The Art Of Not Asking Why

I woke up from a long nap, and I’m almost 100%. Whatever that thing was, it’s gone now. Has a pretty weird out-of-it night with dizziness. The weather is perfect now:

In this kind of weather, I can wear shorts or pants, and when I walk outside, I can wear a hoodie but a T-shirt is also fine.

I took a nap earlier and woke up a bit loopy. The feeling has faded, but still there, feeling dizzy. It’s weird for a cold. Tested for fever and covid again, both negative. I don’t feel horrible, more like weird and weak. Do not like.

I know crontab works on macOS, but I wanted to utilize something more “as intended.” Ended up with an Automator workflow that executes a shell command every weekend. The calendar GUI is way more “human” than crontab!

chatGPT was a boon. Sometimes AI is exactly what it’s supposed to be: a helper.

Sick day. What started yesterday as annoyance became more obvious today. Now, I have to slow down.

Also, man, this photo is overprocessed.

Only three days ago, I linked to an article from Mark Dent, which puts our shortening toilet paper conspiracy theories to rest (spoiler: it’s not a conspiracy, and you’re not crazy, it’s for real).

I contacted Dent with another conspiracy of my own about t-shirts: the t-shirts I bought over the last couple of years seem to almost melt away in the laundry. I tried different brands, and most returned from the laundry with tiny holes, as if I washed them in acid.

Dent did not investigate t-shirts or clothing directly, but he did point me in the direction of another interesting article looking into the alarmingly decreased quality of sweaters.

As it turns out:

Knits used to be made entirely from natural fibers. These fibers usually came from shearing sheep, goats, alpacas, and other animals. Sometimes, plant-derived fibers such as cotton or linen were blended in. Now, according to Imran Islam, a textile-science professor and knit expert at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the overwhelming majority of yarn used in mass-market knitwear is blended with some type of plastic.

It’s not just plastic and your usual capitalistic poison, which is a big part of this problem, but also:

This race to the bottom had been going on for years, but it accelerated considerably in 2005, Sofi Thanhauser, the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, told me. That year was the end of the Multifiber Arrangement, a trade agreement that had for three decades capped imports of textile products and yarn into the United States, Canada, and the European Union from developing countries.

I don’t know about you, but I find these things fascinating. Turns out that you can say, “they don’t make them like they used to,” and you be right, supported by evidence.

About two months ago, I criticized Life Hacker’s article about de-googling. In a nutshell, the article is oversimplified and doesn’t go further beyond the same recycled bullet points of “use DuckDuckGo” and the like.

LifeHacker is not alone in this. I once read a similar article from the NYT tech reporter (I believe it’s somewhere on my old blog; I need to find it), and there are others, too.

The problem with simplifying de-googling is that it’s not simple at all. Even some tech folks I respect, like Irreal (which is how I learned about the LifeHacker article), oversimplify it with a blanket solution like “just use Apple.”

Every now and then, someone has a few good tips. This morning, I saw a video from Louis Rossman, who recommended someone I haven’t followed in a while: Linus Tech Tips.

Linus’ video kickstarts a de-goolging series, because the ways Google is tracking our lives have enough material for a couple of 20-minute videos. Linus goes through all of the big things, including YouTube.

It’s no surprise that part 2, which discusses YouTube in depth, was removed from the platform because of “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” If this is not proof of the quality of the content, I don’t know what is. Part 2 is still available on Linus’ Reddit at the time of this writing. I suggest you watch it while you still can. There are other platforms that can be used to advertise this content, and I think it’s worth it.

I watched part 1, and I can confidently say that it gives an excellent rundown of options that most folks would be comfortable enough to try. It does get a bit deeper into the woods with DNS and routers, but Linus makes an effort to explain these things without getting too deep into them. Still, I think this is where most people who need De-Googling will give up. After all, part of the problem with De-Googling is understanding what Google does so you can seek replacements.

I was just asked for an ID in the supermarket because I bought a six pack. I lifted my cap, showing my bald head: “is this good enough?”

We both had had a laugh and I have my beer. 🍻 Fun moments.

I’m enjoying my new “On This Day” page. As I mentioned before, I’m borrowing Jamie’s blog gardening idea and trying to enhance it. I want to import blog posts from my old blog into my new one.

This is not so simple. It requires I “schedule” posts from the past, which is a crude workaround, as it’s not meant to work this way.

I have to be careful and make sure I put in the date correctly, or the post will default to the present day. If I mess up, I need to change the date of the post to the past, which does not move the current post but duplicates it to the past date I specified instead. I am left with a copy of the post in the present day, which I cannot edit or delete unless I rebuild the blog.

For example, a few days ago, I brought back a post about scripting in Bash. It needs work. The markdown contains a few formatting errors, not to mention a healthy dose of typos and poor choice of words I wouldn’t use today.

I wasn’t careful enough and published it immaturely. Instead of receiving the datestamp from 2019, it was posted on September 1, 2024. I tried to correct this and change the date back to 2019. This created a duplicate post on that date while leaving the original post in 2024. The 2024 post showed on my Mastodon feed, and people commented on it, thinking it was from a few days ago (as they should, since It had the date of September 1, 2024). Back on Micro.blog’s backend, I could only see the post from 2019, the same one in the link above. The duplicate post from 2024 was not there, so I couldn’t edit or delete it.

The solution to removing that “ghost” post was to rebuild the blog on the backend. I think of this option as pressing “reset” on my blog. This fixed the issue. The ghost post disappeared, but it took the comments with it.

Now, I only have the correct post, the one from 2019, and I have a draft with corrections (it’s a long one!). If you comment on this post, it should be fine once I update it. I would wait though; there are a few corrections I need to put into place, including broken links and weird formatting issues.

While it doesn’t come as a big surprise, this article supplies us with evidence and data that we’re not going crazy: our toilet paper is getting smaller:

Why toilet paper keeps getting smaller and smaller thehustle.co

Good riddance. They’ve lost their way and have been pushing their political agenda ahead of their objective news coverage for too long.

WSJ and AP News for me.