Ever since Google search and Google assistant on my phone started using different voices I've noticed that search's voice has begun using some pretty weird pronunciation in some cases. Like today I asked it to add a series of numbers, and discovered that it has a lot of trouble with small numbers.

I've been using Python for over 25 years now, but only got around to really learning how its type annotations work recently. It got me thinking again about something that seems like a bit of a "truism", but I think has some interesting implications...

Even their outage map doesn't work.

App passwords can be used to sign into bsky.app, not just third party apps. You can't create an app password while signed in with one. The UI doesn't do a great job of explaining *why* you can't, though. It highlights the name field as if that's the problem, and doesn't show any error messages.

Most apps that let you authorize other apps with OAuth also have a page somewhere in their UI to revoke these authorizations. I would have expected something like this to be in Bluesky under Setting → Privacy and Security (which is where App Passwords are managed), but it isn't there.

Google's "people also ask" answering the important questions. (Yes, those of us who observe daylight saving time *will* be losing an hour of sleep on Sunday. 😑)

Caramel, one of my kids' cats, sometimes likes to leave a "gift" outside of people's doors: one of her cat toys. Today she left not one, but *three* toys outside of my office door. (The precision placement is all hers.) #cathursday

We forgot to take the wreath off of our front door, and last week we discovered that a bird had made a nest on it. We have since been avoiding the use of our front door so we don't risk scaring it off or damaging the nest. Today we discovered that one of the eggs has hatched.

PSA: remove snow from your car before driving, or it could blow off and temporarily blind the drivers behind you, or worse. Every time I go to Tahoe in winter I see many Californians driving with snow still on their vehicles, but this is the craziest example I've ever seen.

We're using #atproto to build a #decentralized social media app that lets you control your own algorithm. Here’s why...

I saw this sign (below the informational billboard) on a recent trip to Costa Rica, and thought it was interesting that the original Spanish ("no drones") is a better English translation than their posted "translation" ("don't drones").

Posting this as a PSA for anyone else (or possibly my future self) who runs into this issue, as Googling was not helping me out...

"This is a Spoon." I animated prose from voice talent @gideonemery.bsky.social that I found particularly helpful in our America.

Android's setRotateEulerM function (which is supposed to create a rotation matrix for 3D vectors) has a bug that makes it pretty useless. This bug was reported 15 years ago. A fix has even been provided in the comments, and yet the issue is still open to this day.

A recent Android update somehow broke all of my launcher shortcuts so they forgot what their main icon was supposed to look like, and they just started showing the app's icon twice like Dr. Evil and mini-me. If you ran into this problem too, recreating the shortcuts seems to fix the problem.

There was a funny glitch in the subtitles of the most recent episode of #Pluribus. When Carol says "this white powdery stuff", the word "white" is replaced by "#D1AD2C", which is the color code for the yellow used in the subtitles. A "search and replace" error, or a weird Easter egg?

left is the network engineer's system at home, right is at work.

I've been programming in Python for over 25 years, and only just learned that comparison chaining is not just for relational operators, but for all comparison operators including == and is.

I wish I had screenshots of the way the clock and phone apps used to look on Android for comparison, because these Material 3 Expressive updates look terrible. The spacing and sizing of everything is so inconsistent, and where did they get this ugly font from?

Mildly interesting for fellow #Amiga fans: TikTok's 404 page has a "guru meditation" message.

Lemon dressing

There's a LEGO ideas campaign for the Hearthian Lander! If it can get 10,000 votes of support, then LEGO will consider making it a real set. This one's even got a ship interior! beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea... (Wait, have we done this before? 🤔)

Setting timers on other speakers with Google Home has become completely broken in the past few weeks. When I tell our kitchen speaker to set a timer on our upstairs speaker, it tells me that the timer has been started. However, if then I check what timers are running, there are none. It just lies!

At a panel at Open Sauce, and @vsauce.bsky.social concisely summed up how many of us feel about AI generated content: "why would I want to watch something that someone couldn't even be bothered to make"

I only just now realized that the Omega class from Babylon 5 looks very similar to the Leonov spacecraft from the movie 2010 (1984).

I recently found an Odo rubber stamp I've had for probably 30 years buried in a drawer. As a rubber stamp, maybe not so useful. However, because it looks like Odo's head and shoulders on a (mostly) flat base, you can rest it on a random object to make it look like it's Odo mid-transformation.

The box for the Lego Chrysanthemum set has a banana for scale!

In recent years I've seen people online use "weary" in place of "wary" *so* many times. I feel like it's becoming more common than the "their/there/they're" mixup. weary: feeling or showing tiredness wary: feeling or showing caution Mnemonic: it's "beWARE", not "beWEAR".

One feature of @nipht.io's browser extension I really like is that you can save a set of tabs all at once. It's handy for when you get to that state where you've got a dozen tabs open on some subject you were researching, but don't have time to deal with them "now".

The "you probably don't know about" part here is killing me. The last version of Windows that I used regularly, required that you press Ctrl+Alt+Del just to log on. This was supposedly a security measure, to make it harder for someone to create a password harvester.

Does anyone know the original source of this image? It's usually described as a 1970s or '80s vision of what a PDA or smartphone would look like, but the book it came from is never named. It resembles the style of some Usborne books (and the spelling of "colour" suggests that it isn't American).

My friend Tim Russ is very funny. #MaytheFourthBeWithYou www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_ZR...

Movie you’ve watched more than six times using gifs. (“Hard mode” no Star Wars, Star Trek, or LOTR)

I enjoyed this post about pipelining in programming languages. It doesn't mention Kotlin at all, but the way Kotlin's extension functions and lambda syntax support pipelining is probably one of its most underrated features. herecomesthemoon.net/2025/04/pipe...

Tired of manually moving bookmarks from your browser to Niphtio? Now you can import directly from Chrome (and Chromium browsers)! 🤯Save time, effort, and more easily organize all your links in one place. Give it a try today! #Niphtio #Chrome #BookmarkImport #TechTips

Weird but interesting sculpture (?) at SJC.

It looks like if you block enough of your recent followers (my guess is the last "page" worth), then the UI doesn't display your list of followers.

Oof. Sold out as I was checking out.

There are -17 hard problems in computer science...

SAVE THE DATE! VCF West is back on August 1 & 2, 2025 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Please fill out this survey to help us with planning: forms.gle/R1kSCsVqEyZf... This survey is for everyone!

I saw this mural in a restaurant the other day. To drink is human, but to eat salad is divine?

It always cracks me up when a site uses a spinner (the up/down arrows) on their security code input. To get to a random 6-digit code is going to take a *lot* longer (on average) than the 30-second timeout.

Not my home, but I know my way around.

Here's a terrible UI from Nextdoor. Dark pattern, or incompetence? I'm not sure. Does this mean one is *unsubscribed* from all of their emails, or *subscribed* to all of their emails? How is one meant to interpret the double-negative of "you will no longer receive the following" with an OFF switch?

The last couple of days I keep seeing "Chat" in Bluesky light up like I received a DM, but when I check, there are no new messages and it stops lighting up. A few hours later, it happens again. It's happening on both desktop and mobile. I'm wondering if it's bots DMing me and then getting deleted.

🎉 Niphtio’s free browser extension just got better—you can now save Bluesky posts quickly and easily. This new feature is currently available in beta. Chrome: chromewebstore.google.com/detail/save-... Firefox: addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefo...

Is there an easy way to create a task in Google tasks that won't show up until some point in the future? This is what I'd expect creating a task on Google calendar to do, but instead it creates the task immediately, but with a due date in the future.

Does anyone remember a website from around '94 or '95 that was a 2D map of tiles, and you could navigate around and also place different sorts of terrain tiles? You'd see a small square of the world at a time, probably around 15×15 tiles, but the world was much larger than that.

In Doordash, sometimes you'll get a "completing another order nearby" message, and the map shows a pin on the other order's address. I've even caught this while the dasher's at some other restaurant. Pretty questionable, privacy-wise. "Look's like 123 Albatross Ln. is getting Chipotle at 12:45pm."

When the question of whether people all see colors the same way comes up, it often reminds me of the short story "Impediment" by Hal Clement.