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!
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.
So the guy that currently runs FEMA claimed that he was teleported to a Waffle House during a podcast interview. Predictably, normal people were upset about this.
Despite the criticism, Phillips doubled down on his supernatural account this week, claiming that the incident occurred while he was “heavily medicated” and that the incident was a “miracle” performed by God.
FYI, Phillips runs a department with 1,000 employees and a budget of $300M.
Many, many people have found themselves at a Waffle House with no idea how they got there, but there’s no shame in admitting you got dumped there by an Uber or stumbled in after a rager at your buddy Steve’s house. This fucking guy claims teleportation.
The XX played their first gig together in 8 years in Mexico City this weekend. They are awesome and this is long overdue.
Jeez, this story gets worse and worse. Brady Ebert, the Turnstile guitarist who left the band in 2022, was just arrested for running over the lead singer’s 79-year-old father with a car and driving away, leaving him with two broken legs. He’s being held without bail on charges of attempted second-degree murder and first-degree assault.
Heavy Metal Suicide, by the humorously named Ringo Deathstarr. Their music spans several genres, from shoegaze to throwback alternative metal—this track being a good example of the latter. Their albums have been hit or miss for me, but each one has contained at least two or three good tracks, making for a good back catalog. See also: Guilt, Stare at the Sun, and Two Girls.