Bro.
This is simultaneously obscene and one of the most impressive architectural things ever.
Do…do you get an in-house chef? What if you just want to live there alone? What if you just want to cook plain-ass spaghetti every night and then eat it in your underwear while watching Riverdale?
(Not that I do that ever.)
Can the chef watch Riverdale with you?
And it comes furnished, right? What if you want to use your own furniture? How hard is it to get all of that out of there and replace it with your Walmart spatulas and La-Z-Boy chair?
Excess like this is weird to me. Like, on one hand: why? But on the other hand: why not?
But also also: living in the most expensive house in the world is not something I’d ever want to be able to say. Think of all the other things you could do with that money.
But also also also: it is art, to an extent.
You still get bird poop on your windows, though. Money can’t buy poopless birds.
And that’s probably one of the weirdest sentences I’ve ever written.
New Compy!
ALLO, NERDS!
So I finally got a new computer a few weeks ago (my old one was from 2015 and the Online Learning Era pretty much murdered it) and just got around to setting it up. I also got a giganto new monitor.
LOOK AT THIS BOX!
LOOK AT THIS MONITOR! Cup for scale.
Edit: Yo, I changed my cursor size to the “Andre the Giant” setting and it’s HUGE. I love it so much; I think I’m going to keep it like this.
3.5 Inch
Bro, we have a set of floppy disks in the mail room at work:
My dear Millennial friends, do you remember having “2 floppy disks” as an item on your back-to-school list for junior high? We had that. I remember those colorful transparent ones were sold in like packs of five or ten. I also remember how we played fast and loose with our data by pinging that metal covering back and forth and trying to touch the disc inside.
Y’know, ‘cause we could store an ENTIRE WORD DOCUMENT on there.
Fun times. It’s wild that we have little tiny flash drives that can now hold terabytes of data.
I’m the next Steve Jobs, yo
So this is a fun little doodad that lets you design an iPhone. You can give it a try, but I seriously doubt your design can be better than mine. Check out this bad boy:
And the back:
If your smartphone doesn’t have a handle on it, is it really a smartphone?????
???
??
?
????????
DankPods
I found this guy a while back and he’s great. This is one of his best ones.
Calling the manual “Manuel” and screaming about that giant AirPod speaker were fantastic.
Oh my god there are people out there like me!
LOOK!
I have SO MANY BACKUPS of my nonsense, you have no idea. I have backups on flash drives. On hard drives. Three different computers. In clouds. In my email. In my other email. Google Drive. I carry three of the backups with me. I carry a separate one when I run. I keep one in my office. I keep one in the FREAKING UNITED STATES. I keep one in our safe.
I got the backups, let’s just put it that way.
I’m also a big proponent of physical copies of things if you can get them or make them; that’s the main reason I’m printing all my old blogs. They’re a huge part of my life and I’d be so sad if I ever lost them.
Anyway.
AirPods for Me!
So when I got my phone the other day, I also decided to spring for some AirPods.
Because why not.
And dudes, they are GLORIOUS.
I didn’t think I really needed them, because a) I like my cheap-o Koss headphones well enough for outside music time, and b) I have the Bose and FREAKING SENNHEISER headphones for inside music time.
But I do like to talk to my mom sometimes when I’m out walking, and fiddling with the old wired Apple headphones was getting obnoxious (and mine are REALLY old, so they aren’t in the best shape).
So I got these.
And I love them!
They’re way more comfortable than the wired ones, infinitely more convenient, and have pretty great sound. Plus, I got mine a little silicone case, which had to be red to match my new phone.
Woo!
Well, my phone’s dead
It had to happen sooner or later.
My phone, an iPhone 8, has been through it. I’ve taken it on hundreds of walks and runs, many of which have been in very cold temperatures. Because of this (most likely), I’ve had some battery issues off and on, including days where my phone would go from 100% charged to 20% charged without me even using it.
Tonight, though, it finally crapped its last crap and died completely on me. The screen is completely dead. It will turn on, but the screen is black.
I was going to wait until the new year to get a new phone, but I guess this kind of forces the issue, haha. Luckily, I was able to order a phone online through apple.ca and get it delivered to the Apple Store at Market Mall. It will be available for pickup tomorrow afternoon, which is pretty freaking cool!
Now I just have to wait.
Edit: It’s so hard not to be able to call or text my mom, even for such a short period of time, haha.
Rogersgate
What happens when one company owns all the phone/internet/cable in a province?
BAD THINGS, THAT’S WHAT
(Today was an adventure)
Kodak Yellow
I’ve mentioned on here several times how obsessed I was with my mom’s camcorder when I was a kid/teen. I made hours of stupid videos…in fact, enough to fill a shoebox with those old mini tapes.
I’d love to digitize these things before they crumble to dust, and perhaps this is the answer.
There are probably local places that do it, too, so I might want to check those out. But just being able to mail the mass of them to Kodak and then get the digitized stuff back sounds SUPER EASY.
As if any of you care, but whatev.
iNoise
HEY BUTTBAGS!
Did you know your iPhone can play ambient noise for you?
Go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds
Then you can choose to make a sound available to you to play and help you focus. Mine has six ambient noise sounds (white noise, rain, etc.), but I’ve only got an iPhone 8, so newer models might have more.
Supah cool!
New Garmin!
So I’ve had my Garmin Forerunner 35 since…2018 I think. A good amount of time, at least. And during that time, it’s been used a LOT and has been exposed to all sorts of very cold and reasonably hot temperatures.
As expected given how much I’ve used it, it’s starting to wear down, battery-wise. It’s getting harder to make it through a longer walk, and sometimes it just freezes up and needs to reset when I try to start a run/walk.
So my mom and I went to Best Buy and I got a (slight) upgrade!
Meet my new Garmin Forerunner 45. He unfortunately does not have the lime green band like my 35 did, but he’s got a color display and does a few extra things over my old version.
It was SO TEMPTING to get a bigger upgrade (and the Apple Watches were tempting as well, haha), but all I do is run in the city and thus can’t justify a fancier watch that has all the trail maps, etc. built in. Plus, this one really does do everything I need.
Woo!
iPhone Needed
So yeah, I definitely need a new phone soon. Apart from the screen issues, I’ve murdered my current phone’s battery by taking it out on walks in the negative Fahrenheits so frequently.
It sounds like I can just get any phone I want and replace the SIM card in it to keep my current plan. So the phone I’m looking at is the iPhone 12 mini in that awesome lavender color. Here:
I love that color! The only downside is that I’d have to get a clear case for it in order to show off its color (instead of some ostentatious case instead).
WHAT
I’m sorry, his actual name was Clippit?
I had no idea. I always thought he was just officially “Clippy” and I called him Clippit back when I was obsessed with him because I thought it would be cute for “Clippy” to be like a nickname or something.
The Office Assistant lore is deep, yo.
Old Tech, New Tech, But No Blue Tech
This is so freaking cool. I love how technology changes and progresses.
R Guides
Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy wassup?
So in an effort to try to accumulate all the stuff I’ve written on how to use R, I’ve compiled it all and put it (or links to it) on a Google Sites page. I’m like 99% sure none of you care, but in case anyone stumbles upon this blog who DOES care about R, here are my reference guides and such.
More will be added soon!
iNeed a new iPhone
Whatup?
So I dropped my phone after my run this morning (or, more accurately, I took it out of my little running backpack and sorta accidentally flung it in the air and wasn’t able to catch it before it hit the pavement; I’m sure it was humorous to watch) and now my screen is all wonky.
It’s not cracked or anything, but the longer I have my phone on the whiter/lighter the screen gets until it’s very hard to read it. Which is…strange?
Anyway, I’m not sure if it will get better or worse, but if it stays as it is or gets worse, I’m not sure how useable it is from a practical standpoint anymore (it’s getting “whiteout” light within like 10 seconds of being on).
So I might need a new one. If that’s the case…
The Bad News: having to pay for a new phone
The Good News: I love looking at Apple products.
(Me in an Apple store)
So obviously I’m not going into a mall right now because I’m not an idiot, but I can look online and NO ONE CAN STOP ME.
Edit: Hokay, so the iPhone 12 Mini is tempting because it’s small and that purple is a color I’ve been super into lately for some reason. But I know it would probably just be covered up by a phone case, so that point probably doesn’t matter much. Also: EXPENSIVE. So maybe the second generation iPhone SE would be the way to go. It’s still got the “home” button and I don’t think I’m ready to give that up yet.
Peh. We’ll see.
GIVE ‘EM THAT OLD RAZZLE DAZZLE
Have you ever heard of dazzle camouflage? I hadn’t heard of it until today*, but it’s super interesting.
Dazzle camouflage was used a lot in WWI, mainly on ships. It is not designed to conceal a target but rather to make it difficult to estimate how far away it is, how fast it’s going, and where it’s going – thus making it difficult to fire upon it. The idea is to paint the object with complex patterns and geometric shapes that cross and zigzag and basically mess up perspective. Here are some pics:
So did it work? Apparently it’s hard to know. There were some analyses done based on WWI data, but too many confounding factors made it difficult to be able to conclude definitively that dazzle camouflage was advantageous over any other painting scheme. Still interesting, though!
*I was looking up scintillating scotomas and they mentioned that sometimes the shimmering looks like the patterns in dazzle camouflage. Which is true.
Just in case you needed reminding…
MY SENNHEISER HEADPHONES GIVE ME LIFE
Snap back to reality, OOP there goes…um…a rope…
This is REALLY interesting, yo.
According to Wilhelmsen, “when a mooring line snaps, it moves at up to 800km/h…Snap back accounts for a staggering 53% of mooring accidents, according to the UK P&I club, with a sobering 1 in 7 of those accidents resulting in fatalities.”
What a cool, innovative solution to try to prevent these accidents.
Also, this brings back vague memories of reading about snap back incidents with games of tug-of-war. Pretty rough stuff for a “fun” game, but I guess those accidents too have resulted in ropes that are specifically designed for the stress of tug-of-war.
Tabula Rasa
Let’s talk about online teaching!
So U of C shut down in-person classes (and campus in general) in mid-March last semester because of COVID. I won’t be teaching again until summer, but I am doubting that classes will be in person by then. Hell, classes might not be in person in the fall, either.
I ended up using my laptop in its “tablet mode” to finish out the remainder of last semester, meaning that I used it like a tablet to write out all my notes while I dictated and recorded the notes/dictation, then uploaded all the recorded lectures to YouTube. This worked okay, except doing 50-minute recordings made my laptop super hot and I don’t want to demolish it during summer, where I’ll be teaching back-to-back two-hour classes M/W/F.
So I decided to get all fancy and bought a Wacom One tablet!
I’m scared to open it ‘cause it was super expensive and I don’t want to break it, but I’ll have to test it out before summer to make sure it actually does what I need it to do. Namely, I’ll need to be able to write in OneNote on my little note packet PDFs and record the tablet screen while doing so.
Edit from a few weeks later: okay, yeah, this is going to work really nicely I think. The tablet reads as another monitor to my computer, so when I’m lecturing through Zoom, I can “share screen” my tablet and whatever window(s) I have open on the tablet screen show up to my students and get recorded.
Edit from summer semester: this works amazingly! I love this little tablet. Definitely a worthwhile investment, since fall will also be online.
E-lectricity! EEEEEEEEEEE-lectricity!
OH MY GOD I KEEP FORGETTING TO BLOG ABOUT THIS
So we were away from the Superstore for a little while and when we came back they had THESE.
LOOK AT THEM.
They’re little electronic price labels and they are fascinating.
Edit: I just spent fifteen minutes reading a brochure about them.
Can…can regular people get a hold of these? I just want, like…five of them.
To cuddle.
(Sorry, these are for some reason obscenely cute to me and must be treasured and protected. I don’t know what my problem is.)
Edit again: we’ve seen a few injured ones (punctured/broken screens) lying to the side of aisles in the Superstore and it’s so hard not to take them, hahaha. I’d get in so much trouble, I’m sure.
Hahaha, oh my god
A Child from the Future: “Grandpa, what did you do for fun when you were younger?”
Grandpa:
Look at these Millennials ruin everything.
Those vacuums in that pile of cereal, though, that was hysterical.
Eigenblogger 