Book Cover Gallery

Thanks are due to the excellent Recomendo newsletter for pointing out this photo gallery of old book covers spanning the early part of the 20th century. 

Collection of U.S. dust jacket cover art starting from the 1920's and paperback & digest cover art from the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia starting from the end of the 1930's - organized in chronological Albums per publisher / series

I love looking at the covers of old pulp novels, so this could be a serious time sink for me. 

Flickr won't let me copy a URL so I can't post a picture, but trust me, it's worth the time to browse.

Babylon 5 Is Getting a Reboot

Like many other people, I was both surprised and excited to hear the news Monday that Babylon 5, the classic SF TV show from the 1990s, will be getting a reboot. Even better, the original author and director of the show, J. Michael Straczynski, will be in charge of the project. 

I've made no secret of how much I like Babylon 5; I still think that it's the best science fiction TV show yet, although The Expanse is giving it a run for that title. The news that Straczynski will be at the helm of a new version is incredibly exciting. 

He spent quite a bit of time on Twitter Monday adding details that weren't ion the Variety article and reassuring fans. Gizmodo has a longer article with some of his comments. 

“Heraclitus wrote ‘You cannot step in the same river twice, for the river has changed, and you have changed.’ In the years since B5, I’ve done a ton of other TV shows and movies, adding an equal number of tools to my toolbox, all of which I can bring to bear on one singular question,” Stracynzski tweeted. “If I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like? How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then?”

I will certainly be watching it when it airs, probably in a couple of years. Until then, if you want more news about it, you can follow Staczynski on Twitter, where he is a regular poster, or subscribe to his Patreon account. 

Progressive Prepping

I'm not a prepper, but I do find the movement interesting. We have a stash of food and water in the basement cupboard, but that's more for dealing with something like the ice storm we had a few years ago, or supply chain problems that were occurring during the early part of the pandemic. But if there's a total social collapse, we're probably toast.

So I found Rolling Stone's article, Journal of a Progressive Prepper, quite interesting. It did change my somewhat jaundiced view of the prepping movement, though not enough for me to run out and start buying a stash of supplies. 

When I ask if Teri’s worried about the coronavirus, she swipes her hand, calls it “a big damn hoax.” But her focus on the EBT consumer speaks to two more fault lines in modern prepperdom: the first is the distinction that it’s not “the end of the world” we’re prepping for; it’s The End of the World As We Know It, abbreviated as TEOTWAWKI. If the globe explodes in one cataclysmic burst, no amount of MREs is going to do anyone any good. TEOTWAWKI is about adapting to a seismic shift in human existence (but a survivable one), perhaps globally but certainly on a local scale. In this sense, many communities around the world have already experienced, or are actively experiencing, an apocalypse. From Damascus to coal country, The World As They’ve Known It has already ceased to exist. People are not preparing for what might occur. They are Accepting Reality.

Because a second fault line of preparedness is that most apocalypses are slow and subtle. We’re trained by movies and TV to envision TEOTWAWKI as a sudden catastrophe — a meteor or nuclear bomb or snap of Thanos’ fingers upending our world in one brutal instant. Preppers refer to this as the moment when the Shit Hits The Fan (SHTF; we love acronyms). The more likely and typical scenario is a gradual erosion of systems and norms over the course of months or years or decades. Zoom out to the millennial timeline and it appears sudden. But living through it is closer to the frog-in-a-boiling-pot experience. Storefronts and factories slowly close. Corruption or disease seeps in. Thermometers tick upwards in imperceptible hundredths of degrees.

What I found most interesting was the part at the end of the article where the author talks about organizing neighbours into small, unofficial support groups. It's an idea that makes a lot of sense. 

 Preparations for a short-term disaster have transitioned to longer-term focus on adaptation. A month from now, Charlottesville gas pumps will run dry after the cyberhacking of the Colonial Pipeline, the latest reminder of our vulnerable energy infrastructure and our complete dependence on it. It will also be the latest reminder of apocalyptic hoarding — the selfish pricks have no problem filling two dozen spare gas tanks despite a 30-car line behind them. If the last year is any indication of what could happen, we all need to become more self-reliant while also capable of helping others.

This works better if everyone is doing it. Much like vaccinations, we’re a safer neighborhood and community if everyone has taken steps to be prepared for emergencies. If all your neighbors have a stash of emergency food, there’s less chance for scarcity and panic when the SHTF. We already have a great community of skilled friends here in Charlottesville and on the internet teaching us things we don’t yet know how to do, and the goal is to share this knowledge with friends, family, and neighbors. Without its former stigma and mandate for ultra-secrecy, prepping becomes a joint effort — a more collaborative approach to TEOTWAKI.

Featured Links - September 27, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• How dangerous is Africa’s explosive Lake Kivu? An unusual lake in central frica could one day release a vast cloud of greenhouse gases that suffocates millions of people. But it’s not clear whether the threat is getting worse.
• How to Calibrate Your Monitor for Accurate Colors: 4 Easy Methods. "If you're a graphic designer or digital artist, calibrating your monitor's colors is a must." I need to do this again, as I think some of my monitor settings have changed over time.
• Amateur Metal Detectorist Finds Astonishing Gold Hoard Buried by Pre-Viking Chieftain. “Only a member of the absolute cream of society would have been able to collect a treasure like the one found here.”
• Stunning footprints push back human arrival in Americas by thousands of years. "The tracks at New Mexico’s White Sands National Park are upending past assumptions on when humans first ventured into North and South America."
• Crew Dragon: Former Project Lead Reveals Stark Differences Between Spacex And NASA. SpaceX does in a meeting what takes NASA years.
• Neil Gaiman: How The Sandman Reinvents the Audiobook Format. "Neil Gaiman’s Sandman finds its first true adaptation in an ‘audio movie’ and it could be a game changer." The second chapter of The Sandman has just been released on Audible.
• At pivotal points in human spaceflight, NASA undergoes major reorganization. "NASA’s human exploration wing will be split in two."

Photo of the Week - September 26, 2021

This is one of the newer homes with a nice view of Frenchman's Bay. It is totally at odds with the other homes in the area but some people like this kind of building, although I can't imagine why. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4, F5.6 @ 21 mm., 1/850 sec., ISO 160, Kodachrome 64 film simulation.

An Interview With James S. A. Corey

Andrew Liptak has published a long interview with Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank, aka James S. A. Corey, the authors of the excellent science fiction series, The Expanse. 

A decade ago, I picked up a chunky, promising new science fiction novel, Leviathan Wakes, and found that something in the world really stuck with me: it was both a grounded and ambitious imagination of where we might be a couple of centuries from now.

There aren't many stories that stick with you beyond a reading or two, but over the years, I've found myself returning to The Expanse — in part because there's been a series of regular new installments — but because each time I've returned to it, I've found some interesting new insight into the world.

With that first installment turning a full decade this year (its birthday was back in June), with Amazon's television series coming to a close later this year, and with the final installment of the series, Leviathan Falls, hitting bookstores in November, it's a series that I've been thinking back on for a while.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck about that anniversary and what their thoughts are on the legacy of the series, ten years in.

It's a good interview and full of interesting information about how the two authors managed the transition between print and screen for the Sy Fy/Amazon series that is based on the first six books. (AFAIK, the series won't cover the last three, although it wouldn't surprise me if they added some foreshadowing, just in case).  

A Detailed History of mRNA Vaccines

One of the arguments used by vaccine deniers is that the Pfizer/BionTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines is that they are a new technology that is untested. 

Nature has just published a long article detailing the history of the mRNA technology used in these vaccines, and t goes back quite bit a further than you might think. back to the 1960s. I knew that people had been researching mRNA at least since the original SARS outbreak in 2003, but I didn't know about the previous research.

In late 1987, Robert Malone performed a landmark experiment. He mixed strands of messenger RNA with droplets of fat, to create a kind of molecular stew. Human cells bathed in this genetic gumbo absorbed the mRNA, and began producing proteins from it1.

Realizing that this discovery might have far-reaching potential in medicine, Malone, a graduate student at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, later jotted down some notes, which he signed and dated. If cells could create proteins from mRNA delivered into them, he wrote on 11 January 1988, it might be possible to “treat RNA as a drug”. Another member of the Salk lab signed the notes, too, for posterity. Later that year, Malone’s experiments showed that frog embryos absorbed such mRNA2. It was the first time anyone had used fatty droplets to ease mRNA’s passage into a living organism.

Those experiments were a stepping stone towards two of the most important and profitable vaccines in history: the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines given to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Global sales of these are expected to top US$50 billion in 2021 alone.

But the path to success was not direct. For many years after Malone’s experiments, which themselves had drawn on the work of other researchers, mRNA was seen as too unstable and expensive to be used as a drug or a vaccine. Dozens of academic labs and companies worked on the idea, struggling with finding the right formula of fats and nucleic acids — the building blocks of mRNA vaccines.

It's an interesting article that is well worth reading, both for getting a better understanding of what we've been putting into our bodies, but also for insights into the complexity of modern medical and scientific research. 

Convert PDF Scientific Papers to HTML

Most scientific papers these days get posted on the internet as PDFs. That's OK if you're reading on a desktop computer but may not be ideal otherwise. Paper To HTML Converter is an online tool that converts PDFs of scientific papers into a more easily viewable HTML format.  

This is an experimental prototype that aims to render scientific papers in HTML so they can be more easily read by screen readers or on mobile devices. Because of our reliance on statistical machine learning techniques, some errors are inevitable. We are continuing to improve upon our models. To use, upload a scientific paper below, or view a gallery of example papers.

Some Simple Design Tips for Word Documents

As a former technical writer, I have a lot of experience with Microsoft Word. (I've been using Word in one form or another since version 1.0 for DOS). So using Word is pretty much an automatic process for me. But that isn't true for most people, especially those who are using Word for the first time in a professional environment. 

Word is a complex program and it can turn around and bite you at a moment's notice. You can make your life a lot easier by following some basic rules, starting with the ones outlined in this article. 

I could add a few more, but the article does a good job of covering the basics. For more tips on Word, take a look at the Microsoft Word topic on this blog, where I've posted several articles written during my tenure at the TSX to help people there cope with Word's idiosyncracies. 

Going beyond the tips in the article, I would add these two as the most important:

• Learn how to use paragraph and character styles for formatting instead of the buttons in the ribbon.
• Always, always, always paste text from another document as unformatted text. 

The first of those tips will save you vast amounts of time in the long run. The second will keep Word from messing up your formatting in unpredictable ways that are hard to correct. 

Featured Links - September 20, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity. "People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat."
• Portland, Oregon, Is Ground Zero for Violent Culture-War Clashes. And It’s Spreading. "The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other far-right extremist groups have turned the city into a proving ground."
• A Mathematician's Guided Tour Through Higher Dimensions. "The concept of a dimension seems simple enough, but mathematicians struggled for centuries to precisely define and understand it."
• Federal court greenlights TekSavvy’s appeal of CRTC wholesale rates ruling. "Wholesale rates and internet bills are a key issue in the 2021 federal election." This is potentially good news for Canadian internet users.
• Dark Energy Could Be Responsible for Mysterious Experiment Signals, Researchers Say. "What if a bunch of liquid xenon under the Apennine Mountains found 68% of the universe?"
• Porsche and Siemens Energy break ground on low-carbon e-fuel plant in Chile. "Electrolyzed hydrogen is combined with CO2 to make methanol, then gasoline."

Photo of the Week - September 19, 2021

This week's photo is a picture of our cat, McGee. He's a rescue from a warehouse, where they were going to kill him. Fortunately, someone called our local rescue society, and then McGee chose us, for which we are very grateful. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4, F8 at 47 mm., 1/140 sec., ISO 4000, Tri-X 400 film simulation. 

 

Some Good Grateful Dead

Here's an excellent show by the Grateful Dead from Oakland, CA on February 17, 1979. It was the final show with keyboard player, Keith Godchaux, and his wife, Donna. I don't think it's had an official release. The audio is from a good-quality soundboard. 

1979 isn't generally regarded as one of their better years, but this show is hot. Jerry is on fire and Bobby is full of energy and emotion.

This post from Dead of the Day has a short article about the show and links to individual songs if you want to pick and choose. I've listened to about half of it so far and it's all good.

Custom Film Simulations on Fujifilm Cameras

One of the main reasons I decided to buy a Fujifilm camera (in my case, the X-S10) earlier this year was the film simulation modes that Fujifilm includes in its cameras. These simulate the look of several of Fujifilm's film stocks and are simple to use - just turn a dial and select which one you want. 

Here are two examples from our cluttered and somewhat neglected back yard. The first is Velvia, which has vivid, saturated colours and high contrast, which makes it ideal for landscapes. The second is Provia, which is the default simulation on Fujifilm cameras.

On my camera, there are 18 choices, covering a wide range of film types, including black and white and ones that are more suited for video.

You might think that 18 choices are enough, but the built-in simulations are designed to emulate only Fujifilm's products. What if you want to emulate a Kodak film like Kodachrorme or Tri-X? 

Fujifilm's cameras let you save custom settings and there are a lot to modify. People have been creating "film recipes" that you can input and save into your camera's custom settings (on my camera, there are four) to emulate other films. I started by saving two: Kodachrome 64 and Tri-X 400, which here two films that I shot a lot of back in the day when I was using film cameras.

Here are examples of the Kodachrome 64 and Tri-X 400 custom simulations.

I will have to try the Kodachrome 64 more but on first glance I like the openness and warmth of the picture. The Tri-X simulation captures the grittiness and graininess of the original film and I will probably use it as my standard black-and-white simulation. 

The Fuji X Weekly website contains film recipes for more than 100 film simulations. There's also an app for mobile devices, although it just contains the recipes and examples; it doesn't load them onto your phone (as far as I know, there's no way of doing that). 

This article contains instructions on how to enter and save custom settings as well as some other useful links. If you want, detailed information about Fuji's film simulations, this article will tell you pretty much everything about them, and it also explains why it's difficult to simulate them in programs like Lightroom (although you can come pretty close). 

Something Pretty For Today

I haven't been listening to a lot of Dead and Company recently, but after watching the video below, I may have to change that. It's Bird Song from Saratoga Springs on August 27. I've found their music sometimes aimless, especially in the jams, but this performance is mostly pretty focused and often quite pretty. Enjoy. 

Flash Is Dead and So Are a Lot of News Archives

Adobe Flash was notorious for being insecure and a vector for malware and Adobe finally killed it off in December of last year. I don't miss it at all. (One of my least favourite jobs as a technical writer was updating a user guide that the previous writer had written in Flash). 

The last weekend, with reruns of news clips from 2001, has revealed a side-effect of killing off Flash. A lot of web sites from that era used Flash, and now their content in inaccessible. That includes quite a bit of news footage, as this article from CNN points out. 

Adobe ending support for Flash — its once ubiquitous multimedia content player — last year meant that some of the news coverage of the September 11th attacks and other major events from the early days of online journalism are no longer accessible. For example, The Washington Post and ABC News both have broken experiences within their September 11th coverage, viewable in the Internet Archive. CNN's online coverage of September 11th also has been impacted by the end of Flash.

That means what was once an interactive explainer of how the planes hit the World Trade Center or a visually-rich story on where some survivors of the attacks are now, at best, a non-functioning still image, or at worst, a gray box informing readers that "Adobe Flash player is no longer supported."

It's yet another example of how format creep is going to cause problems for archivists, librarians, and historians in future years.  

Featured Links - September 13, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• What the world's most accurate clock can tell us about Earth and the cosmos. "It would take 15 billion years for the clock that occupies Jun Ye's basement lab at the University of Colorado to lose a second—about how long the universe has existed."
• Alan Shepard smacked golf balls on the Moon — and now we know where they landed. "When the Apollo astronaut said his second shot went "miles and miles and miles," that was a bit of an exaggeration."
• You Need to Use Hope like a Club to Beat Your Opponent. Kim Stanley Robinson on Climate Change and Fiction.
• A novel definition of life and its implications to cybernetic systems. "Perhaps the most fundamental puzzle in biology—"What is life?"—is addressed in a new paper by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Oleg Abramov."
• Types of Masks and Respirators. The CDC has updated its mask guidelines. Wear the best one you can!
• Why The World Should Be More Than A Bit Worried About India's Nipah Virus Outbreak. At least it's not spread by aerosol droplets like COVID-19, but with a 70 percent mortality rate it is something to worry about.

Photo of the Week

A late-blooming rose from our front yard.

Fuji X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4, F16 @ 80 mm., 1/240 sec. at ISO 1250, Velvia film simulation, post-processing in Windows Photo.

The Bizarre Bone Asteroid

Every once in a while, I come across a science story that is just so strange  or so revealing that I can't resist posting about it. In this case, we have the asteroid, Cleo, also known as the 'bone' asteroid because of it's shape and apparent low density. 

Recent observations have provided detailed images and a lot more information about the asteroid. 

“The SPHERE instrument is one of these next-generation adaptive optics systems which is now capable of working in visible light,” said Marchis. “Consequently, it provides images in optical light—in this case in red—with the full resolution of the 8m-telescope, like if the VLT were in space.” To which he added: “Thanks to this amazing image quality, we can now see details about the shape of the asteroid, see the two lobes and the bridge connecting them.”

The asteroid is remarkable and odd. But what I find remarkable is the quality of the imaging and the amount of information about it that astronomers have been able to glean. 

I have a math and physics minor from university and I've always had a strong interest in astronomy.  When I think back about what was known when I was in school and what we know now, I am truly amazed. The advances in astronomy are at least comparable (and are due in part) to the advances in computing over the last few decades. As Paul Simon said: "These are the days of miracles and wonders". 

Fall SF&F Movies

The fall is a big time for movie releases and this year will be no exception, even with the pandemic. io9 has assembled a list of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and thriller films to look forward to in the next few months, and it's quite a list. Most of the films include trailers so you can get an idea of what they're about.

Given the new realities of the movie business, it probably won't be long before most show up on one of the streaming services if you're still leery about visiting a cinema in person.

As for myself, there are only a couple of movies that I'm likely to venture out for: Dune and No Time To Die.

 

What I've Been Reading

I finally finished Kim Stanley Robinson's cli-fi epic, The Ministry for the Future. It's a brilliant and important book in many ways, but not a great novel. Parts of the story are chilling and compelling, but other parts are more like a treatise on non-capitalist economic policy - an important subject, but not one that makes for easy reading. I found myself skimming a lot. I did find the last third of the novel quite engaging and liked that he ended on an optimistic note, an optimism that I do not share.

I am now re-reading Charlie Stross' The Merchant Princes series, in the new omnibus editions, starting with The Bloodline Feud. I have been looking forward to the sequel series for some years, and the third book will be published later this month (I have it on pre-order with Amazon). Re-reading the first series was not an easy decision, given the number of books in my to-be-read collection, but I thought that it would help with reading the new series. So far, I've read about 15 percent of the book, and I am hooked. Stross is eminently readable, and I'm looking forward to revisiting his multiverse and picking up some details I missed the first time.

As an aside, I've decided that I have to cut back on my online browsing, especially Twitter. I have many fascinating people on my Twitter feed, and it's possible to spend an hour reading posts and checking out links that people post. But Twitter is like a river, it keeps flowing, and trying to read everything just takes too much time. I'm going to restrict myself to just browsing the last hour or two of tweets and leaving it at that. When I have spare time, I will read my book instead. The Kindle and my phone synchronize position so I can jump from one device to another without losing my place.

Featured Links - September 7, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The west shore of Frenchman's Bay

• How to Turn Your Favorite Web Apps Into Desktop Apps. "Want to access Twitter and Google Chat in a single click? Here’s how to think outside the browser."
• Understanding the E-Reader Global Supply Chain. This may explain why we haven't seen a new Kindle from Amazon in a while.
• ‘Catastrophic’ supervolcano eruption much more likely than previously thought, scientists warn. "Event could affect global climate to the point of ‘tipping the earth into a volcanic winter’, resulting in ‘famine and population disruption’."
• The Global Supply Chain Crisis, as Told by One Stuck Box of Fertilizer. "This is the tale of one humble shipment and its arduous journey across the world. While some of the barriers keeping it from its final destination may be specific to this particular case, the journey is emblematic of the inertia that has gripped global trade during the pandemic."
• To Get To Space, You Must Go Through the Panama Canal. "But before the Webb telescope can take its place in the firmament and the future, it must face hazards more familiar a century ago than in the present, namely a lengthy sea voyage from Long Beach, California to its launch site at Kourou in French Guiana — with the risk of piracy thrown in for good measure."
• Why William Gibson Is a Literary Genius. "Forty years after his breakout story, “Johnny Mnemonic,” the father of cyberpunk remains one of the best writers around."
• The Red Warning Light On Richard Branson's Spaceflight. This was a serious anomaly and the FAA has grounded Virgin Galactic.

Off for the Weekend

It's another long weekend here in the Great White North (which probably will be white in a couple of months). It's technically Labour Day weekend if you're keeping track, and I'm taking the weekend off so I don't have to labour over this blog.

Links, rants, and raves will resume next week.

In the meantime, enjoy these flowers from my front yard. I do.

Dune "Sets a New Standard"

Gizmodo has the first review I've seen of Villeneuve's Dune and ... yes, it sounds like it is as good as we all hoped.

What could happen in the future isn’t something you can think about when critiquing a movie though. There’s this movie, this story, and if it doesn’t work on its own, that would problem. It’s not a problem here. This Dune, by itself, even if we never get another movie, sets a new standard for modern sci-fi epics. Villeneuve’s attention to detail in design, combined with his expansive vision of multiple worlds, conveys a reverence and respect for the material that makes the film feel even more majestic than it already is (and it’s pretty damn majestic). It would be a travesty if we never got to see the second part of this story, but Part One has satisfying narrative threads with a logical endgame that leaves you wanting more. The set pieces, while sporadic, are exciting and the movie presents such a fantastic, robust sci-fi world, you could watch it a million times and find something new with each viewing. And yet, that dense, complex world exists solely to enhance a personal, relatable, emotional story. A story of a world where a boy grows to be a man with all sorts of unfathomable expectations—expectations this movie probably has on it too. But don’t worry, Dune is awesome in every sense of the word, and it’ll be a movie fans cherish for years to come.

The review is spoiler-free - not that it matters with this one - I can't imagine any reader of this blog hasn't read the book or seen the other adaptations.

I have been wishing for a very long time for a movie adaptation of one of the SF classics that lived up to the full potential of both the original work and modern film technology. Probably the best example in film so far is the Lord of the Rings trilogy (with The Expanse for a long series adaptation). Perhaps Dune will become the new standard.

September Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

Fall is traditionally a big time for publishers, and this year is no exception, despite the pandemic. Here's a list of 63 science fiction and fantasy books being published this month. There are quite a few that look interesting. Here are a few that I might look at.

• The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year edited by Neil Clarke
• AI 2041 by Chen Qiufan
• The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel
• Dune: The Lady of Caladan by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
• Invisible Sun by Charles Stross (I am pre-ordering this one). 
• The Year's Best Science Fiction editing by Jonathan Strahan

As I've noted before, my taste runs to science fiction. If you prefer fantasy, do take a look at the list as there are many more fantasy titles than SF. 

If You Use Google Messages, You NEED To Read This

Sorry for the click-bait title, but it's true.

As many people found out during Hurricane Ida, Google Messages doesn't work well during a disaster, when there is no or limited cell network service. That's because of the base RCS protocol that it uses, instead of the older and data-thriftier SMS protocol.  

In the US in 2021, there’s no single agreed-upon way to keep in touch with people unless everyone you know has an iPhone. Some friends prefer Discord, others Facebook Messenger, and I can reach a select few with RCS — an up-and-coming replacement to SMS messaging being championed by Google. On Sunday, with Hurricane Ida only just having made landfall, I was using three different apps to check in on friends and family.

Come Monday morning, the storm having ravaged Louisiana overnight, the situation had changed. All across the state, cell towers were damaged, taking out some carrier networks and making an internet connection essentially impossible in most areas. Worse, there was no way to really know any of that until local news outlets reported it hours after the fact, leaving us worrying all morning about those who stayed behind.

Thankfully, we found that, in some cases, a simple text message could get through, assuming the cell towers functioned at all. Now, what does any of this have to do with RCS?

In trying to reach out to my dad, I opened Google Messages and tried to send him a quick text to make sure everyone was okay. A few minutes later, I realized that it was trying to send via RCS. Google’s current RCS system is built on the assumption that the internet will always be accessible, but thanks to the destruction caused by Ida, I knew internet access would be essentially non-existent.

Knowing my way around Google Messages, I was able to use the per-contact toggle to “Only send SMS and MMS messages” and try to send my message again.

As the article later points out, Google needs to update Messages to provide a general option to use SMS or to fall back to SMS if RCS messages can't be delivered. 

Movie and TV Reviews - August 2021

Here are some short reviews of things I watched in August.

Movies

• Jungle Cruise: This turned out to be better than I expected for a movie based on a theme park ride. It had some good moments but never quite came together. (Disney+)
• Godzilla vs Kong: Meh. (Apple TV)
• Lake Placid versus Anaconda: Lots of screaming. (Netflix)
• The Suicide Squad: Much better than the first movie but still not great. 
• The Last Mercenary: Jean-Claude Van Damme is having something of a career renaissance these days. This was much better than I expected and quite a lot of fun. (Netflix)
• Beckett: OK action flick with lots of implausible action and not much else. (Netflix)
• Mortdecai: Not Johnny Depps best. It wasn't quite quirky enough to be good. (Neflix)
• Sweet Girl: Another movie ruined by a non-linear plot. (Netflix)

TV Shows

• The Heart Guy (Season 5): The final season of this Australian drama got more soapy and less medical. (Acorn TV) 
• Thorne: Older gritty and intense British police drama. Good but a bit grim. (Acorn TV)
• Monty Don's Paradise Gardens: If you like gardens you will enjoy this. (Acorn TV)