Routine Revelations

I tried Tile tags and stopped using them, because I found I don’t lose things, so I am wondering whether the people caught up in the Air Tags hysteria really need them, or just craving a new Apple thing? What I most wanted the Tile to do is not let me forget my pills. I put a tag on a pill box, but found that the notification that my phone and the tag were apart came way too late.

For me the most frustrating and disappointing thing about reactions to COVID is that so many people only think about it in terms of personal health and not public health. I may be at lower risk of severe symptoms but I can carry the disease to someone who is at high risk. The possibility that I could do something that results in the death of another obligates me to take the situation seriously.

Another problem that people don’t seem to grasp is that longer the virus out of control the more mutations that will occur, which has consequences to all of us. It is likely the recent surge in Michigan is due to a mutation.

As of today my wife and I are fully vaccinated! The question now is, what does this mean for us?

COVID-19 will be with us for years and years, continuing to be deadly, because people refuse to take the vaccines or just don’t think the issue is serious.

In an article discussing an breakout of a COVID-19 variant at a Kentucky nursing home of residents nearly all vaccinated, Zeynep writes:

Facts need the right context so that they can turn into information that’s more useful to us.

Zeynep points out that the facts of the study in the context that a breakout in a nursing home is a worst case scenario, shows good news about the efficacy of the vaccines.

Forgive my moment of patting myself on the back. Last night I found that the fill valve in the toilet on the main floor of our house needed to be replaced. I am not experienced with home repairs and in the past managed to mangle toilet repair enough to call in a professional to fix the job. So, in normal circumstances I would have just scheduled a plumber to repair, but I decided to search for information, found videos on YouTube that showed me what to do, and today I bought the parts and made the replacement as easily as was shown in the video.

The UI this website is remarkable. You might have noticed that my site is very bland, that’s mostly because I lack the design skills, but also because I like featuring the text and how it looks on mobile devices.

Amazon has broken a what has been significant piece of functionality in the iOS Kindle app, the ability to send a book’s title and author to Drafts. I used to open About This Book, tap Share and then select Drafts, and the result used to be that a new draft opened with the book title and authors. Today when I did this Drafts wasn’t even an option!

Update: Turns out the issue was not just with the Kindle app, Drafts was gone from the share sheet in all apps. After searching the Internet, I restarted the iPad and that seems to resolve the problem.

Day 1 of lap 56 around the sun.

Received the Obvious Shirt that I ordered, though this is the one that I really want. I wish their web site had a notification for when shirts are back in stock.

This is the largest flowering tree that I have ever seen.

Friday, 1:20 PM Central Standard Time

I have a Logitech MX Keys keyboard and a MX Master 3 mouse that I use every day with my work Windows 10 PC. The PC has two USB ports, one USB 3 port on the left side and what I think is a USB 2 port on the right. In the left port is a dongle for my Jabra wireless headset, and in the right port I have a Logitech Unifying receiver for the keyboard and mouse. I have frustrating experiences with mouse that appears to be due to it frequently losing connectivity.

I’ve swapped the two devices between ports and that fixes the mouse issue, but then the headset loses connectivity, so I think that means there is some type of interference with the right USB port.

I have a USB-C hub and a there is a USB-C port with the computer, so I plugged in the hub and plugged the Logitech receiver to the hub but that didn’t fix the problem. I am now using an USB extension cable and the Logitech receiver plugged in to it. I don’t know why the hub didn’t work, it should have.

Why The Republican Party Isn’t Rebranding After 2020, FiveThirtyEight

I think another reason why Republicans are not willing to change is that they have not yet faced reality that they are a minority. Their arguments for why the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” can only hold if they think there is more of them than others. In other words, if Republicans are a minority then by definition they will get less votes, and we have seen this played out by the fact that since 1988 they have lost the popular vote for all but one presidential election.

I’ve forked a page of information about tracking down the origin of COVID-19 to my wiki. The page is being regularly updated and as a ton of information.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

John Ehrlichman, Domestic Policy Advisory during the Nixon Administration source