Finished reading: Moonraker by Ian Fleming 📚 Bond in the novels is a tool of the state. He is precise, observant, cruel and has a remarkable ability to tolerate pain. But he has no ambition beyond the system. His opponent, Drax, is nothing but raw ambition. It makes their exchanges good to read.
Watched: The Drama 🎬 Some call this a dark comedy but it’s a tale of relationship disintegration. The characters are under so much pressure they vomit. Uncomfortable to watch, but the leads are great. I won’t watch it again.
I enabled Trickplay (those little preview images you see when you fast-forward) in Jellyfin and then remembered it has no GPU. Oof. It processed some feeble number of media files on the CPU until I enabled the generate-from-keyframes option. Performance has shot up.
I bought a hybrid seven years ago after finding exactly one working EV charger on my longest drive. The charging infrastructure has improved since, but the hybrid has come into its own during the Iran war. You don’t realise how fuel-efficient it is until you see the price at the pump today.
I’ve started using Apple’s Downtime feature to put some friction between work-related apps and me. If I don’t, I’m in Slack all weekend. I’m not a surgeon and don’t need to be that available. The implementation is coarse, but it’s sort of working.
We’ve moved on from warm halogen bulbs to an array of LEDs. Hopefully tonight’s Lumie Bodyclock sunset will be more golden than the fluorescent white I’ve been putting up with.
Bringing back Friendster seems like a lark. But Supabase rate limiting showed up to spoil the post registration fun.
Microsoft made sure the upselling worked. While the basics were left to rot.
Token-based billing for AI is inevitable. The subsidies won’t continue. With the drive to use AI where I work, I can’t imagine the token bill versus the payroll. If interns start becoming a thing in tech again, it’ll be because they’re cheaper.
The Commodore 64C took a four-year-old motherboard and put it in a nicer box. Anonymous beige, beautifully so, wrapped around the same clapped out guts. Now they’ve found the original moulds and dropped an FPGA inside. Took me ten seconds to to preorder one.
The halogen bulb in my wake-up lamp went. The replacements I’ve tried don’t look much like a sunrise.
The worst thought about dropping off my old electronics for recycling is they end up in a landfill in some other nation. But European law seems strict on this. Now to wipe any lingering personal data first. If they’ll even power up.
My MacBook Pro met an unfortunate end at the AWS London Summit. Replacing it has been more complicated than expected.
As poorly as Westworld season 3 is regarded by large parts of the audience, I liked Engerraund Serac as the antagonist. He wanted to build a system of invisible control to prevent human extinction. He succeeded up until the moment he failed. Today’s corporate AI plans are heading the same way.
It’s remarkable to me how connecting to hotel wifi isn’t standardised. The password could be your room number, a captive portal asking for your room number. Or, as here, a code that appears when you turn on the hotel TV. Which I never do, because of streaming.
Computing started out expensive and then got cheap. Now it’s becoming expensive again. People need to get back into their garages to develop affordable personal computers, using parts the AI providers have no need for. We did it during the 8-Bit computing era. We can do it again.
The RAM shortage could last years
According to Nikkei Asia, even as suppliers ramp up DRAM production, manufacturers are only expected to meet 60 percent of demand by the end of 2027. SK Group chairman has even said that shortages could last until 2030.
Planned a two-hour Dungeons & Dragons session but since we haven’t played in months it takes 20 minutes just to get everyone back up to speed. The grand finale then becomes “You open the door two doors away from the boss… and we’ll leave it there for tonight.”
Lana Del Rey’s “First Light” has a better title sequence than most contemporary Bond films.
In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead two famous nothings hurtle towards a Shakespearean end. Watching them question their reality when offstage from Hamlet has some interest, but it’s a slog to get to their hangings. “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.” 🎬
Because Dune 3 has every IMAX screen locked this Christmas, Disney have gone the “Corinthian Leather” approach for Avengers Doomsday. They’ve invented a brand certification: Infinity Vision. That non-IMAX screen with its laser projector and Dolby 7.1 surround? It’s “Infinity Vision.”