Just a reminder…. maybe hold off before installing the latest updates on your iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Mac. Give it a few days.
Thank You and happy update day for those that celebrate. Apple iOS 18
Facebook Not Usable
Not sure if it is just personal to me but Facebook is becoming practically useless to use lately. There are just too many ads taking up the feed and I am finding too many angry people.
Also…. these could be related.
An AI Rose by Any Other Name Is Still An AI Rose?
Been reading a fair amount about software companies adding AI features, specifically the design applications I use on a regular basis. I find it funny how much they are falling over themselves with the Look! Look! Look, and see what AI can do for you! What I find even more interesting is how many of the tools and features ther are that we have been using for quite a while. It’s just they were marketed differently, maybe called machine learning instead of AI. Take Red-Eye Removal tools as an example… it has been in most photo editors for years now, but somehow, give it fancy new AI labeling and it becomes magical all over again. The big worry, and I believe rightly so, is the ability for software to completely alter the photographic reallty of an image so realistically that it becomes a very real legal problem. I have been using design tool, including Photoshop for decades and I understand that making complicated edits to a photo can take hours and requires even more time to master the skills to do what can be done almost instantly. Jess Weatherbed at The Verge wrote up an amazing article explaining why this is a very BAD thing. Take a look and remember, in the ever changing landscape of image technology, you should also keep in mind that the unbelievable image you are looking at could be absolutely made out of thin air.
Do Not Trust Elon Musk
This is NOT a Republican or Democrat thing. This is a creepy scummy and abusive thing. Do not trust your data or personal information with anything Musk is in control of. Which is a shame because I believe Twitter was an amazing news tool, I think Tesla as a car is great, and there is no denying the incredible contributions SpaceX has given to space travel.
My Sports Teams
My Sports Teams
Being new to blogging, sometimes I want to write something but I find myself staring at a blank “page”. Today I thought, pick some aspect of my personal life and just write about why it’s an aspect of my life. So today, that something is sports.
Like many fans of sports, it usually starts when you are kid and I was really no different. Without getting to deep into my "Origin Story”, I didn’t grow up in any city or area with professional teams or even college teams. But eventually my family moved to Tallahassee, Florida, the home of Florida State University. This was 1979, and Bobby Bowden was in his fourth season as Head Coach of the football program. Before Bowden, FSU football never had any real successes, but Bowden, and his charm had all of Tallahassee abuzz with the Seminoles. It was so very easy to root for him and his players in those days, they were exciting to watch, they scheduled games against big time programs and even managed to win a few of them. Today, I am a huge supporter of FSU Athletics, and not just the football team. Go Noles!
I have many fond memories of growing up with my family but one set of memories involving sports was becoming a fan of the Atlanta Braves professional baseball team. My family was blessed to have two TV’s (I know amazing!) with one of them being this little 13 inch that was in the kitchen/dining room of our home. During the Summer, after dinner my Mom might be watching something in the Family room that Dad wasn’t too interested in so he would watch something on the 13 inch. That something most nights was Braves baseball games and I found myself joining him in the evenings and soon it became a very regular thing. Thanks to Ted Turner buying the team and broadcasting every game on his brand new TBS network, my Dad and I got to see a LOT of baseball. This was also, in the 80’s and the Braves were pretty mediocre for most of that time but they did have a few incredible players that I still think of fondly, Dale Murphy, Bob Horner, Pascual Pérez, and my favorite Glenn Hubbard. After graduating high school (Go Leon Lions by the way) I ended up moving to Atlanta and attending the Art Institute. I don’t have the time most days to watch many games but try and see them as often as possible and the blessings of the internet allow me to see all the highlights. Go Braves!
This brings me to the NFL. This country may consider baseball its “National Pastime” but football is the king when it comes to popularity. Now, during the early 80’s I was certainly following along with the Seminoles but I really didn’t care too much about the professional league. That was probably another instance of geography, there really wasn’t a team near me and certainly any broadcast I saw on TV would be from cities that might as well have been in another country. When baseball season is done in October, really the only sports on TV is football and on Sundays that means the NFL. My Parents are from western Maryland and while I would believe my Dad would be the first to admit, he wasn’t a big fan of any particular team, he will tell you it was the Baltimore Colts, (yes, Colts not Ravens, go look it up) and while he was not a big sit around and watch a game kind of fan, he did occasionally tune in. Now, it was easy to be a Seminole fan, they were right down the street, being a fan of any NFL team was harder for me. You would think I picked my favorite team because of some particular player or saw some incredible win but that would be wrong. I picked the Seattle Seahawks who at the time were mostly terrible and didn’t really win much of anything. I firmly believe I was drawn to the teams colors, logo, and mascot. The hometown of my favorite baseball team had the Atlanta Falcons, a different fierce bird, but something just didn’t click with me about them. The Seahawks however looked awesome and still, in my opinion, are the best uniforms in the league. What did I care the team was literally the other side of the country from me, they looked cool and that was good enough for me. Go Seahawks!
I was not what you would call an athlete in High School but I did participate in some sports and I basically lived outdoors and on my bike for pretty much 14 hours a day in the Summer. I tried out for baseball at Leon but just wasn’t strong or coordinated enough for that sport but I I could play soccer. I wasn’t great but like today, I did have good stamina and could run without tiring easy. As I got older and moved away for the Art Institute, soccer basically disappeared for me, either playing or being a fan. In those days there was some professional soccer in the US but unless you lived in one of those cities you basically never heard about them. As life brought me back to Tallahassee, I discovered a local recreational league and started playing again, this became a favorite activity for me and I have greatly enjoyed playing again. Most of the players in this league have played for years and years going back to their childhoods and most of them are supporters of any number of professional teams from around the world. By far these teams were mostly from the English Premiere League. I started to pay attention to the spirit and history of a few of these teams and thought maybe I would pick one to kind of start supporting. As it turns out I have family that lived in Great Britain and were very much fans of the Manchester City football club. Well that was good enough for me, and it was fun picking the rival of one of the more popular club among my fellow players, Manchester United. Let’s Go City!
Now… having lived in Florida for most of my life, I never had an interest in hockey and certainly didn’t pay any attention to the NHL. As luck would have it Tallahassee got to be the new home for a minor league hockey team, the Tallahassee TigerSharks. Attending those games gave me such a better understanding and appreciation for the sport, that I started watching and checking out professional games when I could, especially playoffs. I never picked a favorite team and again fate would come calling and provide me with a fine choice. My Daughter started dating and then married a guy who grew up in St Louis, Missouri and he and his family are life long fans of the Blues. Well, that works for me and now I consider myself a fan also. Go Blues!
As for the NBA, again, geography never had me living for any significant time where a team was located, so I never adopted a team. I like basketball and attend games regularly for Florida State but I don’t count myself a fan of any of the professional teams. Maybe this changes in the future?
It’s interesting, that at the moment in time I start following a team, they really are not very good, but soon, usually within a few years, they end up becoming great.
For the Seminoles, the football team won at least 10 games every year from 1987 to 2000 never finishing the year out of the top five and one the National Championship twice in 1993 and 1999.
For the Braves, I became a fan right at the start of 15 straight years of Division Titles, with 5 World Series appearances and 1 World Series Title.
My Seahawks, between 1999 and 2020 they won their division 10 times, made the playoffs every one of those years with 3 Super Bowl appearances and 1 Super Bowl Championship.
Manchester City between 2010 and 2023 won the Premier League title 8 times, including 4 in a row. In 2023, they not only won the Premier League Title, they also won an historic Treble by also winning the FA Cup and the Champions League Title!
The Blues? Well, what can I say. I become a fan and they win their very first Stanley Cup! I really am agood luck charm.
Fanaticism is a funny thing, I have experienced heartbreak, ecstasy and everything in between. As I have gotten older, I have come to understand that teams will go through up and downs from year to year, especially in leagues where there is built in parity. I try not to get to high or get to low now a days but just try and enjoy the talents of the athletes, and do my best to cheer them on. When is the next game...
Breaking News… There Are Shady Companies on the Internet!
Shameless. This is an example people who are concerned with AI will point to has why we need to slow down.
So, I read a fair number off technology websites and blogs, some big like Macworld and others smaller like TechRadar. I am a regular reader of John Gruber’s long running blog DaringFireball and Jason Kottke’s Kottke Like a lot of things on the Internet, some sites get published, are read a good bit, but for whatever reason fade away. One such site I read regularly was The Unofficial Apple Weblog but a few years ago, it went away from my regular bookmarks. Originally owned by AOL, they let the site go to Yahoo, recently the domain (and all of its many years of articles and reviews) was sold by Yahoo to a company based out of Hong Kong called Web Orange Limited. I am not going to link to them because I find them despicable.
Instead of maybe restoring TUAW to a legitimate news source with curated reporters, they took a different route. They are basically using AI to scrape articles from other sites such as MacRumours and engadget and then publish them on TUAW. Now many sites will do similar things but the reputable ones will attribute the source of the original articles. TUAW is not doing this, worse, they are giving the author of such articles to people on their staff…. except most of these people don’t exist.
The following tech writer, Christina Warren, discovered this because she was one off the original TUAW contributing writers, they even were still using her picture, name, and bio on their about page! You can find her X post about it here. When confronted, all TUAW did was change the name on the about page but as of now kept her picture. Horrible.
Adam Engst at TidBits has a very nice summary article with screen shots showing the thefts and explaining it further.
I know there are a lot of more important news happening in the world but things like this really irritate me because it wont get a lot of main stream reporting. Just trying to do my part, however small, to share and call out the offender.
Special Place in Hell
Public Service Announcement.
I have a pretty decent spam filtering process, but no process is 100% and I will still get the occasional BAD email, as follows.
The first screen shot shows the message as it appears in my inbox and is pretty legit looking…. although the use of French in the fine print is a clue. The second screen shot shows the senders full email…. “noreply@pphoki.me” is probably not an actual Disney email server. The last screen shot is what the website looks like and shows the full address in the address bar, yes I used a private browser to access the site. There is a special place in hell for these kinds of criminals.
A very special place.
No More MTV News
Wow. No more MTV news. I mean the M for Music has been gone for years but now they wiped out all of the reporting archives. Kurt Loder was the best.
Have You Done Any Tiling Before?
My house is located basically in a forest, and as such we get roots that occasionally grow where they are not supposed to grow. This time our sewer drain under the foundation. As luck would have it, the problem was located beneath our tiled bathroom that we have wanted to raise and retile for years. Well now was that time.
The plumbers dug through the old tile, concrete, dirt, repaired the pipe and filled everything back in. We then enlisted the help of my Father to lay down backer boards to raise things up level with the hardwood hall floor and lay brand new tiles. The result turned out amazing and couldnt be happier with how things turned out.
Twister Twister Twister
So. That was something a little different. Last Friday morning, Tallahassee was hit with a very strong storm front that came on very fast, that isn’t the new part. The front produced tornadoes, that isn’t completely new either, we are used to Hurricanes but we get occasional twisters also. What was new, was there were three of them all in the span of about an hour and all isolated mostly in the South part of the city. When you live in Florida you understand the destruction that low pressure fast winds can make. You pray for minimal damage, no serious injuries (or deaths) and cope with the loss of power get to cleaning things up. This was different.
Tallahassee is a very beautiful tree loving city… we are kinda famous for our canopy roads. We tend to even build sidewalks around the trees instead of cutting them down. While that does make living here like living in a forest, it does come with downsides when big storms hit. This one was bad. It took down so many trees and with it power lines and poles. The City Utilities reported that the damage was worse than the last three hurricanes to land in the area combined. Those crews, along with neighboring counties and states lending their crews, have been working non stop to restore power to so many people.
We were fortunate to have minimal damage to the trees near our house, bunch of small limbs, a few big ones but nothing too bad. We will need a utility crew to take care of a large limb resting on our power line to the house, but we have our power back after 36 hours. Small blessing to have my Parents home to shelter (and save our food) in while the utility crews did their thing. Sadly, there has been one reported death and a number of injuries. The damage to the Railroad Square art district is near castotrophic, it may be years recovering. Both FAMU and FSU suffered significant damage to buildings.. the FSU Circus had their big top tent destroyed. It will be a long time before that part of the city is functioning back to normal.
A shout out to the efforts of the City of Tallahassee Utilities and the crews helping from other utility companies. Thank You.
Will be listening to rain a little differently now.
Icro for Micro.Blog
Been playing around with some different blogging software. Icro by Martin Hartl is really well made and I like the way it works for iPad. There something nice about posting from a beautiful sheet of glass.
Tuve unas vacaciones increíbles visitando España.
Translation… I had an amazing vacation visiting Spain. With what I hope will be a regular occurrence, I recently traveled with my Wife, her Sister and her Husband. A few years ago we took a trip to Indonesia with Viking Cruise lines. That trip was incredible and if you have the opportunity to travel with Viking, I highly reccommend them.
This time, instead of the other side of the globe, we only went half way around and had my first visit to Europe. I sometimes will do a lot of research leading up to a vacation and try and learn about all the things to do or not do. This time, I consciously chose to only do a minimum of reading or viewing with the intent of being surprised a little as I experienced things. I thought it worked quite well, there were genuine moments and locations that I knew nothing about ahead of time and the impact I think was greater to me.
I began a draft of this post, and it was turning into a travel blog chronicling all of my itinerary. I decided to scrap that and instead just write a bit about my overall impressions. Spain, like most countries, can feel very different depending on where you are, that was the case for me anyway. We started in Madrid, had a day trip Toledo, took a high speed train to Barcelona and then a day trip to Montserrat. Each one of those places had some similarities, but the feeling and vibe were very different to me. Madrid had a very bustling large city feel, we were only really exposed to a very touristy part of the city but I got the same feeling I get when in Atlanta or New York. Toledo, however was like stepping back in time to the Middle Ages, some of the buildings literally. It is a UNESCO World Heritage location and I really loved how well they took care to preserve this very Old World city. Barcelona, the heart of Catalonia, was almost the opposite of Madrid, while just as big and with maybe twice the tourists, things felt so much more relaxed and laid back and I could see returning to visit here again and exploring more. While Barcelona is a very coastal city, it is not far from a very significant mountain. Montserrat was a place on this trip that had the naturalist in me full and happy. It’s an amazing place that is famous for the monks that built the Benedictine Chapel and Monastery there but it also is a haven for hikers and climbers who enjoy the outdoors and the spectacular views.
Spain was everything I hoped it would be, and like most vacations, my time there was too short. I look forward to another adventure with my travel buddies.
Qui no s’arrisca, no pisca! (Nothing ventured, nothing gained!)
Another Trip Around the Sun
So yesterday’s Eclipse went by and the Apocalypse was apparently postponed. I have always loved Space and any celetial events are cause for me to geek out. Where I live gave us about a 70% coverage of the Sun but really happy for those in the totality band that got to experience the full impact of a rotating piece of rock casting a shadow on to a larger rotating rock. ;-)
Speaking of rotating rocks… the one we call home completed for me another trip around the Sun and I have now made 56 successful laps. I am (like all of us) a work in progress and as I grow older I do try and acknowledge the end goal is maybe less important then the pursuit of the goal.
A day is a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles. River Tam of Firefly
Opening Day
Baseball stands the test of time...
Of all the major sports leagues, baseball’s opening day is so much more special then the others and their first games. Not sure why that is. I guess for me, it just has this timeless feeling of winter ending and summer beginning. An eternal hope for your teams chances, no matter how bad they were previously, there is always something hopeful about opening day. Baseball is a different kind of sport for fans, its a much more relaxed atmosphere in comparison to football, hockey, or basketball. There is just something special about a day at the ballpark and it doesnt matter if its the major leagues or your local minor league or college team. Batter up and Go Braves!
Kindle vs iPad
One of my personal goals is also to get back to reading more. I have a Kindle and enjoy it but the battery is really failing. I am going to start experimenting with using my iPad Air and the Kindle App and or Apple Books App. It weighs more but the color screen and responsiveness is way better. A big pro for the Kindle is the dedicated focus in reading is all you can really do with it. I will have to maybe use iOS Focus Mode to make sure the other features of the iPad don’t take me out of my novel. Stay Tuned.
A Thought on RSS
Like a few other million (billion?) users of the iPhone, I have come to rely on it for a great many things. One of the things I find I have improved from pre iPhone, is keeping up with news. I have worked for three different newspapers in my life and have subscribed to more than a few different magazines as well. Today however, the digital convenience of being able to read thousands of news sources from the palm of my hand is simply amazing.
I do not however like having to launch an app for this news source, then a another for that source, than another for something else. It’s tedious and takes up way too much hard drive space to have all those apps installed. I currently have one app, I launch and it provides me with news posts and article links from twenty different sources and at any time I can add or take away from that number as I need. The app is NetNewsWire (iOS App Store link) and it’s just one of many iOS apps that take advantage of a fairly old bit of technology called RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. If you are also a podcast listener, RSS is the backbone technology behind that as well.
This web technology has been around since the late 1990’s but didnt really get widespread adoption till aroud 2005. Wikipedia actually has a very well written summary you can check out here RSS. A great feature of a dedicated RSS feed reader, in addition to it’s customization, is the ability to read articles without all of the web fluff of ads, popups and auto playing distractions. The artices are formatted for easy reading and the font can be modified and sized to your liking. The sources can vary widely from blogs like this one, to mainstream news organizations like NPR, or the Associated Press.
A have tried a few other feed reader apps, check these out in addtion to NetNewsWire and see if any might work for you. Pocket, Inoreader, and Reeder.
Happy reading!
I Am a Runner
To be clear, it is a recent activity for me, I played some soccer and baseball in high school and mostly kept in shape over the years with various other activities like racquetball and tennis. But I was never a long distance runner.
A few years ago there were a few friends who were doing some fitness group runs and invited me to come along. These were just a mile or two nothing too crazy. I enjoyed it and decided to try and do an actual organized race. I did some training runs with this group as well as some runs on my own then ran in my first 10k. I had a great time and decided to try another race a few months later. Eventually I set a goal to run my first Marathon.
Running was never something I did that occupied a lot of my time. I went for short 3-5 mile runs once maybe twice a week. Not really a very regimented training routine. I entered more fundraising 5k and 10k races throughout the year and enjoy the community of them. Eventually I built up enough endurance and I entered and ran my first half marathon. I remember barely being able to finish and if you had asked me at the finish line if I would do one again I would have answered hell no.
However… recovery does amazing things and I found the experience so enjoyable I set my mind and body to actually train and do my original goal of running a full marathon. When I say train, I don’t mean with an actual trainer or even a structured running scheduled. I just tried to gradually build up my weekly miles till I was able to run closer to the full 26.2 miles.
The big day came and Mother Nature decided that the long distance wasn’t challenging enough for me, she decided to add a very cold windy downpour to the equation. I ran on and managed to complete the distance just under the 6 hour cut off but, I did finish. It was miserable and I can’t believe how sore I was. It was however a goal that I set for myself and that I completed it.
I run now for physical and mental health and still run many fundraising 5k and 10k through the year. I also run that same marathon but only the half now. My life, health and calendar has limited even my regular runs lately. Yesterday, I still showed up and ran that same half marathon. I had it in my head that I could complete it but that my time would be very slow. I was pleasantly surprised by my result and it genuinely brought such a smile to my face. It wasn’t close to my personal best but it was so much faster than what I thought I would do.
It is funny sometimes what our brains will tell us about expectations that sometimes our bodies will exceed. And yes, I know it can happen the opposite way as well. Yesterday however, my body thumbed it’s virtual nose at my brain and had a great day.
It’s The Little Things
It’s The Little Things
As of iOS 17, Apple introduced Animated Cover Art for album art in the Apple Music app. So now when viewing the album art while playing a song from the album, the artwork will animate creatively. Artists can design their own animations and submit them to Apple for use in listeners libraries.
I have only now noticed it since for the most part I will begin a playlist and then put the phone away in my pocket or set it down on the desk.
Here is a snippet of the Album animation for Van Halen’s album 1984. Check the cigarette smoke and the angel wings.
Very Clever.
To Sideload or Not to Sideload
There are a lot of articles and opinions out there right now about the new App Store policies they are implementing due to the new EU ruling going into effect. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a really nice take on a Wall Street Journal report, you can read it here. The Wall Street Journal On Apple’s Plans For iOS Sideloading In The E.U.
As a long time user of both the MacOS on Mac computers and iOS on iPhones and iPads, my opinion is this. Keep the current policy for the MacOS where you can use the App Store to obtain software both free and paid but if the use really needs software that is not available on the App Store, allow the installation but with a warning dialog about the security risk that entails. On iOS I prefer to only use software that has been vetted by the App Store. I really appreciate the iOS sandboxing that apps have to be installed in with iOS that insures that an application has no access to other applications unless explicit permission is granted by me. I can see the argument for “unlocking” the iPhone or iPad and allowing for installations from any source but the vast majority of user of those devices do not need this kind of access.
Will be interesting to see how this all works out.