Highlights of 2024

As 2024 comes to a close, a few personal highlights: Welcoming George to our family Our family trip to Portugal A recuperative cottage rental in Haliburton Completing the Ironman 70.3 in Muskoka I’m so grateful for these opportunities and memories.

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🔗 Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2: A Deep Dive into Working with Siri and ChatGPT, Together

I’m aligned with Viticci here:

I think empowering LLMs to be “creative” with the goal of displacing artists is a mistake, and also a distraction – a glossy facade largely amounting to a party trick that gets boring fast and misses the bigger picture of how these AI tools may practically help us in the workplace, healthcare, biology, and other industries.

I could use the help with reducing busywork and letting me focus on the creative part. That’s what I’m looking forward to

After using the new Reeder for a couple of months I’m going to stick with it.

I like having all of my sources (RSS, Micro.blog, Mastodon, Bluesky, and podcasts) consolidated into one feed with easy gestures to tag as “read later” or open in a native app. The recent addition of folders was helpful, as I’ve created an “Attention” folder for anything I really don’t want to miss. Everything else is part of the river of updates and I don’t worry about completion.

One issue with the consolidation is that I’m following people across multiple services and seeing duplicate posts. I’ve been standardizing to their Micro.blog timelines, when available. This fragmentation across services is a common complaint and I expect I’ll be experimenting with different solutions. Now that we can so easily cross-post, we also need to manage our conversations. Recent updates to Micro.blog have been really helpful for this.

The most productive thing I’ll do all week: Organized the giant box of cables by taking out anything we no longer need, had no idea what is was for, or already had at least three backups. The photo is of the discard pile

A tangled pile of various electronic cables and chargers is spread out on a surface.

🎧 20 album covers that shaped my musical preferences

Last month, I posted a series of album covers for music that shaped my preferences. The gimmick was that there was no context or explanation, just an album cover. Now, I’d like to provide a few notes. As part of the overall framing, these are influential albums for me. They aren’t all necessarily my favourite albums by these artists or ones that I still listen to frequently. Rather, what I listen to and enjoy now, are strongly connected to these albums.

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🔗 The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor // Bret Devereaux

I want to focus on rigid science fiction armors because they offer an interesting lens to consider their design: how to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem: quite a few cultures have tackled this particular problem with a lot of energy and ingenuity, attempting to balance protection, mobility and weight. And the “problem with sci-fi body armor” begins with the fact that most of these futuristic ‘hardsuits’ utilize little of any of the design language of those efforts.