Tech – Eclecticism

Weekly Notes: May 26–June 1, 2025

June 1, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

♿️ Officially launched the Accessibility Liaisons project at work on Tuesday, to help train more people and distribute the work of improving digital accessibility across the college. This was just a “soft” launch to introduce the program, with things kicking off more comprehensively in the fall, but it was good to get it started.
🌏 Yesterday we went to Kent’s annual International Festival. Got some good food from food trucks, learned a little bit about some of the many cultures represented in Kent’s population, and saw some good music and dance performances. My favorites were a kids group doing traditional Sri Lankan dance, and kids from the local School of Rock.
🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Happy Pride Month, all. Or if not that, have a well-focused Wrath month. Stonewall was a riot of queer and trans people, after all. And my occasional reminder that I describe myself as “statistically straight“, which allows for some variations in the trend line.

📸 Photos

The School of Rock kids performing; I think here they were doing Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”.

📚 Reading

Finished James Swallow’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds book Toward the Night.
Started Lois McMaster Bujold’s Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, the last of the Vorkosikan saga books.

📺 Watching

Finished Andor. That was really good. Easily among the best of the modern Star Wars shows and films (that I’ve seen, at least, not having seen them all).

🔗 Linking

Eric Wilkinson at King 5: AI stepping up as backup for short-staffed PenCom dispatchers (which was headlined “AI now takes some calls for help on Olympic Peninsula” when I bookmarked this): “AI listens for keywords that may indicate crime or violence. It even picks up inflections in the caller’s voice to sense trouble. If any of those criteria are met, the call goes directly to a real person.” Yeah, I can see no way in which this could go wrong…
Helen Smith at King 5: The Cascadia Subduction Zone looks a little different than researchers thought. Here’s what that means for ‘The Big One’ (which was headlined “New research reshapes ‘The Big One’ tsunami risk” when I bookmarked it…what’s with King 5 renaming headlines?): “New findings show that tsunami risk may be different, though not less, in places along the subduction zone. This is due to the absence of a ‘megasplay fault,’ which was previously believed to run from Vancouver Island down to the Oregon-California border.”
David Friedman at Ironic Sans: Proof that Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe: Fun interview with Star Trek fan and researcher Jörg Hillebrand.
Technology Connections on YouTube: Closed captions on DVDs are getting left behind. Half an hour, but a fascinating look at how closed captions are encoded into analog video, how it works with the digital video of DVDs, and why modern players and Blu-ray disks are falling over with their closed caption support. Some of the basics here I knew from my subtitle projects, but a lot of the technical details were new to me and neat to learn about.
Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal: They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back. (archive.is link): “Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it. ¶ It’s called a blue book.”
Nadira Goffe in Slate: The Controversy Surrounding Disney’s Remake of Lilo & Stitch, Explained: I don’t have any interest in watching the remake (big fan of the original, though), but as a non-Hawaiian white guy, reading about the political undertones in the original that have been stripped out of the remake was really interesting, as it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know.
Anil Dash: The Internet of Consent: “The growing frustration around “enshittification” is, in no small part, grounded in a huge frustration around having a constant feeling of being forced to use features and tools that don’t respect our choices. We’re constantly wrestling with platforms that don’t respect our boundaries. And we have an uncanny sense that the giant tech companies are going behind our backs and into our lives in ways that we don’t know about and certainly wouldn’t agree to if we did.”
Kelly Hayes: From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty: “As an organizer, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the gulf between what many people believed they would do in moments of extremity, and what they are actually doing now, as fascism rises, the genocide in Palestine continues, and climate chaos threatens the survival of living beings around the world.”
Chelsey Coombs at The Intercept: “Andor” Has a Message for the Left: Act Now: “‘Andor,’ the new series set in the universe, doubles down on its anti-authoritarian roots, focusing on the creation of the revolutionary Rebel Alliance. In the process, it gives us a glimpse into the messiness and conflict that often accompanies building a movement on the left, as activists fight over which political philosophies and strategies work best.”
Yona T. Sperling-Milner at The Harvard Crimson: Come At Me, Bro: “I propose an alternate strategy: I shall fight Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon in a televised cage match, the winner of which gets $2.7 billion in federal grants and the power to uphold or destroy America’s continued technological and economic success.”
Suyi Davies Okungbowa: I Call Bullshit: Writing lessons from my toddler in the age of generative AI: “Software is as limited as the individuals, systems and institutions that define and prompt it, and as of today, mimicry is its highest form. But as you can see above, mimicry is not a significant endeavour. A human baby can mimic. A chameleon can mimic. Mimicry is basic.”

(Bi-)Weekly Notes: May 12–25, 2025

May 25, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

I didn’t get to this last weekend, and this week was too busy to sneak it in and backdate it, so I’m just going for a two-week catch-up this time. Good enough!

♿️ The big thing for me at work last week was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. As one of the co-chairs of SBCTC’s CATO (Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight), I’d written a letter of support and call to action that, after editing and input from the rest of the committee, we sent out to several of the high-level committees within SBCTC, and it’s being passed on from there.
🚀 Last weekend was the final committee meeting for Norwescon 47, where the staff gathers for the post-con wrap-up and “onions and roses” session where we discuss what went well and what we can improve on from a staff point of view. Lots of good comments, followed by a social at a local home. And that wraps up this year’s con…on to the next! (Speaking of, I do need to find time to get our website transition process started soon….)

This past week, in addition to the usual work duties, had several evening events that were fun to do, but definitely threw our weekly routine off.

🎫 On Tuesday night, I went out to my first live concert in years and saw Underworld. They’ve been a favorite artist and “bucket list” concert for decades, so even though this was on a Tuesday night, I decided (a few months ago when tickets went on sale) that it was worth it and a good birthday present to myself. Glad I did, too — the show was really, really good. They started precisely at 8 p.m. (the most prompt concert I think I’ve ever been to), played an hour-long set, took a half-hour break, and then played a 90-minute set, wrapping up right at 11 p.m. I didn’t memorize the track list, but it was a good selection from across their catalog, from the Dubnobasswithmyheadman-era with “Dirty Epic” and “Cowgirl” (a really nice version that I hope gets released), to more recent tracks like “S T A R” off of Drift and “And the Colour Red” off of Strawberry Hotel, wrapping up (of course) with “Born Slippy .NUXX“. Great show, and I’m so glad I finally to a chance to see them live. Sure, as an electronic duo, the show is mostly the lights and video as Karl Hyde performs the vocals and Rick Smith plays with the computers — but there’s something about the experience, being in a venue with lots of other fans dancing and enjoying the music, being able to feel the bass and rhythms wash over and through you, and feeling the energy of the crowd, the artists, and the whole thing, that’s so much more than the sum of its parts.
🎓 Wednesday ended the workday with an end-of-the-year celebration of student leaders. Both my wife and I knew several of the students being honored (she had nominated two of them), and it’s always nice to do this celebration during spring quarter.
🍻 Thursday was a get-together with other coworkers at a local bar, something which I don’t do terribly often (between not being much of a barfly if there isn’t a dance floor, not being much of a drinker, and usually just heading home to relax after work instead of socializing), but is fun to do occasionally.
🪕 And then on Saturday we decided to go to this year’s Folklife festival, which we hadn’t done for years. It ended up being a perfect day for it — sunny and mid-70°s — and we spent a nice few hours wandering around, listening to neat music, watching a performance of a 1950s radio show by American Radio Theater, munching on fair food, and running into a few friends.

📸 Photos

Underworld performing, with Karl Hyde singing and pointing to the sky, lit all in reds.

Underworld performing, list all in purples, blues, and magentas.

Underworld performing, lit yellows, greens, and oranges, in front of a crowded floor.

Three shots from the Underworld show. Plus a bonus shot…

A camera person using a large professional camera during the Underworld concert, with everything lit in green.

This cameraperson was a real MVP of the evening, having to keep the camera trained on the stage…and keep it steady. There is no way I could do that job; the camera would be bouncing all over the place in time with the music. I was really impressed!

People sit on a lawn in front of an outdoor stage with the Space Needle stretching up into a cloudless blue summer sky.

Live music under the Space Needle on a gorgeous early summer day.

📝 Writing

A question on a work mailing list got me rambling about my frustrations with the popular confusion of machine learning with “artificial intelligence”.

📚 Reading

Finished Greg Cox’s Star Trek TOS novella Miasma.
Read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga book Cryoburn.
Started James Swallow’s just-released Star Trek SNW book Toward the Night.

📺 Watching

Together, we wrapped up a season of Hell’s Kitchen, hopped into an older season of Drag Race All Stars, and supplemented that with our ongoing binge through the three Chicago shows.
I’ve made it through ten episodes of season two of Andor (hoping to get through the last two tomorrow, and maybe rewatch Rogue One afterwards), and on a whim started watching Max Headroom. Honestly, I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to update Max Headroom for the modern world, especially with AI-generated everything all around us.

🎧 Listening

I’ve added a few albums over the past two weeks that I’m enjoying:

Synthetic. Facts. Seven., Infacted Recording’s latest sampler of EBM/futurepop/however you want to categorize this kind of stuff. Quite a few tracks I’m enjoying, particularly Alex Braun + Rob Dust’s take on “25 Years“, originally by The Catch in 1983.
Peter Murphy’s Silver Shade came out, and is really strong. He’s still going really strong, and this album shows it.
Orbital’s expanded re-release of Orbital 2 (The Brown Album Expanded) also just came out. Orbital’s also been high on my list of long-time favorite electronic artists, and I’m really enjoying the string of expanded album releases that both Orbital and Underworld have done in the past few years. Alternate takes, remixes, and other stuff that might not be critical for a new or casual listener, but for fans, there’s a lot of gold in these reissues.

🔗 Linking

Particularly interesting reads from across the web.

Apparently IBM offers accessibility checking tools, which someone said may be good? I need to take some time to investigate these.
This is a motherfucking website: “I’m not actually saying your shitty site should look like this. What I’m saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.”
Apple unveils powerful accessibility features coming later this year: “New features include Accessibility Nutrition Labels on the App Store, Magnifier for Mac, Braille Access, and Accessibility Reader; plus innovative updates to Live Listen, visionOS, Personal Voice, and more.”
Andrew Liszewski at The Verge: This modern cassette boombox will lure you in with glowing VU meters: I certainly don’t need a $500 cassette deck, no matter how pretty. But I’ll admit, it is pretty….
Shoreline Area News: Disabled Hiker’s Guide to 5 Washington State Parks is now available: “Each park guide includes an overview of the park, suggested activities, and information on the accessibility of many features in the park. Features are broken out into sections, and include parking, restrooms and facilities, picnic areas and shelters, trails, campgrounds, and more, with detailed information and directions.”
Grimoire: A Grim Oak Press Anthology For Seattle Worldcon 2025: Pre-order now, pick up at Worldcon, and get it signed by as many of the authors as you can track down!
Neal Stephenson: Remarks on AI from NZ: “Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. […] Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned.”
James Reffell at DesignCult: The secret origin of “log in”: “‘Log in’ is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online life, though it does seem like it’s being slowly overtaken by ‘sign in’. But where does the phrase come from in the first place?”
Constance Grady at Vox: Why does Elon Musk love this socialist sci-fi series?: “The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it’s worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks’ work? Are they missing the point altogether?”
Georgia Jackson at the University of South Florida’s College of Arts and Sciences profiles faculty member and this year’s Philip K. Dick Award winner Brenda Peynado: In ‘Time’s Agent,’ pocket worlds reveal deep truths — and earn USF faculty a Philip K. Dick award.
Christian Balderas at King 5: Kent grapples with repeat internet outages caused by vandalism: We got hit by both of these outages; twice in two days. And there was another only a few weeks ago. It’s really frustrating.
Nora Claire Miller at The Paris Review: Recurring Screens: “The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-out doses of silence.” This is either a history of screensavers or a poetry review. Or both?
Alexander Hurst at The Guardian: Volodymyr Zelenskyy has courage. Pope Francis had it too. Why are there so many cowards?: “What is just? Who is acting with honour? With courage? When did we stop thinking it normal to consider such questions – and to demand those things from the people who lead us? To demand that they, well, lead?”
Ed Pilkington at The Guardian: Meet the new American refugees fleeing across state lines for safety: “America is on the move. Hundreds of thousands of people are packing up boxes, loading U-Hauls, and shipping out of state in an urgent flight towards safety. ¶ They’re being propelled by hostile political forces bearing down on them because of who they are, what they believe, or for their medical needs. ¶ All are displaced within their own country for reasons they did not choose. They are the new generation of America’s internal refugees – and their ranks are growing by the day.”
Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine: A Young Cooper’s Hawk Learned to Use a Crosswalk Signal to Launch Surprise Attacks on Other Birds: “Researcher Vladimir Dinets watched the bird repeatedly sneak behind a row of cars to ambush its unsuspecting prey.”

Good vs Bad AI (or ML vs AI)

May 16, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

The following is a (lightly edited) response I gave to a recent accessibility mailing list question from Jane Jarrow, coming out of a question around concerns around the use of various AI or AI-like tools for accessibility in higher education:

Folks responded by noting that they didn’t consider things like spell check, screen readers, voice-to-text, text-to-voice, or grammar checkers to be AI – at least, not the AI that is raising eyebrows on campus. That may be true… but do we have a clean way of sorting that out? Here is my “identity crisis”:

What is the difference between “assistive technology” and “artificial intelligence” (AI)?

This is me speaking personally, not officially, and also as a long-time geek, but not an AI specialist.

I think a big issue here is the genericization of the term “AI” and how it’s now being applied to all sorts of technologies that may share some similarities, but also have some distinct differences.

Broadly, I see two very different technologies at play: “traditional”/“iterative” AI (in the past, and more accurately, termed “machine learning” or “ML”), and “generative” AI (what we’re seeing now with ChatGPT, Claude, etc.).

Spell check, grammar check, text-to-speech, and even speech-to-text (including automated captioning systems) are all great examples of the traditional iterative ML systems: they use sophisticated pattern matching to identify common patterns and translate them into another form. For simpler things like spelling and grammar, I’d question whether that’s really even ML (though modern systems may well be). Text-to-speech is kind of an “in between” state, where the computer is simply converting text strings into audio, though these days, the use of generative AI to produce more natural-sounding voices (even to the point of mimicking real people) is blurring the line a little bit.

Speech-to-text (and automated captioning) is more advanced and is certainly benefitting from the use of large language models (LLM) on the backend, but it still falls more on the side of iterative ML, in much the same way that scientific systems are using these technologies to scan through things like medical or deep-space imagery to identify cancers and exoplanets far faster than human review can manage. They’re using the models to analyze data, identify patterns that match existing patterns in their data set, and then producing output. For scientific fields, that output is then reviewed by researchers to verify it; for speech-to-text systems, the output is the text or captions (which are presented without human review…hence the errors that creep in; manual review and correction of auto-generated captions before posting a video to a sharing site is the equivalent step to scientists reviewing the output of their systems before making decisions based on that output).

Where we’re struggling (both within education and far more broadly) is with the newer, generative “AI”. These systems are essentially souped-up, very fancy statistical modeling — there’s no actual “intelligence” behind it at all, just (though I’ll admit the word “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) a very complex set of algorithms deciding that given this input, when producing output, these words are more likely to go together. Because there’s no real intelligence behind it, there’s no way for these systems to know, judge, or understand when the statistically generated output is nonsensical (or, worse, makes sense but is simply wrong). Unfortunately, they’re just so good at producing output that sounds right, especially when output as very professional/academic-sounding writing (easy to do, as so many of the LLMs have been unethically and (possibly arguably, but I agree with this) illegally trained on professional and academic writing), that they immediately satisfy our need for “truthiness”. If it sounds true, and I got it from a computer, well then, it must be true, right?

(The best and most amusing summary I’ve seen of modern “AI” systems is from Christine Lemmer-Webber by way of Andrew Feeney, who described it as “Mansplaining as a Service: A service that instantly generates vaguely plausible sounding yet totally fabricated and baseless lectures in an instant with unflagging confidence in its own correctness on any topic, without concern, regard or even awareness of the level of expertise of its audience.”)

Getting students (and, really, everyone, including faculty, staff, the public at large, etc.) to understand the distinction between the types of “AI”, when they work well, and when they prove problematic, is proving to be an incredibly difficult thing, of course.

For myself, I’m fine with using traditional/iterative ML systems. I’m generally pretty good with my spelling and grammar, but don’t mind the hints (though I do sometimes ignore them when I find it appropriate to do so), and I find auto-captioning to be incredibly useful, both in situations like Zoom sessions and to quickly create a first pass at captioning a video (though I always do manual corrections before finalizing the captions on a video to be shared). But I draw the line at generative AI systems and steadfastly refuse to use ChatGPT, AI image generators, or other such tools. I have decades of experience in creating artisanally hand-crafted typos and errors and have no interest in statistically generating my mistakes!

I’m afraid I don’t have good suggestions on how to solve the issues. But there’s one (rather long-winded) response to the question you posed about the difference between assistive technology and “artificial intelligence”.

20 Minute Tesla Model Y Review

April 23, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

Entirely unintentionally and much to my chagrin, I had my first ride in a Tesla today; one of the newest Model Ys, in fact. I’d never have done this voluntarily, but I was taking a Lyft from a work conference at a school about 20 minutes away from my home, and didn’t realize it was a swasticar until it pulled up.

What an absolutely foolish design.

The touchscreen display on a Tesla Model Y, showing the display as described in the rest of this post.

Virtually no physical controls. Nearly everything is on this display, mounted dead-center, so none of the critical info is directly in front of the driver; you have to look down and to the right to check anything. I think the only physical controls were the wheel, with a couple buttons, and the pedals. There was no stalk on the right side to control things like the wipers, I couldn’t see if there was a left-side stalk for turn signals or not.

The left third of the display is a live updating animation of whatever the car sees, which means there’s a large, constantly moving distraction just barely out of your eyeline, primed to pull your attention away from the road in front of you. Every car or pedestrian the car senses is shown on the display. It will even show whether a car is a sedan, pickup, or box truck, if it can figure that out (more likely when they’re crossing side-on rather than directly in front or behind). I’m a little surprised that it doesn’t distinguish other Teslas with some sort of special icon or coloring or something.

The right two thirds are all the controls, presented with a low-contrast dark grey on light grey color scheme, with small text and icons, all of which makes it difficult to distinguish any one control from another at a quick glance. And, of course, because it’s all a touch screen, you can’t do anything by feel, because it’s one flat pane of glass and you have to look at the screen to make sure you’re touching the right spot.

Even if the owner of the company wasn’t a raging monomaniacal ego-driven techno fascist doing everything he can to rip this country apart and grift as much money out of the process as he can (which, to be clear, he is, and if Republicans were actually at all serious about getting dangerous immigrants out of the country, he should be at the top of the list), I’d still be baffled that these cars are approved to be on the roads and that people are as enamored with them as they are. It’s like a master class in designing a user interface that’s as potentially dangerous for the driver as possible.

Weekly Notes: April 7-13, 2025

April 14, 2025April 13, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

🚀 Almost to Norwescon! So, lots of that when I’m not doing other things.
🥚 While we’re not terribly religious, we do like the cuteness and spring celebration of Easter, so since Norwescon takes place over Easter weekend, we continued our annual tradition of celebrating spring a week early. It was a gorgeous day, so we took a nice walk in the morning, and then dyed eggs in the afternoon.

📸 Photos

Colors and speckles and eggs, oh my!

📚 Reading

Finished Clarkesworld Issue 223 edited by Neil Clarke.
Read 2003 Hugo Best Novel winner Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer.

📺 Watching

We got sucked into the reality tripe of Million Dollar Secret. It’s ridiculous, many of these people are horrible, and it’s keeping us entertained.

🔗 Linking

Online Markdown is a pretty impressive web-based Markdown editor. I’m starting to find some annoyances with Markdown (it focuses on presentational markup rather than structured markup — for example, _using underscores_ to add italics adds italics as <em> tags rather than <i> tags, but since I’m often marking up book titles, <em> is the incorrect tag to be using), but until/unless I decide to go another way, this looks like a good tool to know about.
Daniel Hunter at Waging Nonviolence: What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked: “With the Insurrection Act looming, now is the time to learn how it might unfold and the strategic ways to respond — including the power of ridicule.” I’m hoping this is just paranoia, but afraid it isn’t.
Nicholas Barber at the BBC: ‘It was a magical chemical balance’: How Monty Python and the Holy Grail became a comedy legend: “An independent British comedy made on a shoestring by a television sketch troupe? It sounds like a film destined to be forgotten within weeks of leaving cinemas – assuming it reaches cinemas in the first place. But Monty Python and the Holy Grail is still revered as one of the greatest ever big-screen comedies, 50 years on from its release in April 1975.”
Nancy Friedman at Strong Language: “Smut”: “Although the lyrics reflected a set of social and legal circumstances specific to mid-1960s America, their sentiment has proved to be timeless. In honor of its 60th anniversary and Tom Lehrer’s long, remarkable life, here’s our salute to ‘Smut.'”
Ex Astris Scientia: Design Issues of the Original Enterprise: “The article discusses problems or uncertainties about the design of the original Enterprise by Matt Jefferies, as it appeared in TOS.”
Tim Hardiwck at MacRumors: How to Adjust Mac Volume and Brightness More Precisely: “Before you press the volume or brightness controls, hold down the Option and Shift keys together on your keyboard. Now go ahead and make your adjustments, and you should see the onscreen indicator move forwards and backwards in smaller increments (four over each segment).” I’ve been using macOS since it was Mac OS, and I never knew this trick.
Bauhaus Clock: “A Bauhaus clock screensaver for Mac, designed to be present even when you’re not.” Pretty! But apparently I should have downloaded it sooner; the page is now saying “currently unavailable”. Oh dear….

Weekly Notes: March 31–April 6, 2025

April 7, 2025April 6, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

🚀 This weekend was a little bit of convention conflict, as Saturday we had the final Norwescon 47 planning meeting before the con, and Sunday was Seattle Worldcon‘s announcement of this year’s Hugo finalists. Got everything done, but it did make me glad there aren’t many weekends where I’m trying to do stuff for two conventions at the same time.

📸 Photos

Single-panel comic of two men sitting on a park bench, one is about eight inches tall. The small one is saying, "You think you've got problems! Not only am I the incredible shrinking man, but I've also been bitten by a werewolf so every full moon I turn into a gerbil!"

From a conversation with a friend, one of my all-time favorite Bizarro comics, clipped and saved back when I was in high school.

📝 Writing

On the occasion of Val Kilmer’s death, I reflected on my personal favorite of his films, Real Genius.

📚 Reading

Finished Lois McMaster Bujold’s Diplomatic Immunity.
Read Clarkesworld Issue 223 edited by Neil Clarke.

🔗 Linking

Guillaume Lethuillier: The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst: “Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is particularly evident in its first release (Macintosh, 1993), which was composed of interconnected HyperCard cards. It is now literally one. Here is Myst as a graph.”
Jessica Bennett at The Cut: If Hetero Relationships Are So Bad, Why Do Women Go Back for More? A new straight-studies course treats male-female partnerships as the real deviance.: “‘In this class, we’re going to flip the script,’ she went on. ‘It’s going to be a place where we worry about straight people. Where we feel sympathy for straight people. We are going to be allies to straight people.'”
Nilay Patel at The Verge: Best printer 2025: just buy a Brother laser printer, the winner is clear, middle finger in the air: “This is the third year in a row that I’ve published a story recommending you just stop thinking about printers and buy whatever random Brother laser printer is on sale, and nothing has happened in the miserably user-hostile printer industry to change my recommendation in that time.”
Sarah Jones at the Intelligencer: Then They Came for People With Disabilities The right-wing effort to roll back civil rights finds a new target.: “Though the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act had bipartisan support and were signed by Republican presidents, it’s hard to imagine Trump signing either piece of legislation. A more ruthless strain of conservatism always percolated within the party, and now it dominates and threatens the protections that Cone, and Lomax, and so many others once fought to win. At risk is the concept of civil rights itself.”
Shelly Brisbin at Six Colors: Twenty Thousand Hertz Dives Deep Into Apple Accessibility History: “The latest episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast takes a stab at telling Apple’s accessibility story through sound—not only the sound of a host and his interview subjects, but the way Macs and iPhones sound when they speak to people who use their accessibility features.”
Watts Martin: What makes an app feel “right” on the Mac?: “So it’s possible that the right question—at least for me—isn’t ‘is this app using a native UI toolkit,’ it’s ‘is this app a good Mac citizen.’ In other words, does it embrace long-standing Mac conventions?”
Seattle Worldcon 2025: 2025 Hugo Award Finalists: “Seattle Worldcon 2025, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention, is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer.”

Weekly Notes: Feb 24–Mar 2, 2025

March 2, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

🍃 Big storms hit the Seattle area on Monday and Tuesday, with lots of power outages. We didn’t lose power at home this time, which was nice. Work lost power early Tuesday morning, and though it was back by the time we got in, there were DNS issues that kept campus offline until almost 8:30. Not an auspicious start to the day.
💸 Friday was the “don’t spend anything” economic blackout day. Honestly, this one was easy for me, as I rarely if ever buy anything on Fridays anyway (don’t get coffee or anything on the way to work, bring my own lunch, all household shopping is generally done on Saturday or Sunday, etc.). I have to admit, my cynical side doubts that enough people actually participated for any company to even notice, let alone for it to actually make an impression. But it’s a start, which is good, and hey, you never know — maybe my cynical side will be proven wrong?
🚀 Saturday was this month’s Norwescon planning meeting, so I got to hang out with con friends for a while. This year, in addition to my usual behind-the-scenes duties (website admin, social media admin, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony coordinator, assistant historian) and visible duties (Thursday night DJ, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony emcee), I’ll also be paneling! I posted my tentative schedule earlier today.

📸 Photos

The view from the balcony outside my office at work on our first really good (false) spring day this year.

📚 Reading

Read some nonfiction: Lucy Worsley’s A Very British Murder.

📺 Watching

Finished S19 of Project Runway, and though some contestants left earlier than we would have liked, we were not disappointed with the winner.

🔗 Linking

NYT (non-NYT link), The Man Behind the ‘Economic Blackout’ Served Time for Sex-Related Offense: “In 2007, Mr. Schwarz was sentenced by a Connecticut judge to 90 days in jail and five years’ probation for disseminating voyeuristic material, according to a representative from the Middlesex County criminal court clerk’s office who reviewed court records while speaking with The New York Times earlier this week.”
Marlies on Mastodon: “The vatican needed a latin word for tweet, because the pope tweets. Or tweeted, I suppose, given the whole dead or dying situation. Anyway, they call them breviloquia (s breviloquium) which is honestly a great word even tho it’s not very brief itself. Given its nature and etymology I think we should be able to use it platform-independently and apply it to toots, skeets and even Truths as well. Anyway thank you for reading this breviloquium.”
Joan Westenberg, Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever:

The Internet used to be a connected web of message boards and personal websites. I’m talking 1995 to 2005, when being online meant owning your piece of the web, carving it out yourself, maintaining it, giving a damn about it. It was the age of truly sovereign digital identity and content, built on a direct connection between creators and audiences, who found and fell in love with each other on their terms.

HTML was an almost democratizing force, giving a generation of people the tools they needed to stake their claim and plant their flag in the ground. The personal website was a statement of intent, a manifesto, a portfolio, a piece of digital architecture you could be damn proud of.

And then something changed.
Apple has its issues, but at least this isn’t one of them. Shareholders voted against removing DEI policies; the board had already recommended this decision.
If (like me) you’re still using Facebook (or, unlike me, Instagram/Whatsapp/Meta services), you should follow these simple steps to minimize the amount of data you give Meta. (Also, since this is from John Oliver, the URL is great.)
Trivial Einstein on Mastodon: “We have a whole classic parable on the subject of not crying wolf, to the point where ‘crying wolf’ is something of a dead cliché. In the English-speaking world, pretty much everyone knows what ‘to cry wolf’ means, even if they’ve never actually heard the parable. We don’t think about the story. We make the semantic leap from the phrase to ‘false positive.’ And we are taught over and over that crying wolf is always bad. Which is why we find ourselves in situations like the one in which we currently find ourselves.”

Minor Feedbin RSS Bug? (EDIT: Not a bug.)

February 22, 2025February 18, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

I think I just uncovered a minor bug in Feedbin‘s RSS parsing.

Update: Not a bug! Feedbin support confirmed that they “aggressively” sanitize markup, for various reasons including security and ensuring that any CSS doesn’t break Feedbin’s rendering when viewed on the Feedbin site.

I used some inline CSS to flip an emoji upside-down in a recent blog post, but it’s displaying right side up in Feedbin (and therefore in NetNewsWire, so at first I thought it was a bug there, but if I let NNW read the RSS directly instead of pulling from Feedbin, it displays the inverted emoji properly).)

I’ve confirmed that the inline CSS is present in the raw RSS feed (which makes sense, since it displays properly when loaded directly in NNW).

But when I use Safari’s inspector to peek at the HTML that Feedbin is rendering, though the span tag is there, the style argument with the inline CSS has been stripped out.

Is this a bug? Or is Feedbin intentionally stripping inline CSS style declarations out for some reason? Update: Not a bug! See the added note at the beginning of this post.

iPhone security: Hard locking and lockdown mode

January 31, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

An iPhone showing the Lockdown Mode pre-activation warning screen.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE PROTESTING or in any sort of situation where there’s a higher-than-average chance of having potentially adversarial encounters with the police, and if you have an iPhone, please remember these two tips:

Memorize how to quickly “hard lock” your phone. It’s easy to do, even as you’re pulling your phone out of your pocket or bag: hold the power button and either volume button for about two seconds. Your screen will flip to show the “slide to power off” toggle, along with the Medical ID and emergency call toggles. Once you’ve done this, Face ID/Touch ID is disabled, and you must enter your passcode to unlock the phone. (If you keep holding the buttons for five or more seconds, your phone will automatically call emergency services.)
While there are some legal disputes over this, currently the police cannot force you to surrender your phone passcode, but they might be allowed to force you to use Touch ID/Face ID to unlock it. By hard locking your phone, you’re locking them out until/unless they get a warrant. If the police ever ask you to surrender your phone, hard lock it as you hand it to them.

I also recommend switching from a standard 4- or 6-digit passcode to a longer, alphanumeric password. To set this up, go to Settings > Touch ID/Face ID & Passcode, tap Turn Passcode On, and tap Passcode Options and set your passcode. This is much more secure than a short numerical passcode, and if your phone ever gets confiscated, will make it much more difficult for authorities to gain access to your phone.
Either before you join the protest, or if you see the police presence start to ramp up, TURN ON LOCKDOWN MODE.

Settings > Privacy & Security > Lockdown Mode > On

Note: This is not a setting that most people need to have enabled full-time. It’s designed, in Apple’s words, “for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats.” Turning it on will severely restrict how your phone works in a number of ways (see Apple’s Lockdown Mode support document for details). However, it also makes it much more difficult for anyone to track you, intercept your communications, or otherwise gain access to your phone.

Make your voices heard! But keep yourself safe as you do.

Android users will have to do their own research for these or similar techniques. Or get better phones. ;) (Yes, I’m kidding. Use what works for you.)

(Image yoinked from AppleInsider’s Lockdown Mode post until I can make my own.)

Answering the blog questions challenge

January 29, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

While I wasn’t specifically tagged (I’m not that well known), I saw Matthew Haughey do this (via his Mastodon post), and figured I’d jump in. Nothing like a little narcissistic navel gazing to distract from <waves hands around expressively>, right?

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Trick question (kind of, unplanned): I didn’t even know I was blogging in the first place, because the “blog”/”blogging” terms hadn’t been coined yet! I created my first personal site probably sometime in 1995 (that archive is from February of 1996), and that site had an “announcements” page that was essentially an early blog, with short little updates mostly detailing what changes I’d most recently made, but also with occasional bits about my life. All hand-coded, of course, as this was well before any sort of website builder apps existed, let alone CMS software. It wasn’t until February of 2001 when I discovered the words and realized that I was “blogging”.

Screenshot of my 1996 website, titled 'Woody's World of Wonders'. It has a repeating gif background of my signature, and a 'Netscape 2.0 enhanced' warning at the top.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I’m using WordPress (self hosted), and have been since November 16, 2006. At the time, I had been using Movable Type, which was the Big Thing for self-hosted blogging in the early 2000s. However, they’d been moving towards a more corporate model, and I figured I’d check out this new up-and-comer. Almost 20 years later, I guess it worked out.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yup! Between WordPress and the previously mentioned Movable Type, I was also on TypePad (a hosted blogging platform originally by the Movable Type people, though I have no idea if there’s any relationship anymore); before Movable Type I used a system called NewsPro (which no longer has a web presence). I’ve also at times dabbled with Blogger, LiveJournal (no link because that account got purged), Tumblr, and others; I currently mirror this blog to a DreamWidth blog (like LiveJournal before the Russians bought it).

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Most of the time, as long as I’m on my desktop or laptop, I use MarsEdit. If I’m mobile on my phone or iPad, I just use the WordPress web interface, because I haven’t found a good mobile app. (Yes, I know WordPress has an app; it just annoyed me when I tried to use it.)

The MarsEdit post editing window showing this post being written in Markdown format.

Sometimes I’ll start writing elsewhere as I get thoughts together; if I do that, it’s likely to either be in Apple’s Notes app or BBEdit.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I’m really excited about something or really ticked off about something. Other than that, it’s kind of random. And it’s been more random than I like for a long time (honestly, and unfortunately, my blogging frequency has existed in somewhat inverse relation to the rise of Facebook/Twitter and other non-blog forms of social media), but I’m in the midst of (yet another) attempt at making a real push to blogging here more regularly instead of pushing it all to Facebook. Facebook and its associated Meta products becoming an ever more overt dumpster fire and prompting an exodus is certainly helping with that.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Usually I write, publish, and go. If it’s something I’m really invested in (due to the aforementioned excitement or rage), then I might take a little more time to work and polish it before pushing it live. But my general approach is to just dump it out of my brain and onto the pixels.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

Whatever catches my interest. This is definitely not a single-topic blog; hence the “Eclecticism” name.

Who are you writing for?

My first audience is me — in large part, because I so rarely know if anyone else is reading (few people comment, and I long ago turned off any sort of site statistic tracking). My secondary audience is friends and family or anyone who might be interested enough in my ramblings to read regularly, whether by stopping by my site, following the links I put on social media, or who have me in their RSS feeds. The tertiary audience is whomever else happens to stumble by for whatever reason.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

With 29 years of archives (34 if you include the earliest entries in my “beyond the blog” category that collects email list and usenet posts I made before I had my own website; the oldest one dates from October 17, 1991), that’s a difficult question to answer. However, I do keep a “Worth Reading” page that I’ll occasionally update with posts that I think are among the most…well, worth reading…and of those, I’d say my current favorite is the most recent addition: Change is good, where I advocate growth and learning and my own journey ever leftward, as occasionally evidenced by older posts here.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Nothing solid. I do occasionally look at options for moving away from WordPress (most recently due to what I consider highly questionable choices by the primary face of WordPress), but so far, between having limited time and energy to devote to diving into my computer (my wife does appreciate actually interacting with me from time to time, after all) and not having found quite the right solution to move to, things are probably stable for the time being.

I do have a wishlist of what I’d like to have in a blogging tool (summarized as “early-2000s MovableType, only with some modern updates”) that, if I could find a solution that supported all of these, would get me off of WordPress in a heartbeat. But until someone builds my dream blogging tool, inertia is probably going to keep me with something that works, even if I’m not entirely happy with it.

Who else do you want to tag?

I haven’t got a clue! Especially since “tagging” as a way to notify someone is more difficult over multiple services. Of course, if anyone finds this and wants to jump in without being specifically tagged (like I did), feel free! Harken back to the pre-Facebook/Twitter days when blogs like this were how we kept up with each other and these were memes instead of silly text on an image!