Something better than decorative gourd season is coming. (Attn @jkottke).

Went out to The National in Grass Valley and saw Lorraine Gervais perform. She's a local singer and always has a great band, sort of jazz / cabaret. Good fun, a nice thing about my small town.

A trans friend of mine just sent me engagement ring photos and I am so happy for her!

Made some pickles. Jicama, blanched carrot, jalapeño with apple cider vinegar. This farmers market jicama is so fresh and juicy it's kind of a shame to pickle it.

Saw this cool 3d map at the North Star Powerhouse Museum. It's a gold mine. Layers of the mine are painted on clear panels and they are stacked to show the 3d view.

Lands End no longer has a return button from their order history page. You now have to go to a different page and type in a 7 digit order number.

Marketing websites called "blogs" that don't have a feed.

Today is a day for getting rid of things. Just gave away my old 8" Dobsonian telescope to the local astronomy club. Junk haulers next. Best feeling.

After 28 or so years I closed my Amazon Associates account. I long since stopped making any money from it. In the early days I wrote a plugin for a blog engine that used my associates ID by default. I think I made about $200 that way, plus another $50 with my own links. I was never very […]

Waiting for a waymo to come down the road to back out of my driveway. They are the only cars that will stop in San Francisco.

Been experimenting with Shortwave, a frontend to Gmail with serious AI capabilities. So far it impresses me and is able to do the things that Gmail + Gemini was failing me at. Main drawback is it's fairly expensive for a consumer product.

Waiting at Walgreens for vaccines. 90% of everyone's time is paperwork and bureaucracy. 10% or less is healthcare.

I've been deliberately losing weight the last couple of years. Today I finally tried on the dress clothes I put away six years ago and they fit again! Elated.

Do not share news stories via Apple News. This is what I see.

I got a typhoid shot for a trip in January. Last week I got a bill for $965, my insurance refused to cover it. So I asked the doctor's office and they say they will accept $163.21 instead of $965 if I pay out of pocket. This is not a rational market.

[#uspol] The website defense.gov now redirects to war.gov

I've had two people ask me for a FAX number this week.

New version of Android "Android 16 QPR1" is now out, that's supposed to be a minor quarterly release. No idea if they fixed all the bugs I've been finding. But they've changed the UI around. Again. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse, but I grow weary of these changes. Some images here.

Sometime in the 1990s my mom bought these very fancy cocktail toothpicks. When she died in 2000, Ken took them from her kitchen pantry. We use a few every year and think of her every time.

Enjoying a proper summer evening thunderstorm. We don't have then often in California but we do have them.

Trying to figure out why Gemini AI in Gmail is so very bad. It seems to not have access to email and whatever RAG-like thing they are doing is very stupid. Here's Gemini saying my oldest email matching some keywords in 2021 is from March 2021. If I explicitly tell […] [Original post on tech.lgbt]

Jesus season 2 of The Sandman is tedious. The comic wasn't exactly uplifting but it was interesting and clever. The TV show is just dolor.

Excited for the Indian chicken curry I made myself. It's pretty basic, but it also smells pretty good. Got some special imported chili powder from @carlmalamud to make it special.

I started paying Google for AI in Gemini and so far the stupid thing doesn't even recognize I'm writing in English

Happy Labor Day, Americans!

I'm using a lot more ChatGPT lately and it's useful for so many things. But it's absolutely best for cooking. I'm a competent cook and can sort of wing recipes in several cuisines. It's great for things like "help me cook an Indian curry with chicken thighs, cilantro, and yogurt".

Google product naming at work. There's a "Google AI Premium" and a "Google AI Pro", both for $20/mo. Apparently they're the same thing? Even its own Gemini AI can't keep it straight.

Every time I pay someone in Venmo I get an add for the Wall Street Journal and it is very annoying.

English is an amazing language. We have two similar if folksy / archaic expressions: "to cotton to" and "to cotton on to". They mean different things. https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/cotton-on.html

One of my most useful tools these days are things that take screenshots. Greenshot, an abandoned Windows tool with excellent usability and major security problems. And Powertools Text Extractor which lets me OCR bits of text on the screen. Usability is important here: press one button and stuff […]

I finally blogged about our amazing Phnom Penh street food tour. Highly recommended if you are in the area, or street food tours in general.

In case you have not been following the years-long 2001 slow-motion bot (every 24th frame per hour), the final sequence just started. https://frames.social/@2001x24/statuses/01K3R3A9BFP4S6MQ8G6E8C8N98

Google Workspace is full of dire warnings about how you can try things but they won't work for a long time (maybe). Sometimes that's because of DNS and Internet caching problems. Sometimes it's because Google made a decision in 2001 it was OK to store data in […] [Original post on tech.lgbt]

On my 11th power outage in the last twelve months in Grass Valley, CA. Thanks Piggy!

I am setting up Google Workspace so I can use it for my new email address. I'm flummoxed though, it looks like this is a whole second Google account? I have a 24 year old account with all sorts of stuff in it: photos, email, etc. Can I merge them somehow? Should I?

Wired: Gen X Tired: Middle aged

A Nevada City, CA newspaper article from 1852 describes a talk from someone raising capital to build a local telephone network. "A medium better befitting our wants and feelings—a tongue of lightning." What a great phrase.

Giving up on the idea of charging my car to 100%. Volvo's software has a bug where you change the charge limit but it doesn't commit to the charging circuit. It's had this bug for over a year. This and other bugs are why I'll probably never get another Volvo.

Android makes it hard to run background processes, but one hack to work around it is to display a notification. So my entire phone's notifications screen is now filled with notifications that allow background jobs to run. GPS tracker, fitness tracker, web messages access, syncthing, doze stopper […]

It was a gloriously warm day in SF yesterday and all the boys were out sunbathing in their short shorts. (Today is 100% fogged in.)

AT&T sends refunds to one-off debit cards. Each card has to be registered with a new account. But you can only transfer money _out_ to a bank bank account from one account.

Good news everyone! May he find his Just Reward with mean, smallminded people just like himself. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/us/politics/james-dobson-dead.html

After some 30 years of using `monkey.org` I'm going to change my primary email address. Anti-spam measures has finally made using it with Gmail untenable too many messages are disappearing. My new plan is to give a different domain entirely over to Google Apps for email. I am sad about this, the […]

What if every time we copy-and-paste an emoji, we propagated the history of that particular instance too? So I copy a ❤️ from my friend Alice and send it to my friend Bob, and Bob sees a ❤️ and when he taps on it it says "this ❤️ was from Alice. She got it from Chuck, who got it from David, ..."

At the "wait five days for your domain name to transfer" stage of things. Which is coupled with "your domain name will stop working the moment it finally transfers because you screwed up the order". No big deal in this case but I can't help but think all of this could work better.

Had to blow up a screenshot to recognize these icons for a call on my Android phone. The third icon is "HD+", the ~2017 carrier standard for higher bandwidth phone calls. This is literally the first time I've seen it work.

Headed back to SF after a month+ in Grass Valley. Along the way our pool remodel got almost finished and we can use the pool again. It looks great!

I bought a cheap fitness tracker watch. And it has all these incredibly abusive upsells. Here they are offering me a discount because they like how I am sleeping. This is so unethical. How did anyone do this?

Internalized homophobia is being uncomfortable referring to your male partner when talking to a trade worker.

Yeah sure I've read this flyspeck and evaluated my contractual options. What are we really doing here people?