Archive for Technology
There’s an extremely common telephone situation that I feel like we ought to have a technological solution for by now: A customer and a customer service agent are talking on the phone together. Then something goes wrong, and the call gets disconnected. (This can happen for any of half a dozen reasons, most especially when […]
Waymo cars have now driven 1 million miles with no human behind the wheel. Waymo posted a blog post about that in February, focused on Waymo’s safety record during those first million miles. That post links to a paper with many more details. During those first million miles, Waymo vehicles were involved in 20 “contact” […]
I’m continuing to read/skim Fernand Braudel’s 1980(ish) The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (volume 1 of his three-volume work Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century). I continue to find it a mix of fascinating and annoying—there’s a wealth of information here about what Braudel calls “material life” around the world during that […]
Every so often, I get it into my head that I desperately need a tiny printing press. At which point I go through a mental process (and series of web searches) that goes something like this: I could buy a Speedball Press or other small art press. Art, ink, paper, squeeze them together—boom! printing! …But […]
In early 2020, Google posted about Meena, “a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About…Anything.” The post gets fairly technical, but it also includes two brief sample dialogues with Meena in which Meena pretty much passes the Turing Test as far as I’m concerned. (In one dialogue, Meena makes a couple of on-topic puns; in the […]
For this trip, I decided it would be a good idea to have a portable external hard drive to back up to. (I also keep remote backups via Backblaze, but I wanted to be able to use Time Machine.) So I bought a 2TB Western Digital My Passport SSD. And I’m amazed at both its […]
I’ve been hesitating about buying LED lightbulbs for years (and CFLs before that), because there seemed to be a lot of variables and a lot of confusing terminology and contradictory information about them. I had bought a few over the years, but not many. But recently, my last 65W incandescent floodlight bulb burned out (for […]
I enjoyed the vid party at WisCONline last week. Here are half a dozen of my favorites—some sweet, some thoughtful, some angry. “Come ’Round for Tea” (2014), by Garrideb Showing female friendships in Marvel comics, with all the words in word balloons replaced by hearts. (song: “Baltic Sea,” by The Social Services) (2 min) “Pipeline” […]
Say that you have your own domain name (like my kith.org). And say that you want to send mail to other people’s Gmail addresses. Sometimes, Gmail may think that legitimate mail from you is spam. (Note that this can happen even if you use G Suite for your mail!) Here’s how to reduce the likelihood […]
My Tesla Model 3 arrived yesterday. I ordered it on the morning of the first day they were open for pre-order: March 31, 2016. The expected delivery date kept getting pushed back (for about a year, starting in late 2017, their delivery estimator said my car would be ready in 4–6 months); even after the […]
Content warning for mention of possible use of publicly available tracking technology by stalkers and harassers. The New York Times published an article last week about creating a face-recognition system using publicly available camera feeds: To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked […]
Jim was in town this week. Good visit—played various boardgames, went through some Puzzled Pint puzzles (you can download past puzzle sets from their archives), chatted about stuff, went to the Moffett Field Historical Society Museum, had a roundsing. Even though I’ve lived in this area for most of my life, I didn’t know the […]