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!
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.
It says on the Apple Store that they’ll give me $450 for my current M2 MacBook Air as a trade-in on a new 15″ M5 model. This Air has been a good soldier, but I’ve had a couple of small issues with it restarting itself randomly (this seems to have cured itself with some of the latest software updates), wired keyboards randomly disconnecting themselves, and Safari choking after a day or so of constant use. This last issue may be related to the fact that it only has 8GB of RAM, something I’ve been bumping into constantly as I do more and more video editing. The machine I spec’d out starts with 16GB, has a comparable hard drive, and jumps three generations in chip design, plus the extra screen size. I think, once I get to my next pay period, that I’m going to upgrade to a better machine.
Meanwhile, Apple quietly discontinued the Mac Pro last week, their last tower-based enclosure. I’ve got two Mac Pro towers here at the house, a 2010 model stuffed with 22TB of storage for all of our family data, and a 2012 model with 32TB of storage for work video and photos. They are absolute tanks, but their OS is limited to their architecture—which means the 2010 is running 9-year-old software. When it’s time to retire them, I’m going to have to find a modern Mac Pro for sale somewhere or splurge on a NAS of some kind, I guess. The Synology NAS I’m running at work has been solid, but was not cheap.
At the bank yesterday, I spied this stupid-looking object in the parking lot and decided I’d pull up next to it for a comparison. Compared to the sexy, compound curves of the Travelall, it looks even more like 3D renders I was making at the game company when I only had a 300 polygon limit.
Does this douchecanoe make my ass look big?
I’d stopped to take pictures with this forlorn Saab last year next to the Scout. It hasn’t moved since; the driver’s front tire is shredded. I have considered walking inside to ask them what the story is but I’m afraid they would make me an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I have no place to put this sexy two-stroke Swedish skateboard, as much as I’d love to own it.
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has always offered an interesting look at world history. In this 7,000 word essay he looks at the current Iran war from a strategic viewpoint, and, not surprisingly, finds it as useless and stupid as everyone else besides the current Administration does:
None of the major goals here – regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – have been achieved. If the war ends tomorrow in a ‘white peace,’ Iran will reconstitute its military and proxies and continue its nuclear program. It is in fact possible to display astounding military skill and yet, due to strategic incoherence, not accomplish anything.
A comment on the Metafilter post also reminded me that the military wargamed a scenario similar to this in 2002, where a Marine Corps general commanding the opposing force (read: Iran) used asymmetric warfare tactics to “kill” sixteen U.S. ships, including an aircraft carrier, and the equivalent of 20,000 service members on the second day of a three-week exercise. The wargame was restarted and the opposing force was required to follow a script which resulted in a U.S. victory.
I don’t think there will be any do-overs this time.
Whoami.wiki is a new project built by a software engineer that gathers information from its user, then employs AI to build an interconnected personal Wiki site tying everything together. The author fed it a series of old photographs along with notes he’d taken from his grandmother’s recollections, and then added newer photographs, timelines, online playlists, receipts, FB, Instagram, and Whatsapp entries, and bank transactions. He used Claude to spin up a local Wiki with all of this information and it built out pages of detail on his trips, where he visited, what he ate, and who he met with. It even identified locations in the photos he took.
Powerful stuff, to be sure, and very tempting to play with. I’ve spent a lot of time and a bit of money working on family history, mainly in the realm of photo archiving, but this author has found a whole new way to harness AI to connect hundreds of separate events into a coherent, searchable narrative. However, there’s no way in hell I’d ever give AI access to my personal data on this level.
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On a separate note, I’ve been using Codex to help me with several different projects, and it’s been extremely useful. The first thing I had it do was build a Perl script to scrub excess HTML from an Indesign export so that it could be used in my company’s CMS—automating the process of publishing research products on our website. With some small caveats, it worked exceptionally well. The second thing I had it do was build a simple web page which pulls in my work and personal calendar information for the day, a local weather report, and the top five news articles from the AP and CNN feeds into a responsive page layout. This way I can pull up the important stuff for the day before I drag my old bones out of bed.
Along with getting work done on the trucks, I took care of some projects around the house, some of which were on the 2026 list.
First and foremost, Hazel got a bath. She has smelled like landfill dirt mixed with old socks in a bag of moldy Cheetos for the last two months, but I don’t like sending her out into 30˚ weather soaking wet after a bath. I took advantage of the warm weather to scrub the stink out of her fur and let her dry off in the warm sun on the back porch. I’m sure she quickly rolled around in the mud to spite me.
I pressure-washed the dirt and green algae off our front stairs, which has been bothering me since November.
I climbed out on the roof and replaced the section of aluminum siding that was blown off during the windstorms in December. The aluminum itself was AWOL until last week, when it magically appeared in the flower bed below the den, as if to say, it’s time to get me back up there, Chief.
Along with that, I pulled the rest of the fiber tiles off the attic ceiling down and stacked them by the stairs. I couldn’t bag them for removal, but that will be the next step in cleaning out that space.
The greenhouse has been straightened up for the first time in three years. My residual anger from the Caterpillar Massacre of 2022 seems to finally have subsided, and I was able to get in there and clean things out. I even put three of the bins out on the table in the center and considered buying a couple of bags of soil and some tomato seedlings just to have something growing in there again.
All of the neighbors’ leaves that have collected under our back porch are now bagged up and ready for the County to collect on Thursday morning. And there are three contractor bags full of garbage from the garage and greenhouse ready to go as well.