I want to know what’s burning in Middleton. It honest-to-goodness smells like a cigar in our backyard right now.

Keeping an eye on the air quality, and may not let my kids attend their sports practices this afternoon. A good way to visualize your air quality, and location of fires is with the Breezometer web site.

Wild fires burning all around the Boston metro. We have one burning a few miles down the road in Middleton. Smells like a camp fire in my backyard and I can even detect it in my closed up house. Just replaced my HEPA filter media this morning, and I have that running right next to my desk. 🔥💨

Washington Post owner, and billionaire Jeff Bezos published an Op-ed about how there’s a no quid pro quo for him blocking the WaPo Editorial Board from endorsing Kamala Harris for U.S. President in 2024.

The first thing all the critics point out is that the timing was terrible in that we’re just over a week out from the election.

I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

Timing was "poor"? Bezos is a very perceptive guy. I am not naive enough to think he would not understand how this would cast his business in a very negative light.

The next incredibly suspicious thing is that the CEO of Jeff’s rocket company, who has NASA contracts, met with Trump on the day of the (non?) announcement…

Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with (…) Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out (…) But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning.

Didn't know his rocket company was meeting with Trump? Would you meet with one of the world’s biggest lightning rods, who might soon have sway over millions or hundreds of millions in government contracts with your business without telling your company’s owner? Especially when your boss owns the Washington Post? I’d fire an employee if he met with Trump without telling me.

Come to think of it, I’d probably fire someone who lead to the loss of 200,000 subscribers over the course of a single weekend.

Can you fire yourself? Asking for a billionaire.

If I made a decision that lost my company 200,000 subscribers in a couple of days, I’d be instantly fired.

Two parents with three children is just hard. We need to restructure our economy so families can survive on one average income, so that a parent has the option to “stay home” should they choose. There are traditional gender roles here, so we would need to be intentional and considerate.

Seeing snow flurries this morning. Forecast has Halloween, a couple days from now, at 80°F. this-is-fine.gif

I would be remiss to not post a brief remembrance of Phil Lesh, the virtuosic musician, best known as the bass player and one of the composers for the Grateful Dead. Many credit Phil with bringing the bass guitar out of the backgound in popular music.

The Grateful Dead did not click with me until my mid/late-30s. As a big live music fan, most of my favorite musicians adored the Dead, so I found it surprising that they did not appeal to me.

One day, I noticed that the official live recordings of the Dead were available on the music streaming services. I thought I’d give it another shot. I tried to find “the best show recording”, and found a 1972 concert from Oregon that was beloved. I listened to all seven 3 hours of it and it finally clicked. Once I had decoded the complexity, I could now enjoy decades worth of recordings.

Shortly after, Prime Video released a multi-part Grammy-nominated documentary, Long Strange Trip which I would encourage anyone with an interest in music to watch. The Dead were such an incredible phenomenon on top of being world-renown musicians. The soundtrack is an excellent collection of some of their best live tracks all in one place. Still, that better serves to point you to excellent shows, as listening to a specific show all the way through as a single piece of art is really the best way to appreciate their craft.

If you’d like an example of Phil’s playing, composing and even singing, checkout Box of Rain. He composed it with Robert Hunter for Phil’s dying father.

Perhaps Phil’s passing will lead to others to discover their music for the first time. Fare The Well, Phil.

An excellent piece from @gruber@mastodon.social on the transparent cowardice of owners of the LA Times and Washington Post, and their anticipatory obedience to the orange potential autocrat. Profiles in Cowardice: Owner Jeff Bezos and Publisher William Lewis of The Washington Post

Freddie Freeman = Kirk Gibson

This is great advice I used to follow before APFS. I’m glad to hear it’s seamless again, and I should get back to doing this.

Use a cloned drive to recover from Mac failures

Anyone ever used a tool like Redact.dev? I want to remove all my tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts. I would then make the accounts private—not that I’ve posted to the Meta products in years. I want to hold the accounts to prevent someone from taking over my user names.

Up to 75°F now, here. 🙄🌡️

Did not expect to be on my back deck on the 23rd of October, 65° in New England, participating in a sprint review.

A quick Google Docs tip. When it thinks you’ve made a typo, it often gives you a pop-up hint with a suggested replacement. But how do you use it without lifting your hands off the keyboard? With your cursor in/touching the word, you can press Tab to select it, then press Return/Enter to apply it.

One lists 18 new things you can do when iOS 18.1 is released. I found the Apple Intelligence section the most interesting. These are the type of AI tools I’m most interested in.

The second is a detailed overview of the new Hearing Aid functionality that will be made available to some models of AirPods. As someone with minor hearing loss, I’m intrigued to see how this will work.

One thing I’m convinced of is that the tech world moves on before they’ve really mastered anything for something new and shiny. Here’s an example of a complex business site that is wicked fast and wicked usable and is explicitly not using bleeding edge tech. We need more of this. Via Wes Bos

Calendar and Reminder apps should have an “alarm” style notification option (off by default) for things with a fixed time that you can’t miss. If I have a meeting directly after lunch, I need something that will aggressively get my attention so I get back to my desk. A snooze would be helpful, too.

Many thought provoking aspects to this essay, Reclaiming Sovereignty in the Digital Age, by Paris Marx.

You should just read its entirety. I wanted to dive into one topic, specifically. Early in his essay, he quotes a digital rights group:

Last month, the Global Digital Justice Forum, a group of civil society groups, published a letter about the ongoing negotiations over the United Nations’ Global Digital Compact. “It is eminently clear that the cyberlibertarian vision of yesteryears is at the root of the myriad problems confronting global digital governance today,” the group wrote. “Governments are needed in the digital space not only to tackle harm or abuse. They have a positive role to play in fulfilling a gamut of human rights for inclusive, equitable, and flourishing digital societies.”

Marx makes the argument that governments around the world are beginning to standup to tech industry with regulations. I agree that many are overdue. I think some may be unnecessary, in that you could simply apply existing laws to address some concerns, only in a different (digital) context. But there’s one place I think he’s thoroughly wrong.

The cyberlibertarian argument is that all communications must be encrypted to protect them from the governments they perceive as such a significant threat, and that means allowing the dregs of society to use them in criminal ways too; something the vast majority of the public would surely disagree with.

While I don’t think digital tools helping criminals is good, it is clear as day that encrypted communication must continue to be available. This is because fraud, phishing, and malware are rampant in our networked environment. Regular people should benefit from the protection that encryption provides from criminals. Will this lead to criminals also communicating via encrypted channels? Of course. Criminals conceal contraband in the voids of car bodies, we don’t outlaw car body work so police can see inside everyone’s car.

Since there is no backdoor only for “good guys” (and in his scenario, remember, Putin, Xi and Kim all count as “good guys”) we must live with the fact that police must use other tools at their disposal to break up criminal activity, as they have prior to the proliferation of public encryption.

We can’t make everyone less safe in order to make the police’s job a little bit easier. Furthermore, without encryption, we leave ourselves even more exposed to foreign disinformation campaigns, as hacking groups can more easily access our communications to allow their disinformation to appear more realistic and more targeted.

It appears the French police arrested Telegram founder on charges of enabling all sorts of illegal activities without breaking encryption because Telegram is not E2EE.

…authorities have long been able to get warrants to search people’s mail, wiretap their phones, or obtain their text messages. That’s the trade off we’ve collectively made, and one that the vast majority of people have never seen as a threat to their rights, freedoms, or liberty — because they’re not libertarians.

Technology is a step ahead, and there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. If we outlawed encryption, criminals would still have it because open source is a thing that has already distributed that capability to anyone willing to figure it out. Criminals have all the incentive they need to continue to support themselves if they cannot use encryption available daily to the general public. In addition bad actors in governments would use the security weaknesses to do what they have always done, legal or not, and that’s curtail the freedoms of the marginalized.

While war and crime are far from eliminated, we must recognize that we live in the safest time in all of humanity. Many more horrible things happened prior to publicly-available encryption. But conversely, the world being digitally interconnected, opens us up to newer classes of crime that in many respects are easier than they ever have been. We must take personal measures to reduce that risk.

Let’s use our legislative resources towards most of the rest of Marx’s points, especially the part about curtailing surveillance capitalism from following us all over the world. Meanwhile, let’s encrypt as much personal communication as we can.

I saved this post to share with my non-designer friends as a succinct primer on presentations.

(start) from a standpoint of (…) empathy and perspective.

Stop overusing formatting!(…)The same goes for colors and fonts. Pick one, or maybe two.

Worth it to see the table formatting gif alone.

Design note for those who may not follow the WNBA: The New York Liberty team colors are black, white, pale green, and their uniforms have copper trim. The Statue of Liberty is clad in oxidized copper whose patina is that shade of pale green.

Switching from the NLCS to catch the 5 minute overtime starting now between NY & Minn. to decide the WNBA Finals.

Just found our Harris/Walz sign about fifteen feet into the woods across the street.

Repaired. Placed in a more visible position for our window. Trail cam loans accepted.

I am not apologizing for being up past midnight watching The Dave Matthews Band get inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Live.

Did my election worker training tonight. In short, they take election integrity very seriously.