Last year the Earth spacecraft OSIRIS-REX touched asteroid Bennu and collected rocks. As of last June the spacecraft was 328,000 miles away from Bennu on its return flight to Earth. She is due to deliver the asteroid sample to Earth on September 23, 2023.
When I compare the Pixel 6 to my Pixel 4a the differences in the camera really jump out. I confess that given the price and the features that if I were in the market for a new phone I would be buying the Pixel 6. BTW, I really like that Google provides a way to compare the current and new Pixel phones with the old Pixels, all the way back to the first Pixel. Wish they would include the Nexus phones for comparison. I wasn’t expecting to find the Pixel 6 so attractive.
My main beef with the Pixel 6 is that it is a tad too large. The largest phone I have carried is the Nexus 6P, which was 6.27 inches tall and a little over 3 inches wide, and while I got used to it I always felt it too large. When Google released the Pixel 2 I frankly couldn’t switch fast enough because it was 5.74 inches tall and a little skinnier at 2.74 inches wide. The Pixel 4a I now carry has the same physical size with a larger screen that I find perfect. Sadly, the Pixel 5a is now the smallest Google phone at 6.1 inches and the new Pixel 6 is at 6.2 inches. I have never carried a phone as large as the new Pixel 6 Pro that is 6.5 inches tall. I fear we may never see a sub 6 inch Pixel phone again, but at least the larger phones have larger batteries.
My first impression having watched the ending of the presentation is that Google has hit it out of the park with this release of Android 12 and the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. I’ve been running Android 12 for several weeks and I really like all of the UI improvements. The Pixel 6 and 6 Pro are priced very favorably and is going to put to test the question of whether a well designed Android phone can seriously compete with the iPhone. It looks like Google is all-in on marketing the Pixel 6. The question is, when one walks in to a Best Buy or a AT&T store which phone do people in those stores steer customers toward? Another question is going to be build quality. Google has suffered in the past with defective devices that leave bad impressions so they must step up their quality control game. Only time will tell.
Just clicked System Update on my Pixel 4, and an update is available to Download and install. I expect this to be the production update. It’s a 3.84 MB download because I already have the Android 12 release candidate, which was the final beta, installed. Update is in progress with optimizing apps, which is the longest part of the process.
Where have all the cicadas gone? Inline image support is not yet part of the Drummer integration with microblog. Changes are happening rapidly, just checked this site and I see that Manton must have made an update to include inline images. One difference in publishing is that Microblog doesn’t appear to have captions.
Ok, the Drummer publishing to micro.blog looks easy enough to set up, so I have gone ahead and done it. Success! We have a new post created, but what about edits? Very cool, I can even edit a post. I now see a way that Drummer is emerging as a bigger writing tool than I may have originally envisioned.
Manton hinted about an experiment of integration between Drummer and micro.blog, and he has posted a video about what they have.
Tufte for Micro.blog is a new theme for micro.blog sites. Of particular note is that it supports margin figures, which are what I have been calling the Scripting News image format. I wonder what the odds are for this working with my current theme?
I am happy to have the At A Glance widget back in operaton on my phone, but I am surprised that it doesn’t appear to be integrated with Material You. The wallpaper on my phone changes every day, and today’s picture has fog over clouds and the white text of the At A Glance widget makes it impossible to see. This is this first flaw that I’ve seen with Material You ever since I installed the Android 12 beta.
There have been some changes in a year. How my desk looked last year:
And how my desk looks now:
The biggest different, literally, has been the switch to a 32-inch, 4K monitor that I love. I also have a different USB-C dock.
The At a Glance widget is now functional again on my Pixel 4a after disappearing when I installed the last beta of Android 12. I wonder whether the release version of Android 12 will be pushed later this week? Perhaps we will find out during the Google Pixel event tomorrow.
I wonder why Apple did not announce that the new MacBook Pros will ship with MacOS Monterey? Perhaps that was due to the pre-recording of the event and uncertainty about whether Monterey would be ready.
The future is doomed by money and not just by what is paid to Manchin, though no doubt his leverage commands a sizable check.
Perhaps one of the most encouraging things for me is seeing people figure out how to get Drummer blogs working with HTTPS. That is a big improvement for usability.
Ready for the Michigan Tech Huskies hockey home opener. Let’s go Tech, beat Notre Dame!
I’ve created a public outline to share Drummer scripts. Nothing fancy, but a few useful items that improve quality of life in Drummer for me.
Note that with micro.blog, everything I post is cross-posted to Twitter. With Drummer I can select specific posts to cross-post to Twitter. At this point I am not sure if one way is significantly better than the other. What I really want is an application that acts for me like a switchboard where I can specific to which channels I want an item posted. I can post to micro.blog from eternal apps, but there is no API with Old School to enable the same. Those who read Dave should see some irony in this fact.
Dave has provided code to publish content you write in Drummer to an AWS S3 bucket. It’s not clear yet to me how it’s expected for the content to be served, S3 configured as web server or via pagePark. Either way, I think the existence of drummerCms is good news.
The first phone running Android sold in the United States was the T-Mobile G1, first sold on October 22, 2008. The HTC version began selling a month earlier. I bought the phone shortly after launch and I am surprised that I did not write about the initial purchase. My first blog post about the G1 and Android was on November 23, 2008.
Taking a walk down memory lane. Found a picture of the huge battery pack that I used with the T-Mobile G1 in order for the phone to last through the day.
To me Drummer is the next version of Fargo, but that is only relevant to people like me who used Fargo. One enters and manages content in an outline, which has the same UI as Little Outliner. One can use Drummer to create and maintain a blog that is generated (published) based on a OPML file and a CSS, Javascript and HTML template. Hosting of the front end Editor and backed publisher and web content is currently being provided by Dave Winer, who is the application developer.
One can associate a unique URL to the location where the generated blog content is stored using PagePark. In this instance PagePark is basically acting as a reverse proxy, none of your content is stored on your own server.
Dave does provide Mac version of the Drummer front end that is based on Electron. He may provide Windows and Linux versions of the app. The Electron version of the app will enable you to store and edit your source content OPML files on your own computer, but from what I can tell the published content will still be hosted on Dave’s server.
From what I have read, the desktop version of Drummer is intended to be near to or equal to the OPML Editor. For my purposes it is most desirable to have the desktop version of this application.
Final note, a check of the source to the HTML file of the blog shows that nearly all of the “script src” tags have been changed and it looks like if one hosts PagePark on a server/container that supports HTTPS you might have success in accessing the blog via HTTPs.
My Drummer blog is at oldschool.scripting.com/frankm/.
I will try Drummer. Two things I am interested to learn, one is how is the backend hosting handled the other is the level of integration with Radio3. I do think it’s disappointing that this is another, new blogging platform that does not support HTTPS. While theew is the appearance of fighting “the man” (Google) the reality is soon it will become harder for users to read what is published to this platform because ALL major browsers will make it harder for users to access sites that don’t use HTTPS. The sad thing is that at this point it is much easier to support HTTPS so don’t real there is a real good excuse for not doing it.
I find it interesting that there is a resurgence of tablets running Android, with Nokia being the latest announcement. My guess is that this is a reaction to the pandemic, but will they sell?