I’ve known about some of Google’s special operators for years, but librarian Hana Lee Goldin goes through all of the ones she knows about that supercharge search results beyond the usual five paid results and AI Overview at the top of the page. Bookmarked!
Reading multiple stories about how AI demand has made hard drive, GPU and RAM prices all skyrocket, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade my laptop to something that will handle video editing better than the one I’ve currently got. This is an M2 Macbook Air that I bought three years ago, and I made the mistake of only speccing 8GB of RAM. It’s been a solid machine, but it has a few quirks I dislike (mainly software-related) and it just chugs when I’m working with heavy video files. I specced out a new M5 Air with 16GB of RAM last week, and with a trade in on my current machine I should save about 1/3 of the total cost. However, the order is currently stuck in processing—what was supposed to be in stock locally is now estimated to be here between May 15-19.
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Interestingly, when I look at the stats for IK here, my daily numbers have jumped up to about four times where they used to be a year ago, and when I compare that with the Scout journal, those numbers have dropped. My guess (and I need to do a lot more digging in my server logs) is that I’m getting hit by the AI bots, who are scraping the site for content. I would have expected that the Scout journal would be hit just as much, but apparently not.
I’ve had the drumbeat and bassline of Angel by Massive Attack stuck in my head for the last three days. I was fortunate enough to see them live in 2019 during the Mezzanine 30th Anniversary tour, and this was more powerful in person than the recorded version, if that’s possible. Being able to see Horace Andy and Liz Fraser sing their tracks live was incredible.
Here’s the first release from Inferno, the upcoming BoC album. On first listen, I really like it. The beat is a lot more central to this track than any previous work they’ve done; I was always a huge fan of the Big Beat electronica genre, and I would love to see them lead the charge into a new era of solid groove. I tried to preorder the album last week but it timed out on me, so I’ll try again today.
This beautiful fellow is a Piliated Woodpecker, which is apparently rare compared to the other types in this area. He sat at the base of what used to be our cherry tree and cleaned it out on Saturday morning, giving me enough time to put the long lens on and snap a couple of pictures when he looked up. He’s bigger than he looks—I’d say about the size of a crow.
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The tomatoes in the greenhouse are going gangbusters. I’d say they’ve grown about 5 times their size since I bought them, and they’re all putting out flowers, which I’ve been dutifully trying to fertilize every day. I sure do hope we get some good fruit on each one. I have to repair a bunch of holes in the plastic this coming weekend, because the replacement cover I bought seven years ago did not last as long as the stuff I installed in 2005.
The internet can be a wonderful thing sometimes.
This clip is from a 1982 French cop movie called Le Marginal, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. The featured car is claimed to be an original 1966 Shelby GT500, heavily modified, and driven in the movie by the star himself. The hero car was saved, restored, and sold in 2023. I like a lot about this car, except for the rear taillights.
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…countless researchers have shown that many of the most meaningful forms of real-world creativity and invention depend less on solving well-defined problems than on figuring out what the problem is in the first place.
In 1964 a study on creativity was done where researchers watched how 31 artists approached a still life, and split their approaches into two different types: problem-solving and problem-finding. The former spent their time working on the outcome, while the latter spent their time finding and formulating a visual problem. The researchers then went back five years after graduation to see where the students took their careers:
The artists who used a problem-finding style while in school were far more successful five years after graduation. Of the 11 students who were the least problem-finding in approach, eight had dropped out of art altogether.
This tracks with my personal experience in art school: those of us who embraced MICA’s freshman-year philosophy of learning how to think instead of learning how to make art seem to be more successful in our careers.
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This is an excerpt of a longer video starring a guy named Yung Lean, who is some kind of Swedish rap star. The song is forgettable but the choreography is amazing; leave the sound off if it gets annoying.
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This is a clip of a quartet busking in Asheville, NC, featuring a woman known as Abby the Spoon Lady, who does an incredible job of adding color and style to the percussion. There are many other clips of her available on YouTube, but I like the bluegrass featured here—even though the sound kind of sucks.
Every day I get emails from various Democratic organizations, asking for money. They all say the same thing, in about ten different iterations: Can you believe this, We must stop this, There’s no time to lose, We need help, Our funding is running out, etc. All with the same urgency and desperation. I know why they’re written this way; I’ve been adjacent to and involved with advertising long enough to understand what gets the eyeballs and what gets thrown in the Junk folder.
But that’s not what I’m looking for. The fascists in power had a plan when they went into this administration; it was called Project 2025. it outlined clearly all of their policy goals, their strategy, and the christian white nationalist oligarchy they wanted to reshape our democracy into. It was shared broadly with the general public before the election, and we blindly elected its authors into power. And they’ve been running the playbook ever since then, using Executive orders, DOGE, a corrupt Supreme Court, and ICE/Border Patrol recruits to break down our society.
No, I can’t believe this. Yes, we need to stop them. There surely isn’t any time to lose. Yes, we need help. But I’m not giving the Democrats any money until they come up with a fucking plan. What’s the plan? How do we fight back against the dismantling of our democracy? What are they going to do to regain control, but more importantly, what are they going to do once they’re in control? How are they going to rebuild without dissolving into a bunch of squabbling special interests? Where is our Project 2029?
What’s the fucking plan?
I’m Back, the company who used Kickstarter to develop a digital back for particular TLR and 35mm film cameras, is developing a new system that does away with the earlier models’ bulky attachments and contains all of the electronics inside a film canister-sized unit that fits inside the camera. They’ve raised a crap-ton of money so far to build it out, and from what the article says, they’re well on the way, with prototypes in testing and additional elements in development based on user feedback: a battery and external screen of some kind. This kind of thing would be awesome if I was absolutely in love with one of my 35mm film cameras; at this point it’s still easier to find a lens adapter to put old glass on a digital camera for the same basic effect. I would, however, love an internal system like this for my TLR cameras, because they are more fun to play with.
I’ve had a number of different songs buzzing around my skull over the last couple of weeks, but this one flew in and stuck itself directly into my cerebral cortex.
Back In The Day, one of the first of a handful of MP3s I yoinked from Napster was a copy of this song. It still rips.
I’ve had dreams of putting a real live deck on the back of this house ever since we moved in, but the parade of other priorities required to keep it habitable have always taken precedent. I don’t think we’re going to be doing any major traveling this year, and one of the things Jen and I have talked about is finally pulling the trigger this year. We’ve agreed on the basic shape and footprint, so I used an online deck builder to rough out what it could look like.
One of the requirements is to have a wide set of steps leading gently down to the ground, vs. the almost vertical set of ladder stairs we inherited with this house. We can’t really cover the entire back of the house without covering a hose bib and two of the remaining four windows, so we decided to go outwards and have the stairs drop down facing the garage. An area of 10′ by 15′ will give us plenty of room for a table and chairs, and a set of stairs with 8′ wide by 10″ deep treads will provide plenty of space to get up and down.
Using the deck builder and some quick-and-dirty Photoshop, I mocked up what it could look like on the back of the house.
Of course, the Lowe’s deck builder thing does an automatic calculation for the materials, and it comes out to over $11K. This is, of course, because the decking is all Trex, but we’re going to have to do some saving up before I can tackle this.
The weather forecast was supposed to be much different than what we got this weekend, which put a bit of the kibosh on my outdoor plans, but I was able to get some things accomplished.
Saturday morning the Boy Scouts were having their yearly yard sale at the church down the street, so I bundled Hazel into Darth Haul and we puttered down to check things out. I made a beeline to a stand where a family was getting rid of multiple bins of assorted tools, and spent a half an hour digging for treasure. I wound up walking away with a decent replacement toolbox for my electrical kit, which I’ve outgrown (and which never really closed securely), and filled the top section with a wide assortment of hand tools. I’ve found you can never have enough US-made screwdrivers, 1/2″ and 9/16″ wrenches, tape measures, and pliers, and I added some unique things like hose cutters, a bag of hemostats, and some specialty wirecutters and dikes, among other things.
Returning home, I picked Finley up and drove to the Baltimore waterfront near my first house, where a very unique ship has been docked for years: the NS Savannah, one of only four nuclear-powered cargo ships ever built. In the 1950’s, President Eisenhower launched the Atoms for Peace initiative, to show the world how nuclear power could be used for the advancement of man. the Savannah was one of the projects developed under that program, and was launched in 1959 as a combined passenger/cargo vessel to showcase America’s command of industry and science. In person, it’s huge, but compared to a modern container ship it’s a plastic bath toy. Designed before the advent of container shipping, it’s long and sleek and looks like an early 60’s sportscar.
Inside, we came aboard at the original passenger embarkation point, which had been restored to its original design. Descending down into the ship, the tour took us through the now decomissioned nuclear containment vessel, through the engine room, to the main control room, and back up to the passenger cabins.
The cabin we toured was actually pretty small and not that inspiring, if I’m honest; I would have expected something a lot more spacious and elegant. Most of the original furniture was gone, but they’ve done a good job of sourcing as much period-correct stuff as possible.
The Savannah will be decertified as a nuclear power facility this year, and her future is uncertain; none of the docents know what’s next for the ship or how long she might stay in Baltimore. So I was glad to be able to check it out while we did, and take Finn along with me.
On Sunday I did some work around the house and countersunk a set of rear seatbelt mounts into the Travelall before driving out to Frederick to pick up a used Mirra desk chair from an estate showroom. This was to finally replace a disintegrating 18-year-old IKEA chair that’s been giving me a sore butt for a year or so now. New Mirras go for stupid money, so I was happy to score this one for a fraction of the price, and I think it’ll last a good long time.
Then I headed up to a Travelall aquaintance’s house north of Frederick to look over a truck he’s selling—not for me, but for another fellow Travelall owner I met through the YouTube channel. I shot some video and caught up with the seller before heading home to buff the paint on the hood of the truck, and when it got dark, headed inside to edit video.
When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.
This article has been making the rounds, but it deserves to be shared: Noah Hawley writes about the ultra-rich and the point at which consequences or morality cease to be a factor to them.
But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.