches make it cheaper), and in developer/engineer time. Just make it work, more or less; the dishwasher/TV/etc. is just going to be replaced in a few years anyway. It doesn't matter, and most people don't (unfortunately) care.

I generally refuse to buy devices that work this way. Granted, that strongly limits my choices in the market. But in the end, I'm much happier.

It takes effect to find appliances that don't have crazy UI (or bright blue LEDs!), but instead have discrete and direct control -- but they do exist. For appliances, I've found that units sold to elder/senior citizens are designed better: they often have real buttons/knobs, much simpler functions, and a high degree of safety built in.

I have never had the urge to have children. And whether consciously or not, I've never dated people who wanted kids.

I don't know if my life is vastly different because of this choice. But I've always loved travel and exploring, and I suppose my experiences doing so are far more possible than folks who have families -- and who consider stability something positive. (Not all families are like that, of course.)

I'm in my late 50s now, and have been fortunate to be able to experience living in many places on both the east & west coast of the US, as well as Europe and other parts of the world. I've been able to easily move to a place, and just as easily leave, when the time feels right. I've also been able to put a lot of time into many community/volunteer projects, both online and off. Some of those led to burnout, but many were quite fulfilling, I suppose in the way that some people find children to be fulfilling. I've built a large network of friends around the world, and enjoy heading out to visit them. I also enjoy my 'base' in a quiet part of a rural US state, where I can exist with only the bugs & the birds.

I'll close with saying that, in a way, I also 'can't' have children, but not because of the usual reasons. I have pretty extreme sensitivities to noise, light, chaotic social situations, and the like. In talking to every friend who's a parent who's related their parental/family life to me, I know I'd be so incredibly overwhelmed that I'd likely abandon the situation -- which would be clearly bad for everyone. Hence, I've chosen the other path -- and it's a good one!

I'm not going to summarize the article for you, but I'll tell you a story that actually relates more to the cruelty of crypto than the article does.

A friend of mine was sort of a big deal for a moment in the adult NFT space. It never made sense to me, but she's a smart person and was able to grok the complexity of it all. She delved deeply into the nature of money, of the blockchain, and of the numerous platforms that were trying to pull it together into a coherent yet decentralized system. Not only did she publish her own content, she also gave talks at conferences, hosted online communities, supported fellow adult creators, and so on.

My friend had grown up poor, had been an addict as a teenager, didn't go to college, was a single mom of two kids, lived in a small city in a depressed part of the US, and had really never been successful or felt confident in herself. People in that situation tend to get stuck in a 'poverty mentality': they feel they'll never make it out from the heavy system that seems constantly rigged against them. As an adult content creator, my friend was regularly banned or 'unbanked' because of what she produced (which was pretty mild, comparatively). Like many poor people, saving money was incredibly difficult, and it never felt like it was her fault. It was always a grind and a hustle. She'd make some money, then have some situation that would cause a personal financial crash: her car would break down, a utility bill would be unexpectedly high, a check would bounce, etc.

For her, the promises of crypto, and decentralization in general, were very alluring, and gave her a sense of optimism and control. Imagine feeling so financially powerless for your entire life (she was in her 30s at this point), and then discovering a whole different model of how money could work -- and in a way that she (in theory) could be in control of her own finances. And without the influence of The System's banks, regulators, landlords, etc., without the constant extraction of fees and cuts that the middlemen take.

Of course, the NFT market crashed, along with the hyped-up dreams, and her finances... again. She still stumbles along with an infinite well of creativity and gumption, but I think you could understand why the word 'cruel' might apply.

Look up 'limerance.' There are many online resources, including a few good subreddits. You may not have it, or may not have it strongly, or it may come and go — but some people are highly affected by having limerant obsessive feelings for someone, sometimes for decades. Understanding how it works may help you move on.

For four years, I ran something similar to this: an artist residency, in rural Appalachia. I charged a low fee to folks who came, and kept the experience fairly simple and self-catered.

However, it really wasn't sustainable. People who came invariably expected more — whether more infrastructure or more community or more subsidies/scholarships or more politics — and genuinely 'simple' folks were very rare.

The fees I charged barely covered utility/transportation costs, and were never enough to cover property taxes, much less paying me even a minimal salary. I could have raised fees, but that would have raised expectations and assumptions, too.

Furthermore, all my attempts to obtain professional help were a complete failure — whether getting a CPA/bookeeper (to manage the taxes I was required by the state to collect), an attorney (for making it a legal nonprofit to avoid those taxes), or an insurance broker (for liability insurance because people will sue you). Providers around here looked at my project and just said, 'Meh, I don't understand it. I'm not interested,' or quoted fuck-you prices, like $10K/year for liability! Providers closer to the city might have helped, but for even higher fees.

Sure, I could have — and did — do without all those things. But one realizes, the further one is off that branch, the more unstable things become.

Our society is built for either individual/family scale, or corporate scale. It's very, very difficult to find a place in between that will work for more than a short time. Try to run a project in the US that is not a business but not just an individual hobby: you'll find few options, outside of established structures like churches. And even those have much bigger budgets and organizations than you might think.

Nuthin's easy, son.

I use an analog system that requires nothing but half-sized white index cards, laid out in a grid on a table. No lists, no piles!

Every task has a separate card, described simply in a short actionable phrase, written in pen, in the center of the card. The corners have optional notation:

- top left: a location or '*' if the task must be done in a certain place (eg, grocery shopping) - top right: the date/day/time the task needs to be performed - bottom right: short text describing some dependency or other note, or an arrow indicating that I've written long context (eg, a shopping list) on the back of the card - bottom left: contextual area (project name, 'home', etc.)

Often I shuffle the cards around as an organizational method. Sometimes I gather them and then put them out again, especially if they've sat for too long. Or I'll walk around the house (or a project) with a handful of blank cards and do a 'brain dump,' writing down all the things I've been thinking about.

When the task is done, I rip a card in half (and recycle it) — it's a wonderful psychological release!

I've used this system since I read Allen's original book 20 years ago, and it continues to work very well for me.

While not exactly ‘ancient,’ I believe that typesetting machines were an example of early (pre-digital) computers. I actually wrote a paper about it in American Printing History Association’s journal _Printing History,_ issue 21, 2017.

https://johnlabovitz.com/publications/The-electric-typesette...

If you drag a message out from Apple Mail, say to the desktop, it will save that message as a .eml file. And if you inspect it, it's simply the raw message itself — as it would be in, say, a Maildir folder. You can literally 'cat' the file. Unless there are multiple versions of '.eml' that have different formats...

I did this too! Not on a notepad, but on a Royal typewriter, age 10. My dad had a telecommunications consulting business, based on a remote Univac mainframe he rented time on. He'd bring his Texas Instruments Silent 700 printer-terminal home from work, and I'd sometimes get to play Adventure and what-not if he wasn't using it. I vividly remember typing my first BASIC program on the typewriter, one afternoon after school, and then waiting excitedly for him to get home so I could actually type the program into the terminal. (Pretty sure the program was: 10 PRINT "HELLO" / 20 GOTO 10.)

EDIT: This would have been ~1976.

I’ve mostly heard the term ‘diorama’ in the context of museum exhibits. The diorama mode seems to have fallen out of favor, replaced by more interactive (and often digital) and interpretive installations.

Modelmaking as a hobby has been a somewhat popular at various times in the US, although much less in the past few decades. The high point, as with hobbies like photography, was probably 1970s-80s. But if you dig a bit, you’ll still find folks actively building model railroads, airplanes, cars & motorcycles, etc.