Quick Hits
ACAB. Yes, all of them.
Go download Music MiniPlayer immediately and have your life improve by 1% or higher:
I Bought An iPad
I bought an iPad about a week ago. One of the new Airs with an M1 chip inside, along with a Pencil and Smart Keyboard Folio. I decided to write some first impressions here. We’ll follow up in a month or so to see how my thoughts and feelings have changed.
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So… Why the iPad Air? Glad you asked. First off, I wanted a new portable that is smaller than my 15” MacBook Pro but much bigger than my iPhone 11. I have enjoyed working from home, but sometimes you just gotta touch some grass both metaphorically and literally, and getting the fuck out of the house on the regular has become pretty important to my mental health. I work a lot every day and being able to easily throw something in a small light bag and head off is very appealing.
I also wanted a better device for reading books, a pastime I once reveled in but now have a hard time doing, despite the piles of books around here. I don’t have a Kindle and I’m loath to give Amazon more of my money to be locked into their hardware ecosystem. I do have a decent Kindle library built up over the years, but… also a bunch of books from Apple’s own walled garden, and non-ebook-formatted PDFs. Since the Kindle app still works on iPad, it seemed like a good bet.
Smart Keyboard Folio, a case with a built-in keyboard, is the drizzling shits- just a horrible thing to type on. The keys make a sad thunk like a cheap toy keyboard from the 1980s. The keys are also too small and too close together. My guitar calloused fingers bludgeon two or three of them at a time and my right pinky is getting tired of that backspace key.
The pencil is interesting. So far my hands shake a little too much to use the Pencil very well for precision work, but the sketch-ability is pretty useful and solid. I’ve already used it to make up some documents and webpages I was giving feedback and notes on, and it worked well for that with the iPad Air screen size.
We’ll see if any of these issues get better thru use and practice. Here is one of my awful little doodles, which I have named “susbat:”
and here’s a self-portrait:
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I Was A Speaker At Microsoft Build
Yep, I once again tricked a large corporation into believing I was competent and putting me on video. I was a speaker at Microsoft Build, the big developer conference. This year it was online only, again, which was the right choice. Seth Juarez from Microsoft and me talked about OpenCV Spatial AI Contest.
It was fun and I hope the video production company gives me a supercut of the Winnebago Man level of profanity that streamed out of me every time I botched a line.
Here Is A Picture of Me Taking A Knee On The 50 Yard Line of Levi’s Stadium In A Colin Kapernick Jersey
Phil’s Good Links
Welcome back. There have been multiple mass shootings since I started writing this.
Gun Thefts Are Rising and Leading to More Crime, Including Sacramento Mass Shooting
Looking forward to checking out Vinyl Nation, a documentary on the resurgence of records
Clearview AI is now permanently banned from selling access to its facial recognition tool to US businesses + private entities. It’s a start! But we need a federal face recognition ban.
An extremely kickass modern open source computer with a round display
I need to go to this gas station, which has different sodas from around the world like Iraqi Pepsi
From the NFT files: Seth Green gets his ape token funged, possibly torpedoing the TV show he was trying to make about it
— Phil Nelson
Wizard Tower Gamma, South of Market, San Francisco, California, United States of America, Earth, Hell
05.27.2022
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