In the Appellation Mountains
Margarine is served for dessert in the Appellation Mountains, a region ravaged by the Cupertino effect. In other regions, the dessert is called meringue.
“The old Internet”
Marie LeConte misses “the old Internet.”
Prisoners of Google
From the “Online Shopping” episode of the podcast You’re Wrong About, an exchange between Amanda Mull and host Sarah Marshall: AM: Google is at this point like basically a utility. SM: I don’t know how you could live without it, honestly. Oh gosh. You could use DuckDuckGo
Dictation failure
“Mowed exclamation point mowed exclamation point” Mode! Mode!
Genius
Man, that Elon Musk must be a genius. Who could ever have seen through these tactics?
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Mary Richards and technology.
Zuckerberg and Beckett
I regret that the Zuckerberg video doesn’t depict bodies partly buried in the sand itself. No matter — they’re already trapped.
DuckDuckGo
The New York Times reports on conspiracy theorists turning to a different search engine.
Pfft
Melania Trump’s NFTs (non-fungible tokens) of photographs from a defeated former president’s mad reign seem to be not exactly NFTs.
Verizon, grr
Disappointing but not necessarily surprising: Verizon might be collecting your browsing history. With directions for opting out.
Distraction-free devices
In The New Yorker, Julian Lucas wonders whether “distraction-free devices” can change the way we write. I was distracted by errors of fact about Ralph Ellison and Frank O’Hara.
Telephone FTW?
James Surowiecki suggests that the world of work bring back the telephone.
Pixels and iPads
The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial (who’s also working as an attorney for the defense) appears to believe the defense’s bogus claim that pinching and zooming on an iPhone adds pixels to and thus alters an image. And the prosecutor, who couldn’t provide a clear explanation of high-resolution images, also couldn’t answer the defense’s (bogus?) question about what operating system an iPad uses.
Meta
I presume the blue loop is meant to suggest infinity. I prefer to think of it as pair of handcuffs. Lemme out, Mark! Or maybe it’s head hitting itself against a mirror. Again, lemme out, &c.
“Aloha, Mabel!”
From “How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?,” the third episode of the new Hulu series Only Murders in the Building: “Hey, I figured out the perfect greeting for the text.”
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Charge! Now with photocharger news from the Brooklyn Eagle, 1952.
Recently updated
Charge! Now with a link to a film from the Brooklyn Public Library that shows the Remington Rand photocharger in action.
Charge!
In search of lost library technology: the Remington Rand Photocharger.
American Edge (ugh)
A Facebook initiative. Yes, dark money.
A Backblaze offer
A referral code.
Good Reports
Mark Hurst, who wrote the excellent book Bit Literacy, has a new website, Good Reports, with recommendations for online products and services that are “viable alternatives to exploitative Big Tech services.”
Jeffrey Toobin, exposed
“I thought I was off-camera” is a pretty limp excuse.
Hi and Lois watch
“My touchpad”?
Backblaze, anyone?
A link for a free month.
The kids are alright
A New York Times headline: “TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally.”
“Meaning everyone”
In The New York Times, Virginia Heffernan writes about attending virtual Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the time of the coronavirus.
Projecting
The overhead projector of classrooms past: “As a professor, I would notice the overhead projector stashed on the wall convector, next to lost scarves and notebooks and a little box or two of spare bulbs. A sad, neglected projector in every classroom.”
An alternative to Google Translate
DeepL.
A turntable recommendation
If you want to have a record player on at night, or at any other time, I would like to recommend the Audio-Technica AT-LP120-USB turntable.
Telegraph operators and weather
“Every morning, telegraph operators checked with their colleagues in the surrounding cities to see what the weather was like. ‘If I learned from Cincinnati that the wires to St. Louis were interrupted by rain,’ one operator was recorded as saying, ‘I was tolerably sure a “northeast” storm was approaching.’”