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Two of my favorite writers took on the same topic from different directions this morning. The first to hit was Matthew Inman, who released a (very) long cartoon digging into the artist's relationship with the collection of technologies we call "AI." It starts with his observation that "even if you don't work in the arts, you have to admit you fee it too — that disappointment when you find out something is AI-generated." (Since it's a web comic, you'll just have to read it to get his full essay.) Author...

I haven't regularly used an Apple product in over 30 years when my college newspaper used Mac Classics for compositing. Even by then, I didn't like Apple's closed architecture, having built at least one Windows box from scratch. If you agree with Freddie DeBoer, turns out my instincts were right: There exists, in the digital ether and in the physical world, a peculiar kind of human organization that has no name, no leader, and no stated charter, yet which operates with the ideological precision of the...

Cassie got another two hours of walkies yesterday, and we're planning another few hours tomorrow. Today, though, I really need to finish the project I started in June, and I'm digesting half a rack of ribs. So Cassie will only get an hour or so today. If you have half an hour, listen to this talk Cory Doctorow gave in April, which explains why you hate all of the tech you use regularly (except the Daily Parker):

This weekend, I expect to finish a major personal (non-technical) project I started on June 15th, walk 20 km (without Cassie), and thanks to the desperation of the minor-league team on the South Side of Chicago, attend a Yankees game. It helps that the forecast looks exactly like one would want for the last weekend of summer: highs in the mid-20s and partly cloudy skies. I might have time to read all of these things as well: Jeff Maurer, who watched (some of) this week's televised cabinet meeting so we...

I have a chunk of work to do this afternoon, but I'm hoping I can sneak in some time to read all of these: Dan Rather cheers on the Democratic Party for finally finding the fight. Francis Fukuyama says: move over Berlusconi; the Clown Prince of X has done considerably more to harm Western civilization than you ever did. David Daley puts responsibility for the exploding fight over Congressional maps squarely on US Chief Justice John Roberts. Jennifer Rubin wants us to stop using the word "guarantee" when...

Short lifespans have plagued tech more in the last 25 years than at any point in the past. I particularly hate when a bit of tech goes obsolete for no reason other than the manufacturer decided it doesn't want to support it anymore. I want to take the CEO by the lapels and remind them that they sold these products and they had better support them for a while. Belkin has become the latest company to exit a product line that I have used practically since it came out. They announced today that they will...

The OAFPOTUS threatened to kill an adversary's head of state today, showing the world not only how reckless and stupid he is, but also that he has never actually seen the movie he clearly wants to emulate: Lebanon, desperately wanting to stay out of this one, has warned the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah not to attack Israel. No word yet from our allies, who I'm sure did not want our village idiot to go rogue on this one. But, hey, he's the Inciter in Chief back home, so why would we expect any...

Yesterday, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ scraped along at -11°C early in the morning before "warming" up to -7.5°C around 3pm. Cassie and I got a 22-minute walk around then and she seemed fine. Today the pattern completely inverted. I woke up during the warmest part of the day: 7am, -8°C. Around 8am the temperature started dropping and now hovers around -11°C again—slightly colder than the point where I limit Cassie to 15 minutes outside. She just doesn't feel cold, apparently, and...

Somehow it's the 3rd day of 2025, and I still don't have my flying car. Or my reliable high-speed  regional trains. Only a few of these stories help: James Carville admits he got the 2024 election wrong. Matt Ford thinks "John Roberts is imagining things." A new book by Anita Say Chan equates the tech-bro culture with 20th-century eugenics. Molly White examines Elon Musk's war on Wikipedia. The US Surgeon General has called for adding cancer warnings to alcohol labels. Brazil's experiment in abolishing...

We have warm (10°C) windy (24 knot gusts) weather in Chicago right now, and even have some sun peeking out from the clouds, making it feel a lot more like late March than mid-December. Winds are blowing elsewhere in the world, too: The German government collapsed today after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the Bundestag. People think the OAFPOTUS transition team are doing a great job for the simple reason that most people don't follow this kind of thing. Josh Marshall points out that it...

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.) Meanwhile, the world continues to turn: Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years...

This floored me. The Lebanese health minister reported earlier that 8 people died and 2,750 suffered injuries when thousands of pagers exploded this morning in Lebanon and Syria: Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abia, said the blasts killed eight people, including a girl. “About 2,750 people were injured ... more than 200 of them critically,” with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach, he told a press conference. Hezbollah said in a statement that two of its fighters and a 10-year-old...

Other than having absolutely no real value except to scammers and thieves, cryptocurrency has no real value. But a lot of money gets laundered through crypto these days, so people will spend gobs of real currency building data centers to generate more cryptocurrency. These data centers efficiently dump nearly all the externalities of crypto mining onto their neighbors, except for the externalities crypto already dumps on just about everybody else. Oh, don't let me forget that simulated artificial...

Too bad I'm in my downtown office. It's a perfect, sunny day in Chicago. I did spend half an hour outside at lunchtime, and I might take off a little early. But at least for the next hour, I'll be looking through this sealed high-rise window at the kind of day we only get about 25 times a year here. Elsewhere in the world: Former CIA lawyer James Petrila and former CIA spook John Sipher warn that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v US could undo 50 years of reforms that reined in illegal clandestine...

The New York Times had two opinion pieces today that seemed to go together. In the first, literary critic Hillary Kelly notes the prevalence of pop-culture stories about people not so much in dystopia, but stuck in something else: On one sci-fi show after another I’ve encountered long, zigzagging, labyrinthine passageways marked by impenetrable doors and countless blind alleys — places that have no obvious beginning or end. The characters are holed up in bunkers (“Fallout”), consigned to stark...

Before I take Cassie on yet another 30-minute walk (how she suffers!), I'm going to clear some links: Julia Angwin asks the same thing a couple of my friends have asked: why is Congress talking about banning TikTok instead of, you know, governing? (tl;dr: Republicans, who control the house, really don't want to govern.) Speaking of sclerotic government, Paul Krugman reminds you that the Republican Party really does want to take away Social Security and Medicare, even as our closest friends and allies...

My Garmin watch thinks I've had a relaxing day, with an average stress level of 21 (out of 100). My four-week average is 32, so this counts as a low-stress day in the Garmin universe. At least, today was nothing like 13 March 2020, when the world ended. Hard to believe that was four years ago. So when I go to the polls on November 5th, and I ask myself, "Am I better off than 4 years ago?", I have a pretty easy answer. I spent most of today either in meetings or having an interesting (i.e., not boring)...

The top story this hour, which should surprise no one who can read a poll, is that US Senator Krysten Sinema (?-AZ), who pissed off every Democrat in Congress over her only term in the Senate, has decided not to run again. Since the Democratic Party had already fielded a candidate against her, this makes her completely irrelevant, instead of just mostly irrelevant. The November election will pit Republican Kari Lake against Democrat Ruben Gallego. Meanwhile: Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling compiled all of the...

Inner Drive Technology's new computer arrived two days early, so there was a flurry of activity around lunchtime that postponed Cassie's mid-day walk. We just got back from that...but now I've got to do my real job while the new computer installs tons of software. As someone who paid $200 for four 1-megabyte SIMMs back in the day, I'm absolutely astounded at the tiny 4-terabyte SSD that I snapped into the new machine, and which cost $260. OK, back to work. Friday I'll have a retrospective on Inner Drive...

The computer I'm using to write this post turns 8 years old on April 6th. It has served me well, living through thousands of Daily Parker posts, two house moves, terabytes of photographs, and only one blown hard drive. So I have finally broken down and ordered a new one: a Dell Precision 3460 that will sit on my desk instead of under it, and will run Windows 11 with TPM 2.0 instead of warning me that it doesn't have the right hardware to get the latest OS. The new computer will have an 13th Gen Intel...

Anyone who has read The Daily Parker knows I desperately hope the US and Canada get over their suburban growth pattern psychopathy sometime before I die. Any actuarial table you consult will suggest the declining likelihood of that happening. Still, a guy can dream. (Or move to Continental Europe, I suppose.) Thus my interest in these two stories today. First, from the New York Times, a report about the repeated failures of self-driving cars to operate safely in urban environments: In San Francisco...

Sadly, my doctor did not tell me to try to have fun no matter what I do, though we did have a brief conversation about which Bourbons we both like. Nope, he just said I'm perfectly healthy: I exercise enough, I eat right, I don't drink too much, my vital signs are perfect, and I get enough sleep. Doctor visits should be like software releases: boring. If only that were true elsewhere: Israel has given the 1.1 million residents of Gaza City until tonight to evacuate to the southern part of the territory...

House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) lost the first procedural vote to prevent a second vote aimed at kicking him out of the Speaker's chair, which will probably result in him getting re-elected in a few days. The Republicans in Congress simply have no one else who can get 218 votes for Speaker. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) would get 214, but no Republican would ever vote for him. And my party's caucus have absolutely no interest in helping the Romper Room side of the aisle get its own house in order. Fun...

It never stops, does it? And yet 100 years from now no one will remember 99% of this: A group of psychiatrists warned a Yale audience that the XPOTUS has a "dangerous mental illness" and should never get near political office again. Faced with this obvious truth, 59% of Republicans said they'd vote for him in 2024. Timothy Noah looks at the average age of the likely nominees for president next year (79) and the average age of the US Senate (60-something) and concludes our country needs a laxative....

My 3+-year-old Garmin Venu 2 Plus has about 40 hours of battery life and doesn't have a host of features that Garmin has developed since I got it. So, voilà, a Garmin Venu 3 appeared yesterday: I'm still testing it out, but so far it's demonstrably better than the 2 Plus. For one thing, it came out of the box last night at 80% battery, and 20 hours later it's at...70%. And overnight, it analyzed a lot more about my sleep than the older watch ever could. Possibly next I will get a Fenix. I understand...

That's just one of the absurdities that I encountered over the course of the last 24 hours: A prankster put up an official-looking sign declaring Loyola Beach on the north side of Chicago clothing-optional. Unfortunately no one was fooled. For the 15th or 20th time since its founding, critics accuse the US Navy of adapting too slowly to emerging risks in order to preserve tradition and Mississippi jobs. (Really, this comes up about every 20 years.) Of course, it doesn't help that we currently have no...

My home office sits at the top of my house as a loft over the floor below. I think it could not have a more effective design for trapping hot air. (Fortunately I can let a lot of that out through this blog.) This afternoon the temperature outside Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters didn't quite make 25°C, and it's back down to 23°C with a nice breeze coming through the window. Wednesday and Thursday, though, the forecast predicts 36°C with heat indices up to 43°C. Whee. (It gets a lot better...

Writing for The New Yorker, Inkoo Kang summarizes why the film industry seems in precipitous decline lately: To survey the film and television industry today is to witness multiple existential crises. Many of them point to a larger trend: of Hollywood divesting from its own future, making dodgy decisions in the short term that whittle down its chances of long-term survival. Corporations are no strangers to fiscal myopia, but the ways in which the studios are currently squeezing out...

I learned on this trip that the German word for the small computer you carry everywhere is "Handy." That got me thinking. In the US we call it a "cell phone." Most of the rest of the Anglosphere calls it a "mobile." Same in Czech ("mobilní telefon"), French ("téléphone mobile"), Spanish ("teléfono móvil") and most other European languages. I find this interesting because in most parts of Europe, the name describes what the thing is. In German, it describes how you use it. But in the US, we still use a...

Yah, my old phone ist kaput. It works fine, if you can guess the contents of the bottom 40% of the screen. Right now it's transferring all its contents to my new phone, after which I'll start going through all my MFA settings, email, sounds, pictures, etc. I really would rather be doing something else. At least this didn't happen while I was traveling.

Often when I think about Elon Musk, Spike Jones' 1942 hit "Der Feuhrer's Face" comes to mind. Substack, whose links Musk recently banned from Twitter, brings us A.R. Moxon's similar thoughts: If you were the world’s smartest man, after all, you’d have turned your apartheid inheritance into the world’s largest fortune, and since you haven’t done that, you aren’t the world’s smartest man. Why, you might not even be a man, the definition of which is something the world’s smartest man seems to have some...

The Lebanese Government has capitulated after the massive outcry and international ridicule that followed their asinine decision to postpone daylight saving time on two days' notice: ميقاتي: قررت دعوة مجلس الوزراء لعرض ما سبق وكان النقاش هادئاً وتقرر اعتماد التوقيت الصيفي ابتداءً من ليل الأربعاء - الخميس.. لمتابعة البث المباشر:https://t.co/ZPB5WFwPTA — Al Jadeed News (@ALJADEEDNEWS) March 27, 2023 Translation: Mikati: I decided to invite the Council of Ministers to present the above. The discussion was...

Lebanon has one of the most chaotic political systems in the world. The previous government presided over a massive ammonium nitrate explosion they could have prevented had any one person in government taken responsibility for removing a derelict Russian freighter. Once again, the Lebanese government has displayed head-shaking incompetence, this time on what seems like a minor matter but could lead to more religious unrest as hot weather combines with people not eating or drinking water during the day....

At my day job, we just ended our 80th sprint on the project, with a lot of small but useful features that will make our side of the app easier to maintain. I like productive days like this. I even voted! And now I will rest on my laurels for a bit and read these stories: If you don't worry that the entire US Supreme Court has the technical expertise of your 99-year-old great uncle, perhaps you should? Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explains how giving economic aid to Ukraine benefits the West. In part...

In other news: Greg Hinz goes over the upcoming Chicago mayoral election. Kansas Republicans have not given up their fight against the state constitution as they try to ban abortions there against the will of the majority of voters. The US Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing today into the monopolistic behavior of organized crime syndicate concert promoter Live Nation and its accomplice, Ticketmaster. The Long Island Railroad begins service to Grand Central Station tomorrow, bringing commuters...

The Arctic air mass has arrived: We didn't actually get that much snow, though: On her evening walk last night, Cassie wanted to run around in the snow in circles for a bit, so I let her. But even with her double coat, after 4 minutes she was shivering, so we had to go in. She will not enjoy today at all. One other thing of note. I got myself one of the coolest and geekiest toys I could ever have imagined: That shows the location of every CTA train running right now. I might have to get one for London...

What a delight to wake up for the second day in a row and see the sun. After 13 consecutive days of blah, even the -11°C cold that encouraged Cassie and me to get her to day care at a trot didn't bother me too much. Unfortunately, the weather forecast says a blizzard will (probably) hit us next weekend, so I guess I'll have time to read all of these stories sitting on the couch with my dog: The House Select Committee on the January 6th Insurrection referred the XPOTUS to the Justice Department on four...

I can't quite draw a line between all of these stories, but it feels like I should: Elon Musk suspended several top journalist's Twitter accounts last night while ranting about nonsense "assassination coordinates," making the money-losing media service less relevant by the day. The XPOTUS made a "major announcement" about...a hilariously pathetic NFT project that lost value within minutes of its release. Mazars—the only firm sketchy enough to do the XPOTUS's taxes—decided crypto firm Binance was just...

Theodore Schleifer examines the intellectual and ethical upbringing of Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old indicted yesterday for perpetrating one of the biggest frauds in history: Of all the potentially unanswerable riddles underpinning the Sam Bankman-Fried saga—why did Sequoia invest in a mop-topped kid who played video games during a diligence call; were Alameda and FTX ever really separate?—perhaps the most vexing is how the mastermind of this whole legal and ethical imbroglio was the offspring of...

Crain's reported this morning that a company I used to work for has laid off 180 workers, about 10% of its workforce. I hope none of the people I'm still friends with was affected. Also unfortunate is the URL that Crain's content server generated, which makes the story seem much more complicated than the news would otherwise suggest: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/technology/west-monroe-lays-180-workers I really hope that (a) none of my friends had that happen to them, and (b) some prankster gamed the...

Derp. Yesterday was the 30th birthday of the SMS, too. Also, I came across a nifty live CTA tracker, so I now know where part of my bonus is going. I feel seen! (They have a bunch of other live trackers, including one for the Tube. Kewl.)

I mean, why? Just why? The XPOTUS, as predicted, announced his run for the 2024 election, despite looking like a total loser in the 2022 election. But narcissists gonna narcise. The Illinois Worker Rights Amendment passed, and will now become part of the state constitution. I think this will have a bunch of unintended consequences not beneficial to workers, so I voted against it. We're stuck with it now. Boomer Kathleen Parker spends her column today tut-tutting Boomers for not understanding Millennial...

One of Inner Drive Technology's old laptops—actually, the most recently purchased—can be yours along with a few accessories for only $300: That's a Dell E6440 laptop with 12 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7 2.4 GHz processor. It has a 97 W/h battery, and I'm including a docking station, 130 W power supply, and a DVI cable to connect the docking station with a monitor. It does not have a hard drive or software. (I originally had a 512 GB SSD. It'll take a standard 3½-inch laptop drive.) But hey, $300? I've...

I always find it interesting when a literary magazine takes on technology. In that spirit, the New Yorker does its best to explain the Network Time Protocol: Today, we take global time synchronization for granted. It is critical to the Internet, and therefore to civilization. Vital systems—power grids, financial markets, telecommunications networks—rely on it to keep records and sort cause from effect. N.T.P. works in partnership with satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System (G.P.S.)...

So I have queued up stuff to read later: How can anyone believe the Republican Party's "freedom" rhetoric in light of their current behavior? Millions of Canadians have yet to regain Internet and telecoms services after monopsony telecom provider Rogers suffered a catastrophic outage yesterday. Speaking of Canada, the Court of Appeal for Ontario heard three weeks of testimony about the struggling Ottawa Light Rail project, one of a slew of Canadian transport projects that hasn't gone as planned....

Chicago's official temperature at O'Hare hit 35°C about two hours ago, tying the record high temperature set in 1994. Currently it's pushing 36°C with another hour of warming likely before it finally cools down overnight. After another 32°C day tomorrow, the forecast Friday looks perfect. While we bake by the lake today, a lot has gone down elsewhere: The Federal Reserve raised its target interest rate range 75 basis points to 1.50–1.75%, the largest single-day increase since 1994 and the highest rate...

Yesterday I had a full work day plus a three-hour rehearsal for our performance of Stacy Garrop's Terra Nostra on Monday night. (Tickets still available!) Also, yesterday, the House began its public hearings about the failed insurrection on 6 January 2021. Also, yesterday was Thursday, and I could never get the hang of Thursdays. Walter Shapiro believes the January 6th committee might "have the goods." Slate's Dan Kois describes the efforts of L.A.'s Crosswalk Collective and the UK's Tyre Extinguishers...

After four nights, five puddles, four solid gifts, and so much barking that the neighbors down the block left a note on my door, Sophie finally went home this afternoon. I also worked until 11:30 last night, but that had nothing to do with her. It did cause a backup in my reading, though: Reports out of the Supreme Court say the Justices have gotten testy with each other after last month's leak of Samuel Alito's (R) draft opinion allowing states to kill pregnant women with impunity. This has...

It's mid-July today, at least until around 8pm, when late April should return. The Tribune reported this morning that our spring has had nearly three times the rain as last spring, but actually hasn't gotten much wetter than normal. Meanwhile: Millennial writer Marisa Kabas boggles at George W Bush's volte-face on the Iraq war this week. Josh Marshall shakes his head at the Republican Party's acceptance of a particular nasty and racist theory of immigration. Andrew Sullivan says this is because white...

A couple more resources about "web3" (cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, etc) crossed my inbox this week. Even before going through these stories and essays, the only way I can understand the persistence of the fantastic thinking that drives all this stuff is that the people most engaged with it turn out to be the same people who believe all kinds of other fantasies and wish-fulfillment stories. Case in point: the extreme right-wing protestors up in Canada have received almost all of their funding from...

One hundred years ago today, President Warren Harding installed a "Radio Phone" in his White House office. As the Tribune reported, "Navy radio experts commenced work to-day installing the latest scientific means of communication." Flash forward to now: Margaret Talbot argues that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom nobody ever elected to public office, is playing a long game to bring her right-wing Catholic ideology into the mainstream—or, at least, to enshrine it in the law. Times columnist Margaret...

Yes, today is the second anniversary of the first confirmed Covid-19 case popping up in Washington State. But that's not what this post is about. No, instead, I want to highlight two articles about why airlines really do not like 5G mobile networks—at least, not the way the US implemented them: “TO BE BLUNT,” reads a statement from ten U.S. airline executives, “the nation’s commerce will grind to a halt.” That was in a letter sent to the White House, the FAA and the FCC. “Unless our major hubs are...

I swear, the local poké place used three shots of chili oil instead of one today. Whew. (Not that I'm complaining, of course.) While my mouth slowly incinerates, I'm reading these: University of Baltimore School of Law professor Kimberly Wehle warns that the legal theories the Republicans on the Supreme Court suggested this week could roll back a lot more than just abortion rights. Also in The Atlantic, actor Joshua Malina wonders why anyone would hire raging anti-Semite Mel Gibson. Daniel Strauss asks...

About that new phone, I have to say, I am very impressed with T-Mobile's new 5G network: Also note that temperature bug in the upper-left corner. Yes, it was 26°C yesterday afternoon in Chicago. For comparison, October 10th has a normal high temperature of 18.2°C. June 7th has a normal high of 26°C. I hope autumn actually starts sometime this month.

After 2½ years and one unfortunate crunching sound last week, I've finally gotten a new phone. I decided to go with the Samsung Galaxy S21. So far, I like it, though with any new hardware you also get new software. Some of the basic apps work differently. Switching phones got really easy in the past couple of years, though. The only dicey part came when I had to transfer all my multifactor codes over. And I have to keep my old phone handy for a while in case I missed one. Now my eyes hurt from squinting...

As a follower of and contributor to the Time Zone mailing list, I have some understanding of how time zones work. I also understand how the official Time Zone Database (TZDB) works, and how changes to the list propagate out to things like, say, your cell phone. Most mobile phone operators need at least a few weeks, preferably a few months, to ensure that changes to the TZDB get tested and pushed out to everyone's phones. If only the government of Samoa knew anything at all about this process: The sudden...

I have a Roomba. I have a dog. When these two things live in the same house, every dog-and-Roomba owner has the same anxiety: will they interact in such a way that will require a messy cleanup? iRobot, who manufacture Roombas, have a new model advertised (only $850!) to reduce this anxiety considerably. I do not have this new model. I have an older model. And yesterday, anxiety turned to horror. Fortunately (depending on how you look at it), Cassie's accident must have happened at least 12 hours before...

Today is the 40th birthday of the IBM 5150—better known as the IBM PC: It wasn't that long before the August 1981 debut of the IBM PC that an IBM computer often cost as much as $9 million and required an air-conditioned quarter-acre of space and 60 people to run and keep it loaded with instructions. The IBM PC changed all that. It was a very small machine that could not only process information faster than those ponderous mainframes of the 1960s but also hook up to the home TV set, process text and...

If all goes as planned, in about half an hour a Comcast technician will make a change to my service here at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters that will, in turn, result in Cassie experiencing some anxiety. I don't want to cause doggy angina, but if Comcast moves my primary cable connection from the room it's in now to the room I want it in, then I'm going to spend the subsequent two or three hours moving furniture. Updates and art as conditions warrant.

The deployment I concluded yesterday that involved recreating production assets in an entirely new Azure subscription turned out much more boring (read: successful) than anticipated. That still didn't stop me from working until 6pm, but by that point everything except some older demo data worked just fine. That left a bit of a backup of stuff to read, which I may try to get through at lunch today: Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (aka "Coach K"), the winningest basketball coach in NCAA...

The author (most notably of the generation-defining novel Generation X) wants Canada to follow the science and quit screwing over my generation: People my age and younger got the leftovers – which is fine. AstraZeneca is a terrific vaccine, people! But people my age are used to leftovers. It’s the curse of being Gen X, and it’s not very often I ever discuss Gen X qua Gen X, but I think it’s called for here. For a generation that has grown up knowing their pensions will magically vanish the moment they...

Today is not only the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, it's also the 84th anniversary of the Nazi bombing of Guernica. Happy days, happy days. In today's news, however: The European Union has announced it will allow fully-vaccinated travelers from the US to visit starting this summer. Chuck Geschke, who invented the portable document format (PDF) that we all know and love, died last week. The FAA revoked all of the certificates held by a 79-year-old flight instructor and aviation...

Facebook reminded me this morning that 10 years ago today I got the first digital camera I've ever owned whose photo quality approached that of the film cameras I had growing up. My new Canon 7D replaced my 5-year-old Canon 20D, and between the two I took over 32,700 photos in just over nine years. In May 2015 I upgraded to the Canon 7D mark II, the first digital camera I've owned whose capabilities exceeded my 1980s and 1990s film cameras. I've updated the chart showing all the photo-capable devices...

I'm looking out my office window at the light dusting of snow on my neighbors' cars, wondering how (or whether) I'll get my 10,000 steps today. My commute to work got me 3,000 each way, making the job tons easier before lockdown. Easier psychologically, anyway; nothing prevents me from going for a 45-minute walk except that I really don't want to. Instead of a lunchtime hike, I'll probably just read these articles: Palm Beach, Fla., has notified the STBXPOTUS that because he agreed in the 1990s not to...

The Electoral College has voted, and with no surprises, as of 16:37 Chicago time Joe Biden has received the requisite 270 votes to be elected President of the United States. And yet, we had a few surprises today: The loathsome STBXPOTUS fired his almost-equally-loathsome Attorney General, Bill Barr, which could not have happened to a better couple. The US passed 300,000 Covid-19 deaths today. Probably 250,000 could have been prevented. Security guru Bruce Schneier advocates for regulation of persuasion...

I stumbled upon this commercial from the 1980s that ran in the UK: Definitely John Cleese. (And what the hell has 4.1 megabytes?)

I kind of got into the flow today, so things to read later just piled up: Illinois found 1,532 new known Covid-19 cases as of today, with four downstate, bright-red counties now getting warned that their numbers are rising quickly. The GOP failures on containing this disease keep mounting. Greg Sargent points out that "Trump's authoritarian crackdown is so bad that even some in the GOP are blasting it." Maeve Higgins finds that her American passport just doesn't work anymore. Garmin's entire production...

I wore both my old Fitbit Ionic and new Garmin Venu for about 42 hours straight. Yesterday they overlapped for the entire day. And they came in with similar, but not quite the same, numbers. I thought that my Fitbit would record fewer steps overall, because it recorded about 450 (about 7%) fewer on my walk yesterday. For the whole day, though, the Fitbit counted 14,190 to the Garmin's 13,250—7% more. But I wore the Fitbit on my right (dominant) wrist, so it may have just had more activity in general. In...

Yeah, the Garmin wins, hands down. After realizing that my first head-to-head test pitted an Ionic whose GPS was failing against a treadmill exercise, I went out for a quick loop around the block with both trackers correctly set to "Walk." The Garmin found a GPS signal in about 20 seconds. The Fitbit never did. After the walk, the Garmin produced this delightful map, complete with weather report and options for different maps: Right on the activity view, I've got a gear icon with these options: Fitbit...

My day kept getting longer as it went on in a way that people living through the pandemic will understand. So I didn't have time to read any of these yesterday: The Chicago Tribune produced six charts that explain the pandemic's economic effects. Rolling Stone identifies the four men most responsible for our current calamity. The Washington Posts lists six takeaways from Dr Anthony Fauci's testimony before the Senate today. Consumer Reports helps you avoid Zoombombing. The New Yorker describes the...

Welcome to day 31 of the Illinois shelter-in-place regime, which also turns out to be day 36 of my own working-from-home regime (or day 43 if you ignore that I had to go into the office on March 16th). So what's new? Oy: Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele says America "has been abused by this president." George Packer says "we are living in a failed state." Josh Marshall calls Covid-19 "an extinction-level event for news." The Trump International Hotel has asked its landlord, the...

More than 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance last week (including 178,000 in Illinois), following the 3.3 million who filed the week before. This graphic from The Washington Post puts these numbers in perspective: Hotel occupancy has crashed as well, down 67% year-over-year, with industry analysts predicting the worst year on record. In other pandemic news: Testing in Illinois shows about 20% of the 34,000 people tested have come up positive for SARS-CoV-2, which is about the same as...

I had a lot going on at work today, so all I have left is a lame-ass "read these later" post: Cranky Flier wonders why Delta is Tweeting to individual passengers. James Fallows looks at Bob Garfield's latest book. Bruce Schneier says China isn't the problem in crappy 5G security. And John Scalzi has a new book coming out, which he'll sign if you pre-order. I'd say "back to the mines," but I believe I have a date with Kristen Bell presently.

First event: Last night around 7pm, my main data drive seized up after storing my stuff for a bit less than 4 years. Let me tell you how much fun Micro Center is at 9pm two days before Christmas. After 12 hours it looks like it's about 75% restored from backup, and I didn't suffer any data loss. Second event: Just look at this lovely, peaceful scene: That's the cemetery in my neighborhood a few minutes ago. And that's what we call "dense fog," with about 200 m visibility and what they call...

My 5-year-old Microsoft Surface, which I use at work to keep personal and client concerns physically separated, has died. I thought it was the power supply, but it seems there is something even more wrong with it. Otherwise I would have posted earlier. This means I have to make an expensive field trip tonight. Regular posting should resume tomorrow.

The Guardian gave a group of London teenagers five technologies from the distant past to see if they could use them: 1 Phone home… with a rotary dial telephone They recognise the old phone from movies (and from watching The Sweeney in media studies – I want to go to Mr Rushworth’s media studies classes). Do you have to call the operator first, wonders Jannugan? Is the operator even still there? But obviously they don’t know their numbers, although Jannugan knows his mother’s ends in 202. Hang on, he...

Via Bruce Schneier, Irish writer Maria Farrell explains how a feminist perspective leads to some creepy realizations about smart phones: Here are some of the ways our unequal relationship with our smartphones is like an abusive relationship: They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact – ‘user engagement’ – that keeps their hold on us strong. Working with social media, they insidiously curate our social lives, manipulating us emotionally with dark patterns to...

I mentioned earlier today Aaron Gordon's evisceration of Uber's and Lyft's business model. It's worth a deeper look: The Uber and Lyft pretzel logic is as follows: Drivers are their customers and also independent contractors but cannot negotiate prices or any terms of their contract. Uber and Lyft are platforms, not transportation companies. Drivers unionizing would be price-fixing, but Uber and Lyft can price-fix all they want. Riders pay the driver for their transportation, not the platforms, even...

It's the last weekday of summer. Chicago's weather today is perfect; the office is quiet ahead of the three-day weekend; and I'm cooking with gas on my current project. None of that leaves a lot of time to read any of these: Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot gave her first State of the City address last night, complete with her revealing that the city has a $858 million shortfall next year. Aaron Gordon says that, essentially, Uber and Lyft are parasites, so it's no wonder they oppose California's efforts to...

Today's Daily Parker flash of inspiration will memorialize my update to an obsolete proverb. Instead of "a stopped watch is right twice a day," substitute "a dead mobile gets no bad texts." On second thought, they're not orthogonal. But in my defense, I was thinking of the president at the time.

Alexis Madrigal takes a look at criticisms of the World Wide Web from when it was new: Thirty years ago this week, the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN, the European scientific-research center. Suffice it to say, the idea took off. The web made it easy for everyday people to create and link together pages on what was then a small network. The programming language was simple, and publishing was as painless as uploading something to a server with a few tags in it. Just...

I had these lined up to read at lunchtime: Bruce Schneier explains how blockchain shifts, but does not eliminate, trust; and Bitcoin isn't useful. A lined article from 2017 goes further and says Bitcoin is an environmental catastrophe. A new interactive project shows how the summers in your city will feel in 2080. (Chicago's then will feel like Kansas City's today.) It turns out, if you're liberal, your brain reacts much differently to repulsive pictures than your conservative friends' brains. I'm ready...

Via Bruce Schneier, a report on how third-party Amazon sellers use Amazon's own policies to attack their rivals: When you buy something on Amazon, the odds are, you aren’t buying it from Amazon at all. Plansky is one of 6 million sellers on Amazon Marketplace, the company’s third-party platform. They are largely hidden from customers, but behind any item for sale, there could be dozens of sellers, all competing for your click. This year, Marketplace sales were almost double those of Amazon retail...

Sometimes it's fun going through some stock shots and giving them another go with Lightroom. Here's a digital photo from July 2004 that needed minimal tweaking: This one needed lots of help, and unfortunately it probably needs another scan. I haven't checked the slide in a while; I hope the problems are with the scan (from 2009) and not with the slide (from 1984): By the way, I took this photo here. Check out what that looks like today. Finally, a slide that came out OK, though again it seems the scan...

Worse than the president's unsecured iPhone are the obvious but undisclosed conflicts of interest in his family. Add the unelected, unconfirmed Jared Kushner on top and we've got serious problems: Senior adviser Jared Kushner was the one who pushed a Saudi-centric policy. One can easily see why. In the crown prince Kushner no doubt saw a kindred spirit — a young sophisticate living in his family’s shadow who had great potential to transform the region. He (Kushner) and the actual crown prince, MBS, were...

I finished unpacking from my move yesterday, with only a few chores left (like finding a home for all the little things in my office that have taken over my desk). Shortly after finishing, I took out the trash, and started to wind down. Then I noticed my house getting warmer. The previous owners had an Ecobee thermostat, which, because I'm on the Google ecosystem, I will replace with the Nest thermostat that should arrive today. I noticed that this Ecobee had a very strange reading: 63°F. And falling....

I'm about to go home to take Parker to the vet (he's getting two stitches out after she removed a fatty cyst from his eyelid), and then to resume panicking packing. I might have time to read these three articles: Lelslie Stahl interviewed President Trump for last night's 60 Minutes broadcast, with predictable results. The Smithsonian explains how Chicago grew from 350 people in 1833 to 1.7 million 70 years later. The Nielsen-Norman Group lays out how people develop technology myths, like how one study...

While trying to debug an ancient application that has been the undoing of just about everyone on my team, I've put these articles aside for later: Using the example of an automated process that sends out emails that your inbox subsequently deletes without any intervention on your part, Raymond Chen discusses Le Chatelier's Principle. Demonstrating that a stopped clock is correct twice a day, it turns out the Trump tax cuts have given a (temporary) boost to craft distilling. Whisky Advocate name-checks...

President Trump, after hearing a report on Fox News that Google search results on his name aren't totally flattering, now believes that Google is part of the conspiracy against him: The Trump administration is “taking a look” at whether Google and its search engine should be regulated by the government, Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s economic adviser, said Tuesday outside the White House. “We’ll let you know,” Kudlow said. “We’re taking a look at it.” The announcement puts the search giant squarely in...

Shocking, I know, but politicians seem comically unaware of how technology works: We’re now a dozen years past the infamous “series of tubes” speech. Yet our political leaders still don’t seem to have learned much about those “tubes” or the cyber-sewage that frequently flows through them. Consider a recent, noncomprehensive history. These days Trump lashes out at private companies that suspend nut jobs and neo-Nazis, decrying that “censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police.”...

Economic historian Louis Hyman describes how the choices people in government and business make actually lead technological change, for some pretty obvious reasons: The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes. This insight is crucial for anyone concerned about the insecurity and...

I didn't have a chance to read these yesterday: Boxer Joe Louis had a home in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. As of yesterday, none of the 4 major U.S. air carriers has propeller-driven airplanes in service anymore. Juggalo makeup can reliably defeat facial recognition software. Contra this article by Franklin Foer, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior really is annoying. Now I'm off to work. The heat wave of the last few days has finally broken!

Item the first: Bruce Schneier discusses how Russian censors have tried to shut down Telegram, an encrypted communications app: Russia has been trying to block Telegram since April, when a Moscow court banned it after the company refused to give Russian authorities access to user messages. Telegram, which is widely used in Russia, works on both iPhone and Android, and there are Windows and Mac desktop versions available. The app offers optional end-to-end encryption, meaning that all messages are...

The Associated Press has obtained the latest edition of the Chicago Crime Commission's "Gang Book." It shows the turfs claimed by 59 gangs, including many small areas formed as groups split off from other groups after top leaders go to jail. The book also highlights how social media make gang disputes worse: Gangs put a premium on retaliation for perceived disrespect. In the past, insults rarely spread beyond the block. Now, they’re broadcast via social media to thousands in an instant. “If you’re...

Alexis Madrigal, closer to an X-er than a Millennial, rhapsodizes on how the telephone ring, once imperative, now repulses: Before ubiquitous caller ID or even *69 (which allowed you to call back the last person who’d called you), if you didn’t get to the phone in time, that was that. You’d have to wait until they called back. And what if the person calling had something really important to tell you or ask you? Missing a phone call was awful. Hurry! Not picking up the phone would be like someone...

Via Bruce Schneier, interesting research into how to use mouse movements to detect lying: Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have long noted a big "tell" in human behavior: Crafting a lie takes more mental work than telling the truth. So one way to spot lies is to check someone's reaction time. If they're telling a lie, they'll respond fractionally more slowly than if they're telling the truth. Similarly, if you're asked to elaborate on your lie, you have to think for a second to generate new...

Chicago Public Media's Curious City blog examined the city's plan to replace 270,000 sodium vapor streetlights with LEDs in the next three years: [C]ity officials are undertaking an ambitious four-year plan to use LEDs for about 80 percent of the city’s streetlights. They hope this plan will save the cash-strapped city $100 million over a decade and improve public safety. This summer, the city will charge forward with the next phase of the plan, which will ultimately replace 270,000 lights around the...

Richard Florida demonstrates how Amazon's HQ2 competition was rigged: A detailed analysis undertaken by Patrick Adler, my colleague at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, and Adam Singer, a graduate student at the university’s Rotman and Munk schools, took a look at how all 238 HQ2 applicant cities and the 20 finalists lined up on Amazon’s RFP criteria. While it can be difficult to measure whether a given city adheres to each criterion, their analysis shows that many of the finalist...

Amazon's bidding process for its second headquarters (HQ2) has given the company a bonanza of information about what 238 cities are willing to give up in order to get a piece of the action, and thus what levers Amazon can pull to get public money for its private gain. Not to mention, the applications gave the company millions of dollars worth of marketing data: Amazon asked every city and state applying for its second headquarters for details about local resources, like available talent and transit...

The Cloud—known to us in the industry as "someone else's computers"—takes a lot of power to run. Which is why our local electric utility, ComEd, is beefing up their service to the O'Hare area: Last month, it broke ground to expand its substation in northwest suburban Itasca to increase its output by about 180 megawatts by the end of 2019. Large data centers with multiple users often consume about 24 megawatts. For scale, 1 megawatt is enough to supply as many as 285 homes. ComEd also has acquired land...

Following up on my post this morning, here is the New Republic's analysis of Russian cyber-warfare tactics and strategy: Western democracies are uniquely susceptible to this form of attack. The key insight of autocratic governments like Russia’s may be the recognition that democracies have a weakness: They are open societies committed to free speech and expression. That characteristic is and continues to be exploited. What’s more, other countries are already aping these techniques in their own...

That the President hasn't condemned Russian interference in American politics demonstrates how unfit for office he and his associates are. Because Russian interference has real consequences. Via TPM, the Russians have had extraordinary success dividing Americans through social media: Last year, two Russian Facebook pages organized dueling rallies in front of the Islamic Da’wah Center of Houston, according to information released by U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican. Heart of Texas, a...

Specifically today, I'm talking about chipped credit cards, which the rest of the world has had for years longer than we have, and they're a lot less annoying. Bloomberg's Ben Steverman explains why: It's an awkward and irritating experience, and payment companies are aware of the problems. "Some places, it's seamless and beautiful," said Robert Martin, North American vice president of security solutions at Ingenico Group, the second-largest maker of payment terminals in the U.S. "Other places, not so...

Real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield has published a list of the top-25 tech cities in the U.S. It turns out, we're not Silicon Valley: The report’s authors analyzed data from a variety of sources to measure factors such as universities, capital, talent and high-growth companies. The authors evaluated the cities on the potential for tech to affect the commercial real estate business, they wrote in the report. Chicago’s overall rank, No. 16, placed it behind Portland and New York and ahead of Atlanta and...

Paul Allen has funded development of an airplane designed to launch satellites into space. It's...huge: Called Stratolaunch, the plane has some impressive stats: a wingspan of 117 m, or longer than a football field, and a height of 15.24 m. Unfueled, it weighs 226,800 kg. But it can carry 113,400 kg of fuel, and its total weight can reach 590 tonnes. But, really ... how big is it? It’s so big that it has 28 wheels and six 747 jet engines. It’s so big that it has 96 km of wire coursing through it. It’s...

Via my company's Slack #general channel, San Francisco cartographer Justin O'Beirne has analyzed the changes Google has made to its Maps feature over the past year, while Apple Maps has stagnated: So it seems that Apple is updating its map more frequently than Google. But when we look closer, this doesn’t seem to be what’s happening. For instance, near the park’s southeast corner, there’s a group of three auto service-related businesses: Domport Auto Body Service, Fell Street Auto Service, and...

Via security expert Bruce Schneier, the AP reports that police in central Connecticut obtained an arrest warrant partially on the timing of a murder victim's Fitbit step data: Connecticut State Police allege [Richard] Dabate killed 39-year-old Connie Dabate at their Ellington home two days before Christmas in 2015, while their two young sons were in school. Dabate told investigators a masked man shot his wife and tied him up before he burned the intruder with a torch. Authorities responded to a burglary...

A little busy today, so I'm putting these down for later consumption: Via the Illinois State Climatologist, NOAA has released its state climate summaries for the country. Brian Beutler worries about President Trump's ego driving life-or-death decisions. Hollywood Reporter has some new photos from Game of Thrones' upcoming 7th season. Space junk and thousands of tiny, new satellites might make low orbit inaccessible in 50 years. Why are Germany's nude beaches (and parks and lawns and basically every part...

Amazon is opening an actual brick-and-mortar bookstore right by the Southport Brown Line stop: On Tuesday, it will open the doors of a brick-and-mortar store in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood, giving customers a chance to test the e-commerce giant's take on offline shopping. It's just one 6,000-square-foot neighborhood bookstore. But it's also one of Amazon's first experiments with live customer service and cash registers, and a sign that one of the retail industry's biggest disrupters may not be...

First, two unidentified have discovered malware on 38 Android devices that could only have been installed after manufacture but before distribution to retailers: An assortment of malware was found on 38 Android devices belonging to two unidentified companies. This is according to a blog post published Friday by Check Point Software Technologies, maker of a mobile threat prevention app. The malicious apps weren't part of the official ROM firmware supplied by the phone manufacturers but were added later...

Jeet Heer says no: [T]he very nature of our modern world, and the United States’ supremacy, makes it impossible to dismiss an American president’s word. The U.S. is a nuclear-armed superpower, with a commander in chief who presides over the world’s largest economy. Millions of people all over the world pay careful attention to what a president says, making their own plans based on the words coming out of the White House—and they will continue to do so whether or not the press corps and political class...

The Finnish manufacturer is bringing back their 2000-era 3310: Given the rising angst of a society run by technology, Nokia might have picked the perfect time to introduce an antidote to the smartphone. But even under today’s conditions, it is tempting to see the new Nokia 3310 merely as another example of retro nostalgia. Ha-ha, what if you could get a dumbphone instead? It would pair perfectly with a milk crate full of vinyl albums. But it’s also possible that the 3310 marks the start of a new period...

My new LG G5 is now a brick, so I'm back to my slightly-cracked G4. Yesterday, the phone got hot, stopped responding to inputs, and rebooted itself twice in three hours. That's usually the sign of a runaway app. So upon turning it back on, I manually rebooted it to clear running apps (it auto-loads apps that were running when it resets), and all seemed fine. Then sometime while I walked home from Wrigley it shut itself off completely and has not yet woken up. Fortunately T-Mobile was able to move my SIM...

The appeals court that is typically the last stop for regulatory disputes has ruled that the Internet is a utility: The court’s decision upholds the F.C.C. on the declaration of broadband as a utility, the most significant aspect of the rules. That has broad-reaching implications for web and telecommunications companies and signals a shift in the government’s view of broadband as a service that should be equally accessible to all Americans, rather than a luxury that does not need close government...

Canadian writers Pat Kelly, Peter Oldring, and Chris Kelly nail it:

Startup founder Tim Romeo decided to kill his startup right before they would have gotten a check for $500,000. Sounds crazy? No; he did the right thing: [S]omething was wrong. It seemed trivial at first, but it bothered me. Despite glowing praise, our users were only using ContractBeast to create a small percentage of their total new contracts. I spent the next two weeks visiting our beta users, looking over their shoulders as they worked, and listening to them explain how they planned on using the...

Senior Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen describes a feature in Windows 10 that is unusually useful: Windows 10 brings the Xbox Game DVR feature to the PC. The Game DVR feature lets you record yourself playing a video game, so you can share the recording with your friends. Suppose you have some program that you want to record, say for a bug report or for an instructional video. Just pretend it's a game: Put focus on the program you want to record. Press Win+G to open the Game Bar. If it asks whether you...

Scott Hanselman suggests that, rather than dividing the world into technologists and non-techies, the division is simply about curiosity: I took apart my toaster, my remote control, and a clock-radio telephone before I was 10. Didn't you? What's the difference between the people that take toasters apart and the folks that just want toast? At what point do kids or young adults stop asking "how does it work?" There's a great interview question I love to give. "When you type foo.com into a browser, what...

Apparently Comcast has upgraded my Internet service: Yeah, I can live with that.

Breaking from more than 60 years of tradition, on May 11th the National Weather Service will stop using ALL CAPS in its forecasts: The National Weather Service has proposed to use mixed-case letters several times since the 1990s, when widespread use of the Internet and email made teletype obsolete. In fact, in web speak, use of capital letters became synonymous with angry shouting. However, it took the next 20 years or so for users of Weather Service products to phase out the last of the old equipment...

Because no one has actually cleaned up a database of IP address geocodes, a Kansas farmer is getting blamed for all manner of bad behavior on the Internet: As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point...

Via Chicagoist, astronaut Tim Kopra snapped this from aboard the International Space Station earlier this week: The city's borders show up brilliantly because unlike most of the surrounding suburbs, Chicago uses sodium-vapor lamps, which glow yellow-orange. But that's changing (including right in my own alley): The Chicago Infrastructure Trust will replace the city's 348,500 outdoor lights with energy-efficient LED technology, according to a statement from City Hall. The Smart Lighting Project is aimed...

The new computer has arrived, and I am now setting it up. This used to be a total pain in the ass. Copy files, install from disks, copy more files, find passwords... And by "used to" I mean in 2012. Today my working files are all in OneDrive, my frequently-used, unimportant Web passwords* are in Chrome, and my apps are all in the cloud. This pretty much means the only things I have to do are (a) log into my Microsoft account, (b) download Chrome, and (c) copy a portable hard disk onto my local. So much...

This little box here contains 32 gigabytes of RAM, and cost me $1 per 162,842,362 bytes. As I mentioned Thursday, this is considerably more RAM for considerably less money than the RAM I bought in January 1993 to upgrade my 4 MB ZEOS computer to an 8 MB computer. Those 4 megabytes cost about the same as these 32 gigabytes in total. But back then, I got only 20,972 bytes per dollar. Put it another way: this RAM is approximately 8,000 times less expensive than the RAM I bought in 1993. It's also somewhere...

Reddit recently published their 2015 Transparency Report, in which they tell how many times they received official requests for user information. However, NSA letters often require that the companies receiving them keep the letters themselves secret. So how to let the world know you've received one? Kill a canary: At the bottom of its 2014 transparency report, the company wrote: "As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence...

This was originally published on 31 March 2016. You can see an updated version of the table in a post from 26 January 2024. In late March 2016, I ordered what may turn out to be the last desktop computer I'll ever buy. I think this may be true because (a) I've ordered a box that kicks proportionately more ass than any computer I've bought before; (b) each of my last three computers was in use for more than two years (though the one I bought in 2009 would probably have lived longer had I not dumped a...

For a big reason that I'll announce tomorrow afternoon, I've just ordered what may turn out to be the last desktop computer I'll ever buy. I think this may be true because (a) I've ordered a box that kicks proportionately more ass than any computer I've bought before; (b) each of my last three computers was in use for more than two years (though the one I bought in 2009 would probably have lived longer had I not dumped a bowl of chicken soup on it); and (c) each of the previous 2-year-old computers was...

Jeff Atwood uses a complaint about how computers have ruined chess forever to make an important point about security: What's not clear in this table [of exponentially decreasing dollars per gigaflop] is that after 2007, all the big advances in FLOPS came from gaming video cards designed for high speed real time 3D rendering, and as an incredibly beneficial side effect, they also turn out to be crazily fast at machine learning tasks. Let's consider a related case of highly parallel computation. How much...

Microsoft launched and then quickly shut down an AI customer service bot this week after the Internet taught it bad habits: The aim was to “experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding,” with Tay able to learn from her conversations and get progressively “smarter.” But Tay proved a smash hit with racists, trolls, and online troublemakers, who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide. Microsoft has now...

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump won their respective Illinois primary elections yesterday. And in other news: Turns out, a strong social safety net leads to lower mortality, and because poor, mostly-white areas in the U.S. voted theirs down to minuscule levels, poor, white people are not doing well. When you vote against your own party in a hot battle with the opposition governor, and the governor wins that battle, that's a career-limiting move. Illinois representative Ken Dunkin (D-Chicago) got...

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym yesterday ordered Apple, Inc., to bypass security on the iPhone 5c owned by the San Bernadino shooters. Apple said no: In his statement, [Apple CEO Tim] Cook called the court order an “unprecedented step” by the federal government. “We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand,” he wrote. “The F.B.I. may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would...

On Friday I mused about which new technology (or technologies) I should learn in the next few weeks. As if they're reading my mind (or blog) up in Redmond, just this morning Microsoft's Brady Gaster blogged about a little Raspberry Pi project he did: I broke out my Raspberry Pi and my Azure SDK 2.8.2-enabled Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition and worked up a quick-and-dirty application that can send sensor data to an API App running in Azure App Service. This post walks through the creation of this...

I'm debating what new area I should explore, assuming I have the time: SignalR, maybe by making the Weather Now home page auto-update? Python, maybe by putting together some scripts that use a new API I create for The Daily Parker? Bootstrap, maybe by overhauling the Inner Drive Technology corporate website? Raspberry Pi, maybe by making a cute little device that responds to a Weather Now API? I'm thinking about a few side projects, obviously. And this article on new "universal remote" apps in...

The European Commission yesterday announced they've reached a broad agreement with the United States to allow trans-Atlantic data transfers that respect European privacy laws: The EU-US Privacy Shield reflects the requirements set out by the European Court of Justice in its ruling on 6 October 2015, which declared the old Safe Harbour framework invalid. The new arrangement will provide stronger obligations on companies in the U.S. to protect the personal data of Europeans and stronger monitoring and...

President Obama and I have the same fitness tracker. His, however, has some customizations: What counts as must-have features for many people — high-definition cameras, powerful microphones, cloud-connected wireless radios and precise GPS location transmitters — are potential threats when the leader of the free world wants to carry them around. And so using the latest devices means more than merely ordering one on Amazon for delivery to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It means accepting the compromises...

The Economist peeks under the skirts of the top tech firms and finds what people in my field have known for a long, long time: However, a career as a software developer or engineer comes with no guarantee of job satisfaction. A survey last year of 5,000 such workers at both tech and non-tech firms, by TINYPulse, a specialist in monitoring employee satisfaction, found that many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated and otherwise discombobulated. Only 19% of tech employees said they were happy...

I've just spent a few minutes going through all my company's technology expenses to figure out which ones are subject to the completely daft rental tax that Chicago has extended to cover computing services. The City theorizes that rental tax is payable whenever you pay to use a piece of equipment that belongs to someone else for a period of time. This makes a lot of sense when you go to Hertz, but less when you use Microsoft Azure. My understanding of the tax and the City's might not be completely...

Last night, the GOP candidates for president debated technology a little, and they just had no idea what they were talking about—or they dissembled. Take your pick: It’s not exactly clear what Trump means by “closing areas where we are at war with somebody,” and we’re not exactly sure Trump knows what he means, either. Our best guess is that he’s saying it’s possible for the US to shut down Internet access in countries like Syria. That’s problematic, not only because it would shut off millions of...