Headline of an article on The Free Press, "Trump’s Been Bombing Boats in the Caribbean. Is This Legal?" I think is irrelevant in the current U.S. illiberal democracy in which anything The Executive does is legal according to the Supreme Court. (BTW, having the word "Supreme" in the name of a branch of government seems to be an Achilles heel hidden in plain sight.) Nearly everyone has not yet come to terms with the fact that the idea of "rule of law" was overturned by SCOTUS when it said The Executive had immunity from the law.#
The real litmus test for the U.S. Government is whether the Federalist Supreme Court justices are truly federalists in the traditional sense of states rights that they uphold lower court rulings that effectively enforce that the Federal government cannot do whatever it wants to states. Does the ninth and tenth amendments matter? We've already seen SCOTUS ignore the ninth with the Dobbs decision.#
The U.S. Congress has made itself so irrelevant that it can cease to function and nobody cares, such is another sign for how entrenched the dictatorship is becoming. We will all find out next November that the midterms don't matter, because even if Democrats take a majority of Congress the Executive and his Supreme Court will simply ignore it. It seems as though Republicans in Congress know they are irrelevant and happy with the charade of power and the Executive simply doesn't care because it will simply do whatever it wants and nobody will stop it.#
My reaction to this article about Today's Christian Tribes is that Jesus called us to be small things like yeast and salt. I do not think Jesus intended for a religion for which his title was an adjective to be the official religion of empire, but that is how it became assimilated, like the northern tribe of Israel. I will note too that one thing the article gets right is associating the Christian religion with tribalism, for religions are tribes that align identity with a deity. #
Note, the header graphic is not from this year, my wife took that picture in Houghton, Michigan during our fall trip in 2023.#
Last weekend we were on our annual fall road trip to visit my mom in Menominee, Michigan. We stayed in Mackinaw City on the way there and back and on Saturday we drove over to west side of norther Lower Peninsula to drive through the Tunnel of Trees on M119.#
I agree very much with the gist of this article on 9to5google.com that some of the features of Android Phones is taken for granted and therefore underappreciated. Features like Now Playing and At A Glance have become so fundamental to my expectation of my phone that I am sure I would miss them in a "what do you mean that is not here" kinda of way. #
The Cubs beat the Brewers last night to force a deciding game 5 in the NLDS Saturday night. Both teams have held serve in their home parks, so the Cubs will need to break the pattern to play the Dodgers in the NLCS. #
Journalism professor Jay Rosen has retired from NYU to join a non-profit that has the purpose of training content creators how to do better news reporting. I am a bit uncertain about how even good news reporting distributed through social media contents with the wealth generating algorithms. In other words, do we have a creation problem or a control and distribution problem with news? #
From an originalist perspective, what is "the press" as stated in the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution? I think it is obvious that which exists today is not like "the press" in the late 18th century, which is why I think originalism is flawed. I can imagine the current SCOTUS saying that the first amendment freedom of the press doesn't apply to CBS News because it is not "the press." #
- I am reading Thomas Zimmer's essay about Russell Vought that I think correctly states what is happening in the United States. The MAGA project is the destruction of the United States that they view as already been destroyed. In their view this is the third American Revolution, the second American Revolution started with the New Deal and culminated in Obama's election. I think in order to fight against this I think more attention needs to be put on the question of what comes after the U.S. government is entirely destroyed.#
- Rooted in this question is the reality that these people only place value in freedom for themselves, freedom is not for their opponents. Democracy, including the U.S. Republican one, allows the possibility of one's opponents gaining power and therefore impeding upon their freedom. Consequently, Democracy is flawed and the only way to assure their freedom is a dictator. The form of what is in place may have the appearance all one thinks of about the United States, a Congress, President, Supreme Court, but for that structure to remain there must be guarantee the opposition can never gain power. #
- Consider the current government shutdown, doesn't it feel different to you? The difference is that the current Republicans behind the shutdown do not fear the voters, they don't fear not being re-elected, because they believe so long as the fall in line with the MAGA project they will continue to have a share of power.#
- Of course, anyone who understands what is going on ought to be sober enough to know that when everything relies on human feelings rather than laws sooner or later you can, and likely will, become the opposition to that person. Marjorie Taylor Green might being finding this out right now.#
Stop calling it mainstream media, instead call it corporate media or capitalist media. What is even considered mainstream today any way? It is definitely not "the press" as intended by the First Amendment. #
I think that Craig Counsell has done a poor job of managing the Chicago Cubs in this NDLS against the Brewers. First, he should not have started Boyd for game 1 on only three days rest and second it is absolutely wrong to not start your hottest hitter, Michael Busch even when going against left handed pitcher. How do you justify starting PCA who clearly has difficulty with left handed pitching and no start Busch. Pat Murphy was Counsell's bench coach and I am beginning to think he did more the managing than Counsell when he was in Milwaukee. His performance does not justify being the top paid manager in baseball. David Ross could have equally managed to the two losses that have occurred in this series. #
Yesterday I read on reddit that the Gemini Pro model does a better job of translating handwriting on the Viwoods AIPaper Mini than the Gpt-4o model so I tested it using the Journal notebook and can confirm that it does a better job of translation. I had it translate all four pages of the notebook and it did a nearly perfect job!#
Welcome to October on what could be the last day in which we see 80 degree temps in southeast Michigan this year. #
Read on Reddit that a plugin has been developed for importing notes on the Viwoods tablets in to Obsidian. There are also a couple of demo videos on YouTube. #
Here is a well written review of the Viwoods AIPaper. The author has experience with Remarkable and notes that much of the notetaking functionality mimics Remarkable. #
It is looking like the ability to publish what I write in Drummer to my blog hosted on micro.blog is breaking/broken. The trigger for micro.blog to check the outline for new updates runs slower and the posts are not being published every since Manton made a "fix" to enable category filters to run. I feel bad about complaining because I know I could be the only person want to post in this manner. At least the posts end up over in micro.blog, but I have to take the extra step of loading it up over there and updating to publish.#
The Chicago Cubs play their first Wild Card game for the 2025 MLB playoffs this afternoon, which is their first playoff game in many years. Looking forward to seeing how the team performs. I am not expecting much success in the playoffs this year, and I am mostly happy for the young players to gain experience with playoff pressure. Winning championships is part experience, part talent, and part luck, you need them all to win a World Series.#
We are seven days in to autumn and in the last two weeks we have had the best summer weather of all year. Temps in the low 80s with low humidity during the day and temps dropping down into the 50s over night. Apple Weather says the average high temperature for today is 69 degrees, the forecasted 81 degrees is 15 above that average. The forecast temps for the next 10 degrees are all above average, summer continue well in to October.#
Two years ago the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft dropped off the samples it collected of the asteroid Bennu. I've been fascinated by our ability to fly a spacecraft to an asteroid, which is also rapidly hurling through space, do a "touch and go" to collected samples, then fly back to earth, drop the samples off and continue on to another asteroid. Today I did a quick search to see what has been learned about Bennu. Recent reports state that Bennu is "a mixture of dust that formed in our solar system, organic matter from interstellar space, and pre-solar system stardust. Its unique and varied contents were dramatically transformed over time by interactions with water and exposure to the harsh space environment." [Source] and "In addition to the five nitrogenous bases -- adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil -- required for building DNA and RNA, the researchers also found xanthine, hypoxanthine, and nicotinic acid (vitamin B3)." [Source]. OSIRIS-Rex has been renamed OSIRIS-APEX and is currently flying toward another asteroid, Apophis, which it is scheduled to meet up with in 2029. #
Came across Notesnook in my RSS feeds and checking out the site I am asking myself, how many notetaking apps does the world need? Then I see their pro subscription is just under $5 per month and realize ok, these guys are at least competing on price.#
The U.S. Supreme Court seems firmly entrenched on institutionalizing the unitary executive theory. In light of this, if SCOTUS serves more than President Trump it seems they need to clarify the power of Congress over the Executive, for it seems to me that the Constitution invests Congress the power to write and pass laws, including the power to overturn a President's veto, and that the Congress says the Executive must execute the laws of Congress. It does not seem to me that the Constitution gives the Executive power to interpret a clear law, even if that constrains the executive. In other words, dear SCOTUS, please explain to me how checks and balances of the Constitution exists in the world of the U.S. Presidential monarchy that you are creating. #
Today Dave described a new way to read his stuff, via a timeline. At the end of the post he provides a link to a FeedLand Reading List that one can use to "subscribe" to his timeline in Feedland. So, I open my instance of Feedland, go to Tools, Subscribe to reading lists and enter his URL. I see the info and I see that I am subscribed, but now what? No documentation about FeedLand Readling Lists. Do the posts of the reading list get merged in to my news? Do I have to bookmark the news view page of the reading list to go back to it? Searched Scripting News for info, took another look at the feedlist view, saw the names of the feeds and that they are checked, went to my FeedLand feed list and see that the feeds were added.#
So, all this turns out to be a Note to self: a reading list is a way to share a list of RSS subscriptions that others can subscribe to for merge into their own feed list. #
- Last week I bought the Viwoods AIPaper Mini and therefore I have been thinking about tablets and e-ink tablets in particular. While I appreciate the different companies pushing the boundaries of tablet use cases a problem is that there is no standard for data beyond PDF. I can save/backup my writing on both the Boox and Viwoods devices to PDFs but I can't search within those PDFs, all I can do is browse them. #
- On the Viwoods I can't even search on the device for text that I write. The work around is to use the AI Text Conversion on the device then copy and paste the result in to Obsidian. The text conversion is not flawless but works well enough and the net effect is a process akin to converting a fleeting note to a permanent note. #
- Boox does provide a way to search for text within handwriting of notebooks on the device and in their web app but the PDFs it generates does not include an index for searching. #
- Ultimately what I want is how OneNote seems to work (or at least used to) on the iPad. Prior to buying the Boox Note Air 3C I wrote all of my work meeting notes on the iPad Air using the Apple Pencil in OneNote. I used the integration between Outlook and OneNote to create meeting note templates for each of the meeting and then wrote my notes in the resulting page. It seems OneNote does handwriting to text conversion in the background and embeds that result with the note so that I can be used for search both on the device and in the desktop version of the app. #
- I can run and use OneNote on both the Viwoods and Boox devices, in fact it works better on the Viwoods, but it does not look like the Android version of OneNote has the handwriting to text conversion, so I can only search on titles and note on words in my handwriting. #
- I understand that the constraints of the devices may make it difficult to include handwriting to text conversion, although it seems to work on the Viwoods, just not automatically. It occurs to me what would work well for me is if Viwoods or Boox or a third party provided a back end web app for storing the PDF versions of handwritten notes and can do the processing of text conversion and indexing to make them searchable. #
- In doing a little bit of searching, I find Pen to Print that makes searchable PDFs but costs $180 per year to make 1000 PDF pages per month searchable. I could buy a month for $24.99 and then cancel. #
There is little doubt in my mind that September 11, 2001 was the tipping point toward the U.S. transformation to an illiberal democracy. After the events on that day the prime directive of the United States shifted from liberty to safety. While safety is important in the preservation of liberty, making it the prime directive makes one willing to give up liberty for the sake of safety. In fact, all which are necessary for liberty or the consequences of having liberty are deemed as unsafe and must be reduced to the point of not being recognizable for our own safety. And if one does not accept the foundational idea of liberty for all, then that leads one to elaborate the prime directive further to only mean safety for me and not for you.#
- I am reading this interview of Dan Wang by Russ Douthat of the New York Times and find it fascinating how Wang describes the difference between China in terms of engineers and lawyers. Wang says the current China is founded by engineers, who in my experience put great value on efficiency. I think Elon Musk's DODGE was/is very much a rise of engineers in the United States who believe they know better about running a country than lawyers. Whenever you have a group of people who are dominated by ego to think they alone are the smart people and therefore know all the answers to all the problems, you have a high potential for tyranny. Democracy and liberty is not about efficiency, it's about peaceful co-existence. If one insists upon efficiency you end up being like the other countries, such as the old USSR and China, who likewise make efficiency a prime directive.#
- Here is the money quote of Dan Wang in the article:#
The game goes to he who outlasts the adversary. But what the Chinese want to do is to just keep things really, really stable and just wait for the Western countries to collapse.
#- China plays the long game while the U.S. plays the short game.#
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. #
Yesterday I reached the half way point of my virtual walk of the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail that I started on December 18, 2024. I am using the Walk The Distance app. #
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. #
- Yesterday I wrote that I think we need to have serious discussion about what is liberty, and here is what I mean. I believe the fundamental purpose of the U.S. Constitution and thus the fundamental purpose of all branches of the Federal government, and in particular the Supreme Court is to preserve liberty. #
- For liberty to be preserved there needs to be agreement on how liberty is preserved, what conditions must exist or how to we determine there is liberty. For example, I think individual privacy is required for liberty to exist and I think personal autonomy (control over one's body) is required for liberty to exist. Neither privacy or autonomy are enumerated in the Constitution, but amendments such as the fourth amendment function in maintaining privacy and autonomy. Furthermore, liberty cannot exist in a country where people are at risk of being killed, so viewing the second amendment in the context of preserving liberty also means the government has the obligation to create and enforce laws about weapons. #
- Consequently, it is wrong for SCOTUS to go hunting for literal references to privacy and autonomy in the Constitution, they are not there and it does not matter because the prime directive of liberty is what above all matters. The ninth amendment states that the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution should not be understood to mean that other rights retained by the people should be denied. In my opinion the use of originalism by SCOTUS is a violation of the ninth amendment. #
- I think the real reason why politicians and Supreme Court Justices avoid the fundamentals of liberty is that most do not agree with the idea of liberty applies to all citizens. They do not accept that women and blacks are equal to white men. Keep in mind that if one wants to think the only valid form of the Constitution is the original document and the Bill of Rights then women and black people are not citizens and therefore politicians and Supreme Court Justices do not need to preserve liberty for non-white men. #
- We literally fought a Civil War over this topic. The only people who want to live within the literal constraints of the rules and societal norms of 100 years or more ago are those for who doing so provides an advantage over everyone else. The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution says:#
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
#- The preamble states why the Constitution was written, it was done to preserve liberty for the current and future generations. Liberty is the prime directive, but I also think the key word within the preamble is the word more. Clearly the authors of this document did not believe that how they had been living was perfect, and thus I believe they expected we would all strive to continue making a more perfect Union. I do not accept that the authors of the Constitution would think of it as a dead document, they provided an amendment process for its change and a Congress to pass laws to make the Union more perfect in securing the Blessings of Liberty. #
- I am sad about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I lament how in our society a non trivial number of people see violence as the means to react to their grievances. The only way such violence can be rationalized is through a self centered and intolerant world view. All of this violence in the Unites States is a symptom of and a reaction to much deeper problems. Putting the military on the streets or even putting more cops on the streets is just managing the symptoms and not addressing the root cause. I am not entirely sure of what is the root cause, there likely is no single thing to which there is a silver bullet, but from my personal theological perspective I think it might be idolatry. We are worshiping many idols in the United States: the second amendment, capitalism, power, wealth, and Western Christianity to name a few.#
- I think a step, not the only step, towards understanding the root cause of this violence in the United States is a serious discussion about liberty for the purpose of increasing a shared understanding of what it is. The enduring debate since the founding of the United States seems to be liberty versus equality and which is more important. I believe there are many in the United States who believe liberty cannot coexist in a world that prioritizes equality. Again, from my theological perspective the default view of liberty in the United States is "either/or" and the default view of equality is "both/and." #
- We probably will never fully resolve the debate about liberty versus equality, but I think it would be helpful to at least agree on what is liberty and what is necessary for liberty. For me liberty comes down to personal autonomy, do I have complete control over what happens to my body? Do I have a choice on where my body goes, what goes in and what goes out? A test case of liberty is whether I can speak my mind without my body being put in jail or killed. For the test case to pass there must be a desire to co-exist and to not view other autonomous humans with contempt. It seems for the sake of liberty, liberty in the United State is being taken away because in the eyes of many liberty for me cannot mean liberty for all.#
- Ultimately, we need to decide what is the United States because in difference to what has been said, the United State truly is more about ideas than land. Ninety percent of us who inhabit the land of the United States are not ethnically native to the land, colonialism does not make one native. I learned in the government classes I took in my public education middle and high school, the teaching of which is the fundamental purpose of public education in the United States, that the United States is a melting pot. The original motto of the United States, which is still on seal of the United States and on our coins is E pluribus unum, Out Of Many, One. For the motto to be true we must not only co-exist with the other, we much see the other as a part of ourselves. #
- In all of the reading I have done of what Jesus taught and commanded, I never once come across him teaching about liberty. The idea of rights never exists at the time of Jesus. However, Jesus did speak about oneness and equality, and most importantly, love. Wouldn't a nation that is supposed to be built upon the teaching of Jesus reflect such teaching? What of the fruits of the United States? Oh, you meant we are a Christian nation, you didn't say anything about Jesus, to which I respond, your are absolutely correct and you make my point. #
- Reading tea leaves about Dave's integration of FeedLand and Wordland. I think he is making FeedLand the RSS feed management / subscription engine for the social network platform that he is building, analogous to the Twitter back end, and Wordland will be the where one sees a timeline of all their feeds and writes responses. The responses will likely be published to Wordpress for storage. In effect Wordland will be analogous to the Twitter front end. FeedLand will be the place for one to find and subscribe to new feeds. Wordpress will be analogous to one's Twitter profile. If I am following this right then I would think that the RSS feed created by Wordland for its associated Wordpress site will need to be automatically added to the FeedLand feeds database to be available for others to subscribe, then if there is a Follow Me button on the Wordpress site (profile) you will redirect to the add feed page of Feedland. #
- If I am right then unless Dave adds a type of federation model to FeedLand there will need to be a central instance of FeedLand (feedland.social?) where everyone goes to find and subscribe to feeds., which requires centralized hosting that has always been the Achilles heal of Dave's work. FeedLand puts everything into the MySQL database that I am not sure scales well for this use case. #
- All of this is pure speculation on my part, but I see how RSS underpins all of this but I don't see how this will work in decentralized manner. Perhaps the timeline he is putting in to Wordland can pull from subscribed feeds on multiple FeedLand instances? This would make everything function similarly to Mastodon from a feed perspective. You could have a community built around one instance of FeedLand that might be more like the BBSes of old and that might be enough. #
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.#
- Today is iPhone announcement day, which I really don't care directly about, but my fear is that Apple will someday replace the iPad Mini with an iPhone, perhaps a foldable. As I think about my personal tablet usage and needs going forward, I think the iPad Mini size is ideal. If I were to replace a notebook with a tablet then I would want the 12-inch size screens. For me the only use case for a 10.3 - 11 inch screen is as an alternate to a 8.5 x 11 inch pad of paper such as for writing notes during meetings but after the first of the year I expect that use case need to diminish. #
- Actually, I would really like using a foldable phone but I am not going to pay north of $700 for such a device. All of the current model year iPhones cost north of $700, which makes them less desirable to me. #
- The iPhone Air (note no version number) looks very nice but it seems to me the thinner the phone the more obvious the camera bump (plateau?) and that to my eye detracts from how thin the iPhone Air looks. Still, I imagine the iPhone Air is going to be new status symbol phone. #
- The two-tone back of the iPhone Pro 17 looks funky...or unappealing. Google and now Apple have added "vapor chambers" to their phones to address heat, but how long can those chambers be effective? #
- Most important from all of the announcements from Apple today is that Apple is releasing the latest version of their operating systems on September 15, which affects both of my iPads and my Macbook.#
- Finally, a reminder to myself. Last year Apple announced / released the iPad Mini 7 in a mid October press release, the most notable part of that was the upgrade to the A17 Pro processor, otherwise the physical design is all the same. Apple could skip a new Mini this year though I think it is due for some physical design changes. I think it would be ideal if the bezel shrunk while keeping the physical dimensions. A thinner Mini would also be cool, but it seems clear that Apple wants to feature the "Air" line as the thin line worth a higher price.#
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. #
Looks like Kagi News uses AI to summarize news RSS feeds. At they provide source links, this could be useful worth checking out over time.#
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.#
While reading Brent's description of how he programmed in the 90s using UserLand Frontier I immediately thought of NewtonScript. Apple had much innovation in Newton that got overlooked and how apps were developed and ran on the operating system is one. Newton OS even had a database based file system that optimized sharing across applications to prevent redundancy. I think the Newton files system was not only needed due to the constraints of limited physical storage but also to enable fast and easy application development like Brent describes.#
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.#