Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
Book 53 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Has all the great characterization, worldbuilding, humor, and heart of the Vorkosigan saga, only this time in a fantasy setting. This was an interesting experiment, reading fantasy from an author I became a fan of through her sci-fi work. Somewhat amusingly, and definitely interestingly, I just couldn’t quite get as much into this as I did the Vorkosigan books – which is not a fault of the book, I’ve just always been more into SF than F.
💻 A particularly exciting part of the week was getting issued my new work laptop. My old one was a Dell something-or-other, my new one is an Apple MacBook Pro with M4 Pro, 48 GB RAM, and 1 TB drive. A very nice upgrade, prompted because I need to be able to work cross-platform for accessibility testing and document remediation, and this allows me to run Windows in a virtual environment inside the macOS. Haven’t gotten very far setting it up yet, but it’ll be very nice when it’s all set up.
There’s a bit of a theme to this week’s links that will be quite obvious….
Federico Viticci at MacStories: iOS and iPadOS 26: The MacStories Review
John Voorhees at MacStories: macOS 26 Tahoe: The MacStories Review
Dan Moren at SixColors: iOS 26 Review: Through a glass, liquidly
Jason Snell at SixColors: macOS 26 Tahoe review: Power under glass
Jason Snell at SixColors: iPadOS 26 review: A computer?
Work was pretty uneventful, though this was the last week of the summer break; this coming week is our “opening week” with lots of staff and faculty welcomes and training workshops, and the week after that, students are back on campus. Back into the school year!
And I looked back on season three of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
I finished two books this week; one was even non-fiction! Though as it was a behind-the-scenes look at Star Trek III, it was still solidly within my usual wheelhouse.
And I’ve just started Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion, as a precursor to moving forward on my Hugo best novel reading project; this one isn’t a Hugo winner, but its immediate sequel is. With how much I enjoyed Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, which though sci-fi, combined two genres that aren’t my usual thing (military SF and romance), I’m curious what I’ll think of her in the fantasy realm, which is also secondary to SF in my interests.
Two movies this week:
The Phoenician Scheme (⭐️⭐️⭐️): I am absolutely a sucker for Anderson’s quirky hyper-stylized films.
The Thursday Murder Club (⭐️⭐️⭐️): Take some of today’s most known British actors and let ‘em run around having fun in a murder mystery. Quite enjoyable.
Erin Reed: We Must Not Posthumously Sanitize Charlie Kirk’s Hateful Life: “Charlie Kirk was not “practicing politics the right way.” His work should never “be continued.” He embodied everything corrosive about American politics today. […] His model of politics was not dialogue, but trolling: hopping from campus to campus to bait students, churn out sound bites, and spread hate. And his rhetoric was not debate—it was violent, dehumanizing, and designed to put targets on people’s backs.”
Elizabeth Spiers at The Nation: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning: “There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins ‘Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.'”
Identity 4: Racintosh Plus: Really impressive work putting a Mac Plus into a one-unit rack mount casing.
Book 52 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
This was fun, and I can totally see it as a mid-pandemic “just need to have fun writing something” lark of a book. Having recently watched the first season of the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters series (set in one of the recent Godzilla timelines), it was amusingly easy to see this as an extension of that…or vice versa, for that matter. It did skimp a bit on actually describing any of the creatures (the kaiju are big, some have wings, claws, and/or teeth, they have parasites that are also dangerous, use your imagination for anything else), but while a little odd, I can cope.
(Previously posted on Mastodon.)
Lots of spoilers follow. Stop reading now if you haven’t finished the season yet, unless you’re not invested enough to care about spoilers.
Book 51 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The third in Titan Books’s series of Star Trek films “behind the scenes” coffee-table art books, and the second from the team of John and Maria Jose Tenuto. It’s always fun to see all the production art, photos of models and setups, and all the skill that goes into the films. As with the prior books, much of the information I knew, but there are always some gems and stories that I hadn’t come across yet.
📷 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.
Read one Star Trek novel, Gene DeWeese’s Into the Nebula.
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.
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.
Book 50 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
As is common for this era of Trek lit, a serviceable entry. I figured out the mystery early enough that the rest was just waiting for the characters to catch up.
Book 49 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Anthology of dark, noir-ish fiction inspired by the music (and memories) of the ’90s alternative scene. My favorites were Veronica Schanoes’s “Wendy, Growing Up”, Alex Jennings’s “We’ve Been Had”, Brian Francis Slattery’s “Never Let Me Down”, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Superstition”, and Cyan Katz’s “The Show Must Go On”.
Two additional notes: This is the debut publication for Cyan, whom I’ve known since we were both running around in the 90’s alternative scene in Anchorage, Alaska, and I’m thrilled for them; and I’m sorely tempted to make a playlist/”mixtape” of the inspirational tracks for all the stories in this anthology.
I don’t know exactly when this happened (my best guess is maybe sometime in April, based on this YouTube video; if you watch it, be aware that the output seems to have improved since it was made), but at some point in the not-too-distant past, Google Docs has started including accessibility tags in downloaded PDFs. And while not perfect, they don’t suck!
update: Looks like this started rolling out in December 2024, earlier than I realized. Thanks to Curtis Wilcox for pointing out the announcement link.
For PDFs to be compatible with assistive technology and readable by people with various disabilities, including but not at all limited to visually disabled people who use screen readers like VoiceOver, JAWS, NVDA, and ORCA, PDFs must include accessibility tags. These are not visible to most users, but are embedded in the “behind the scenes” document information, and define the various parts of the document. Assistive technology, rather than having to try to interpret the visual presentation of a PDF, is able to read the accessibility tags and use those to voice the document, assist with navigation, and other features.
However, until recently, Google Docs has not included this information when exporting a PDF using the File > Download > PDF Document (.pdf) option. PDFs downloaded from Google Docs, even if designed with accessibility features such as headings, alt text on images, and so on, were exported in an inaccessible format (as if they had been created with a “print to PDF” function). The only way around this was to either use other software to tag the PDF or to export the document as a Microsoft Word .docx file and export to PDF from Word.
But that’s no longer the case! I first realized this a couple months ago when I was sent a PDF generated from Google Docs and was surprised to see tags already there. I’ve recently had the chance to dig into this a little bit more, and I’m rather pleasantly surprised by what I’m seeing. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t suck.
I’m not a PDF expert! I’ve been working in the digital accessibility space for a bit over three years now, but I’m learning more stuff all the time, and I’m sure there’s still a lot I don’t know. There are likely other people in this space who could dig into this a lot more comprehensively than I can, and I invite them to do so (heck, that’s part of why I’m making this post). But I’m also not a total neophyte, and given how little information on this change I could find out there, I figured I’d put what knowledge I do have to some use.
Very simple, quick-and-dirty: I created a test Google Doc from scratch, making sure to include the basics (headings, descriptive links, images with alt text) and some more advanced bits (horizontal rules, a table, a multi-column section, an equation, a drawing, and a chart). I then downloaded that document as a PDF and dug into the accessibility tags to see what I found. As I reviewed the tags, I updated the document with my findings, and downloaded a new version of the PDF with my findings included (338 KB .pdf).
More details are in the PDF, but in brief:
<P>.<H1> (or whatever level is appropriate).<Link> with a <Link - OBJR> tag. Link text is wrapped in a <Span>, and the link underline ends up as a non-artifacted <Path>.<Figure> with alt text included. However, images on their own lines end up wrapped inside a <P> tag and are followed by a <Span> containing an empty object (likely the carriage return).<LI> list item includes a subsidiary list, that list is outside of the <LBody> tag, and I’m not sure if that’s correct, incorrect, or indifferent. Additionally, list markers such as bullets or ordinals are not wrapped in <LBL> tags but are included as part of the <LBody> text object. However, this isn’t unusual (I believe Microsoft Word also does this), and doesn’t seem to cause difficulties.<TH> if the header row is pinned (which is the only way I could find to define a header row within Google Docs). However, the column scope is not defined (row scope is moot, as there doesn’t seem to be a way to define row header cells within Google Docs; the table options are fairly limited).<P> containing an empty object (presumably the carriage return, just as with images).So, not perfect…but an impressive change from just a few months ago, and really, the output doesn’t suck! For your basic, everyday document, if you need to distribute it as a PDF instead of some other more accessible native format, PDFs downloaded from Google Does now seem to be a not-horrible option. (My base recommendation is still to distribute native documents whenever possible, as they give the user agency over the presentation, such as being able to adjust font face, size, and color based on their needs. However, since PDFs are so ubiquitous, it’s heartening to see Google improving things.)