Answer here this time tomorrow.
Hint: smaller than a bread box.
Another: no moving parts.
A third: not by Josef Albers.
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
Why are commercials on Peacock less annoying?
Unlike commercials on conventional TV since forever, Peacock's commercials are accompanied by a small yellow circle in the lower left hand corner of the screen which encloses a second-by-second countdown timer showing exactly how long till the commercial ends.
Perhaps it's the participatory gamification that ensues: I try to precisely unmute the TV at the exact second the commercial ends and the show resumes.
Anything that I can gamify immediately becomes more appealing.
What's vexed me for decades is my inability to figure out a way to gamify my dreaded daily run.
I haven't given up trying and I never will.
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
InkField
From Dense Discovery:
.............................
InkField treats drawing as an event rather than an image — every stroke, pause, and gesture is recorded and can replayed stroke-by-stroke.
Its ink physics mimic watercolor bleed, dry brush, and salt crystallization.
You can also download anyone's recording from the gallery and paint on top of it, your work branching off theirs.
...........................
I have no idea what all that technical talk above means but I'm sure others will twig.
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Bluetooth for phone calls in the car is a FAIL
Long story short: Who hasn't been talking on the phone when all of a sudden the call drops, only for it to connect again after a few seconds of silent dead air?
The other party blithely dismisses the outage, remarking "The call switched to my car's Bluetooth."
Same thing when they arrive and turn off the car and the call goes dead for a few seconds while it switches back to the phone.
Wake up and smell the coffee: That's not a feature — it's a bug.
It's so annoying and it doesn't have to happen.
Turn off your car's Bluetooth when you're not using it — when you get in while talking on the phone put it in a cupholder or the center console, anywhere: you'll hear it just fine and so will the person you're speaking with.
Just because you have a feature doesn't mean it's of benefit.
Are You Dead?
I just subscribed to this app — you can too!
It's taken China by storm and earlier this year it was #6 on the U.S. iPhone app store.
You could look it up.
Long story short: For $1.99/month you get up to 4 (four) peeps to receive your one-touch daily check-ins — and react with alarm if you miss two days in a row such that they get an alert that you've gone silent.
I've used 2 of my 4 peeps: my brother and the lady across the street.
More on the app here.
Jordan Mechner's "Replay" is the best non-fiction book I've read in years
I must've seen it mentioned somewhere but I can't recall where.
In keeping with my newly adopted "no spoilers in boj" policy, I offer this link to a review by NPR.
That Mechner created the iconic game "Prince of Persia," released for Apple II in June 1989, was enough to make me want to read his multigenerational family saga.
Monday, June 29, 2026
Emperor Penguin Chicks Jump Off a 50-Foot Cliff in Antarctica
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At six months old, Emperor penguin chicks march to the ocean.
Most jump just two feet off the ice to take their first swim.
Since 2009, satellites recorded evidence that some head towards sheer ice cliffs.
What happens next remained a mystery — until cinematographer Bertie Gregory sent a drone to record what happens next.
What Apps Can See
From Dense Discovery:
................
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.
................
More, from the app's self-description:
................
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.
................
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'
Sunday, June 28, 2026
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:
..............................
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.
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
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.
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
Doh!
Saturday, June 27, 2026
'The Beauty of the Useless' — Spanish Napkins
From Abbas Asaria's Guardian story:
...........................................
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
Friday, June 26, 2026
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)
'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.
Thursday, June 25, 2026
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?
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
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