Deflock is a crowd-sourced mapping tool which shows the locations of Flock surveillance cameras, searchable by zip code or address. I’m kind of shocked that there are only a few in my general area. If you care about civil liberties, tell your local lawmakers you don’t want Flock cameras, and if they’re already installed, tell them you want them removed.
From a link on Metafilter, I found a webcomic called Strong Female Protagonist, which was published online from 2012 to 2018. It’s a standard superhero setup but completely upends the standard genre by investigating what happens when superheroes realize that punching bad guys doesn’t actually solve anything, while navigating friendships and romance after revealing their secret identities. There are some very interesting (and, at points, navel-gazing) discussions about right and wrong, free will (in the context of a superhero who can read minds), and other moral and ethical questions about what it might mean to have extraordinary abilities. The creators went on hiatus and have not finished the series, sadly, but have gone on to bigger things. I shared the link with Finn and she devoured the entire series in a day, which is the best recommendation I can give.
This is Never Enough, by The Cure. This appeared on a comp album they put out called Mixed Up, where they had a bunch of different artists re-imagine earlier work, and was an extended version of a new single. My roommate bought the album and I had this one track on heavy repeat back in the day. All of the current streaming versions are different than the one I remember—the one on the cassette was a little shorter and simpler, and I like that one best.
Happy Birthday, blondie. I love you!
I took the girls out for a pre-birthday brunch on Sunday at a place called, unfortunately, Bunny’s Buckets & Bubbles, a southern comfort food place now installed in the dear departed Wharf Rat in Fell’s Point. The food was very good, the drinks were strong, and we ate enough that we went home and didn’t eat for the rest of the day.
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I was using my old MacBook Air as a travel machine for a while, leaving the big new one on my desk as a dedicated video editing machine, and I found it to be super-handy. Not worrying as much about bringing my primary laptop out to the dirty garage, for example, was liberating. About a month ago I threw the travel laptop in my bag, not realizing one of Hazel’s travel water bottles was also inside, and that it was leaking from the lid. Before I knew it, about 1/4 cup of water had leaked onto the laptop, and when I noticed it, I immediately shut it down and tipped it up to drain out for a couple of days. Carefully booting it back up, I was happy to hear the startup chime and see the screen come up, but the trackpad and keyboard refused to work.
Annoyed, I followed the disassembly directions on iFixit and pulled the trackpad assembly out to find corroded circuitry at the base, where the trackpad/keyboard ribbon connect to the main controller board. Pulling the bottom cover off with the required force to disconnect a bunch of clips, I wound up cutting into the ribbon at one of the 90˚ bends (d’oh!) but was able to get the trackpad assembly out with no problem. iFixit had the trackpad I need in stock, but the ribbon is not. I ordered the trackpad and put myself on the notification list for the ribbon. I’m hoping water did not find its way further inside and onto the logic board—but I figure the fact that it boots up with no problem means I’m in the clear there.
Here’s a video update from July, which includes a bunch of truck stuff but ends with some good camping footage. My output has slowed down dramatically in the last couple of months, as I’ve gotten busy with work-work and also gotten a little burned out on shooting, editing and posting every week. I don’t know how you’d be able to do this as a solo creator for years on end unless you had an outside editor, but that’s a success problem I don’t have at this point.
Ooof, this is a tough one. Mark Lanegan (of the Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age, and an extensive solo career) did a cover of Alice In Chains’ Nutshell about six years ago: a song about addiction—but really, what AiC song isn’t about addiction? He dedicated it to the memory of Layne Staley and Mike Starr, who both overdosed at different times. Lanegan and Staley were good friends, and Lanegan was also an addict, and was apparently clean—but died of unknown causes two years after recording this.
He’s singing in a completely different voice here—I didn’t recognize him at all without the rough growl, and his clean voice is achingly beautiful. I’m always wary of pedal steel, but his accompanist is masterful—she’s just perfect. What a beautiful tribute.
Trump administration admits grants for clean energy were canceled based on politics:
The administration has acknowledged in court documents that it canceled $7.6 billion in grants for hundreds of clean energy projects “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state” — in this case, 16 states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
…Projects that were cut were located in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state.
Americans rewire their grocery shopping routines while digesting the biggest price jump in 50 years:
Buying food to eat at home has gotten 33% more expensive in U.S. cities since the beginning of 2019, according to government figures. In the 7 1/2 years before that, prices rose 6.4%.
Between the heat and the remains of Canada’s forests floating through the air, we stayed indoors Saturday and convinced Finn to binge the first season of Stranger Things with us. As a Child of the Device, she would much rather watch TikTok shorts than television, but we convinced her the series was good, and within the first fifteen minutes she was hooked.
While that was on, I sat my laptop on my knees and updated my new storefront with products—a tedious process of updating each design with an updated URL, uploading it, setting it up with colors that complement the design, and making it live. I’ve got all of the Scout grille designs up, a couple of different silhouette designs, and added two new Scout 800 designs. As it turned out, I made a sale while I was updating the site, making double the amount of money in profit than I did on the old storefront. Now I have to go through each of my YouTube videos and figure out how to swap in a new URL at the end of each.