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!
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.
What a long, strange trip it’s been so far.
PS. my phone and email have been flooded with well wishes this morning; I can’t tell you how much that means to me.
oooooh, this essay on technology is really good: it puts the state of current technology and its cross-section with society in really clear perspective. I won’t spoil it for you: it’s a great read.
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The court deposition videos of DOGE members being questioned about their activites were posted last week by several of the agencies targeted, and on Friday a judge ordered they be taken down. The reason given was because “publication of the videos could subject the witnesses and their family members to undue harassment and reputational harm,” according to the government complaint. Because sometimes the internet can still be awesome, the videos were archived and posted elsewhere, as well as torrented, ensuring they’ll always be available.
I don’t know what’s more maddening, the fact that the government is more concerned about the safety of these privileged white men than all of the people that were fired, or the fact that they’re so bored-looking as they struggle (and fail) to define what DEI even means.
It was almost 80 degrees here in Catonsville yesterday, so I pulled the Scout out of the garage after work, buttoned the sides of the soft top up, and pointed it north on the Beltway for her first drive of the year. I had a class scheduled after work up at a gun range north of the city: a free seminar on how to clean a shotgun. The class was run by the armorer at the range, who is the son of my CCL instructor, and about 20 of us found seats at clean worktables, waiting to begin.
Around me, the other guys pulled fancy new shotguns from expensive cases: tactical models with pistol grips, camouflage-patterned hunting models, and military-style breaching models with flashlights and shell clips. I pulled Dad’s humble New Haven 600, a Mossberg 500 license-built for department stores in the 1970’s, from its simple bag and waited for our first instructions. I’ve known that it needed to be taken apart and cleaned ever since I brought it home: the action was caked with carbon and dirt, like it had been fired for several years, dragged through mud, and stored in a garage.
I also brought Dad’s cleaning supplies, so I started by polishing the crusty barrel to a mirror finish with a brass brush. The armorer walked over and I saw his eyebrows jump as he took in the condition of the rest of the gun. I explained where it came from and asked him not to judge me, and he chuckled as he broke it down so I could clean each part individually, assuring me he’d seen and heard worse. Over the course of an hour I was able to get the firing pin assembly, bolt, trigger group and receiver cleaned for the first time in decades, making a small mountain out of filthy cleaning wipes on the table next to me.
Seeing how the gun came apart was very helpful for me—I’m more than willing to disassemble almost anything, but where firearms are concerned, I want to know exactly how it comes apart and goes back together before I put a round in it and pull the trigger. Eventually I’d like to replace the original wooden forend on the gun with something lighter, and I knew before the class that removing it requires breaking the gun down almost completely. At the end of our time, he came back over and complimented me on the cleaning job I’d done, and then I watched as he expertly re-assembled the gun and racked the slide with a satisfying clack-clack, as opposed to the muffled whup-whup it made before.
I said my thanks, packed up my stuff, and enjoyed a twilight ride home with the warm wind in my hair.
This week’s brainpan echo: Fu Manchu, Mongoose. I have a deep love for stoner rock: bluesy, distorted, repeating riffs with nonsense lyrics and a driving beat. Fu Manchu has been around for decades and brings the thunder on this track; their killer-to-filler ratio is much less than a QOTSA or Clutch, but when it works, it works.