In case you’re thinking about trying Mastodon and/or leaving Twitter this weekend, here’s a guide.
How To Get Started On Mastodon and Leave Twitter Behind (PC Mag).
Twit.
So as of last night, Elon Musk has completed his purchase of Twitter and immediately fired the top four execs of the company. (Source: Axios). There’s evidence of content monitoring already being relaxed. Nothing else noteworthy has occurred this early in the game, but I’m sure there’s a whole avalanche at the top of that hill.
I have two public accounts on Twitter, one for general stuff with a tech lean and one primarily for my aviation endeavors. Both can easily be abandoned without much strife on my part. I’d simply leave them in place with minimal information in the profile and that’s that.
I’ve already been waffling about whether to stay with the platform. This is a struggle I constantly have in my head as I find it to be an incredibly detrimental time sink with not a lot of reward. I have met some great people through social media in general, especially Twitter, but like many things in the United States, since the beginning of the Trump era it went down the shitter. (There really isn’t an elegant way to state that fact). Kicking Trump off the platform was an improvement, but the fire of idiocy had been lit and there’s just a lot of incredibly stupid people out there saying things indicating their city speed limit IQs.
As I write this blog entry I’m talking myself out of going back there but like watching the proverbial train wreck, sometimes you want to see just how awful your fellow humans can be.
I believe the new regime at Twitter will give us plenty of opportunity to behold that spectacle.
In the meanwhile, you can find me on mastodon, which is much more complicated but open source and focused on privacy. The tech hoops one has to jump through to find their way around mastodon reminds me of using CompuServe or Prodigy in 1992, but it makes for a less reductive experience when it comes to content.
Here’s a link to an article on The Verge.
Lucky.
Lucky likes to keep it casual on a Thursday. I like to think his ears are a little bit country and a little bit rock ‘n roll.
Decade.
A year or so before I began my personal aviation journey, I was in the habit of watching airplanes and driving by small airports in the region. I browsed through Apple Photos to see what I was up to a year ago, and this is what I found: a photo of a runway.
Upgrades?
So last week Apple announced an upgrade to their iPad Pro line and their “regular” iPad. There wasn’t a big event around the announcement; it was more of a “here’s some new stuff” press announcement, which Apple occasionally does.
The tech world is not impressed. Neither am I.
A month or two ago I replaced my 2018 iPad Pro with a newer 2020 model. The reason I went this route is because I wanted to use the same Magic Keyboard from my 2018 iPad Pro for my new 2020 model, and I figured Apple would change everything about the 2022 iPad Pro. This is what people wanted, a new chassis with things like the front facing camera moved to the side (or the top of the iPad Pro in landscape mode), like a traditional laptop. They did not do this. It’s the same chassis, using the same accessories, just with the faster M2 chip. The current software available for the iPad Pro barely taxes the M1 chip announced back in 2020, there is absolutely no reason to upgrade to an M2 chip. There’s nothing out there that needs that horsepower. Plus, there was no Magic Keyboard refresh announced for the iPad Pro, so we still go without a row of function keys. Not good for a techie, we still rely on things like the Escape key.
The new iPad, or the iPad 10, has a new design. The webcam has been moved to the top of the iPad in landscape mode and uses the same design language as the iPad Air. However, the new iPad 10 uses the older Apple Pencil, not the magnetic version found on the other new machines. And because the original Apple Pencil is designed to use a lightning port for charging, and the new iPad 10 has a USB-C port, to charge your pencil you have to buy a dongle from Apple to convert the USB-C port to a lightning port.
Apple sure loves its dongles.
They’ve been saying for years that Apple has lost its way a bit since Steve’s passing. The company needs a strong leader that is willing to get their hands dirty coming up with solutions. I feel like Apple is devolving to their 1990s era when they had way too many products and the lineup was confusing. As I mentioned on social media last week, all that’s missing is the iPad Performa.
And So It Begins.
I wish I could say I’m excited about the impending holiday season. I don’t even really get excited about Halloween anymore. Perhaps I’m becoming a cranky old man.
While the holiday experience is enjoyable, there’s a certain magic in the air that seems to be missing, at least for me. The coziness of the holidays has been replaced by Black Friday Sales, Online Tuesday Sales, 24 hour shopping experiences on Thanksgiving day, electronics, electronics, electronics, and trying to figure out what to buy people who don’t want to tell you what they want so you have to guess.
I’m not that perceptive in that area.
Halloween is in full swing. I doubt our carved pumpkins will survive the desert heat to make it to Halloween, but we went through the motions and I’m filling up on roasted pumpkin seeds.
Fiber makes the holidays better.
Rock.
We had a load of landscape gravel delivered to our home earlier this week. The load was seven tons and we all opted to move the gravel where it need to be ourselves. Today we finished the project and got the Yavapai (that’s the color designation, apparently) gravel where it needed to be.
I think the results are acceptable. My arms appreciated the work out.
Test entry.
I think I have solved my strange characters issue in my blog. When a database is over 20 years old, it’s bound to have some rust.
This is a test entry with ‘lots of punctuation’ and off-beat characters like an é and an è. This is from my Mac.
Here’s a paragraph from my iPhone with è and õ and ü
And here’s an entry from my Linux machine with “quote marks” and ‘single quote marks’ and back ticks
And then one more paragraph from my “iPad Pro” with lots of things going on, including é and è and ø and ü and º degrees
Caturday.
Truman and the combined forces of Lucky and Jinx (our canine representatives in this entry) have come to some sort of understanding.
- Canines do not bother kitty when he’s in Daddy’s office
- Tails that brush by kitty on a bench are fair game
- If one of the canines sniffs a feline butt, the feline shall do the same to the canine
The three of them have actually come to some sort of understanding and I haven’t heard a feline drama scream of dissatisfaction in weeks. I think everyone has decided to be friends.
First!
I went for a ride to the southeast of Tucson and drove through Sierra Vista and around nearby Fort Huachuca. It was in Sierra Vista that I discovered the very first McDonald’s Drive Thru.
I noticed the “McDonald’s” in the main sign and the “McDonalds” in the little sign.
