Tech
Is there anything more disconcerting than a computer keyboard and mouse amok? For some reason just now my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard connected to the MacBook wouldn’t do what I want. Click an icon on the dock and instead of launching the app a Finder window opens with the Application I clicked highlighted. Click icons on the menu bar and nothing happens. Restarted several times, including without the externals and shutoff some items that start at login. It’s gone for now, but I don’t know which item I shut off was the culprit and I don’t know that I care.
I am reading through articles about announcements from Google I/O 2026, and I think this change Google is planning to make to Tiles in Wear OS 7 has to be one of the most idiotic design decisions I have seen. When you have a UI on a small screen like a watch, why would you not use the entire screen? What are they thinking?
Tiles are also getting a redesign. Google will roll out widgets with Wear OS 7 to replace full-screen tiles. A 2×1 or 2×2 block will display app information in a style that more closely resembles Android 16’s widgets. It doesn’t appear that the new design will allow users to stack widgets on top of each other in the same screen, like Samsung’s version of Wear OS allows Galaxy Watch users to do.
I put my Pixel 10 on a Belkin MagSafe wireless charger. Today it dawned on me that it would be cool if when the phone is on the charger that if a phone call comes in the phone would automatically operate in speaker phone mode so I could just tap a button to receive the call and talk.
Gadgeteer has an embed of a leaked walk thru of the forthcoming Android Desktop that Google officially announced as Googlebook this week. The demo is running in a VM on a Mac not on any native hardware. I don’t see anything in the demo that is really new or exciting. We have been using the “desktop” personal computer metaphor for so long and I wish that a company would have the guts to try something really new.
I think the only reason to consider Googlebook if it were built from the ground up as a AI-based user interface, but instead I think it will simply have AI stuff bolted on and that is not appealing. It’s early days, but hard to say what will be the reason to buy a Googlebook rather than a MacBook.
Om Malik has written a very compelling post about what he calls the Internet of AI. Part of the post is an explanation about what AI actual means from an overall technology perspective. Here is a valuable summary:
The right historical analogy for what is happening with AI is not Web 2.0 or the cloud. It is the railroads of the nineteenth century. Railroad operators understood the freight cars were not where value lived. The value was in owning the rails and everything around them, including the land. Owning the rails meant controlling routes, latency, geography, redundancy, and the cost structure of every customer who depended on the network.
A few days back I asked the question, does Apple really need to have an AI product? In this video Nate Jones reads the tea leaves of Apple’s impending re-org suggesting that Apple’s strategy towards AI may be the same as it’s strategy about personal computing 50 years ago. I think it’s the right move by Apple. However, I do wonder about what might be the relationship between local models and personal computer operating systems.
I can’t help but notice that in his blog post about the value of RAM for AI and how Apple’s unified architecture has proven to be an advantage, Om does not mention the Neo. Om’s point in this post, Memory Is The Machine, is the reason why think users are going wish their first generation Neos have more RAM. Heck, my M4 MacBook Pro’s 16 GB of RAM might not be enough in three years.
Our fears about artificial intelligence are a projection of the fears about ourselves. The human ego desires to control the world, and AI is probably the biggest threat to human control we have created to date. We know that we are incomplete yet our ego insists on turning to ourselves to resolve what ails us rather than changing our mind to follow the path of Jesus.
Personal Programming
I am old enough to remember a time when there were no personal computers. While computers existed throughout my life time (I was born in 1966), personal computers didn’t exist until 1975 (the Altair 8800) and back then they weren’t very useful because one had to program these computers for them to do anything.
In the 1970s there were no stores for one to go to and buy software needed to make the PC do something useful, instead one wrote their own programs. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, which enabled one to write their own programs, and ironically that led to the formation of Microsoft and the personal computer software industry.
The need to write programs limited the market for PCs to hobbyists who were willing to spend the time to learn and tinker and share their code with others. To most hobbyists the idea of selling programs was abhorrent as they saw them as art to be freely shared, and with this point of view the animosity toward Microsoft was born.
Building My Personal Assistant App
XTEInk X4
Stay Awake
The intended effects of social networks for the sake of wealth ought to be the lens through which we look at AI. At their beginning we were told of all the good things social networks provide, and they did do that for a while, but then the wealth generation went in to hyper drive. We have no reason to believe the motivations towards more and more AI is not the same wealth generation. And since there can only be one most wealthiest person on earth, that leads to not caring about the negative impacts on the rest of the world.
A potentially helpful question to ponder when thinking about where all this AI “stuff” is going. Think of the songs that you have heard in your life, do those songs stand out because they sound good and are entertaining or do they stand out because you connect to the lyrics and relate what they convey? Perhaps that connection has also leads to feeling like you know the song writer, or better yet that the song writer knows you.
Bob Nystrom’s blog post, The Value of Things, inspired the question. Perhaps a way to combat the nihilism of AI is consciousness. Most times we are unconscious, which is like hearing music and simply enjoying the sound, while times we are conscious enough to hear and relate to the words. The risk of AI is the decrease in the amount of time that we are conscious, so perhaps working on our own consciousness is a method to combating the affects of AI.
Very cool dashboard for the Artemis II mission around the moon. There is so much more technology now than when we last traveled to the moon 50 years ago, including our ability to check in on the voyage via the Internet. I wasn’t home to watch the launch on TV but I got a notification on my phone about it and was able to watch the launch on my phone sitting in a strip mall parking lot.
Just got the Ugreen HDMI wireless extender transmitter and receiver and I am using it to connect the Pixel 10 desktop mode to the Innoview portable monitor. I’ve watched some video on YouTube and although this is only 1080P the video looks good enough. I am thinking this is an easier way to connect my iPads to a television while traveling but I was curious about how well this works with the Pixel 10. There and been some brief disconnects and it looks like the connection is more solid while I have the transmitter plugged in to power, otherwise it pulls power from the phone.
I think the MacBook Neo presents a dilemma, what is the worth of really good physical construction of a laptop if the computing capabilities inside may not be as valuable over the long haul? I think people considering buying the Neo need to consider how they will feel if after just a few years they will want to replace it with a more performant computer. At the root of this is the question of whether or not one thinks $599 is a lot of money.
Most likely what the Neo is really about for Apple is increasing cash flow from Macs. Previous Macs tend to be useful well beyond five years after release, which makes it hard for Apple to convince people to buy their new models. I think Apple hopes that today’s Neo owner will replace their Neo next year or the year later at the latest.
The step count on my Pixel Watch was consistent with expectations yesterday, so it is looking like that disconnecting and re-connecting the watch to the Fitbit app on my phone helped with the problem. I did notice an odd situation of the step counts decreasing by a few hundred after ending a workout and I am not sure what is going on with that, but at least the counts are in the ballpark of being correct. I don’t expect high accuracy here, close enough but consistent is what I need to track how I am doing over time.
Fitbit On Pixel Watch Update 1
My Reddit post about the Fitbit app on my Pixel Watch is the source of an article on 9to5Google this morning as many people have replied to the post stating they are experiencing the same issue.
As an update, since I disconnected my watch from the Fitbit app on my phone, restarted both watch and phone, deleted yesterday’s step and distance data and then re-connected the watch to the Fitbit app the step count appears to be within expectations.
The problem now is I am not confident that the step count will remain accurate, so the whole situation is requiring more attention that I would like. One needs to be able to rely on data like this or there is no point in even collecting the data.
I have noticed through observations while sitting here at my desk that steps are added slowly over time while they shouldn’t be added at all. I have the felling the sensors on the watch are not being used properly right now, for steps and distance the watch should only increase when one is moving forward and not while sitting at a desk typing.
Fitbit On Pixel Watch Broken
The March 5, 2026 Wear OS update that Google released has broken the Fitbit app. The Fitbit app of my Pixel Watch 3 is significantly over counting/doubling my steps, mileage, and calories consumed. It looks like it is doubling the counts. As an example, I have taken two walks today and the workout details appear correct, one 12 minute, 0.69 mile walk of 1,515 steps and a second 24 minute, 1.35 mile, 2,967 steps walk, but the overview shown on my phone and watch shows a total of 9,827 steps and 4.7 miles.
As an experiment, I shut off my phone and watch then started my watch. After first start up the watch shows the correct step count, but eventually it connects to the Fitbit servers and is then updated with the higher step count.
I am seeing a recommendation on Reddit of a fix involving resetting the watch, which I think means that I will have to re-install apps, but before doing that I decided to try disconnecting the watch from the Fitbit app on the phone.
After I did the disconnect I deleted the day’s step and distance data from the Fitbit app and the backend server so that it displayed 0 steps. I then restarted my watch, observed that it displayed the correct step count, and then reconnected the watch to the Fitbit app, and after a short period of time the watch and the app on the phone showed 5,462 steps.
Next, I went for another walk of 2,662 steps and afterword it showed the correct sum of about 8,124 steps. I am not ready to declare the situation is fixed with my watch but it’s looking positive.
Boox has released second generation of their 10.3-inch Go series e-Ink tablets that appear intended to compete with the Remarkable 2. There are two versions of this generation, a $400 without a front light and a $450 model with a front light. A major negative, in my opinion, is that Boox has replaced the Wacom EMR stylus support with their InkSense capacitive stylus is that is less accurate and requires charging. I would not buy this tablet due to this choice by Boox.
I would wish that Boox would release an 8-inch e-Ink tablet with Wacom EMR support but that appears to be less likely to happen as time passes.
I am watching a video overview of Inkwell, which is Manton’s RSS app released last week. I’ve tried using Inkwell but find it doesn’t fit in to my web reading triage workflow. I send everything to Readwise Reader where I do all my reading, so the blogging and quote blogging of Inkwell would be more useful for me in Readwise. One thing that I am intrigued by is the Reading Recap feature in Fading, but I don’t know whether I would really use that feature a lot or not.