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))
)
)
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!
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?
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.
From the archive:
Learning about God from dogs, Orthodox monks breed and train canines in upstate New York monastery web.archive.org
inspiring 🐕
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 📚
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!
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:
- No workforce (not enough American workers are trained for this job, and they’d cost too much anyway)
- No materials (Apple’s supply chain lists roughly lists 80 different countries)
- 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.
I’m visiting my mom, who lives with her boyfriend of several years. As a New Yorker, this place is huge - a garage for two cars, two showers and a half, a dining room separate from a kitchen and a foyer, and more space that I don’t know how to name correctly. I’d say it’s a big house, not a huge house, somewhere in Pennsylvania where you can afford something like this on a mortgage without robbing a bank, I guess.
I’ve lived in NYC for over a decade, and I’m used to small spaces. My new bedroom is huge compared to anywhere else I’ve lived before, but the apartment itself is small, but not in a contrasting way, it’s comfy. I don’t understand why people need all this space.
Most people my age (40s) have a family and kids, so a few more bedrooms make sense, two bathrooms and showers, sure, but let’s say you only have one kid, or maybe the kid moved out, or maybe you just don’t have kids. I think (and I may be wrong?) most people live in houses, and these houses have space, and, well, what do you do with this space?
Over here, they love plants: 📷
And then there’s the art they like to get, and the basement has a lot of tools and additional storage, and then there’s another old fridge in the garage, and the dining room has a table, but you can also eat in the kitchen - but why? I feel like I’m criticizing and not coming from the angle of “this is wrong,” I just don’t get it. Maybe if I were to live in a place like this for a while, I would. What do you get out of the extra space and extra stuff?
Taking down my S3 Videos
During my blog maintenance today, I stumbled upon a link to one of my S3 videos from two years ago. These were about 20-30-minute summaries of me going over my posts that week and explaining them in more detail, sort of offering an additional “behind-the-scenes” look. After watching the video, I decided to take all of those videos down.
The main reason for that is that I don’t feel comfortable talking to an audience in front of a camera. I don’t like how I sound, I don’t like the grammatical mistakes I make in speech (they happen more often in videos), and I don’t like all the “umms.” It’s different when I’m recording myself to family or friends, but publically, it feels different.
I write better today than I did two years ago and much better than I wrote five years ago. With recent developments in AI, mostly Grammarly in my case, I also get suggestions for clarity and precision, which help me bring out my ideas better. I prefer to express myself in writing than in speech—I always have—which is why I always had a blog.
Repeating the same things is another reason I would rather not have these videos up. I already write a lot of my thoughts down between this blog and my journal, and rehashing everything again a third time at the end of the week for the sake of having something in video doesn’t change the fact that it’s 90% the same thing.
When and if I do consider doing videos again, they would probably be instructional (like a how-to video) or a recording of a game playthrough. And when this happens, I think I will skip PeerTube altogether.
The server I uploaded my S3 video is shutting down, as the sole person behind it is running out of money and patience to maintain it. The instance I was on was already the third one I tried after two other ones failed on me, and moving large video files around for the sake of a free server somewhere is not worth it. Besides, I don’t like the fact that PeerTube, as awesome as it is, is just a recycled YouTube idea (classic YouTube, but still YouTube). There’s a lack of innovation in all these federated services, which build a copycat version of the proprietary platforms, be it Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. But that’s mostly just my grump.
In any case, I’m back here ranting as usual, still adding pieces from my old blog and my journal from time to time.