What Apps Can See

From Dense Discovery: 

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Loupe for iOS shows you exactly what any app can read about you/your device without ever asking for permission — from time zone and keyboard languages to paired accessory names and installed apps.

It's a free tool that shows how seemingly innocuous details combine into something that identifies you enough to follow you across the web.

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More, from the app's self-description:

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Ever wondered how advertisers recognize you across apps and websites? It usually comes down to fingerprinting: small, ordinary details about your device, combined until the mix is rare enough to point back to you.

Loupe provides a guided tour of the data any app can quietly read about you. Explore what's exposecd, see why it's identifying, and decide what to do about it.

Loupe lets you see these details yourself. It reads the same public APIs that third party apps use, showing you the raw data and explaining why it matters.

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Free, the way we like it.

'Without matter there is no space or time' — Einstein

A few more takes on time:

"If time travel is possible, then there is no such thing as time." — Kurt Gödel

"Time is what prevents everything from happening at once." — John Archibald Wheeler

"Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it." — Leonardo da Vinci

"Time is money." — Benjamin Franklin

"All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain." — Roy Batty in 'Blade Runner'

"Time moves slowly but passes quickly." — Alice Walker, 'The Color Purple"

"No man goes before his time. Unless the boss leaves early." — Groucho Marx

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me." — William Shakespeare, 'Richard II'

Keybr — Adaptive Touch Typing Trainer

These days online typing tutors are a dime a dozen. 

I remember fondly my lessons with "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing," which came on a CD.

Worked great improving my accuracy 30 years after my in-person Introductory Typing course at Sawyer School of Business in L.A.

"Keybr is a smarter-than-average typing tutor that skips the generic lessons and instead uses your keystroke data to generate phonetically plausible practice words targeting your weak points. The tool watches how you type, then adjusts its degree of difficulty to enable you to make as rapid progress as possible."

Why Growing Pink Pineapples is Illegal

YouTube description:

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A pineapple grown in Costa Rica can sell for $400 in the U.S. but it's illegal to buy, sell, or even grow in Costa Rica itself.

That's the consequence of a mistake Del Monte made in the 1990s, when it spent 30 years developing the Golden Pineapple, tripled U.S. sales, and then lost control of its creation.

Why? A farmer hired to grow it leaked it, and rival Dole grew the exact same fruit in Honduras.

With the PinkGlow pineapple, a GMO engineered to convert its own lycopene into pink flesh instead of yellow, Del Monte built a legal fortress: patents, registered trademarks, and a biosafety law that turned the Costa Rican government into its enforcement arm.

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Reverse Hourglass

That's different.

When I saw this a couple years ago I instantly wanted one.

Just the thing if you're in Human Resources and conducting job interviews: keep it on your desk and the moment each candidate sits down, flip this puppy upside down and watch their reaction.

Easy peasy way to sort the wheat from the chaff.

But I digress.

It wasn't easy for me to acquire one: my Crack Research Team©®™ spent hours in the depths of the internet before finding them for sale at — surprise! — Home Depot.

You can too!

Red, Green, or Blue: $35.27-$38.64.

More?

Your wish 

is my demand.

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Doh!

'The Beauty of the Useless' — Spanish Napkins

From Abbas Asaria's Guardian story:

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If you have ever eaten a meal in a bar, cafe, or restaurant in Spain and grabbed a napkin from the ubiquitous small metal dispenser on the table. you will be familiar with the most intriguing feature of the wafer-thin servilletas: how utterly functionally useless they are.

Don't bother to use them to mop up spilled liquid, as they are less likely to soak up the spillage than protect it with an impermeable barrier.

And yet these humble serviettes are a deeply cherished part of the Spanish way of life.

A floor littered with servilletas is a sign that you've entered a bar that is humble and authentic.

The serviettes' useless papery texture has one great upshot: they're easily printable with all kinds of text and monochrome imagery.

Madrid-based photographer Felipe Hernandez has been collecting these little gastronomical mementoes from down-to-earth restaurants since 2014.

By 2017 he'd accumulated more than 150, which was when he decided to start photographing them on a white marble slab he had in his studio, and uploading them to a dedicated Instagram account.

Last month he released the book "Servilletas," containing 600 of the 1,000-plus in his collection.

'The Burning Sea'

A terrific 2021 thriller that seamlessly integrates a great cast and a love story into a gripping film centered on the sudden catastrophic failures of hundreds of offshore drilling platforms off the west coast of Norway in the North Sea.

I watched it on Prime Video last week, renting it for $4.99.

While preparing this post, my Crack Research Team©®™ discovered you can watch it free — the way we like it — on YouTube.

If you're one of the few people like me still using your Vision Pro, this 4KUHD movie will knock your socks off.

bookofjoe is a 'Content Machine'

After nearly 26 years of daily blogging, with over 44,000 posts published, last week one Ben Behnke sent me the reply up top in response to my submission of bookofjoe for listing on Bubbles, his website featuring a curated list of blogs.

Oh well.

I had a look at my referrer stats just for lulz and found this:

Bottom line: after jumping through the various hoops — never simple or straightforward — required to even get listed on obscure websites like cloudhiker, ooh.directory, blogroll.org and their ilk, the traffic generated is minuscule — at best.

Pro* tip: If you're going to waste your time and effort creating a site like Ben's, put the word SUBMIT with a link to your email or website at the top of the home page rather than hiding it beneath two or three other links at the page's bottom.

You'd think that would be obvious but you would be wrong.

*I'm gonna go out on a limb here and claim this status

Electric Bug Zapper

Finally.

Features and Details:

• Lightweight

• Travel friendly

• Anti-slipp [sic] grip

• Safe 3-layer mesh design

• Requires 2 (two) AA batteries (not included)

$9.99.

100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time

Here are your next 100 one-time use passwords.

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'Unconditional'

Here's a superb new 8-episode show premiering on Apple TV.

It came in under my radar since I hadn't read a word about it before stumbling on it while cruising the Apple TV website.

It's a spy thriller that's extremely twisty, without the violence and blood that oftimes accompanies such productions.

With each episode layer upon layer of subterfuge and deception is revealed, always unexpected and yet logical.

I love the underlying uncertainty and ambiguity.

Highly recommended.

Are You in the Weights?

Wrote Kottke: "LLMs encode their knowledge and reasoning through billions of numbers called 'the weights.' 'In the weights' means that a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search."

I'm big (top) in the eyes of LLM/AI — way bigger than Joe Biden!

Ready? Set? 

Go!

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A Million Times: 288 Clocks (24 x 12)

Res ipsa loquitur.

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'The Vanishing Half'

I just finished this extraordinary novel, the first one this year that was so engrossing I abandoned all the things I was supposed to do for two straight days so as to read it nonstop.

I invoked SlowRead©®™ at around page 30 (of 400) so as to make it last as long as possible.

Note: rather than tell you what it's about, instead I choose to link to reviews that are then your decision to open or not.

There are those constant readers (you know who you are) who will take my word for it when I rave about a book, something I do a couple times a year.

My Amazon Book Royalties For The Past 2+ Years

$1.05 in 2024, 70 cents last year, 35 cents so far this year.

Long story short: Don't quit your day job!

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Wiki Spy

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Fair warning: there goes the day.

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bookofjoe's Favorite Thing: Seki Edge Nail Clipper

This is a whole different level of functionality and elegance, a step up from the shiny cheapo clippers with a useless file in a clear plastic bin next to the cash register at CVS et al.

I've had mine for nearly 5 (five) years (top) and it still functions perfectly, precise and just right in my hand.

It cuts rather than breaks the nail, which makes for a smoother edge.

$18.

How I Decide Which Book To Read Next

This is one of my favorite things.

What a luxury, to be able to buy any book I want to read.

Back in the day I used to check out the maximum number allowed at one time from the Milwaukee County Public Library.

Weekly half mile long walks carrying them back and forth — no fun in winter.

Now the library comes to me: what a great world.

I like to have at least three but ideally four or five new novels on my "To Read" shelf.

I choose books based on reviews in the many online newspapers and magazines and newsletters I read, as well as chance recommendations/mentions in any number of online hangouts like Hacker News and Cool Tools.

But I digress.

The actual selection process is always the same: I put all the possible books in a stack next to my reading spot.

I think to myself: read the first twenty pages and if they're not compelling, put the book down and move on to the next.

Here's the thing — I very rarely get to a second or third book because invariably I'm engrossed in the very first one I started.

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Slumdog Millionaire

This terrific 2008 film knocked me for a loop from the opening scene and kept me totally enthralled throughout its 120-minute run time.

It made big stars of Dev Patel and Freida Pinto.

The soundtrack alone is sensational: I listen to songs from it on a regular basis.

You can too!

Firewood Splitting Simulator

Res ipsa loquitur.

Far Out Company

Wrote Mark Frauenfelder:

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Far Out Company is a curated archive of 1960s-70s counterculture visual art: concert posters, TV shows, underground newspapers, commune newsletters, comix, hippie business advertisements, and album art.

I love the DIY design aesthetic of this era: hand-lettered type, day-glo colors, psychedelic illustrations.

Artists and designers like Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, and Milton Glaser were doing world-class work for free newspapers.

It's a great resource for design inspiration or a trippy rabbit hole to fall into.

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'I can't do it'

Every year or so I replay James Altucher's genius formulation — which originally appeared in his long-defunct Financial Times column — of how to say no without finding yourself hemming and hawing and abba abba abba-ing.

When someone who's asked you to do something hears this response they're startled and silent.

Then they capitulate without you having to say anything else.

If this doesn't work for you, let me know and I'll cheerfully refund three times what you paid for this advice.

Chili Peppers of the World

From Kottke:

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An amazing visual field guide to the chili peppers of the world by Erik Gauger.

Capsaicin, the compound that makes chili peppers hot, is an evolutionary filter designed to punish animals and reward birds.

Mammals feel it as pain because mammal digestion destroys seeds.

Birds lack the receptor that detects capsaicin, so they eat the fruit, fly off, and deposit seeds far from the plant from which they ate, a dispersal mechanism.

Humans entered the picture late, and changed almost everything about peppers' forms, flavors, and range. 

But the underlying logic of nature remains in every fruit: a molecule that says no to the animals who won't deliver its parent seeds far from the rooted plant.

Includes hand-drawn illustrations of 176 different peppers, where they originated, their heat levels, and which hot sauces include them.

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11 Great Science Fiction Novels

Many reading this have never read a science fiction novel.

I know this to be true because over the years I've asked people if they've read any science fiction and many say "No."

If you're willing to dip a proverbial toe in the sci-fi water but have no idea where to start, I'm gonna make it easy for you: below, a list of 11 great sci-fi novels I've enjoyed over the years, most of which I've read more than once.

A book that thrilled me when I was kid, if it's a classic, will enchant me once again, in a different way, 60 years later.

Note: They're in no particular order; these are the first ones that came to mind when I decided to create this post.

• The Demolished Man — Alfred Bester (1953)

• Neuromancer — William Gibson (1984)

• Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson (1992)

• The Martian Chronicles — Ray Bradbury (1950)

• Dragon's Egg — Robert L. Forward (1980)

• Mission of Gravity — Hal Clement (1954)

• Flowers for Algernon — Daniel Keyes (1959)

• Childhood's End — Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

• Darker Than You Think — Jack Williamson (1948)

• A Canticle for Liebowitz — Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)

• The Stars My Destination — Alfred Bester (1956)

The Shoehorn: What's Old is New Again

If, like mine, some of your running shoes employ a sock-like upper, you will have doubtless found that they can be devilishly hard to put on, especially if you're wearing thick socks such as Thor-Los.

After fighting with mine for years, it occurred to me that perhaps an old-fashioned shoehorn could help.

Long story short: mos def!

As any fool can plainly see in the bookofjoe Studios©®™ premiere video up top, the Nike AlphaFly Next% 2 resists my efforts to don it on my own but capitulates nicely without any undue stress or effort on my part when I employ a shoehorn.

You can too!

Two (2) Official bookofjoe shoehorns can be yours for $5.99.

Make a friend's day by giving them one.