For some reason Google Assistant is not working on my Pixel Watch. It recognizes “ok Google” but then does not recognize anything that I say. Restarting the watch and phone now as both have been updated recently. Ok, restarting the watch appears to fix the problem.
Upgraded my iPad Mini 6 to iPadOS 16 yesterday and was reminded of the new Apple Weather app, otherwise known as what happened to Dark Sky. One thing I wish the weather apps did and most do not is put the normal temperature next to the current temperature. I can’t be the only one who wonders whether the current temperature is above or below normal. I use many weather apps and the only one that provides historical information and normal temperatures is Accuweather, but they bury it.
Today I did some experimentation with passkeys, which is supposed to be the new, better, more secure alternative to computer passwords. Maybe it will be, but right now, it is not as easy to setup and use across platforms as passwords.
Over one hundred years and only one radio play by play person has called a World Series win for the Chicago Cubs.
Looking at the COVID numbers for my county and it shows good news and bad news. Good news is that the weekly reported cases is flat compared to this time last year. Bad news is that the infection rate, which is a leading indicator to the community numbers, is trending upward having been relatively level (up and down around 1) since August. It doesn’t look like we will reach the levels of new cases through the end of December and January like we did last year, but we clearly are getting the somewhat expected increases with the holidays and colder weather upon us.
Wilson Contreras signing with the Cardinals is the absolute worst case scenario for the Chicago Cubs front office. They better hope that Contreras does not become a Cubs killer or the fan base will never let them hear the end of it. The Cub’s unwillingness to do what it takes to keep players who fans grew to love is extremely frustrating.
Sad to learn that Nick Bollettieri has passed away, he coached many of the great tennis players during his life and practically became synomous with tennis.
Can Elon do anything that will get him kicked off Twitter?
From 52 things I learned in 2022
Percussionist Emil Richards played the finger clicks in The Addams Family theme, the bongos in Mission Impossible and the xylophone in the theme for The Simpsons.
While re-reading what I wrote two years ago about Republican’s addiction to scapegoating, a question occurred to me. I think it was widely expected that the 2022 midterm elections would be highly influenced by inflation and the state of the economy that we are now experiencing, but yet it was abortion and election denial that influenced the election even more. I wonder though, is the fact that these topics were the main influencers good? Or was the result of the election that those who are profiting significantly from our current state given a free pass?
It seems that at least once a year something happens with Evernote, the company, that results in a number of people deciding to ditch Evernote, the app. I am a long time, paying customer of Evernote and for the moment I don’t intend to change unless I need to. However, Evernote for me is more of a repository than a notetaking application. I particularly like it’s web clipping, but I also forward particular emails such as emailed receipts.
A while back I decided it was worth trying export some or all of my Evernote notebooks and import them to another app, just in case something were to happen. I found that the best import was to DEVONthink and the second best was OneNote. I tested with an eval copy of DEVONthink but decided to not buy it as what I got in to OneNote was good enough.
I have found that the Microsoft Surface Duo is the perfect device for following fantasy football. I can monitor my score on one screen while surfing the web or checking my feed on another, and I can have the apps for both of my leagues loaded at the same time.
User Hostile Apps
I play in two fantasy football leagues, one that uses the ESPN app and the other that uses Yahoo. I find it interesting how opinionated both apps are in terms of how they are used on tablets and phones. On iPads the apps only work in landscape orientation no matter which way one is holding the iPad, which I find frustrating because they are literally the only apps on my iPad that does this. On my smartphones the apps only work in portrait, again no matter how you actually hold the phone.
The smartphone behavior is even more interesting on the Microsoft Surface Duo. I have the two apps in a group so they both launched, one on each screen, and they look fine when I am holding the Duo in “book” or landscape orientation, but when I rotate the Duo into portrait orientation the apps rotate to maintain portrait while the individual screens are landscape.
Regardless of the platform, I find it very hostile to me as a user that the app only works in one way as this is completely unlike any other app. It’s as if the developers don’t actually use the platforms for which they are developing.
Read The Whiteness of Mastodon
Does the “digital commons,” which is owned by capitalists, really exist? One of the problems in the United States is that their is a decreasing understanding of “public” and “common good” because everything is seen as a opportunity for someone’s wealth.
Yesterday we saw Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and while I thought it was very good it also felt like the storyline was forced in a direction not originally intended, for obvious reasons. Was I watching a tribute or a part of the MCU storyline?
Reading through the micro.blog Discover feed this morning, thinking to myself, what’s up with all these posts about grazing? Oh, Microblogvember.
Having read this article, I am looking forward to seeing how the new rule changes will affect MLB next year. Last year I watched a few minor league games that have the pitch clock and was impressed by the improvement in pace of play.
I ran the Fedifinder app to see how many of the people who I follow on Twitter have accounts on Mastodon. I follow around 500 users and only 25 of them are on Mastodon. I really like the app, including the link it provides to Revoke Permissions.
One thing that sets micro.blog apart from Twitter and Mastodon is the Discover feed. Manually curated and no replies, “retweets” or “retoots” just a curated list of new items shared by the micro.blog community. Not sure whether Discover will scale if many more new users join, but i hope it always remains.
Two years ago a buck stopped to look in to our window and this morning a larger buck trotted past our window while I was eating breakfast.