Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Threadless

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It took less than 24 hours for me to delete the Threads app from my phone.

Hate groups Libs of TikTok, Moms for Liberty, Gays Against Groomers, and PragerU are already on Threads and harassing people. Apparently PragerU even already has a blue “verified” checkmark.

I’ve updated my bio there to say that I’m not using the service, and put up a post similar to this one telling people why I’m leaving and where to find me.

It had already given me a bad first impression, as there is only one feed and it’s all an algorithmic constant stream of crap from obnoxious randos and (so, so many) brands, with no way to filter it out to just the people you actually want to follow or get a chronological view of posts.

And there’s no way to add alt text to images, so accessibility is obviously an afterthought, at best.

Threads does not get my recommendation. If you choose to explore, good luck and stay safe.

Star Trek Collector’s Series by Dr. Pepper

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Here’s a fun little entry in my small and random collection of Trek stuff: A set of four drinking glasses issued by Dr. Pepper. They all have TAS artwork on the front, some technical or biographical information on the back, and have a copyright date of 1976.

Four drinking glases sitting on a bookshelf in front of a stack of TOS Star Trek novels. TAS artwork on the glasses shows the Enterprise, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

This set was found by my brother at a garage sale or antique store (I don’t remember exactly) a few years back and sent to me as a present. They’re great! Though they’re definitely display pieces, as I don’t want to risk damaging them…or the possibility of their using some sort of funky ’70s-era lead-based paint or some such thing.

Four drinking glases sitting on a bookshelf in front of a stack of TOS Star Trek novels. They are turned to show the text on the back of each glass, though it's difficult to read in this photo.

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My Twitter Archives

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Thanks to this simple Twitter archiver, I’ve just added my Twitter archives to my website, and added a link under the “Worth Reading” header menu item (though whether or not they’re actually worth reading is debatable).

While I wasn’t one of the most prolific users out there, I had my share of silly, serious, inane, or thoughtful things to say over the years, and it would have been a shame for them to have entirely disappeared. So I’d downloaded my data before deleting it and locking down my account, and have had it sitting on my computer waiting to find the right way to get it online somewhere. Nice to have them visible again.

(I actually have them all also imported into this WordPress blog, but the tool I found to do that imported them all as their own specific post type intstead of adding them as standard posts, which means they’re not easily visible. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to either covert them to regular posts or incorporate this other post type into the rest of the blog. For now, though, they just sit in the database.)

📚 Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe et al.

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31/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Hopepunk and Afrofuturist stories in the world of Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer. A really good set of stories, written with a lineup of coauthors. There wasn’t a story here that I didn’t enjoy. While not strictly necessary, I do recommend at least watching the Dirty Computer “emotion picture” before or along with reading this for a little more background on the world and its characters. And, of course, Monáe’s Dirty Computer album, along with the rest of her albums, is excellent.

Me holding Dirty Computer

📚 Somewhere to Belong by Dayton Ward

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30/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Taking place not long after the end of season three of Discovery (after solving the riddle of the Burn), this uses an adventure tying back to earlier Discovery moments as a framing device, but also nicely exploring an area that the show rather skips over: how the crew of the ship adjust to their new circumstances. There’s some entertaining lampshading of several DIS events, an interesting answer to why one of the alien races encountered in DIS were never seen in later Trek shows, and some very amusing movie night choices bookending the action.

Me holding Somewhere to Belong

📚 Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh

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29/2023 – ⭐⭐⭐ 1989 Hugo Best Novel

This one took me a while to get through, and it wasn’t really until the latter half of the book that I really started to feel like I was really getting invested in it. It’s dense, with a lot of the plot revolving around political maneuvering, cloning, and using psychological conditioning to educate, train, and mold the personalities of clones, as well as to influence and adjust both clones and non-clones throughout their lives. I often found myself reading just a few pages or sections at a time before setting it down, rather than just reading my way through. There’s a lot of in-depth, high-concept ideas in here — great if you’re into that kind of thing, but difficult if you’re not. (Right now, I appear to be somewhere in between those two extremes.)

Me holding Cyteen

2023 WWDC Thoughts

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Thoughts as they came during the WWDC keynote…

  • 15″ M2 MacBook Air: Nice! But since I got a 13″ M2 Air not long ago, I’m not due to upgrade for, oh, a decade or so.

  • M2/Max/Ultra Mac Studio: I have no need for a Mac Studio. My M1 Mini does me just fine, and I don’t think I’ve ever really stressed it. But if I had absolutely ridiculous amounts of expendable cash, I’d love to get one of these.

  • Apple Silicon Mac Pro: Again, I have no need. But if I had more ridiculous amounts of expendable cash than necessary for the Mac Studio, sure, let’s toss a Mac Pro on my desk! (But starting at $7k…this seems unlikely.)

  • iOS

    • iPhone
      • Customized contact posters: Looks slick. But since it’s pushed to other people’s phones, hopefully they can disable it either globally or by contact. I could easily see “pranksters” sending some…interesting images that way.

      • Live voicemail transcription: Okay, that’s nifty.

    • Facetime

      • Facetime voicemail: Also nifty. But I don’t Facetime very much, so maybe not for me.
    • Messages
      • Looks like some nice incremental upgrades. Check-in is an interesting balance between convenience and creepy.

      • Custom animated stickers will probably land somewhere between fun and annoying.

    • Autocorrect is due for updates, but a Transformer language model? Hopefully I get the Autobot release and not the Decepticon release.

    • I’ve never been able to reliably get into any sort of journaling routine (I can’t even keep this blog going without months-long gaps…), so I doubt the Journal app will change that, but for people who are into this sort of thing, yay?

    • Standby will make a nice bedside clock while traveling (I don’t keep my phone by my bed at home)…but I’ll need to upgrade to a phone with an always-on display to really take advantage of it (I’m still on an iPhone 11, though, so it’s getting close to time to upgrade…maybe this fall?).

    • I get Siri triggering when I don’t need her often enough with “Hey Siri”, won’t shortening that to just “Siri” make that problem worse?

  • iPadOS

    • Widgets and Lock Screen customizations are things that look like they should be really useful, and I’ve never taken the time to try to set them up and figure out how to make them work for me.

    • PDF improvements? Actually, these are looking pretty nice, particularly being able to fill out forms that have been “scanned” with the camera. And the live collaboration on PDFs in Notes.

  • macOS

    • Next version name: Sonoma.

    • Widgets on the desktop, for those who aren’t driven up the wall by a cluttered desktop! (My desktop might occasionally get one or two files dropped on it temporarily as I’m actively working on them, then they get put back away. I hate a cluttered desktop.)

      • Heh. You can tell they recorded this more than a couple days ago, with the Apollo for Reddit call-out.
    • Though I’m not much of a gamer and likely won’t do much that benefits from this, it is nice to see gaming-focused improvements.

    • Oh, the presenter overlays and gesture effects are going to be giving Camo Studio and mmhmm a challenge, at least at the basic feature level. As with any Sherlocking, it’ll depend on what they can do above and beyond the basics.

    • Safari Password family sharing is good, but I agree with those who think that Apple should pull their password/keychain stuff out into a standalone app instead of having it buried in the preferences.

    • Profiles is long overdue, but will be nice to have outside of Chrome.

    • Webapps is just the macOS version of iOS’s feature that I never use, right?

  • That guitar is great. Obviously.

  • I like the AirPods Pro audio features and improvements, I just wish I could get used to how they fit.

  • Oh, AirPlay in hotels needs to get widespread fast. I’d love to have that instead of trying to figure out if the hotel’s TV will let me plug in an HDMI cable.

  • If I used FaceTime more, I’d be more interested in the AppleTV integration. Nice to tie that into continuity camera.

  • watchOS

    • First question: Will my Apple Watch 4 support Watch OS 10? Or will I need to add that to the “upgrade soon” list? Other than that, looks to be the expected incremental updates.

    • The updates to the hiking part of the workouts app are neat, but are they available on the iPhone too? Some of those (like marking the last known cell signal point) look really useful outside of when using the app for a hike.

    • Again, the Mindfullness app and mood tracking look nice…but are they limited to the watch? Okay, looks like that’s also on the phone.

    • How many children have Apple Watches? More than I’m aware of, obviously.

  • Wow…”one more thing”! Haven’t heard that in a while.

    • The Apple headset (Vision Pro) looks a lot like the goggles the away team wore in TOS’s The Cage.

    • I’m still not sold on my need for or interest in AR, but the demos are pretty fascinating to watch.

      • Movies and TV are so often used as demos, because you can get a virtual “big screen”, but it still seems kludgy to have to strap this thing to your head instead of just looking at a TV.
    • I do like that it doesn’t need controllers, but just tracks your hands and gestures. Must be sensors on the underside of the goggles.

    • The screen showing your eyes to other people was an accurate rumor. I’m surprised. That’s…again, somewhere between neat and creepy, but at least last first blush, looked very uncanny valley.

    • How difficult must typing be with a virtual keyboard? At least with the iPhone/iPad screen you have that to type on, even if you can’t feel the individual keys. But without any physical contact? (This is also one of the issues I have with nifty sci-fi holographic user interfaces.)

    • Seeing people on FaceTime calls with the headset, sure. What do they see?

    • Wait, a 3D camera? Interesting.

    • Disney’s on board, huh?

    • Okay, time to get some of the tech details. This’ll be interesting.

      • I still can’t imagine wearing something like this on my head for hours at a time, let alone a full workday.
    • They’re actually addressing the “how do people see you on FaceTime?” question.
      • Okay…your own personal uncanny valley avatar! Yikes.
    • Snark aside, there’s a lot of neat stuff here. Definitely not for me, at least not at this stage, but it’ll be very interesting to see where it goes over the coming years.

And now, cue all the hot takes on how bad all of this is and now doomed Apple is once again!