Essays
My Thoughts About Android Desktop
I watched XDA’s presentation of the Android desktop mode available in the Android 17 beta. Desktop mode is available with Android 16 too and I’ve tried it out and it’s not bad. I’ve long been intrigued by the idea of using a smartphone as my only computing device, and I honestly think this is best applied to foldables.
As I see it, the main impediment to such an all-in-one device is the lack of wireless connectivity to monitors, keyboards and mice. Imagine being able to use the desktop mode of your phone while the phone is still in your pocket.
It does appear that while desktop mode is available with all Android devices, it’s primary purpose is as a replacement to Chrome OS. For Google, Android desktop mode is a consolidation of operating systems. Google seems convinced that it’s worth it for them to offer a desktop computing user interface for their operating system, even though Chrome OS only has a small percentage of the desktop market, per Wikipedia.
I am not convinced that Android Desktop offers anything for the desktop market, and rumors are Apple may be soon announcing a low cost Macbook built on their A-series processors that will be hard to compete against.
The one scenario I can think of that might be interesting is Google pitching the idea of the Pixel Fold being the computing device that is all one will need, and therefore try to justify the greater than $1,000 price tag for the Fold. The math works when compared to the sum cost of a phone, tablet and desktop if the device fits all these use cases. However, I think for this to work there must be wireless connectivity to keyboard, video, and mouse or at the very least an easy to use drop-in docking station.
The State Of The Union
The President’s State Of the Union speech historically began as the means for the executive to report to the legislature on the current state of affairs for the country and the government. It’s an administrative act that city managers and corporate executives make on a more frequent basis, but because it is broadcasted for the world today it is now entirely a political event.
I think the recent words of the President, the reaction by the U.S. Men’s hockey team, and the reactions to both over the last several days presents the current state of the union. One third of the nation does not want to face the fact that everything is abnormal, think that no U.S. Olympian ought say anything disparaging about and respect the President. One third of the nation is opposed to everything being done by the President and the U.S. government, and the remaining one third is entirely in agreement with and supports the President and the U.S. government.
Decouple Meaning From Employment
In his blog post, The End of the Office, Andrew Yang paints a very dire picture but one that I think must be seriously considered. I think Yang’s fifth point is most important:
Pessimism and anger will rise up. I saw a note on social media that said, “Do you really think politicians will let millions lose their jobs? They’ll ban AI first.” Has this person been paying attention? Go talk to the manufacturing workers or the journalists and see how it worked out. Hundreds of billions of dollars have not been spent on this technology for corporate juggernauts to stop now, and most officials have been cheerleading what they see as progress. The genie is out of the bottle.
The social contract of ‘study hard, go to school, get a good job, live a decent life’ is about to be vaporized to smithereens. Upward mobility for most will be a thing of the past. People are not going to take it well. Particularly educated people who think that they deserve better. That’s an ingredient for revolt.
What Yang describes has been happening for the last several decades and the wealthy class embrace of AI will accelerate the process. I fear the consequences significant. A society built on consumption is really built on employment because one must be employed to earn the money to spend on the products to be consumed. Worse is that how we define people has good or bad, successful or unsuccessful is defined by employment. Think of Ronald Reagan and the “welfare queen.” Think of the ongoing war between the wealthy class and wealth redistribution put in place under FDR that contributed to forming the middle class in the United States.
We will need to redefine employment in the United States, such as less than a 40 hour work week, decouple fundamental necessity of healthcare from employment, and change how we define and measure success.
Two Way RSS
Yesterday I wrote a draft post about RSS Feeds and I wrote this:
A lot of pixels are being dedicated to writing about Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, which I think of as a “broadcast medium” for text and files.
Oceans Rise, Empires Fall
Title inspiration: You’ll Be Back
Joan Westernberg uses the failure of empires as a metaphor for why current predictions about AI are likely not to be completely realized. She equates empires with corporations and says this:
We haven’t seen the first great AI collapse. We haven’t seen a foundation model company make the BlackBerry mistake or the Nokia mistake, or the Roman mistake, or the Ottoman mistake or reach their Bunker-in-Berlin mistake. But we will, and we’ll see it multiple times, because these mistakes = features of power concentration. The hubris that makes a company or an empire dominant in one era is frequently the quality that blinds it to the next one. If you could ask Lazaridis in 2006, or a British colonial administrator in 1900, whether their model of the world was permanent, each would’ve given you a very convincing explanation for why it in fact was.
The interesting thing is that while she is applying the fall of empires to AI, she could actually be describing what is happening right now in the United States. We are living in a period of time in which the fall of the U.S. empire is accelerating. I think AI is a contributor to the fall of the U.S. empire because employment is a pillar of the empire that has been built using economic might.
Those of us who have been raised on the privileges of the U.S. empire are being told that the source of our pain is the “other,” however that is defined (race, nationality, gender) by each one of us. The purpose is self preservation for the people in power who created and maintained the U.S. empire for their personal benefit, but as Joan points out history shows they too will ultimately fail.
That anxiety you are feeling is being caused by the stones of the U.S. empire starting to fall around you. All you have known is the life the empire has provided to you and you know your life is going to change. We know this in our bones because change is a cosmic truth.
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Down The Drummer Rabbit Hole
Earlier today I noted that Dave had posted about the issue I encountered on January 30 preventing me from publishing my Daynotes using the “default” blogging tool in Drummer referred to as “Old School,” which is descriptive of a day based blogging format.
I started the process of making and testing the changes that Dave suggested, finding them to be more involved, but the net result is that the Daynotes site is now served by HTTPS rather than only being accessible via HTTP.
When the ability to build the blog from within Drummer broke I did my own work around by creating a new OPML file that is served by my instance of PagePark, which is Dave’s web server app that knows how to render OPML files for web browsers. For now I am going to continue using my “new” Daynotes outline file while using the Drummer blog for longer articles. My simple forwarding url for daynotes (daynotes.frankm.info) will go to single outline page while I have created a new forwarder for the Old School site (oldschool.frankm.info).
Analyze Oil Consumption Using NotebookLM
Of all the AI tools currently available I use Google’s NotebookLM the most. My best way to describe NotebookLM is that one can use it to apply Google’s Large Language Models toward a topic based on sources for information that one provides. For example, when we were researching health insurance plans last fall I created a notebook in NotebookLM and uploaded to it as sources PDFs provided by the insurance providers. I then used the chat in the notebook to ask questions about the different plans, which I then saved for future reference.
I have a 2013 GMC Terrain and a few years past I learned that this make and model SUV has a history of burning oil, so I have been diligently checking the oil level once a week and after long drives during trips. I log the date, odometer reading, and oil level in a note in Google Keep using my phone and I wish Gemini were integrated in Keep so that I could directly ask questions like how many miles have been driven and when is the last time I added oil.
Google has not added Keep as a source for NotebookLM, which I think would be logical, but what I can do is send (export) a note in Keep to a Google Doc which I can then add as source for NotebookLM. Today I exported each of my three log notes to a Google Doc, created a notebook in NotebookLM and add these docs as sources. NotebookLM correctly identified the sources as a maintenance log for a vehicle but it didn’t know which type of vehicle nor did it know the year the entries started because I only recorded the month and date. I created a README note that I added as a source in which I specified that the first date was in 2024 and that the logs are for a 2013 GMC Terrain. I also added some information about the dipstick markings.
With the oil logs in NotebookLM I am able to ask simple questions like, how many miles were driven between the last oil check and the prior check? I asked NotebookLM how many miles were driven in 2025, and it then offered to make an infographic that broke down the 2025 mileage by month. NotebookLM also created a detailed vehicle usage and oil consumption analysis report.
NotebookLM provides me with a simple and powerful way to analyze this data, but the fact that Google Keep cannot be a source means that as I update the current log note I will have to re-export it to the Google Doc and refresh that doc source in NotebookLM. I hope that in the future Google will add Keep as a source to either Gemini on my phone or to NotebookLM.
Expectations For The Pixel 10
I got the Pixel 10 for Christmas. We ordered it from Best Buy during their “Black Friday” sale at a cost of $549, when launched this phone cost $799. With an $80 trade-in of a Pixel 6a the total cost to me is $469, which is a very good price for a “flagship” phone.
Before I received the Pixel 10 I wrote this expecting it to be a blog post but I never published it, so now I am going back and I am going to put in quote format my original expectation and then my current point of view after one month of use.
Avoiding Dead Links
I currently subscribe to the basic micro.blog plan and I have been monitoring the features that Manton adds to premium for any that I might find useful. Today Manton posted a video demonstrating a feature he is experimenting with that could be added to premium that would help prevent dead links.
A problem that exists with adding links to other sites in my blog posts is that over time the pages I link to disappear. Chances are good that if you click a link on a post that I wrote five years ago the link no longer exists, which is a bit of a pain.
The new feature that Manton is experimenting with enhances the Bookmarks feature of micro.blog that creates an archive copy of a web page. Booksmarks is similar to Archivebox. The enhancement associates the original source URL of a archived page that one may use in a blog post and provides a “single click” way to convert the URL to the archived copy of the page on micro.blog and then you can update the post.
Of course, the problem with the current approach is that one has to know that the source URL is no longer available and make the change. For this to really be useful there needs to be some form of automation, which I can imagine could increase the costs of running micro.blog.
Perhaps a compromise is providing micro.blog users a method to initiate a scan of archived posts for dead links, check for the ones that are dead, see if there is an archived version and offer to convert the link. Such ad hoc scans might result in lower compute costs.
Another thing that would useful, if this becomes a real feature, is provide a way for the micro.blog user to an archived copy of the linked to page at the time of writing the post. I don’t know if Manton would want to automatically create an archive of all destination pages of blog posts, but that would be useful for people like me who often write posts using an editor other than micro.blog’s.
A final thought…. I wonder whether this could be integrated with the Internet archive is some way? It seems the purpose of the Internet archive is to do this type of web page archival and their storage may be a way minimum the costs to micro.blog.
Empire Falling
It can be said that much of our problems today started with what the United States did after World War II. I remember in high school history being told that the U.S. decided after WWII that it couldn’t return to it’s isolationist past, what the history teacher did not teach is how the U.S. became an empire. Today our consumption economy depends on the low cost of goods made outside the U.S., and reason why that cost is low depends on the overvalued U.S. dollar. The dollar is overvalued because it is needed by countries for trade.
Empires don’t last forever. Life in the United States is going to be very different in the future, and I fear it will be painful because Americans have been living off the privilege of this empire for so long they don’t even know how or why.
I strongly suspect that people in power, the political backers, the corporate CEOs, and the people whom they helped elect into office all know how bad things are going to get, which is why they are working so hard to get U.S. citizens fighting amongst ourselves and blaming anybody but those in power. In my opinion, this is what Trump’s efforts around crypto are truly all about.