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I don’t like Outlook, but I have to use it. I’m trying to integrate it with my other email accounts once more, to have less email craziness going on. We’ll see what happens.

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The Shrouds, 2024 - ★★★

I watched this one last night, but it was hard to follow. Not what I expected it to be. I am holding full judgment until I see it again and watch the details more carefully.

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On Linux, I now use Pop!_OS, which is dark by default. I find that ef-deuteranopia-dark looks better with my theme there. Meanwhile, on the Mac, ef-frost works for the light theme and ef-night for the dark theme.

Here’s what I do to make this as automatic as possible (F8 is mapped as the key to guggle from light to dark when on the Mac). These are Prot’s EF themes, including the function to switch.

    (cond 
     ((eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
      (ef-themes-select 'ef-deuteranopia-dark)
      )
     ((eq system-type 'darwin)
       (mapc #'disable-theme custom-enabled-themes)
       (ef-themes-select 'ef-frost)
       (setq ef-themes-to-toggle '(ef-frost ef-night))
       )
     )
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Captured this guy this weekend 📷. We’re enjoying “hunting” birds: Nat identifies them using the Merlin app, and I try to capture them with the camera. It’s not easy, and I’m rusty, but it’s fun!

Auto-generated description: A small bird is perched on a tree branch surrounded by budding leaves.
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I really enjoyed Silo. Season 2 ended with a lot of open questions and half-answers, can’t wait for season 3. Seems like Apple TV is the new HBO?

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Today in On This Day, I wrote about my attempts to leave Arc Browser after using it both for work and personal stuff for a couple of months. I thought their days were numbered, but they’re still around, and as far as I can tell, enjoy a thriving community of users.

Overall, I’m still more comfortable using three browsers for my three categories of web surfing: Edge for work, Safari for personal, and LibreWolf (trying to keep it on Linux only) for private.

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From the archive:

Learning about God from dogs, Orthodox monks breed and train canines in upstate New York monastery web.archive.org

inspiring 🐕

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Owls are my power animal, and I like to watch my nieces counting all the owls in my apartment, but I know very little about them. Maybe this book would help.

Currently reading: What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman 📚

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After market tumult, Trump exempts smartphones from massive new tariffs - Ars Technica

The dispensation for smartphones and computers will be especially welcomed by Apple as the bulk of its supply chain is centred on China. Analysts estimate about 80 percent of its iPhones are still made in the country even as the tech group worked to diversify production to India in recent years.

Man, I thought it would take the Clown on Chief another week or so. What a disappointment!

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Why a US-made smartphone is not going to happen soon

Anyone who’s remotely familiar with how electronics are built knows a US-made phone is not feasible, at least not in the time span of the current administration, but 404 media’s Jason Koebler wrote a pretty thorough article explaining why.

A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy 404media.co

This is behind a paywall, so I’ll sum up the three main reasons:

  1. No workforce (not enough American workers are trained for this job, and they’d cost too much anyway)
  2. No materials (Apple’s supply chain lists roughly lists 80 different countries)
  3. No Factories (the machines for these factories are also manufactured overseas)

Some of the quotes I liked in this article:

The Reshoring Institute put out a paper that said American machine operators made an average of $43,000 annually in 2022; Vietnamese machine operators made less than $5,000 annually.

‘Factories require machinery and components from other countries, so if machinery gets really expensive you’re going to have less manufacturing, not more. So I think this is very unlikely to yield the results that they want.’

It is also worth considering that Foxconn, which manufactures iPhones and other devices, got billions of dollars of funding to build a factory in Wisconsin, failed to do so, and totally abandoned the site. Foxconn failed in Wisconsin for many reasons (chief among them, it did not ever actually build a factory, which was covered best by The Verge), but an executive there explained that it was not feasible for the company to find workers only from the local communities: “It is not feasible to tap into just Mount Pleasant or Milwaukee alone to really build up the talent pool,” Alan Yeung, who helped lead the Foxconn project, told The Verge.

The quote below is from a different article by Jason, interviewing the CEO of a company that’s trying to make a 100% US-built phone, but it highlights the material problem:

One specific item is a type of crystal that needs to be put into phones, which is basically for keeping track of time and a few other measurement metrics. That crystal is something that only comes from China, and maybe I think you can get it from South Korea, which is where we either are sourcing or trying to source that last component from.

By the way, the phone, Liberty Phone by Purism, is a $2000 Android device with mid-specs that cannot compete with phones less than half its price. And It’s still not entirely made in the US.