Weekly Notes: September 1–7, 2025

by
  • 🇺🇸 Monday we recognized Labor Day by heading into Seattle to participate in one of the local protests. It was a small but enthusiastic group; my one slight disappointment was that though held on Labor Day, it was more generally anti-Trump than specifically pro-labor/union. (Not that anti-Trump is bad, of course. It just seemed to dominate the sentiments, and the day itself was just relegated to being a convenient day to protest because some people had the day off of work.)

  • 📷 I did post an album of photos of the day’s adventures, before, during, and after the protest. I had fun playing a bit with these; the only lens I brought was a Pocket Dispo, a disposable camera lens mounted in a 3-D printed fitting. It gives the images a fun bit of distortion. Definitely not an everyday lens, but fun to have in my kit for when it feels right.

  • The rest of the week was a pretty standard week, with no particular stories of note.

📸 Photos

A metal firefighting hose pipe fitting on a brick wall, with sticker graffiti that says, 'destroy monotony write on walls'.
Somewhat ironically, this is sticker graffiti, not written.
A curved grey brick wall with graffiti that reads, 'those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won't teach them to love society', surrounded by more graffiti of cat heads and text that says, 'bigots beware' and 'trans hearts run this park'.
I’m kinda digging how the Cal Anderson Park gate house has become a point of trans solidarity and resistance.
A woman sitting on a brick wall and smiling, holding a sign that says, 'Palantir is how Númenor fell'.
The intersection of geeks and political protest always results in some great signs.
A crowd of people, many hoding protest signs and some holding U.S. flags, gathered in a brick plaza and watching people speak.
Some speakers were better than others, but our current state Attorney General Nick Brown spoke well and was the highlight of the rally. At this point, he seems good. Of course, our former AG, Bob Ferguson, was great in that role as well, but has not been nearly as impressive as Governor, so…who really knows?

📚 Reading

Read one Star Trek novel, Gene DeWeese’s Into the Nebula.

📺 Watching

  • We finished our rewatch of Scrubs; our first time watching all the way to the end, including the Scrubs: Med School ninth season/spinoff. The first few seasons of Scrubs are definitely the best; much of the latter seasons are very hit-and-miss, but generally still at least amusing.

  • We also watched Murderbot, which was a really good adaptation of the first book in the series, and even got my wife, not as much of a sci-fi fan as I am, invested and enjoying (most of) the show. The one disappointment was a section in the final episode that fills in a period of time that’s skipped in the book, and which was tonally very different from the rest of the show, enough so that we skipped forward through a chunk of it. Still, overall, really good, and I’m looking forward to the second season when it shows up.

🔗 Linking

  • Micah Lee: Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater: “Joshua makes strong claims about the security and privacy of his app without backing any of them up with technical details. Many of his claims are false. He also chose to target only iOS, and not Android, because of a misunderstanding about how Android push notifications work. And even worse, during the Q&A, he made it clear that he didn’t understand terms like ‘warrant canary,’ ‘reverse engineering,’ or ‘security through obscurity,’ which doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  • Jason Aten at Inc.: After 18 Years, This Is Still the Most Useful macOS Feature You Probably Forgot Existed: “…one of the most underrated features in macOS is also one of the oldest: the Guest User account. It’s been around for more than 18 years, first appearing in Mac OS X Leopard in 2007. Yet most Mac users barely remember it exists.” It’s a very clickbait-y headline, but honestly, I’d not thought about the Guest User account in years, and it’s worth keeping in mind.

Leave a Comment