Uncategorized

MSPoweruser: Dell may be working on a Surface Studio-like monitor.

While it will probably be well beyond what I’d be willing to pay, I kinda want to see this and more displays like it.

All-in-One PCs are an interesting concept but for my use cases they’ve traditionally been too limiting even when you pay the big buckaroos. Advancements in laptop hardware and a thing called Thunderbolt give me a little hope that might change someday.

But I’d much rather have a display that could function as both a typical monitor and suddenly become like a drawing board, that can be connected to whatever device can drive a touchscreen monitor. Because a really great display tends to last until it gives up the ghost. The same is not always true of computers.

Every now and then, I’ll stuff a few frozen pancakes in the toaster to make a quick breakfast. Usually followed by coating them in peanut butter and creating a sandwich. Today, since I skipped the PB, I opted to give the peanut gallery a taste.

Which was welcomed by the peanut gallery but I was reproached for it being the last of the pancake, lol. I will skip sharing the stare I am now getting from Willow….

CNET: John McAfee believed to have been detained, campaign manager says.

I’ve never really paid the guy any mind aside from that rather humorous video about uninstalling McAfee Antivirus, but the more I read it sounds like the guy has covered more than a bit of colourful ground over the years.

Coin flip: you may be drowsy or crazy if you imagine your dog being very Juno and explaining there is a special place in hell for those who don’t share their midnight snacks.

Yes, I’m pretty sure that is what Misty wants to tell me about the lack of sharing going on….

Questionable choices: when you chase a dinner salad with devil’s food donuts and whiskey.

Or perfect choices? 😂

The New York Times: I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering. It Worked.

I think Mr. Berlinquette make a rather accurate statement towards the end:

With the ISIS campaign, Google decided what a radical view was, who seemed to hold those views and who should be able to view them. It’s hard to be cynical about an initiative that deters extremism. But entering the domain of social engineering is a slippery slope. The standard of what needs to be deradicalized is adjustable.

Social manipulation in one form or another isn’t very new. What is new is the ease of exposure. Most people are going to see search results one way or another. The number of people using as blockers will likely remain a minority.

It’s not like you’ve got to rely on stories from the local village elders for everything. Searching the world wide web connects you to many sources of knowledge; beware the wise asses you listen to. Because we all have an agenda whether or not we realize it ourselves.

Oddly I feel a bit of temptation to watch Blade Runner….

Scrolling through old journal entries, interesting to come across A Day Made of Glass 2: Unpacked. The Story Behind Corning’s Vision. (2012) and my comments about it at the time.

In a lot of ways I still find Corning’s vision fascinating.

Something is also apparent to me in hindsight: casting. Bits like the car dashboard were still pretty foreign at the time. Approximately a year later, Google launched the first generation Chromecast. Devices like the Roku would likewise gain voice input and competitors like Fire TV weren’t far off just yet. Today in ’19 it isn’t abnormal to easily manipulate a screen but we’re nowhere near as cool as that video yet.

I don’t think any product like the Surface Hub was well known until a few years later. While iMacs and clones had already modernized by then I don’t wanna gander at history to see when more touch capable AiOs became readily available. Devices like the Surface Studio are Still. To. Damned. Expensive. Not to mention rare in people’s homes and work places.

Another thing that has changed since Corning’s video is the PC. Back in ’12 touch screen laptops were more of a novelty than an accepted thing. Hell, the modern tablet had just about come into its own, and was very unlike its PC based forebears.

A lot of things have changed in hardware and software since then and will continue to change. But I still hope the result looks more like A Day Made of Glass than 1984….hehe.

Odd thoughts: Pretzel stick for the dog, whiskey for the human.

Somehow this seems to suit all of us, lol.

Why the B-1 Bomber Is Such a Badass Plane

Growing up, I always found the B-1 a curiosity more than anything else. Here we this large, variable sweep wing bomber. It was and still is rather unique. Meanwhile most folks were mesmerised by the more modern Stealth designs.

Years later, I find it even more curious that people still talk about the Lancer, and that we’ve somehow managed to keep any in service since the cold war era drew to a close.

So far I generally find myself in a middle ground of sorts.

Diaspora* makes for a social environment that works pretty well, although I think a touch behind what G+ became. But to be fair most of the things I miss about G+, other than the people, were things that took time for the platform to develop.

Where I find myself most frustrated tends to be the software.

You see: most of my time on such things is centered around my Android tablet. Dandelion is about as much as any Diaspora client could be but I find the performance lacking, as a consequence of it being forced to function as a web based app instead of a native client.

Such that I am almost better off going back to keeping my journal on a blogger platform and automating sharing posts to Pluspora, where there is more social life. This my recent experiments doing RSS -> D*.

But of course that leaves another open loop. Before moving to G+, I had used Blogger. Before that I used Live Journal. But in the years since moving from Blogger to Google Plus not much as changed. Rather Blogger has mostly remained fixed in time and others like WordPress have marched on. Creating a sort of software want redux.

Difference is that it is easier to pull a journal migration or write a custom bot bridge than it is to pull a better Diaspora client out of my wazoo.