Against Lore
This week on my podcast, I read Against Lore, a recent piece from my Pluralistic blog/newsletter, about writing and the benefits of nebulously defined backstories. Warning: the last few minutes of this essay contain spoilers for Furiosa. In the recording, I give lots of warning so you can switch off when they come up. One... more
Parable of the Sofa
When Lauren was pregnant with a child who?s now turning 25, we purchased a comfy dark-brown leather sofa which fits our living room nicely. What with kids and relatives and employees and cats and Standards Comittees and friends and book clubs and socials, the butt-support cushions had, a quarter century later, worn out. So we had them replaced, at a fair price, by a small local business. Which is something that modern capitalism is trying to make impossible. I?ll be honest; when we realized how ratty the sofa was getting, my first thought was ?crap, gonna have to buy a sofa?.
More clipboard pain
Yesterday I found various ways to bridge the gap between the cut buffer and the clipboard. But they all seem to have issues, and I spent quite some time today trying to understand how to do things correctly. The only thing that I established with any certainty was that things don't ever seem to work the way they're documented. Emacs documentation contradicts itself, but claims that the normal c-y should copy from the clipboard, when in fact it copies from the cut buffer, as it always has done. Why is this so difficult?
Another mobile phone search
So I need to buy a new mobile phone in the next 3 months. What should it be? Xiaomi, definitely. Not because I like them?after all, it is a ?smart? phone?but because I have come to terms with their particular wrinkles. And there are now 5 generations of newer phones, with prices between $375 and round $2000. Which do I choose? Definitely nothing over $1000, almost certainly nothing over $500. What features? I recently discovered that my current phone either doesn't have a telephoto lens for its camera subsystem, or it's so well hidden that I couldn't find it.
Digital driver license: scam?
Thinking about yesterday's experience with trying to register my digital driver license, it occurred to me: I already have it! My article on the subect last August was when I installed the app and noted that I could authenticate myself with a thumbprint. And later I tried to use it at the Napoleons post office, but they didn't accept it, probably correctly. So what's all this about? Somebody trying to scam me? First, let's change the password from a Real Computer. How about ?W4s I breached??? No, not valid: Please enter a valid password.