How To Get Rid of Goog;le's AI Weights File

If you use Google's Chrome browser under Windows and don't want to use it's AI features, then you should read this. 

Google has been downloading a 4 GB file called weights.bin that's used by Gemini Nano, which runs locally on your PC. If you don't want this file, or the AI functionality, you can set up a registry key to block it, then delete the file. Instructions are in the article linked above.

The file is installed on my PC and I'm leaving it alone as I occasinally use Gemini in Chrome. Still, it would be nice if they told you about it and gave you the choice before using up such a big chunk of your disk. 

Getting Dark Mode in Acrobat Reader

Here's a tip for fans of dark mode: how to get white text on a black background in Acrobat Reader. 

These instructions are for the latest (and highly enshittified) release of Acrobat Reader. 

1. Click the hamburger menu icon in the upper left.

2. From the menu,, click Preferences.

3. In the Categories list, click Accessibility.

4. Select Replace Document Colors.

5. Then select Use High-Contrast colors and choose White text on black from the High-contrast color combination list.

6. Click OK. 

In step 5, you could select Custom Color and then pick your text and background colours. 

I'm posting this because I cannot easily read PDFs with black text on a white background. The current release of Acrobat Reader changed whatever settings I had in the past to give me dark mode in PDFs, and it's been driving me crazy for a while now. 

Some PDFs may not work well with these settings;. for example, tables with shading will be a problem. I will have to experiment more to see if other settings in the Accessibility dialog will help.

If you know of a (preferably free) PDF reader that works well in dark mode, please leave me a comment.

 

The Hugo Voter Packet Is a Bargain

Thanks are due to Elizabeth Bear for reminding me to check out the 2026 Hugo Voter Packet. I wasn't planning on buying a voting membership for the 2026 WorldCon, but including 16 GB of ebooks in the voter packet made me reconsider.

Included are:

• Full ebooks of 4 of the 6 finalists for best novel. Unfortunately the one I was most interested in, Adrian Tchaikovsky's SHROUD, is only an excerpt as is A DROP OF CORRUPTION by Robert Jackson Bennett.
• All of the short fiction finalists.
• Most of the finalists for best series:, 36 books in total!
• Many ebooks from finalists for the Lodestar Award, the Astounding Award, and best editor (long form).
• Most of the finalists for the other awards.

It's a huge amount of fiction and non-fiction. Most books are in EPUB format, some are PDFs, and some also include audiobooks in MP3 format. 

It is not cheap ($50 US), but given that it includes several books that I likely would have bought, it's worth it. (Just INVENTING THE RENAISSANCE by Ada Palmer would justify the cost). And there's so much more. It'll keep me reading all summer. 

And of course, you get to vote for the Hugo Awards. I have a lot of reading to do before the voting deadline of Ausust 8. 

A Note About Posting

I've been thinking about what I want to do with this blog and I'm going to change my posting routine a bit. 

Going forward, I'm going to stop doing most of the regular link posts like Featured Links and We're Toast. I'll continue the Saturday Sounds posts and probably occasional posts about Canada - US relations.

I'll continue posting about things that interest me or that I want to record here for future reference, like the next couple of posts that will be up tomorrow and Wednesday. 

Given that it's summer and I want to spend more time outside, I probably won't be posting as much. 

Off for the May 24 Weekend

Yes, I know May 24th isn't until next weekend, but up here in the Great White North, 24 means something other than the date. Look up what 24 means in Canadian slang. I won't be consuming one (just a few tall boys), but I will be cleaning the BBQ, mowing the lawn, raking over the garden, and staying away from my computer and the news as much as possible.

I'll be back here sometime next week. In the meantime, here's a tulip from our front yard that somehow survived having two metres of snow dumped on it over the winter.

A hardy tulip

More on Disinformation 9

It's time for another post about disinformation and misinformation. I could probably do a post a day like this if I had the time and the stomach for it.  

• The War Against Misinformation Is Over. The Lies Won. "New research suggests people know images and headlines are false but share them anyway." What a journalist has to cope with. 
• "Klansplaining": A Field Guide to The Term And Language Trump/MAGA Have Perfected. 'A new word — Klansplaining — for rhetoric engineered so racists hear racism and everyone else hears "concerns about crime"'
• Russia and U.S. amplifying Alberta separatist narratives to stoke division, distrust: report. "Moscow's influence scheme is covert, while Trump-aligned meddling is overt and public." Just one of many articles on the subject: see also my blog post from earlier this week. 
• Canada Is Building a Firewall Around, Disinformation, Hate Speech And Democracy. "While the U.S. is busy letting the president sign executive orders restricting who can vote by mail, Canada just quietly dropped two of the most consequential pieces of legislation to protect democracy from foreign-funded gaslighting machines."
• AI Fakes Spread Disinformation. Is the Distrust They Create Even Worse? "Manipulated images undermine our shared reality—and the democracy built upon it."
• Scientists warn fake research is spreading faster than real science. "A major investigation found organized networks producing fake scientific papers, selling authorships, and manipulating journals to mass-publish fraudulent research."
• 5 (more) logical fallacies in the era of RFK Jr. "Common rhetorical tricks that are used to spread false health information."
• The Nursery Is No Place for Misinformation. "A basic newborn shot has become another target of the distrust machine, and the consequences can be devastating."

Featured Links - May 13, 2026

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

Overlooking the marsh

• When the Emperor Has No Clothes and the Cabinet Has No Conscience. "A President in Decline, and Only Six Days Until Beijing." The scary quote: 'Dr. John Gartner, among the most vocal of the professionals tracking this deterioration, offers a formulation that is worth sitting with. The Donald Trump you see today, he says, is the best you will ever see him. It will only get worse from here."'
• On Superpower Suicide. "And the recovery of justice." The call for a new era: "The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future."
• DNA identifies four more crew members of doomed Franklin expedition. "Three served on the HMS Erebus; the fourth was Petty Officer Harry Peglar of the HMS Terror." Modern science and historical sleuthing working together. 
• e.C-200 Ultrasonic 8" Chef's Knife.  High tech meets kitchen knifes. I want this!
• I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment. "The problem wasn’t just the perfectly polished, yet mediocre prose. It’s what’s lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words."
• How Jeff “Skunk” Baxter took his session guitar experience and inspired a radical digital guitar. "Skunk was involved in designing Roland and Fender's innovative G-5 – an all-in-one guitar offering a plethora of built-in tones and models." No more lugging 15 guitars around on tour. 
• The 'Quick Settings' overhaul is the most underrated part of Android 16. "The changes may not seem like a big deal at first, but after months of using Android 16 on my Google Pixel 8 Pro, I've realized they make a noticeable difference in everyday use." I have found this myself and it's much easier to use than the Apple iPad OS equivalent. 
• Composite Artemis II Animation Shows Just How Much Stuff Is in Low Earth Orbit. "It's like playing dodgeball! Except the ball is traveling at 17,000 mph!"
  
• Meta’s Embrace of A.I. Is Making Its Employees Miserable (gift link). "As it adapts to the artificial intelligence era, the company is pushing many of its 78,000 workers to use the technology, and preparing to lay some of them off."
• The “big one” might not come alone: Double West Coast earthquake threat. "Two major fault systems along North America's West Coast, the Cascadia subduction zone and the San Andreas fault, may be more closely connected than previously believed. A new study suggests that activity on one fault could trigger earthquakes on the other, raising the possibility of closely timed seismic events."
• Free Universal Construction Kit. "The Free Universal Construction Kit is a 3D-printable set of adapters that allow you to connect 10 popular construction toy systems, including Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K'Nex, Krinkles (AKA Bristle Blocks/Stickle Bricks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob."
• Reviving the IBM Selectric Composer Fonts. " Before you can start drawing a revival of a typeface originating from any mechanical system, you need to do the math." A great article for typewriter and typography nerds. I occasionally typed on a Selectric in my first job out of university. It was almost a religious experience. The ladies in the office typing pool could hit more than 100 words per minute. I was lucky to do 30. 

What the Heck is Happening in Alberta?

Over the past couple of months it's become clear that the usual discontent Albertans have with the federal government has morphed into something far more concerning. I lived in Northern Alberta for five years until 1984 and there was no love lost for Ottawa and especially Pierre Trudeau and his National Energy Program. But what is happening now is very different. 

In this post, I'm going to highlight several recent articles that cover different aspects of the current political scene in Alberta. 

For a starter there's this lengthy piece (gift link) from the Toronto Star:  "I went home to the heartland of Alberta independence. Even after covering Donald Trump for 10 years, I was still terrified by what I found." by James Maclennan. I included this as it was written by someone who grew up in Alberta and provides a good overview of the current separation campaign. The scary quote:

We like to imagine we are immune somehow from whatever it is that has torn the American polity apart so violently over the past 10 years, that what is happening there could never happen here. I promise you it can. In Alberta, it already is.

In this article Dean Blundell provides (in his words). "The Alberta File: How a Foreign-Backed Separatist Cabal Doxxed Three Million Albertans, Lawyered Up Against Treaty Rights, After Being Promised "500 Billion" From The Trump Regime: A definitive, on-the-record accounting of what the hell is happening in Alberta — and why every Canadian, every Treaty signatory, and every NATO ally should be paying attention."

Yes, he can be a bit long winded, but the article provides more history and context than most of the pieces I've seen in the major media and ties it to influence from the US and wider international disinformation campaigns. 

What is happening in Alberta in the spring of 2026 is a stress test of Canadian sovereignty conducted, in part, by a foreign power in friendly contact with a domestic separatist movement, lubricated by an algorithmically amplified information environment that pays Dutch YouTubers to tell Albertans separation is inevitable, organized through evangelical and convoy networks with documented histories of contempt for the state, and enabled by a provincial government that rewrote its own constitutional safeguards to accommodate the operation."

In The Leningrad Hot Dog Maker and the Destruction of Canada Charlie Angus takes a deep dive into the Russian disinformation machine and how it might affect Canada, even if there is no referrundum.

It won’t matter that the separatists don’t have the votes to succeed. They will drive false claims that the referendum was stolen or encourage a convoy of extremists to set up camp on the Coutts border to call for American help.

Imagine the hate that will be generated against First Nation people by online bots if the courts shut down the referendum.

The Donbas playbook is about weakening our nation and creating internal chaos. A full on hate storm is brewing. The Prime Minister needs to take this threat very seriously indeed.

Finally, Patrick Lennox of The Walrus asks How Did an Alberta Separatist Group Get Its Hands on the Voter List? There will no doubt be court cases arising from this and it will be interesting to see just how high up in the Alberta government they reach.

That 2.9 million voting-age Albertans have had their personal information circulating in the Maple MAGAsphere poses a massive public safety risk and exposes the October 19 referendum process even further to foreign influence from the global far right. We can safely assume that Alberta’s list of electors has been captured by agents of authoritarian regimes who wish Canada, as the last standing democracy in North America, all sorts of harm, unrest, and collapse.

The implications of this breach, which is likely the largest in Canadian history, will come into further relief in the coming days and weeks leading up to the referendum the UCP seems hell-bent to bring on.

That will do for now. I could have easily included sevral more articles, but the ones above paint a pretty detailed, and not pretty, picture of what's going on. 

 

 

Photo of the Week - May 10, 2026

This week's photo is of some daffodils in our backyard. It's been a late, cool, and wet spring; not the best for flowers, so I'm glad to see these coming up. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

Spring daffodils

Saturday Sounds - Broken Social Scene - Remember the Humans

This week's musical treat is Remember the Humans,  the latest album from Toronto's Broken Social Scene. I've seen them live four times and posted about them several times, so a new album is an event. 

The new album is quite long, almost 50 minutes, and contains 12 tracks. The production hearkens back to their classic You Forgot It In People, with multiple overdubbed vocals and wall-of-sound instruments. It'll probably sound best on headphones. 

They'll be out touring this summer and if they're anywhere near you, go; they're one of the best live bands I've seen. 

We're Toast 66

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. 

Springtime in Paris after the AMOC collapses

• A catastrophic climate event is upon us. Here is why you’ve heard so little about it. "This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster."
• Key Atlantic Current System Collapse Could Trigger Huge Carbon Dioxide Release, Increasing Global Warming By 0.2 °C. "he Atlantic Ocean has a complex system of currents and eddies known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), and includes the famous Gulf Stream, which helps with milder temperatures in Northern Europe. Over the last century, however, the AMOC has been slowing down, and new research highlights just how bad things might get for the planet’s climate if it collapses completely."
• Climate change is supercharging hurricane rainfall, contributing to deadly floods. "Freshwater flooding has caused over half of all direct hurricane deaths since 2013. The threat will increase as climate change makes hurricanes wetter and potentially slower-moving."
  
• The Clock Is Ticking on a Global Tragedy. "It’s not just oil that travels through the Gulf; the region is home to a massive industry that produces the agricultural fertilizer required to keep food production going. The ongoing disruption of this trade has raised the spectre of global famine."
  
• SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites. "Here's how that could impact the atmosphere and the night sky. 'These launches affect everyone,' says one astronomer."
• Palantir Meets the Anti-Christ. "More and more, the Silicon Valley tech bros are revealing themselves as very dark figures indeed. Gone are cookies and surfing, now they are peddling “AI Kill Chains” for tracking and targeting state enemies. Those being tracked don’t have to have guns. They can be troublesome journalists or civilians hiding from mass deportation."
• Satellites Could Start Smashing into Each Other in Less Than Three Days, Study Finds. "But new research led by Sarah Thiele at Princeton University has found that one of the biggest threats is a solar storm that could cause a cut in communications between satellites and their operators. If the resulting geomagnetic storm did cut comms, the research shows that it could take just 2.8 days before a collision."
• How climate change threatens the economic backbone of the Pacific. "Warming water temperatures caused by climate change pose a substantial risk to local tuna populations, threatening Kiribati's economic backbone."
• The Man Who Made America Safer for Measles. "A brief history of how crackpot ego became public-health policy."
• Major hurricanes in the Northeast are rare. Could climate change make them common? "A Category 4 hurricane making direct landfall on New York City could cause as much as $500 billion in insured damage."
• How strong can a hurricane get in a warming world? "In the Gulf of Mexico and western Caribbean, hurricanes with 224 mph (100 m/s) winds are possible. Warming the oceans will increase this maximum potential intensity, with potentially devastating effects."
• Panama’s ocean lifeline vanishes for the first time in 40 years. "For decades, the Gulf of Panama has relied on strong seasonal winds to trigger upwelling, bringing cool, nutrient-packed water to the surface. But in 2025, this dependable event didn’t happen. Researchers point to unusually weak winds as the likely culprit, reducing ocean productivity and warming coastal waters. The surprise disruption highlights how vulnerable these critical systems may be to climate change."

Featured Links - May 6, 2026

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

Springtime swans

• Rip.so, the graveyard of dead internet things. 'rip.so is a "graveyard of dead internet things," with a handsome old-web aesthetic (there's even a <marquee>!) with which to enjoy the sites that time forgot.'
• Russia cloaks launch schedule after spaceport falls in Ukraine’s sights. "We had serious inbound attempts to the cosmodrome that day.”
• Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs — law goes into effect, designed to prevent bypassing age checks. "Senate Bill 73 holds websites liable for users who mask their location." Yet another ridiculous law trying to regulate the internet. 
• Rush Lost Its Beloved Drummer. The Band Is Ready to Get Back on the Road (gift link). "After losing Neil Peart to cancer six years ago, the trio is returning to touring with Anika Nilles, a powerhouse drummer who’s forged her own relationship with the group."
• What if Dark Matter Doesn’t Actually Exist? "Modern cosmology assumes dark matter exists. But what makes us so certain that dark matter is the answer—and what if we're wrong?"
• The Paradox of Medical AI Implementation. "From Missed Opportunities to Missing Evidence."
• Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone? (gift link) "What the rise of A.I. and the gutting of books coverage across U.S. media will mean for literature."
• Windows has a tool that shows every app that touched a file on your PC. "Microsoft's Process Monitor was the tool that surfaced all these activities that I never knew existed. Unlike the Task Manager, which shows resource usage percentages, it reveals the exact files my apps are touching in real time. Seeing the volume of activity gives me a deeper understanding of my computer."
• New Lithium-Plasma Engine Passes Key Mars Propulsion Test. "NASA engineers recently tested a next generation electric propulsion system that achieved new records while requiring lithium metal vapor for fuel and holds the potential to be a gamechanger in propulsion systems for the future of space exploration."
• Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers. "AWS stops billing Middle East cloud customers as repairs to war damage drag on."
  
• Break free from the fossil-fuel trap. "We're going to pay an extra +$500 billion for oil and gas this year."
• Don't Save This World. Design the Next One by science fiction author and futurist Karl Schoeder. "In this article I’ll lay it out one of the inventive processes I use. This is an approach common to many of my posts. I’ll present it in four easy stages that you can learn to follow yourself. Then, I’ll give you a couple of fun examples of how I’ve used it." 

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Photo of the Week - May 3, 3036

This week's photo is taken along the marsh land near the lake. Most of this vegation will come back in the summer but right now it looks pretty bleak. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and touched up a bit in Google Photos. 

Marsh land plants after the winter

 

Saturday Sounds - The Sheepdogs - Keep Out of the Storm

This week's musical treat is the new album from The Sheepdogs, one of Canada's better bands. Keep Out of the Storm is a solid rock album that sounds a bit like some classic Southern rock bands, which is a bit odd considering that The Sheepdogs are from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. No mater; it's a good album. Enjoy.

Movie and TV Reviews - April 2026

Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in April. Now that we're watching the Blue Jays, there won't be as much here.

Movies

• Anaconda: A remake of the original big snake movie. It has some funny bits but otherwise not much to recommend it. (Crave)
• The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: This is a series of four made-for-TV movies originally broadcast by the BBC between 2011 and 2014 and  based on a novel by Kate Summerscale about Jack Whicher, a "private inquiry agent" in Victorian England. They were all quite good with one of the better evocations of that period that I've seen coupled with interesting stories and first-rate acting.  (BritBox and Hoopla)
• Kingsman: A rewatch. Silly but fun. (Disney+)

TV Shows

• Young Sherlock. I wasn't interested in this until I found out that it was directed by Guy Ritchie. It's well made and entertaining. I can't comment on how it fits into the Sherlock Holmes canon. (Amazon Prime)
• Saint-Pierre (season 2). This is a Canadian-made crime drama set on the French island of Saint Pierre off the south coast of Newfoundland. A light detective drama with some good actors and a slightly exotic setting. The second season is better than the first. (CBD Gem)
• Cross (season 2): The first season was OK but the the first couple of episodes of the 2nd season left me completely cold. It did get better later on. (Amazon Prime)
• The Nature of Things: Wild, Wild, Weather. A very good documentary on how climate change is affecting worldwide weather systems.  (CBC Gem)
• Hope Street (season 5): It's a pleasant enough show but I think it's gone on past its best before date. (BritBox)
• Reboot (season 1): The classic 1990s animated series is back. By modern standards, the animation, which was pioneering for the time, is primitive, but the show is still quite watchable for both kids and adults.