It occurs to me that a part of embracing
liberty as the prime directive of the United States is knowing/accepting what is not an infringement on liberty. The lack of agreement on what is not an infringement might be one of the key issues in the United States. For example, I believe that tolerating other's speech that I don't agree with or tolerating a women's choice to have an abortion is not an infringement of my liberty. Furthermore, I don't have the right to infringe upon another's liberty in doing these things. I say this while acknowledging that "promoting the general welfare" of a nation requires laws that infringe upon liberty as doing anything and everything that I want. Justice is about the give and take between individual liberty and the general welfare of a nation, and this is why we have laws in the United States.
#Current politics in the U.S. turns every tragic event in to a debate about why it happened for the purpose of placing blame upon one's opponent. The facts about what happen don't really matter it is all fodder for the trolling. I think it is what happens when the practice of politics becomes only about trolling, which is performative for emotional responses and not for progress.
#If you believe that capitalism depends upon a free market that depends upon democracy to exist, then it seems to me that
the U.S. Executive successfully threatening a U.S. corporation that results in that corporation meeting the Executive's demands is clear evidence the U.S. is now
an illiberal democracy. Corporations are the prime entities of capitalism that has wealth as it's prime directive, not liberty, so
they are not going to stand up to the Executive. And here is the kicker... given that most American's retirement savings is tied to capitalism via corporate stock, it can be argued their actions are in the best interests of the citizens. The affect is trading liberty for wealth and security.
#Of course, what we are seeing are the consequences of capitalism within an illiberal country. All you need is the Executive to threaten the corporation and the company's greed will cause them to comply with the Executive's orders. All of this is made possible by a non-elected, appointed by the Executive, Supreme Court (see conflict of interest?) implementing tyranny under the banner of "
unitary executive theory" reinforced by a proclamation of being above the law. We got here because the Supreme Court decisions for the last twenty years have not been through
the lens of liberty but through the lens of fundamentalism, both
secular and
Christian.
#Looks like soon there will not be any Late Night television. I don't understand how anyone can square a professed love of the first amendment and the government threatening citizens and companies with retaliation for speech.
#
The Chicago Cubs have clinched a Wild Card spot in the playoffs, what remains is to determine whether they have home field for the three game Wild Card series that will be in October. My buddy who is a fellow Cubs fan doubts the Cubs will have success in the playoffs. I see no reason why they can't win a three game series at Wrigley, however I think what is most important is that the young Cubs players gain playoff experience. How well the Cubs will do depends on how well they play during the next two weeks. In recent years the best MLB teams haven't won the World Series, it's been the hottest teams.
#Democracy is thought of as a weakness when
the prime directive changes from liberty to power. If the goal is to power over others, which by the way has been
a key means to the American way of life since World War II, the most efficient means to that goal is dictatorship.
#I am skeptical of
the attribution of violence in the United States as rooted in mental illness because it assumes each incident is one-off. The thinking is that if the people who did these things just got treatment, the incident would not have occurred. What if the incidents are a result of societal conditioning? It means entire populations of people are are risk of perpetuating an incident and entire populations can not be treated by a psychiatrist. The problem is systemic and
systematic thinking and not individualist thinking is the solution. We need to resist the simple, knee jerk causes and solutions.
#ESPN makes an interesting comparison between
MLB pitchers who are considered "aces" in 2025 to those in past decades going back to 1975. I think a key stat missing from the comparison is the average throwing speed of the pitchers because I think the key difference is that "aces" are now throwing more pitches above 95 mph than ever before and that increases risk of injury such that pitch counts rather than innings are the the key metric for how long a pitcher is in a game.
#Alan Jacob's article,
Wokeness and Myth on Campus, writes about technological core and mythical core world views that seems related to Carl Jung's persona and ego and Thomas Merton's true self and false self.
#
I listened to Dave's podcast in which he starts to describe what he is doing with WordLand and FeedLand, and that sounds a lot like what I said that I want in practically my first post on micro.blog. Right now I am writing this using Drummer and it will be published to my Daynotes blog. If I want to also publish this on my micro.blog I need to copy and paste it in to another outline from which posts to micro.blog are published.
Copy and paste is a lot of work, what if for every post I could specify which publishing destination that post goes to simply by selecting the destination locations via a checkbox? What if I could later add a destination by simply going back to that post and checking another box, or clear a checkbox and it is removed. When I edit the item the changes are automatically re-published. BTW, the last item probably won't work to social network destinations because they generally don't allow editing.
The key is the per item control over the publishing destination and continual ability to edit the item. For now micro.blog's ability to cross post items I publish to it to Mastodon and Bluesky come closest to my vision, but that is not on a per post basis, it's all items published to my micro.blog that are published to those other destinations.
I am more interested in learning about how I could
use AI to do things or retrieve and understand information than to create things. I want to do the creating, partaking in creation is what it means to be made in the image of God.
#
Last week I learned about
Daily Notes for Boox, an Android app designed specifically for Boox eInk devices. I installed it on by my
Boox Note Air 3C and the
Boox Go 7 and primarily using it on the Go 7. In function it is a simple app, a page for every day on which I can write notes, but it has a nifty todo function. Anything that I write on a page can be selected and converted to a todo, which I can then tag. There is a simple way to move a todo from one day to the next. Each month's notes an be exported to a PDF for archival. Unfortunately, there is no synchronization between devices and the app's author suggests this may be too complicated for him to add. Still, I am finding the app a very handy personal daily notes and tasks tracker.
#Daily Notes works well on the Go 7 although the plastic on glass writing experience and small screen makes it only comfortable for writing a few sentences, which is fine for tasks and simple notes. As I have written earlier, I am thinking I want a tablet smaller than the 10.3 inch size and among the devices I am looking at
the Supernote Nomad appears to be a perfect fit, although it does not have the Google Play store. Problem is that while the price of the Nomad is $329, that does not include a stylus or a case. With the cheapest stylus and a case the price is $550 which is on the high end of what I want to pay. I also have concern that I can only buy it direct from the manufacturer.
#
- I believe today is the day that Apple is to release the "2026" version of their operating systems. I just checked the iPad Mini and it shows no update available. I think the release version of iPad OS 26 was installed on my iPad Air, which I have had the beta versions installed, last week.#
- Checked whether the iPad is available on the iPad Mini at 4:45 PM EDT and it is currently downloading.#
- Installation went as expected with no problems. I don't have an emotional reaction to the glass-like UI changes but I don't know the translucent background of notifications makes notifications better. Same for the control panel. #
- Am I the only one to think the icon for the Journal app doesn't make sense? #
- I enabled the windowing mode, which I was curious to see on the iPad Min so I tested with my primary two window use case, displaying two fantasy football apps (ESPN and Yahoo) side by side. The authors of these apps force them to be in landscape by default, which I hate, so that makes landscape side by side not look like it does on the Microsoft Duo, but I think top down in portrait is workable. I wish the ESPN app fonts weren't so small or there was a way to zoom in a window on the Mini. #
Ben Thompson says the camera bump (plateau?) is where all the brains of the iPhone Air reside, which is how it can be so thin. I assume then all that resides in the rest of the case is battery. Thompson pushes back as what he sees as negative opinions about the new phones, my guess is part of the negative reactions is that when you talk about a cost north of $1k it's hard to feel value in incremental changes. The real solution is if you buy a new phone this year ignore the announcements about the next two years of phones. The iPhone 17 probably makes more sense to someone who owns an iPhone 15 or older. The manufacturers cannot make enough change to justify the upgrade from N-1 to N.
#
In his
writing about the iPhone 17 event, Rui Carmo makes a good point about Apple's move to eSim when he writes "eSIMs were designed to solve carrier problems, not user problems." Google has also moved the Pixel 10 to an eSim and I fear they will do the same with the Pixel 10a. A physical SIM card gives one a degree of control, but I acknowledge that probably more than a majority of smartphone users will not care.
#
- The quote of Steve Jobs that Thompson has in his article about the iPhone 17 event I think encapsulates the difference between Tim Cook and Steve Jobs, which is the difference between a founder (Jobs) and a CEO (Cook). Capitalist America forces non-founder CEOs to prioritize profits and revenue over everything else, which is why people see Cook do things they believe Jobs wound never do. #
My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
#- The above defines the corporate culture of Apple, it's why Apple exists and what Steve Sinek describes in his TED talk on leadership. I think this is why culture in corporations is created by founders because in corporations culture is the ultimate deliverable of leaders. #
- Last week the Remarkable Pro Move was released; it's a 7.3-inch eInk tablet. An eInk tablet has an eInk display that also supports input via a stylus and Remarkable made the first eInk tablet that earned success. It's advertised writing experience that is as good as writing on paper is what first caught my eye, but I always felt the Remarkable too expensive for only being an electronic equivalent to a pad of paper. Last year I bought a Boox Note Air 3C that I am very happy with, it has the same writing experience but comes with the Google Play store so that one can install and run any Android app. #
- The problem with the Note Air 3C is that while it's larger size works very well for replacing paper notepads to write, it is too large for reading books. When it comes to reading I prefer the size of the iPad Mini, and I like eInk so I have been using the Boox Go 7 as my primary reading device. The physical size of the Remarkable Pro Move looks perfect for my needs but it does not have the ability to run the Kindle or Readwise apps that I need for reading. I am not going to pay $500 for a single function device, at that price I expect to device to have more ultility, but I would pay $300 for it. #
- The Boox Go 7 does support stylus input but it's not the same writing experience as the Note Air 3C, the capacitive stylus has a plastic nib so it has the "writing on glass" feel of the Apple Pencil and iPad. I also think the screen size is a tad too small for notetaking, at best the equivalent paper experience is post-it notes. The best thing about the Go 7 is that it only costs $249 and comes with the Google Play store so you can install whichever Android reading app you prefer. If it had the same Wacom EMR stylus support as the Note Air 3C it would be nearly perfect and worth $100 more in price. I think Boox sees the Go 7 as an alternate to a Kindle that can do more and it fulfills that description perfectly.#
- The Remarkable Pro Move looks like the perfect size for a portable electronic notepad that has the best writing experience. I probably would be all in on it if it at least had the Kindle app. #
- My most current tablet is the iPad Mini 6, which is an N-1 generation device. I also have the fourth generation iPad Air that for the most part has been replaced by the Note Air 3C. I don't plan to replace the iPad Air, I expect my needs for large sheets of "paper" to write notes will diminish greatly after the beginning of the year so I am thinking my future tablets will be smaller in size. I expect to replace the iPad Mini 6 with a new iPad Mini, I just don't know when, mostly to be able to run iPad OS apps, and I am also thinking about replacing the Boox Note Air 3C and the Books Go 7 with a single smaller screen tablet. Right now that might be the iFlyTek AINOTE Air 2 or the VIWOODS AIPaper Mini, the AIPaper Mini is the front runner due to price. I wonder whether Boox will make tablet equivalent to the Remarkable Pro Move given that the Go 10.3 is clearly intended to compete with the Remarkable 2.#
The primary reason why I write here is because the CMS is oriented around dates, unlike every other blogging platform that has a timeline / title orientation. Best part of about the date orientation is that each month's posts are consolidated on one page / URL, which makes it easy for me build and maintain an index of the archive. Recently I found another great use for the monthly URLs, I add each month as a source to a notebook in Google
NotebookLM, which provides a way to search for what I write about and also to gain insight in to what I write about.
#Dave reset feedland.org, which means that to use it one has to create a new user and then subscribe to feeds. The only reason why I am bothering with it is that this is where the latest version of
FeedLand resides. It should be easy enough to copy my subscriptions from feedland.com or my local instance of
FeedLand by saving the feeds OPML file locally and then importing from file, however, the import from file does not work. I am seeing an error about the XML format, it's actually hidden behind the import status message. I notice that the subscriptions list generated by
FeedLand now includes a category for each item and I suspect the code doing the import doesn't know what to do with that. Giving up on this for now. I wonder if he will upgrade feedland.com.
#
Last Friday I installed the QPR1 update of Android 16 on my Pixel 7a and I am really happy with the result. The update has enough changes to the UI and new features to make it feel more like an operating system upgrade, which is probably the point. In the past Google has released
upgrades of Android in late August or early September so the
release of Android 16 in June was unusual, but then it didn't really seem like an upgrade because nothing looked or did anything different. I am not entirely sure about the benefit of this approach.
#
Too many people seem to not want to weigh the consequences of dropping
vaccine mandates. Should your child's health be at risk because other parents don't vaccinate their kids? Almost all laws in the United States exist to provide consquences to people who chose to not care about how they affect everyone else. One is free to speed but if you get in an accident and kill someone you can end jump in jail for manslaughter. I know that I would not live in Florida or Texas and I certainly would not have kids in Florida.
#I've changed wallpaper to see the new effects and I have moved some widgets around. Switched the home screen wallpaper to the live Fitbit wallpaper. So far I am happy with the changes that I see.
#Android 16 QPR1 with the new Material 3 Expressive UI is installed on my Pixel 7a. First thing I notice is the change to the status bar with the cell and WiFi indicators switched and the battery indicator larger.
#
I think that what Brent describes in his post about Frontier's database for persistent storage is why
Dave always
emphasizes the need for a common storage platform on the Internet. I've seen Dave struggle through this over the years from using Dropbox and then AWS. Problem seems that we continue to be stuck on the original file structure developed in the CP/M and Unix days with very little innovation ever since. Microsoft seemed to try with
WinFS but that never came to fruition and it seems that the industry just gave up.
#
One thing I have never understood about conservatism in the United States is how the ideology thinks progress is to be made. Today all tenants of conservatism are being bent in extreme directions such that any and every change today is tarred by the claim of wokeness. Why does it matter that
a corporation changes its logo? It only matters when you obsess on watching for and fighting against every single change no matter how big or small, good or bad. What a scary world to live in!
#I think we are heading toward a time in which public education in the United States will no longer exist. First, it is already hard enough to get good people willing to be teachers and work in public education, but the
right wing populism in the United States makes public education totally unattractive. Further, the last thing populist leaders want is an educated electorate and one of the main grievances of right wing populism is against the "educated elite." Broadly, public education has long strayed away from its original purpose of developing children in to good citizens. The current purposes range from enabling children to be wealthy adults to providing daycare and in almost all ways alleviating parents from the burden of raising their children.
#I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that
meteorological fall is practically here. Just last week the temperatures were in the mid to upper 80s but this week the temperatures have only risen to the upper 60s / low 70s. Looking at the air conditioning usage since Monday and I see at most an hour per day where as a week ago it was up to nearly seven hours. It feels just so sudden.
#
The prime reason why right wing populism has risen in the United States has been greed or the very least extreme self interest. When the Internet made it easier to ship jobs outside the United States the management class did not think of the consequences., although
Ross Perot warned us! The primary message from half the United States is, "get a job" and yet most of that half worked hard to take jobs away.
The same thing is now happening with AI. Rather than ignore the consequences we need to make fundamental changes to how work is viewed in the United States and what enables a sound society. I am thinking about things like
changing the definition of full time employment to 20 hours a week so that the number of the original pool of limited jobs doubles. It is drastic thinking like this that is going to be required because we are seeing the results of the current way of thinking.
#Outdoor thermometer says it is 53 degrees today. I am not ready for the colder weather.
#
Feedland.org was down earlier today, I really only use it for the blogroll on the right of this page. Going to try and switch that blogroll to feedland.com. I actually would prefer to switch that to my self hosted version of
FeedLand but that is not accessible via the public Internet. It was pretty easy to switch the blogroll server but I quickly notice that there are fewer feeds in the blogger category of the feedland.com instance. I tried creating
#
Sooner or later some idiot is going to do something stupid and
be shot by one of of these National Guardsmen and all hell will break loose. Next, the President will declare martial law. It's all pretext and not a peep from the Second Amenders.
#You can't on one hand say the Federal government is bad and inefficient and should not exist and then
on the other hand desire to have the Federal government own/run companies. As Gen X I continue to be amazed by all the things I learned in high school that was bad about the USSR and China now be embraced by the U.S. government and nobody of the party in of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" as a problem. Why can't we view health care in the United States in the same way as computer chips?
#Rui Carmo (TaoOfMac.com) is
not sold on iPad OS 26. He and others are much more concerned about the UI details than I am. I got to exercise the new windowing in iPad OS 26 during my first fantasy football draft of the season. I had three windows open to display cheat sheets, one large windows on the left and two smaller windows on the right. I originally tried tiling the small windows but found that didn't display enough info so I overlapped them. In general, I don't think windowing to be much useful for screens smaller than 12 inches, but I agree with Rui that the rounded window corners inefficiently use screen space and you really notice that on smaller screens.
#An update to the beta of iPad OS 26 has been pending for my
iPad Air because there is not enough free space available with the 64 GB of storage it has to install the update. The updater says in requires at least 17.82 GB free! I've never run in to this type of thing before on an iPad. Currently 52.77 GB of 64 GB is being used, so I have a lot that needs to be deleted. Finally got the update installed and after all of the deleting that I did there is now 19.66 GB of free space after the update.
#
Maybe rather than focus on a generation,
like the Baby Boomers, we ought to look at happened during societal-level events that have happened and consider the consequences and perhaps learn how to do better. For example, the Vietnam War and associated Pentagon Papers, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and Watergate clearly had the affect of convincing a large portion of the people in the United States that it cannot trust its government. The Iraq War had a similar affect an another large group of people. The rise of conservatism and fundamentalism has also had an affect, in fact I would submit that the cumulative affect of all these things has snowballed in to the current hyper individualistic and hyper libertarian/anarchist world view. Further, these things did not affect just one generation but generations.
#Pixelsnap's support for Apple's MagSafe "standard" makes Pixel phones that have it very compelling. I hope it will be included in the Pixel 10a, I think it will be because that appears to be how Google will support the Qi2 wireless charging standard. My understanding is that the Pixel Stand that I use with the Pixel 7a. Access to all of the
Magsafe accessories is very appealing.
#
Google launched
the Pixel 10 series this week, and there are several things about it that I like but I would prefer to not spend more than $500 on a phone even if I can get $200 in trade-in for the Pixel 7a. I am leaning toward getting the Pixel 10a when it comes out next spring, particularly if it has the
Pixelsnap charging and the Tensor G5 processor. I might consider buying a
Pixel 10 later in the year if Google (or Amazon or Best Buy etc.) has a sale that can be combined with a trade-in that gets the price closer to $500. I do like that Lemongrass color.
#Perhaps
one of the lessons of the Trump presidency is that the United States is not as powerful as it thinks it is, which in the long run might be good lesson to learn.
#I like collecting and looking at data about myself and I have been using
Exist.io for many years now.
Today I learned about the update they have made to their mobile apps and web site, which looks very nice. At one point in time it appeared the app was going to be shutdown, so it's nice to see the improvements being made.
#Turns out that Kyle Tucker had a small fracture in his hand, which likely the cause of his broken mechanics at the plate. It seems to me the job of a baseball manager is to prevent players from being their own worse enemy. No matter what the player is saying, the manager has to make the right decision and I don't think Counsel did in this instance. Further, the GM and President have to also know this is happening and step in when needed. A total failure by the Cubs organization in my opinion. Ricketts must have also known this and still rewarded Hoyer with an extension. I am sure the hope is that by sitting Kyle now he can be right for the push to the playoffs in September.
#
Workism is idolatry. The Jewish commandment to
practice sabbath is intended to protect us from this idolatry and thus protect us from ourselves. I am coming to the end of my career in IT and honestly struggling in my mind between doing what I want to do that I believe is the right thing to do and the fear of doing it. One thing that I think would help society is to learn the difference between happiness and joy. Most in the United States is in constant pursuit of happiness, heck that is even written in one of our founding documents, but happiness depends on external factors. Joy is a state of being, a choice that one makes in how they view the world that comes from within. Joy is what makes one appear to be happy even when they live by the world's definition of poverty.
#
My first fantasy football draft is this coming Saturday and I am in denial that we are even at the point in which summer is winding down. Two weeks from today is the first day of September.
#Looks like Dave's change to Wordland is putting one's timeline front and center, which looks to me as a repeat of
1999.io. If memory serves me correct I think one could see replies to one's posts in the
1999.io timeline.
#
Some interesting things
here regarding running
FeedLand in Docker configured via a single docker compose file. My current install of
FeedLand is running on Proxmox, I have one LXC container running the MySQL database server and another container running the
FeedLand app. Everything in
FeedLand goes in to MySQL so the container/host running it needs enough CPU and RAM.
#Friday before a week long vacation.
#
The best thing about baseball is that until playoff series deciding games there is always tomorrow and a
chance for the team to redeem itself. Yesterday the Cubs won and continued to avoid a three game series sweep and thus keep avoiding long losing streaks, which are the real deal of a major league team. The team's weaknesses are real and could be exposed in the playoffs, but avoiding being swept and winning a majority of the season series ought to be the path to the playoffs. On August 18 the Cubs will play their last four games against the Brewers for the season, and in some ways that will be their last best shot at controlling their own fate.
#
I wonder if
Tom Ricketts can be embarrassed? First he extends Jed Hoyer's contract before the trade deadline, then the lone pitcher Hoyer trades for to help a severely depleted starting rotation
pitches two innings before being injured, and there were concerns about that pitcher's velocity decrease prior to the trade. Finally, the Cubs hitters have gone cold as ice and have dropped to four games behind the Brewers for the NL Central lead. In fact, the Cubs now only have a 2.5 game lead in the Wild Card. Most likely Kyle Tucker, for whom Hoyer traded away a top prospect to the Astros, will leave at the end of the season. Factor all these recent events with the over all failure to win the National League or the division under Hoyer's leadership sums up the very questionable decision by Ricketts to extend Hoyer before seeing whether the Cubs win the NL Central this year. Instead Ricketts rewarded mediocrity and sent a message to the team that he is not committed to winning.
#Saw reports yesterday that ESPN has acquired the NFL Network and Red Zone. I rely on Red Zone for fantasy football and right now have it on my cable plan but fear that ESPN may put this on their streaming services and block it from cable.
#
Last week
FeedLand started running slow for me so I increased the amount of CPU, memory, and storage allocated to the container running the MySQL database and now it is running much better.
#
The ideas for some of
my blog posts come from what I read in Readwise, but I am trying to find a simply way to keep track of those ideas. Today I experimented with a few options, one are to add links to those potential source posts to this site which is what you see immediately below but Drummer does not work well on the small screen of the iPad Mini.
#I then thought I would try using Wordland and publish the sources as items on my linkblog and associate them to their own category, which I have done
here. Wordland works much better on the iPad Mini and markdown gets rendered nicely on the Wordpress site.
#The simplest approach, however, is to add a document tag in Readwise to the source article and be sure highlight something on the page so that the entry syncs to Obsidian. I can then create a page in Obsidian with the name of the tag, I use blog-post, and then all of the tagged articles appear in the Linked mentions section of the note.
#As a long time fan and user of tablet computers I pay attention to what Apple does with the iPad and I am fascinated by the changes coming in iPadOS 26, particularly for what that means on the iPad Mini. #
Over my 37 career in IT I have seen how over time how the skills of the people with whom I work has decreased and now I know why.#
Wondering how well I can write in Drummer using the iPad Mini.
#
I have cancelled my yearly subscription to Roam Research after having one for several years and I am now using Obsidian to manage my notes.
#If the Cubs don't get the starting pitching they need they better extend Tucker otherwise they will have wasted a top prospect.
#So far, not impressed by the Chicago Cubs trade deadline deals. Ricketts extending Hoyer before the deadline and not at the end of the season tells me all I need to know, the problem is ownership. Cubs ownership is reverted to being happy enough in collecting the money off the team than in demanding championships.
#
It doesn't feel like there are many good
pitching acquisition options for the Cubs. A problem I have with Jed Hoyer is that he has been to reliant on the in-season trade deadline and a "wait and see" approach rather than building up a roster that can win a championship during the off season. Chances of signing the talent you need at the price you want is better during the offseason rather than during the season when you have less leverage. Selling teams know buyers really need something and therefore are going to demand more.
#