The calendar says winter is coming but the temperature say not so soon.

Due to the lack of rain, the trees have been under much more stress this year, and therefore the fall colors are not as good. This is the best color in our condominium this year.

I’ve written before that I am using a new RSS app called Birchfeed because I really like its keyboard shortcuts in the web app. The developer continues adding new features, and today it added a fast way to clear out unread messages. It provides a visualization of the age of articles and an easy way to mark them as read.

The United States is in no way a Christian nation. The religion of the United States is capitalism and its deity is itself. Money is the idol.

We can’t have nice things in the United States because there will always be somebody who exploits them for their own gain. Spam has ruined email, phone calls (telemarketing) and now text messaging. The number of political text messages I am receiving is exhausting, so I have created a new mode on my Pixel 10 so that only messages and calls from my starred contacts come through.

Wouter Groeneveld aptly writes of the same frustration I have had in obtaining human support from Xfinity. My prediction is that soon we will be charged premium prices for human interactions, which will be on top of the processing fees we pay for nearly all electronic transactions. Imagine Xfinity providing a yearly subscription service, which they might even call Xfinity Prime, that provides a 1-800 number to call and to which I provide my member number for the privilege of waiting on hold for an hour to talk with a person.

Readwise Books

I have been a Readwise customer for several years and its Highlights and Reader apps/functions are critical to how I read and track what I read. This week Readwise launched their eBook platform, which is a combination of a book store and app for Android and iOS. In a blog post Readwise explains why they are getting in to eBooks and what is their strategy.

Read More →

The creek has run dry. This is Pebble Creek after about a month of no rain.

For some reason the Spotify media controls that appear with Android’s notifications and lock screen have become more persistent and thus more annoying to me for the last few weeks. I went into the phone settings, searched for media, found an option for Pin media player and turned that off. I understand the media player there when I am playing music, but it was constantly appearing even when nothing is playing and I found that annoying.

I wonder whether the iPad mini prices will come down at Christmas or next year?