Back in 2004, I remember my parents still had dial-up. I wanted to download Microsoft Office that my college provided to use on the home computer over the summer. I tried up the phone line for 4 days doing that…

I very much enjoy Micro Blog, but it stopped posting to Bluesky and LinkedIn with no warning. Still showed connections to the site in my profile, just stopped posting there. Working now, so now when my posts get no reaction on those platforms, it’ll be earned :)

Been playing around with a Sigma DP1 Merrill and it’s such a weird little camera. A complete pain to work with but it does render colors in a lovely way, beautiful but brittle in a way I can’t put my finger on.

Turning off the Guardians to watch something less depressing (turns on Grizzly Man)

I made this in 2013 and the Browns keep living up to it

Just realized my ideal mechanical keyboard is just Batman Returns

I genuinely love that the Manningcast brings the production quality of a zoom call to sports broadcasting. Every time there’s a bad connection or someone’s headphone mic rubbing against their hair I’m delighted.

Playoff baseball is a mood

The Browns despair this year feels a like 2009 under the abysmal Eric Mangini regime. That was the year that broke me as a Browns fan. They went 1-11 to start the year and their only win in that stretch was 6-3 baseball score.

Not sure if ChatGPT is the best LLM out there, but it’s consistently the one with which I can iterate the fastest. I tried using Gemini for some image-generation tasks. DALLE is so good for making small edits to colors, aspect ratio, etc. With Gemini, I couldn’t get it to stop making square images.

Just tried using Gemini for image generation and I can’t seem to get it to output any other aspect ratios than square. I’m trying to get it to make a 16:9 YouTube background based on a podcast logo and it keeps giving me square images and getting the color palette wrong.

Did you know you can catch the live video version of It’s a Thing with Molly Wood and Tom Merritt on YouTube? Streaming today at 6 pm ET www.youtube.com/live/MJx4…

Excited for this week’s Cyber Security Headlines Week in Review with Jason Shockey. Talking about Salt Typhoon taking advantage of wiretap access, privacy destroying smart glasses, and insurers funding ransomware payments. Goes live at 3:30pm ET. www.youtube.com/watch

I hadn’t updated my Micro Blog sources in a while and didn’t realize I can crosspost to Threads now, super useful!

A few thoughts on Microsoft’s recent AI-PC and Surface announcements:

1. It’s weird to describe the new Surface Laptop as “outperforming” the MacBook Air. I know the Apple Silicon launch gave that laptop new performance chops, but the Air set the consumer laptop standard for years before that with middling Intel chips. It was a success because it nailed the fundamentals, namely great battery life, the right form factor, and a great trackpad. Microsoft must be confident in its performance because it isn’t claiming the Surface laptop will be thinner, lighter, offers better web-browsing battery, or a brighter screen.
2. To the Surface Laptop’s credit, it looks great, has better I/O (a card reader on the 15-inch version!), offers removable SSDs, and doesn’t think variable refresh rates is a pro-level feature.
3. It seems like the moment is here for Windows to succeed on Arm processors. Microsoft has it’s OEM ecosystem all ready to fire with Arm as a platform. More importantly, the software support will be there too.
4. Let’s assume that Microsoft and its OEMs have figured out a killer Arm platform. Let’s take better performance than Apple’s M3 as a given. Great. Apple definitely got a lot of people to upgrade Macs with the release of M1. But did it actually move any market share? It doesn’t seem like it. Apple grew PC market share about 1.5% from 2015 to 2023. There’s much more variability within the Windows OEM ecosystem quarter to quarter than what Apple could achieve with a breakthrough processor. So even if it’s framing this as a blow to Apple, Microsoft… doesn’t care?
5. The bigger question is what does this new class of Windows PC look like in the next 2-4 years. I imagine the first generation of these machines will all be very similar, based on the same platform with virtually the same components. Will this just be OEMs waiting on Qualcomm’s chip release cadence? Will x86 PCs become budget options that you’re mad your parents bought at Best Buy without calling you first? Apple may still have a distinct advantage with product selection simplicity. Although as said about, none of that really seems to translate to market share.
6. I keep thinking about this.

   Post by @reckless1280

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Intel’s chip making business lost $222 a second in 2023.

I enjoy that the Verge’s AI content policy is to only include it sarcastically on Brother laser printer posts.

“Instagram founders' news app acquired by Yahoo” is the most ignoble form of death.

I continue to be impressed by 404 Media. Full text RSS is definitely a feature I’d pay for.

I was very tempted to get this two-year lease deal on an Hyundai Ioniq 6. I’ve been wanting to get an EV and this would be the perfect secondary car to test the waters for a limited time. Problem is there are currently only 6 listed for sale within 300 miles of my house (which has a bunch of fairly large markets, like Chicago, Indy, Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh), and all of these seem to have already left dealer lots. Looks like my EV dreams will have to wait.

Also the entire process of contacting any dealer is a hellscape.

Extremely good vibes on the CISO Series Week in Review with Gerald Auger. He brought the Simply Cyber crew in the chat, super fun time. Also I may have solved IOT security in the episode. www.youtube.com/live/mJvm…

I can buy Topo Chico hard seltzer and mixers in Cleveland, but not regular Topo Chico

The launch of Threads is proof that Meta can keep shipping good usable products. But I often don’t like engaging with it on a very personal level. It suffers from the “birthday” problem, where friends and family find one of your interests and then that’s all you ever get for gifts for the rest of time. I know if I mention something I enjoy, Threads default feed will soon serve it back to me, with a heaping of engagement bait influencers on top. So I keep it pretty chill and use its algorithmic feed for internet zeitgeist stuff.

Considering how easy it is to compost coffee and paper filters, I’m glad to see Keurig finally removing K-cup landfill waste with their new Alta system. But let’s not delude ourselves into seeing this as just another way to make a proprietary coffee pod, the environmental optics are gravy.

It’s amazing how little space in my head is left for this social network. Saw that X is doing articles and was amused how little it mattered to me.