Watching the trash/recycling cans dance and tumble along the curb (awaiting their weekly pickup) in today's unusual-for-southern-California winds was slightly surreal.
Tom Kiefer
@thogek.bsky.social
/thō'-jek/ n. Computer/web geek, reader, husband, father, Myers-Briggs INTJ/ISTJ, etc. Not necessarily in that order. Speaks for no one but himself. Also at x.com/Thogek, threads.net/@thogek00, substack.com/@thogek, linkedin.com/in/thogek
Turns out, chemically rock-stable on the ocean floor does not imply stability in open air. gizmodo.com/deep-sea-roc... 😮🔥 Something similar (but far less dramatic) happened with moon dust on Apollo 11. 🌑 #ContextMatters
Deep-Sea Rocks Spontaneously Combusted After Scientists Brought Them to the Surface
A recent discovery highlights an unforeseen potential hazard of deep-sea mining.
gizmodo.com
Who's tried Octane #Coffee's fully automated drive-through experience (in #Wisconsin) so far? www.qsrmagazine.com/story/step-i... How smooth and reliable is it? 🤔🚗☕🤖
Step Inside Octane Coffee, the Employee-Free Beverage Shop
Adrian Deasy grew up around restaurants. His mother managed them for years, and he swore he would never go back. Instead, he became a mechanical engineer, working across automotive, motorcycles,…
qsrmagazine.com
Prolonged chronic stress resulting in significant #allostatic load (⟶ allostatic overload ⟶ burnout) is real. Bonus points for the ensuing package of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis dysfunction, metabolic & immune impairments, and more. 😫
Great panel-discussion on the importance and challenges of viewpoint #diversity and constructive debate in #schools and #classrooms: www.edsurge.com/news/2023-10... (60min audio).
How to Encourage Viewpoint Diversity in Classrooms
Newsletters
edsurge.com
Fun discovering the Anbernic RG SP; its wide range of supported "classic"* console-game ROMs; and its microSD, mini HDMI, & muOS/KNULLI details. * An '80s/'90s definition of "classic", not the classic-er Atari 2600 & Intellivision of the '70s. #GenerationalContext 👴🏻🎮
I'm both happy not to have to deal with (IMO horrendous) particle #physics / quantum field theory #math *and* impressed that today's #Claude Science with Fable 5.1 (an #LLM based #AI) is able to push the frontiers of said math like this. www.anthropic.com/research/yes... 😮🧮🤖
Claude computes a nine-loop amplitude in N=4 super-Yang-Mills
Claude computes a nine-loop amplitude in N=4 super-Yang-Mills
anthropic.com
My son just tried a dense "red" vegetable-juice blend my wife brought home, and says that it tastes like a beet just slapped him with a celery stalk. Vivid.
Is @malwarebytes.com Browser Guard v3.3.6 now blocking #Wikipedia (and *lots* of others) as "a risky pattern" (under rule 33559825 which apparently means using behavioral analysis that resembles known malicious activity)? 😕
"For 70 years, game theory has tried to predict what rational players will do… humans have stubbornly refused to be rational players. Now we’ve built machines, trained them on everything humans have ever written, and dropped them into games…" juliadiez.substack.com/p/we-built-m... #AI #LLM 🤖
We Built Machines to Be Rational. Then We Trained Them on Us.
Game theory and working with LLMs and AI agents
juliadiez.substack.com
Finally got some Beats Fit Pro earbuds (to replace my dying Soundcore Spirit X2) and am so far finding them rather nice *after* I found and disabled #Android "Absolute Bluetooth Volume" so that I could then set a reasonable (read: non-deafening) volume for them. 🔧🔉
Do #Flock cameras really run on Android 8.1 (EOL/unsupported as of 2021) on Linux 3.18.71 (EOL/unsupported as of 2019)? micahflee.com/flock-camera... The accumulated unpatched #security vulnerabilities must be... interesting.
Flock cameras are riddled with security vulnerabilities and hard-coded credentials
This morning, DDoSecrets published an exciting new dataset: Filesystem images of the partitions from an in-use Flock ALPR camera. 404 Media and Wired published a joint investigation into it. I downloa...
micahflee.com
Who's tried out #Android 17's "motion assist" feature so far? support.google.com/android/answ... I've never been able to read much (book, screen, etc.) in a car without getting a terrible headache. My current phone runs Android 16. 📱
Use motion assist to help reduce motion sickness - Android Help
If you need to use your Android device while riding as a passenger in a vehicle, motion assist can help reduce motion sickness. Motion assist shows small, subtle visual bubbles along your screen edges
support.google.com
Nice to see interest in cellphones with physical keyboards continuing. 📱+⌨️ www.unihertz.com/products/tit..., clicks.tech/communicator, www.hackster.io/news/the-min... #QWERTY #Unihertz #MinimalPhone #ClicksKeyboard
The Minimal Phone 2 Brings Back the Physical Keyboard — To Minimize Modern Distractions
Clever command-line interface provides shortcuts for common tasks without ever having to open an app.
hackster.io
Amazing how a warm summer with unusually elevated relative humidity levels can sap human energy so effectively. 😓
When a legitimate job-openings outreach email from a former employer looks in every way like a textbook example of a cryptic-attachment-laden phishing email... 🤦🏻♂️
When the #dog has clearly had enough of all the yapping humans in the house... Maybe this nose-down nap position will muffle them all?
Having to change my @pandoramusic.bsky.social station names every so often to keep them recognizable and actionable by #Google #Gemini (via my Google Nest Audio speaker) is kinda frustrating.
The use of Rush's "Tom Sawyer" song in the new teaser-trailer for #Reacher (on Prime) Season Four feels... perfectly appropriate. youtu.be/PCbp1FfipPg 🤜
REACHER Season 4 - Official Trailer | Prime Video
YouTube video by Prime Video
youtu.be
@americanexpress.bsky.social, I received a statement-notification email *and* a our-emailed-failed paper letter. 😕 The email's SMTP headers suggest an initial failure delayed the email by four hours until a retry succeeded. 😑 Perhaps allow a few hours to exhaust retries before printing letters? 😐
I just saw a table-top AI companion device that looked like a little 1998 Apple iMac G3. Cute. What'd really be amusing, IMO, is a desktop AI companion device that looks like Clippy. 📎
Always happy to find good #restaurants while far from home. And it turns out that El Rodeo in Clive and Jethro's BBQ in #DesMoines are both really good. 🌯😋🍖
Belatedly catching up on how important #Google #Android's #earthquake-warning system was in the recent Venezuela earthquakes. 📲😮🫨 www.techradar.com/phones/andro... So many this-saved-my-life stories... www.howtogeek.com/androids-ear... That is some seriously impressive positive impact.
Got an Android phone? You probably have the built-in earthquake alert feature that warned 11.4m people about the Venezuela earthquake — here's how to find it
Android's Earthquake Alerts System is now in place on more than 2.5 billion phones worldwide, Google says.
techradar.com
Wondering whether my #email provider's default "greylisting" setting is [part of] why my AmEx statement emails often don't show up (and many others are sooo slow). www.allegrow.co/knowledge-ba.... 🤔 Offhand (not having looked at it before), it seems yet another anti-spam mechanism with problems. 📧🛑⬛
What is Email Greylisting? How to Fix Delayed Emails (2026)
Are your B2B emails getting delayed? Learn how email greylisting works, why 451 error codes happen, and the difference between a greylist and a blacklist.
allegrow.co
Wouldn't it be funny if this grew into a trend? "Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ #engineers after #AI falls short": techcrunch.com/2026/06/28/f... 🤖🧹🧓
Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ engineers after AI falls short | TechCrunch
"Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence ... that would produce a high-quality product.”
techcrunch.com
Much of this— youtu.be/k_0YMPuzP2A (12m 22s)—is a great tour of why so many of us consider Harrison Ford to be among the most favorite of [people who work as] actors. 🤣
Harrison Ford Loves Mark Hamill’s Impression Of Him
YouTube video by UnfilteredCelebs
youtu.be