“Our cousin lives in Jupiter, Florida so you can imagine my 8yo’s disappointment once we arrived.”— @ihidefrommykids

A Magic 8 Ball would be a superior weather predictor to my iPhone weather apps

iPhone weather app, at noon: “Buckle up, motherfucker, you and your house are flying to Kansas!”

Same weather app a few minutes ago: Um, no biggie, but you might get some light rain in a few minutes. Or not. Either way, don’t worry about it."

Amount of rain and wind received in the intervening 3.5 hours: Zero.

It’s sunny and clear and I just got a weather alert to expect severe thunderstorms in 40 minutes. WTF?

The air does smell ozoney, though.

Praise for the Vivaldi browser

I’ve been using Vivalidi as my primary browser on the Mac for a few months now.

I started using Vivaldi because it seemed to be the most efficient at handling multiple tabs. My 5-1/2-year-old MacBook Pro wheezes and staggers if I have more than four or five tabs open in Safari. Vivaldi handles a dozen tabs with ease, and when the MacBook starts straining, Vivaldi lets me hibernate background tabs.

I also like several other features in Vivaldi. I’m learning to use Workspaces, which seem to be a more manageable alternative to having multiple windows open. I also like the command palette.

Last week, I started using Vivaldi for iOS as my primary browser on my iPhone. That’s my first time using anything other than Safari as the default iPhone browser. Other browsers seem too rough, most likely because of iOS restrictions on using alternative browser engines.

In the next few months, I expect I’ll get a new MacBook and might go back to Safari then. Or maybe not—I like Vivaldi.

I’m trying to be more mindful about adding articles to my read-it-later list. It becomes just another to-do list to add stress to my brain. I want to stop adding “that might be interesting” articles to the list. But that’s hard to do because those articles, well, might be interesting.

My latest on Silverlinings: Oracle climbs to the hyperscaler A-list — Oracle’s growth and multi-cloud strategy elevates it to the big leagues. Its deeper partnership with Microsoft will burnish the Crimson Cloud Conglomerate’s shine.

Read to the end for a failed comparison to “Goodfellas.”

I tried steel-cut oats for my morning oatmeal and the texture was like tiny styrofoam pellets. Not recommended.

It's nice to be recognized

I am delighted to be included in the new blogroll for Dave Winer’s Scripting News —consistently one of my favorite blogs for more than 20 years.

Dave is reimagining the blogroll. Following up on that, Micro.blog, the excellent blog hosting service I use, recently launched a new recommendations and blogrolls feature. I want to look into that.

Something I thought about while naked

I took off all my clothes to get in the shower and then I remembered I wanted to do something in my office. So I went into my office and did the thing on the computer.

I thought, “Being naked like this is comfortable. I could do this all the time.”

I caught a glimpse of my bare chest reflected in the display and thought, “What if I have a zoom meeting?”

Then I thought, “I could just put on a shirt for that.”

And then I wondered how many people are already donald ducking it while I’m zooming with them?

Something I saw while walking the dog.

This would have been a fantastic photo if not for that frickin green blurry stick photobombing the right side.

LED light bulbs have gotten great—inexpensive, energy-efficient, bright and reliable.

Kevin Drum: We are living in a golden age of light bulbs. [jabberwocking.com]

Wirecutter: It doesn’t matter if you turn them off when you leave the room. The energy usage and financial cost is trivial. [nytimes.com]

Via Jason, who says: “LED light bulbs are like every conservative outrage— once the fight against them is won, we all move on and just live in a better world.” [json.blog]

Something I saw while walking the dog.

A fairy village in a front yard, with a little ferris wheel, buildings and such.

Two weeks ago, executives from TikTok’s U.S. operations flew to their company’s international headquarters in Singapore with good news. They told bosses that after years of battling over its fate in the U.S., the popular video app wasn’t in imminent danger of being banned in its most important market.…

How TikTok Was Blindsided by U.S. Bill That Could Ban It. [wsj.com]

I’m half-bald. I don’t see myself getting a hairpiece, even if they are realistic now. I just get my hair cut down to 1/8 of an inch and wear hats to protect myself from the sun when I’m spending a long time outdoors. And because I like hats.

How Toupees Got So Realistic That Young Guys Started Wearing Them. [robbreport.com] — My feelings on toupees, hairpieces and baldness treatments for men are complicated.

On the one hand, it seems like foolish vanity, insecurity, a wicked waste of money and conspicuous consumption.

On the other hand, if you don’t like your body, you should absolutely change your body.

The road from “I agree; the cat will never sleep in our bed” to “Of course she smacked you, that’s her pillow” is shorter than many imagine.

— @quinncummings [threads.net]

Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots. [theverge.com] — Generative AI is transforming dating apps and spurring real people to romance AI bots. On the Vergecast, hosted by Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, with reporter Emilia David.

One company lets users set up AI chatbot versions of themselves and then the chatbots talk with each other to decide whether the originals would make good romantic matches. Presumably the people make the decisions, after reading transcripts or summaries of the chats, and the bots are not matchmaking directly.

Looks like there’s a TV series in the pipeline based on the 1993 novel “Manhattan Transfer,” by John Stith, who was active on GEnie back in the day. [imdb.com]

A massive alien ship rips Manhattan out of the ground and brings it on board, along with its 2 million inhabitants. Is this some sort of cosmic zoo exhibit, part of a scientific experiment, or perhaps fresh groceries for the aliens?

It was a fun book.

The cast list includes Casper Van Dien, who starred in “Starship Troopers” (1997), and is heavy with Star Trek alums: Doug Jones (Cmdr. Saru, “Discovery”), John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox, “Enterprise”), Tim Russ (Tuvok, “Voyager”), Walter Koenig (Chekov, the original series and movies).

I don’t see any mention of the series other than this page, so it’s anybody’s guess whether it actually comes to anybody’s screen anytime.

An app called Bless Every Home, backed by some of the biggest names in evangelical circles, is mapping the personal information of immigrants and non-Christians to conduct door-to-door religious conversions and “prayerwalking” rituals.[newrepublic.com]

Nerdy Saturday morning: I’m messing around with having ChatGPT write Drafts actions to automate formatting text for blog posts.

I’ve succeeded in having it create an action that formats link posts on mitchw.blog the way I like them, with the link at the end of a paragraph showing just the domain as the text of the link. For example

I’m now working on converting Markdown to a plain text format suitable for publishing on Facebook and other text-only platforms.

If I can get that working, the next thing I want to do is get ChatGPT to write a Drafts action that will suggest line breaks for Mastodon threads, and eventually BlueSky and Threads.