One tough part of having a side project that is actually operational and relied-upon is that I can’t always just try new things on a whim. Like, I need things to work and work reliably. Might need a side project from the side project.
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Oh do I feel this so much.
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Weather

Look out, KPAH…
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Weather

Really impressive line of discrete supercells on the Memphis radar.
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Much happier with the Mac Studio after making the decision to move forward with a fresh setup. Didn’t realize just how many barnacles I had accumulated with the prior install – everything is just smoother and better.
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Now that I had a few minutes to import my Mastodon follows, Micro.blog is really taking shape quite nicely as my primary Fediverse presence. Kudos to @manton for how he’s rapidly evolved his product to be a first-class Fediverse citizen.
Tech
If it ain't broke...

The DOGE Boys are apparently going to rewrite the software that runs Social Security in six months, according to Makena Kelly’s reporting at WIRED.
“Move Fast and Break Things” is such a scourge upon the software …
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Well, at least nobody sent a Liberian flag in the war plans group chat.
Tech
Links
Disabling Apple Intelligence suggestions in Messages...in a strange place
The actual way to disable these suggestions in Messages on MacOS:
In System Settings: Apple Intelligence & Siri, click the “About Siri, Dictation & Privacy…” button.
In the panel that opens, go to Messages. Turn off “Show Siri Suggestions in application”.
(When I turned this off, an already-generated …
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I hereby decree that 88x31 buttons on websites are back in style.
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At least the book I co-authored in the mid-2000s lives on in LibGen! 🙃
I don’t really have an issue with this, but what I do have an issue with is Meta training its AI on it, of course.

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I’ve got my eye on you, storms.

Tech
Personal
The Apple Studio Display, A Few Years Later

Personal nerd and poor financial decision milestones were achieved today: I got a VESA-mountable Apple Studio Display to pair with my M2 Pro Mac mini. This is my first-ever Apple desktop display of my own. It’s been just a few hours, and I haven’t had much time with it, but so far, so …
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The Hollywood Hills fire is showing up on the Fire Temperature RGB product from GOES-West. Not good.
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Went out on a limb and joined Team Trackball (Logitech MX Ergo) over on the weather computer, where there’s limited room for mousing anyway. Getting the hang of it, though drawing on the screen will take some getting used to. The precision mode is nice, though, and may help.
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Just a casual 85 MPH wind gust earlier northeast of Los Angeles earlier this evening. Unfortunately, the worst fears around wildfire conditions are verifying here.
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I’m “oh my god I can’t believe that amazing CSS property is so widely supported” years old.
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iOS 18.2 seems to have nuked all of my iPhone-to-Mac notification settings. Ugh.
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In the process of making Micro.blog the center of my slice of the fediverse by migrating my Mastodon account following and followers here. Pretty excited about this – ActivityPub gives us a standards-based opportunity to think differently and break old habits around how we interact online.
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Folks, it’s The Holiday Season™.
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If I ever find myself back in academia, this is how I’m writing my papers. Only way I can truly feel like I’ve achieved the “in-school” mindset.

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I’ve not been paying much attention to Threads lately, and the growth-hacking notifications have definitely been picking up steam. If there’s one thing Meta knows, it’s how to sound desperate when you ignore one of its platforms.
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Instead of sleeping at a reasonable hour, I’m considering consolidating my personal fediverse presence on micro.blog to get the benefits of using my domain. Will want to migrate my Mastodon following and the like. Probably worth investigating during my holiday time off. (NERD.)
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Cracked open the chswxbot parser this weekend for the first time in a while. Starting to add some more metadata parsing for each product. This effort begins with the coastal flood products, hopefully making those automated alerts more useful.
I also need to do some better character-limit wrangling …
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Milton and I don’t exactly see eye to eye.
