Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

Tonight, on this last night of 2022, I’m refreshing Dark Sky and reading again about the current temperature and how it Feels. I’m looking at the radar page showing clear skies around me. And I’m mourning a great product produced by a company that was bought by a megacorporation, in this case Apple, who ruined the product. At midnight tonight, Dark Sky will go dark forever.

I guess I’m happy for the folks who got a big check, but shame on Apple for this.

#apple #nerdery #antitrust

I don't think I have enough time today to finish another book, or even start one, so my count for the year stops at 128.

More pages but fewer books than last year.

That's an average of 2.85 days per book, which seems amazing even to me. I know some books took much longer than that, but I also remember a few days in which I read multiple books back-to-back, reading from morning until night.

31 of the 128 were audiobooks, and two were graphic novels.

I read so many good books this year! In 2022 I finished Ada Palmer's fantastic Terra Ingota series, discovered the wonderful books of Diana Wynne Jones, and met the wonderful Leonid McGill character of Walter Mosley.

I started a new job this year, and the increased demand on my brain meant I read more in the first half of the year than the last half. Then again, I think that seems to be true every year. Still, I'm tempted to lower my target for next year.

I am far behind most of my friends and family when it comes to movies and TV shows, but I think I probably read more than average.

#books #blog #personal

My final breakfast of 2022 seems happy.

As a nascent digital hoarder (I can stop at any time!), the ups and downs can come quickly.

For example, I hastily mis-pasted a command and removed *not* the @eaDir directory and all of its sub-directories as I intended, but the *parent* of that @eaDir directory and all of its sub-directories, or as many as it could remove before I realized the command should have finished already and interrupted it. That was a discouraging feeling.

Then I remembered where the content in that directory had come from, checked Discord for a link, then used `wget` to download replacement files at 18.2MB/s. That was an encouraging feeling.

I might be no farther ahead than I was before my mistake, but I *feel* like I’ve accomplished something.

#nerdery #DataHoarding

For reasons too boring to go into here, I was searching for the origin of a particular phrase when I came across this amazing work of fiction from 2013:

http://www.defenestrationmag.net/2013/04/you-non-miraculous-son-of-a-bitch-by-eirik-gumeny/

Sadly, the author, Eirik Gumeny, "tried Mastodon and kind of hated it?" (question mark in original), but he does have a substack, which is a thing that people do:

https://notaviking.substack.com

I know next to nothing about him other than that he's a freelance writer in New Mexico, and he wrote a delightfully amusing story set there in 2013.

#blog

I finally managed to get my daughter interested enough AI art enough to try some prompting of her own, and she immediately put Midjourney to the task of creating a new profile picture for one of her many online accounts.

#AIart #midjourney

On this fifth day of Christmas, I hope Santa is taking time for himself. Maybe relaxing, maybe getting some sun.

I asked Midjourney what that might look like.

#AIart #midjourney #Santa #Christmas