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!
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.
A couple of years ago I found myself in a rainy field, attempting to free a rust-frozen series of bolts off the front of a Scout that was sitting only a few feet from a crusher. There wasn’t a lot of salvageable stuff on the truck other than some sheet metal; in hindsight I could have probably picked more parts, but I spent most of my time fighting these dumb bolts. I eventually found an employee of the yard, borrowed a cordless angle grinder, and had the grille free in minutes.
A month later I bought a cordless DeWalt grinder and used it a couple of times when my corded units didn’t quite reach, but I found that it only had about 30 seconds of power before it would basically just die out. I chalked this up to my older, smaller 20v batteries not holding a ton of charge, but this winter, I bought a fat 6A for it and my impact driver, and the resulting surplus of power made no difference. I dropped it off at a local authorized service center and they called me this morning to tell me the magnet and armature are bad, and that it isn’t worth the repair cost.
I bought into the DeWalt ecosystem 15 years ago, and while I don’t have a ton of their stuff, I’m shopping for a Milwaukee replacement now.
Wow, here’s a couple of hours’ worth of reading: a man researched and mapped the 8 major English dialects across the continental US, with examples of the differences in vowel pronounciation in exhaustive detail below. Sadly, the map was produced in something called Paint.net; I’m shocked that a data viz or graduate student has not volunteered to rebuild it on a proper cartographic platform.
From an ongoing series of articles about the enshittification of pretty much everything, here’s one about why power tools have gotten less dependable over time.
SBD bought them in 2004. The cheapening of internal components started immediately.
According to a former tool industry representative who spent 30 years in the business, the plan was clear from day one. Cheapen the internals to build more profit margin into each unit. Discontinue large portions of the product line, including iconic legacy tools the brand was built on. The service centers closed within roughly six months of the acquisition.
TL;DR: 90% of all major tool brands are owned by a handful of large conglomerates, and it increases shareholder revenue when they make the tools suck so that we have to replace them every five years.
- It’s going to take me a while to get used to 90˚ weather this year. I can already feel it sapping the life out of me.
- When do we get to see Jules Winfield walking the earth like Kaine in Kung Fu?
- I’m growing four tomato plants in the greenhouse this year, after taking four years off. I refuse to put any more time or hope into it than that.
- I made a tactical error the last time I was at the liquor store: I bought a 12-pack of Western IPA instead of Pacifico. We are clearly in beer-with-lime season, and I have something like eight more cans to go through before I can feel the island breeze again.
….just got my irons in a lot of fires. I was at the World Bank Monday to interview an old friend for a work project, and back there yesterday to do some filming. Work in general has been very busy, and the personal projects are all moving along at a brisk pace. BRB, will update more soon.
BoC might be teasing new music, according to the internets; apparently a bunch of mysterious VHS tapes have been released from Warp Records, their label, featuring audio samples that sound vaguely Boards-adjacent. It has been over a decade since they released Tomorrow’s Harvest, which is way too damn long.
Twelve years ago, I traded the web design field for a gig as a creative director, and while it’s been challenging to move to management from the trenches, I’m glad I did it. By the time I hung up my spurs I’d been doing it for 15 years, and I was pretty burned out. I also noticed that our shop was beginning to utilize templated designs more and more, and I could see the writing on the wall, especially at that place. I loved web design, and what it did for me, and I miss parts of it very much.
Meanwhile, I’ve kept a Google spreadsheet of my parts inventory for the trucks for several years. After parting out the green Travelall, when the number of rubbermaid bins full of parts overwhelmed my brain’s capacity to remember what was where, I did a sweep through each one and catalogued their contents. This worked well for a while, but the search function in a spreadsheet sucks, and updating the sheet is even worse on a phone. I’ve resisted spending money on yet another app because I’m cheap.
This evening I asked Codex to help write a basic PHP script for me to query the spreadsheet and return search results with the name of the bin and its location. After it helped me navigate the wilderness of Google API authorization, it built a small web app that gave me solid search results in a phone-optimized format. When I had that nailed down I asked it how hard it would be to include a way to add new items, and within a few minutes that was done as well. There’s even a flag that allows me to note when I’ve pulled something from a bin, which colors the field in the Google sheet so I can update it later.
Half of the fun of learning programming languages was the feeling you got when something you wrote actually worked. But my personal success ratio was generally 1 minute of joy vs. 59 minutes of frustration. Codex got me to where I wanted to be much faster than I ever would have been able to do on my own.
I’m glad I’m not doing web development anymore.