Beardy Guy Musings

I've steered clear of reading or watching any news and will do the same for another week or so.

Went to bed early.

Just some obvious examples and points of likely failure as citizens that actually take democracy as a responsibility rather than as an afterthought.

There's a lot of anxiety and panic leading up to the election.

Spending this rainy morning watching The Cure.

Out on a walk in the woods today I discovered a small patch of pawpaws on the trail and it occurred to me that now might be the best time to find them because their very large oblong leaves are currently pale yellow and stand out as most of the trees have…

A follow-up on my post yesterday about the fire at the battery recycling plant.

I was sitting on my porch cracking walnuts and noticed a nasty smell.

There's a bit of renewed interest in Siri as Apple starts to release Apple Intelligence.

Before I get started, a bit of context.

Joe Biden has apologized to the indigenous people 'for what happened during the "Indian Boarding School era".

I wrote about foraging for walnuts a couple weeks ago and in the time since I've really come to enjoy this new daily ritual and have improved the process.

I'm happy to have been included in Manuel Moreale's ongoing People and Blogs series.

I just clicked into someone's blogroll and visited a large sample of the linked sites to discover half of them have not been updated in several months, some have less than 5 posts (in total), one was suspended.

Watching season 2 of Pachinko and it's excellent.

A round-up of interviews with author Ta-Nehisi Coates on his recently published book The Message.

Today's afternoon food experiments.

Morning breakfast that was so good it deserves a mention: Baked pumpkin oatmeal with walnuts.

Dave Rogers, a long-time resident of Florida who is NOT delusional about the reality of the climate emergency and posts often about how it is playing out in Florida has three excellent posts this morning that I want to note and comment on.

Listening to Tech Won't Save Us podcast with morning coffee and oatmeal.

Population of the Gaza Strip: 2,400,000 x .017 = 40,800 (est current death toll) Population of US: 332,000,000 x .017 = 5,644,000 (equivalent US death toll) Or the equivalent of two Chicagos Population of Chicago: 2,746,000

A few days ago Lou wrote about his connection to online people, specifically stating that he values those relationships equally and does not distinguish them from IRL relationships...

Over the past few days I've been collecting newly fallen walnuts while out on my dog walks and processing them each day.

Rabidosa rabida, also known as the rabid wolf spider, is a species of spiders from the family Lycosidae, native to North America.

I've made a good bit of progress the past couple weeks getting my Images page setup.

Sitting on the porch listening to a flock of birds in a nearby tree.

A brief note of appeciation for Wikipedia.

The most recent October episode of Mike McCue's DotSocial podcast popped up in the Podcasts app and I gave it a listen.

Had an interesting five hour visit and conversation with a friend and fellow radical yesterday.

One year later and Gaza is now reduced to rubble. 41,000 dead (likely 100,000 when those buried under the rubble are included). 100,000+ wounded.

Long introductory preface and note: I feel the need to preface this post because at the end of the day Apple is a corporation that will always do capitalism which means it will always seek to increase its profits.

As someone who works from a tiny home, lives on a tiny budget and makes an effort to limit unnecessary driving, I have a diet that relies on home cooked food, much of it purchased in bulk.

What is it with the common practice of the tech press publishing stories that are more breathless opinion than actual substantive analysis?

On a whim I started writing a what I intended to be a quick response to Mark Gurman's comparison of Meta's Orion glasses to Apple's Vision Pro in his newsletter today.

I think this is what some of us are looking for when we talk about weaving a social web experience with personal sites and blogs that link freely and often.

Become a climate activist.

A couple months ago my fairly old drip coffee maker stopped working and was beyond repair.

I was glad to see this adorable and very furry little critter a couple days ago.

I live in a rural setting where the night skies are dark and magnificent.

I must have passed by this plant near the gravel road twenty times before I really looked at it.

A couple years ago I got a new client who wanted a website and one of the last things he asked in our initial meeting was simple and direct: “Not to be morbid but what happens to my site if something happens to you?”

Reading a few blogs and having morning coffee I thought I’d post a photo of my current iPad set-up because it illustrates something I’ve noticed I do a lot which is use things in ways they were not designed to be used.

I posted recently about my iPad-based workflow in the rebuilding of the blog portion of my website.

As I've been working on tidying up and rebuilding my blog archive it was notable that in 2003 and 2004 most of my blogging was about the US war in Iraq.

Client, seven days ago: Hi!

These past few days I've had a fantastic time building up some new workflows as I've reorganized the site.

Over the past two weeks I've given myself a much needed break from reading and posting about climate and Gaza news.

I posted a couple days ago about my tendency to do things the hard way or, more to the point, the manual way.

I tend to do things the hard way.

If you had told me 4 years ago that I would unsubscribe from Apple Music I would have scoffed loudly.