This came up in my Youtube suggestions the other day and I just had to watch it again. I remember wondering the same thing when I was a youngster, “who is Rula Lenska?”
June 2023
Vision.
So today was Apple’s annual kickoff of WWDC, or World Wide Developers’ Conference. Folks far and wide look forward to the keynote that kicks things off, because folks far and wide, especially those in media, get wrapped up in the hype.
Admittedly, I blocked off two hours in my work calendar so I could tune in.
There’s a lot of good things coming, including incremental updates to MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS. The star of the show was a “One More Thing…” moment, and that’s the reveal of Apple Vision Pro.
I have an Oculus Quest, which was purchased at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s alright, but I don’t really use it that often and I don’t find the experience compelling.
I find Vision Pro to be absolutely compelling. Now, is it $3500 worth of compelling? I’m sure there’s lots of folks that will buy this at that price and I’m probably not among their number.
One of the things I really like about Vision Pro when compared to other VR headsets is that Vision Pro concentrates on AR, or augmented reality. Instead of taking the user completely out of the space and created a virtual space, a “Metaverse” if you will, Apple gives the user the opportunity to overlay the entire experience on the world around the user. You can tune the world out complete or you can navigate around the system, using your apps and playing games and watching cinematic experiences, while still being able to see everything going on around you.
A really interesting feature is that others can see you. An outfacing screen shows a representation of your eyes and your current expression. I like the thought, but there’s an uncanny valley / “something is off” about the eyes looking back at the world. Maybe it’s the obligatory single blink shown in all the marketing materials.
I really like where Apple is going with this type of experience versus all the other approaches we’ve seen thus far. As usual, Apple takes it in a direction that is as elegant as it can be, seamlessly integrates with their ecosystem, and seems to keep the user first and foremost in their design. Will it become the next iPhone? Hmmmm.
I look forward to a future generation of this technology when it’s only a pair of glasses I have to wear instead of goggles with a battery pack on my hip. But I really think this first generation experience is taking us in the direction of making Augmented Reality a thing.
I hope the glasses thing comes to fruition in my lifetime.
Tempest.
Even though my birthday is over a month away, Jamie, Chris, and Mike gave me my birthday present. Mike kindly installed it yesterday. It’s a Tempest Weatherflow weather station.
I’ve had my eye on this weather station for a while. As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m fascinated by weather, and the guys thought it’d be best if I had my birthday present before Monsoon Season starts up later this month.
As a trained Weather Spotter for the National Weather Service, I’m excited about this piece of hardware installed on our roof. I’ve already given the family the weather stats for the hour several times today and I’ve been playing around with the incoming data and the like. I’ve also started contributing to Weather Underground. I was excited to see the number of weather stations in our neighborhood, and I’m happy to be contributing our data to the mix.
Mike was able to use an old DirecTV mount for the weather station so that made installation easy. It’s solar powered, so I don’t need to climb up there to change the batteries like the old days when we lived in Central New York. And this weather station has real-time data, so I’ll be able to see how high the wind gusts actually are as a storm is rolling through. Plus, this provides lightning detection with a roughly 40 km radius.
In addition to our station stats in Weather Underground, I’ll probably end up putting a widget somewhere on the page here to share our weather data. I love this stuff!
The Great Purge.
I refuse to be sick. It’s just the way I approach the idea of illness, I refuse to accept it and I press on. Nine times of ten I feel like this approach works to life but once in a while my body wins over my mind and I end up getting sick.
Hence the activities of Friday.
After repeatedly vomiting during the day on Friday and taking some much needed downtime from work, I decided to just approach the weekend to allow my body to do whatever it needed to do. Apparently, that meant lots of sleep. I am writing this on Sunday morning and for the first time in months I actually feel well rested. I took three or four naps yesterday, went to bed early last night and ended up sleeping straight through until my usual wake up time, which these days is around 06:00. I get up early because after all, I’m a middle aged man and that’s when middle aged men apparently wake up. I also have a feline that likes to stir a bit at sunrise.
When my body wins the illness battle and convinces me to slow down, I take a moment and realize that it’s time to listen. So that’s what I’m doing. As a riff on Friday’s theme, I’m calling this weekend “The Great Purge”. I’ve made a few promises to myself in regards to tamping down on some of my habits (caffeine intake, calories intake, etc) and trying to get myself to a better place, both mentally and physically.
My career can be stressful. It’s manageable, at least I think it is, but it is stressful. Sometimes I think I take work things a little too seriously.
Home life can be stressful too. Again, I think it’s manageable but sometimes a house of five grown men can be overwhelming.
As one that tends to read into things, I feel like this bout of illness was my body and brain ganging up on me a little bit and saying, “hey, slow down a little bit. Get your act together.”
And that’s what I’m going to try to do.
Caturday.
Truman often situates himself on the bed when it’s time for us to get up, but he’s always at the end of the bed and facing away. This is the feline equivalent of interested disinterest. But it’s to be assumed that this is for kibble distribution.
So Sick.
I can’t keep anything other than small sips of water in my stomach. After barfing with mic mute on and the camera off on three of today’s meetings, I decided to take the rest of the day as sick time, cancelled any weekend plans, and am just doing whatever my body wants to do this weekend.
Someone keeps settling in next to me on the couch and on the bed and looking after me in his way.
Digital Minimalism.
While I was chasing storms a couple of weeks ago (and driving hundreds of miles across Texas), I listened to some podcasts. I’m not an avid podcast listener; my interest in the art waxes and wanes as much as the moon, just on a slower timeline. But along the way I discovered Cal Newport’s podcast “Deep Questions” and I found it fascinating.
I’m eager to read Cal Newport’s book “Digital Minimalism”. Lately, and this week in particular, I have found being online to be overwhelming. There’s a lot going on in the world: the endless war in the Ukraine, the debt ceiling fiasco, the upcoming presidential elections, in addition to the usual idiocy that’s celebrated by society these days. I needed to find a way to calm down the noise. I especially needed to find a way to quiet the noise in my head.
I (mostly) left Twitter months ago when Elon Musk took over the platform. I still have my aviation/storm chasing account over there but I rarely look at it. I don’t like having the application on any of my devices because it just mines endless amounts of data. Same with Facebook and Instagram. I don’t need the datamining in my pocket. I do, however, like to know what’s going on with family and friends via Facebook and I like sharing and enjoying photos once in a while.
In this video by Cal Newport, he talks about focusing on “Digital Minimalism”, not “Digital Elimination”. There’s good content in the algorithmically supported applications out there. The trick is to minimize the distractions while you’re there.
For the Mac, I recently discovered a Safari extension called Social Focus. It’s worth the $1.99 price tag and it looks like the options will do much of what I’m looking for this sort of thing to do. Here’s my options for Facebook:
Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox all have similar extensions available; a quick search revealed “Social Fixer” for those browsers.
In the past I’ve talked about 30 day challenges I’ve given myself; these are month long odysseys to try to improve my life in some way. For the month of June I’m focusing on “Digital Minimalism” in two ways: ridding my iPhone of anything with “infinite scrolling”, especially the social media apps, and using social media in a responsible way with the Social Focus extension in Safari making things a little more sane.
I’m also very interested in purchasing Cal Newport’s book “Digital Minimalism”, however, I want a physical copy. I think I’m going to go to one of the locally owned bookstores this coming weekend to see if it’s available.
