LG 32GP750-B Gaming Monitor First Impressions

For some time now, I've been thinking of replacing my Lenovo 28" monitor. I bought it at a ridiculously low price from the TSX when they were selling off excess gear so it's now more than six years old. I liked having a big monitor but as I did more with Photoshop and Lightroom, its limitations began to bother me. The final straw was when Nancy started gaming after we upgraded our PC and found that there was a lot of lag on FPS games. 

So last week we bought a new monitor, an LG 32GP750-B UltraGear 31.5" IPS gaming monitor with a 1 ms. refresh rate and a resolution of 2560 x 1440. Lag is no longer an issue.

As for using it to edit photos, it's perfectly fine. The colours are accurate (I have looked at some calibration images and they look fine) and brilliant. The monitor supports HDR, so it has excellent dynamic range. I am running it on the default settings on both the monitor and video card, and I see no reason to try an further adjustments. (I had a bad experience trying to use the Windows 11 calibration tool with the Lenovo, so I am leaving it on default settings, at least for now). 

Things I like

• The size. The extra 3.5" makes a difference.
• The increased resolution.* The Lenovo was a 4K monitor that I ran at 1920 x 1080p. I could have run it at 3840 x 2160, but I wouldn't have been able to read anything on screen. 
• The lack of lag in gaming. Nancy can get ridiculously high frame rates with no jitter when gaming.
• As mentioned above, the colours are gorgeous. 
• The matte screen has eliminated the glare problem I had on bright days. (I know some people think matte screens degrade image quality but I don't have a problem with it). 
• The joystick controls for the on-screen display are easy to use, especially compared to the Lenovo's capacitive buttons. 
• The monitor is light considering its size and was easy to set up. 

Things I don't like

• No USB ports (It has one, but it can only be used for firmware upgrades).
• No speakers. I don't need speakers in my monitor as I have a perfectly good Logitech 2.1 speaker system, but the monitor software installed a sound driver that kicked in when the monitor was turned on. It took a few minutes to figure out why we weren't getting sound and reset Windows' sound output to speakers. I've since disabled the LG sound driver as the monitor kept switching back to it when coming out of sleep mode. LG needs to fix this.
• Calibration controls are pretty basic. The Lenovo had more calibration options. Hopefully, I won't need them. 
• Despite not having speakers, the monitor must have a sound chip, because it chirps when turning on or off and when adjusting settings. It's annoying and I can't find a setting to turn it off.
• The power cord has a power brick at the plug end. I was able to rearrange the cords plugged into my power bar but this might be a problem for some users. 
• There is a very slight falloff in brightness at the left and right sides of the screen. I only notice it because I sit quite close to the screen; most people would be sitting further back, and moving back even 15 cm. makes it go away. 
• LG needs to revamp their registration process. I tried three times to register the monitor online and it failed each time. I will have to mail in the registration card.

On the whole, I'm happy with the monitor. We bought it in something of a rush because it was on sale (which was ending on the weekend) without doing a lot of research. I think we got it at a good price and I didn't want to spend more. 

* The increased resolution is a mixed blessing. Windows 11 is pretty dumb when it comes to scaling up the size of Ui elements. I can get bigger text without too many  problems, but trying to get larger dialog boxes is hit or miss. (Windows' settings warn you about trying to increase the scaling factor and they're right.) I occasionally have to resort to my reading glasses. I will have to look into this in more detail later.

2023 World Fantasy Awards

It's award season in the science fiction and fantasy world. This week, the winners of the World Fantasy Awards were announced at the World Fantasy Convention in Kansas City. These are the fiction winners.

Novel: Saint Death’s Daughter by C. S. E. Cooney (Solaris)

Novella: Pomegranates by Priya Sharma (Absinthe Books)

Short Fiction: “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge” by Tananarive Due (Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology)

Anthology: Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, eds. Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight (Tordotcom Publishing)

Collection: All Nightmare Long by Tim Lebbon (PS Publishing)

Featured Links - October 30, 2023

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

A Halloween display in our neighbourhood

• 2022 Sidewise Award Winners. These are awards for the best alternate history stories of 2022. 
• Catching Up With the Pixel 8 Pro: A Review, Mostly About the Camera. A review by SF author John Scalzi. His comments mostly mirror my own feelings about the phone.
• Google's Latest Updates Helps Root Out AI Deepfakes. "The ‘About this image’ feature in image search and AI app restrictions on Google Play are a few ways Google is trying to clap back against AI-generated fakes."
• Your ultimate guide to ultra-processed food – how bad is it really?  *archive.ph link) "Highly processed foods, from pizza to bread, are said to be seriously bad for your health. Here is a digestible guide to what the evidence says, to help you make sense of the conflicting claims."
• The Potentially High Risks of Alternative Health Care. "A new study suggests a large number of people across the country may be using unproven, and sometimes dangerous, treatments."
• AI Has Made the Israel-Hamas Misinformation Epidemic Much, Much Worse. "War propaganda is turbocharged with software that can pump out an endless supply of incendiary images."
• The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic. "Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio program did not touch off nationwide hysteria. Why does the legend persist?"
• The Science Fiction of the 1900s. From SF author and futurist, Karl Schroeder: "My latest Substack asks whether we're walking into 21st century crises and opportunities with 20th century expectations. Are we working to build our parents' future, not our own?"

Photo of the Week - October 29, 2023

The photo this week is from my new Pixel 8 Pro and is of a mid-1970s Pontiac Grande Ville, if Google Lens is accurate. It was parked near our house and I thought it was cool; you don't see many cars of that vintage on the road any more. 

Pontiac Grande Ville

Saturday Sounds - Bruce Hornsby - Spirit Trail 25th Anniversary Edition

I listened to quite a lot of Bruce Hornsby's music back in the 1990s and I remember enjoying his Spirit Trail album when it came out in 1998. Several of the songs on the album have become staples of his live performances and listening to the remastered 25th anniversary edition, it's not hard to see why.

As well as a nicely remastered version of the original double album, this release includes a disc of outtakes and a disc of live performances of some of the Spirit Trail tracks. 

Listening to the album again, I think it holds up pretty well. What do you think? Leave me a comment. 

Dealing with Disinformation on Social Media

It's really hard to know what to believe right now, especially when you are looking at posts on social media platforms like Facebook or X (aka Twitter). I found that particularly difficult in the last couple of weeks when trying to get accurate news about events in the middle East. 

Bellingcat has become an essential resource when dealing with news on the internet. They bill themselves as an "independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists brought together by a passion for open source research." Their website includes a wide selection of articles and guides dealing with a range of current topics including several major journalishtic investigations.

They've just published "Separating Fact from Fiction on Social Media in Times of Conflict". 

In a time of crisis, social media is flooded with images, videos and bold claims. This can be useful for researchers like ourselves but overwhelming for the general public seeking the facts.

At Bellingcat, we pride ourselves on providing tools and resources for our audience to think critically about sources they find online. In this short guide, we give a few tips on what to consider when confronted with an abundance of footage and claims. 

Here’s how to separate fact from fiction with real, recent examples of misinformation.

I can't recommend this short guide highly enough. It provides a handy framework for sorting out the real from the unreal in today's crazy information environment.

Happy Birthay, Microsoft Word

After the 20th anniversary of my blog yesterday, today marks another significant computing anniversary. Forty years ago, Microsoft released Microsoft Word 1.0. The program got off to a slow start, but eventually became the dominant word processor.

I first encountered Word in 1985, when I picked up a copy of PC World (if memory serves) that had a bonus copy of Word 2.0. At the time, I was using WordStar 2000, but I immediately abandoned that for Word and never looked back. (I still consider Word 5.5 for DOS to be the best version of Word, including all the subsequent releases of Word for Windows). 

The BBC has published a long retrospective that looks at "the role the software has played in four decades of language and communication evolution."

Ironically, given its ubiquity, Word has rarely been a pioneer when it comes to features. As mentioned, it was far from the first word processor. It’s often credited with introducing grammar tools, despite the fact these were developed decades earlier. And the idea behind "track changes" – where you can see edits to a document – wasn’t a Microsoft invention.

Yet Word’s superpower was using smart, simple design choices to make such features accessible to a global audience, not just techies. Its "What You See is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) design philosophy is now commonplace in software and on the internet. Word introduced line breaks, along with bold and italic fonts on screen. It revolutionised typeset-quality printing, as well as the use of templates. And it was in these templates that Word’s early impact on communication emerged.

As for me, I still use Word for Microsoft 365 for most word-processing tasks. While at the Toronto Stock Exchange, I had to use Google Docs, which I hated with a burning passion. Google Docs has since improved to the point where it is usable for small tasks, but I haven't yet found a reason to use it instead of Word. (I do use Google Sheets for simple spreadsheets; it compares more favourably to Excel than Docs does to Word). I've played around with Libre Office and would probably use that if I couldn't afford a Microsoft 365 subscription.

See the Microsoft Word topic on this blog for many posts about Word, including guides that I wrote to help co-workers at the TSX. 

Canada's Year of Fire

You can't live anywhere in North America and not be aware of how bad the wildfires in Canada were this year. Smoke from the fires affected almost every part of the continent and even darkened the skies as far afield as Greenland. In Canada, several towns and cities burned and 200,000 people were evacuated during the summer. In the previous worst year for fires, 10 million acres burned; this year the toll was 45,000,000 million acres. 

The New York Times has published a long article that looks at how the fires affected people across the country. It's the best article I've seen yet on the subject and I'm linking to it here with a paywall-free link from my subscription.

One of the key points of the article is that wildfires aren't occurring just in distant forests; they're burning in places where many people live, in what's called the "wildfire urban interface" in both Canada and the United States.

When the town Slave Lake in Alberta burned in 2011, it felt like a small-scale throwback to the great fires that engulfed Chicago and San Francisco — 400 homes destroyed and more than 700 people left homeless. When Fort McMurray burned in 2016, it looked like another step-change — not a remote town deep in the boreal wilderness but a major, modern, industrial tar-sands boomtown and a rapid evacuation of 90,000. But each has been followed by so many successive examples that they are now, distressingly, something like an annual event: Santa Rosa and Paradise in Northern California, Boulder in Colorado, Lytton in British Columbia and Lahaina in Maui, where a brush fire swept through the old Hawaiian capital, killing nearly 100 people. It was the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century.

Each of these is, to some degree, a climate story, but each is also a story about aggressive residential development into what is called the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI. Today, more than a third of American homes are in the WUI, as are half of Canadian ones. “It is a beautiful place to live, until it goes feral,” Vaillant writes in “Fire Weather.” “When the WUI burns, it does not burn like a forest fire or a house fire, it burns like Hell.”

You may think that just because you live in a big city, that wildfires aren't a concern, but the Canadian fires this summer had a global impact, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than the annual output of more than half of the world's countries combined.

And next year may be worse.

Core Dump is 20

Today is the 20th anniversary of my first post on Core Dump. At the time, I said:

I don’t know how frequent posts will be here. I’ve not been very good at updating my web site recently, but it should be easier to keep this up to date.

I guess it was easier, because since then I've made several thousand posts and written what is probably the equivalent of a novel or two.

Core Dump started out in Blogger. After a few years, I switched over to a self-hosted WordPress blog, which is still up on my website. After retiring in 2018, I set up the current version of the blog back on Blogger.  

I'm not sure where I will go from here. I like WordPress more than Blogger but I don't want to self-host a new version of the blog. If I switch back to WordPress, I will probably do it on WordPress.com and will likely have to use a paid version, and I'm not sure I want to incur the expense. We'll see. 

I do intend to keep blogging, though I may not be here every day. I enjoy writing and over time the blog has become a useful resource. I do often go back to it to look things up; it's become my own personal Wikipedia.

Readership is not high, usually less than 100 visitors a day, assuming I can believe Google's stats (which are not always reliable due to referrer spam). It would be good if more people commented on posts, as that would encourage me to post more, so if you like what I'm doing here, please let me know. 

Featured Links - October 23, 2023

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

Autumn colours

• Doomscroller vs. Windtunneler. "How to expose the fallacies of "it'll never happen" arguments." Some good advice from science fiction author and futurist, Karl Schroeder.
• Anesthetists discover how NOT to use Excel. "A British medical office has made a right mess of selecting trainee anesthetists by the misuse of Excel. Let’s look at what happened and some ways you can avoid similar mistakes." Data analysis is not for amateurs.
• How can we be alone in the universe? You may be surprised at the answer.
• The gentrification font: how a sleek typeface became a neighborhood omen. "The clean, modern typeface has adorned the New Yorker, Shake Shack and even. HBO’s Girls – now it might bedeck your last home."
• The Dangerous Mystery of Hamas’ Missing ‘Suicide Drones’. "Hamas has long touted its military drones, but little is known about the true scale of the threat. The answer may have consequences for people on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border." impacting our climate, new research suggests."
• Metals from spacecraft reentry in stratospheric aerosol particles. "Measurements show that about 10% of the aerosol particles in the stratosphere contain aluminum and other metals that originated from the “burn-up” of satellites and rocket stages during reentry. Although direct health or environmental impacts at ground level are unlikely, these measurements have broad implications for the stratosphere and higher altitudes. With many more launches planned in the coming decades, metals from spacecraft reentry could induce changes in the stratospheric aerosol layer."
• Elizabeth May: Good Riddance to the Impact Assessment Act. "The Greens co-leader explains why she cheered when the Supreme Court slammed the Liberals’ environmental review law C-69."

Photo of the Week - Octover 22, 2023

This week's photo is of the Old Stone Cottage restaurant and bar in Scarborough. Nancy I had lunch there on Friday while our dog was at her groomer's. Lunch was good and the building is lovely inside and out.

This was taken with the wide angle camera on the Pixel 8 Pro. 

The Old Stone Cottage

2023 Hugo Award Winners

The winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards were announced today at the 81st World Science Fiction Convention in Chengdu, China. The WorldCon (as it's known in the SF community) was held at the World Science Fiction Museum, a new and stunning facility that looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

These are the fiction awards:

• Best Novel: Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher (Tor Books)
• Best Novella: Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
• Best Novelette:  “The Space-Time Painter”, by Hai Ya (Galaxy’s Edge, April 2022)
• Best Short Story: “Rabbit Test”, by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2022)

For the full list of winners, see File 770.

Saturday Sounds - Joni Mitchell - Live at the BBC, Sept 3, 1970

My YouTube feed continues to pop up some real gems and this weeks Saturday Sounds post is one of them, a Joni Mitchell solo concert recorded for the BBC on September 3, 1970. She performs many of her early hits, including "Woodstock", "Big Yellow Taxi", and "Both Sides Now". The performance is excellent and the video and sound are very good. Enjoy.

Photography Links - October 20, 2023

 Here are some articles about photography that I found interesting or useful.

The entrance to Frenchman's Bay, taken with the Pixel 8 Pro

• Google Pixel 8 & Pixel 8 Pro review: software power delivers top smartphone camera performance. A detailed review of the cameras on Google's new Pixel phones from the top camera review site.
• The Photography Terms Glossary. "The world of photography is full of words and phrases that can be confusing for new photographers, so PetaPixel has put together a complete glossary of everything you may want to know the meaning of if you’re just getting started."
• Best photo editing software in 2023. "We pick the best photo editing software that's completely subscription-free. Read on for the best Photoshop alternatives available right now."
• How bad is Google Photos’ compression anyway? If you have a lot of pictures stored in Google Photos, this article is worth reading.
• ScanSpeeder is software to scan several photos at once. If you have a flatbed scanner, this may be worth a look. There are free and paid versions.
• Old Photographs Brought to Life With the Latest Colorization Techniques. A book review of The Colors of Life by Stuart Humphrys with several stunning colourized photos.
• Astrophotography From Start to Finish: Shooting, Stacking, and Post-Production. A video guide from a top astrophotographer.

Google Pixel Watch 2 First Impressions

Until very recently I had no plans to get a smartwatch. Early this year, I got a Fitbit Sense which is a fitness tracker with limited smartwatch features. I enjoyed using it and unlike most smartwatches, the battery will last several days between charges. But Google threw in a Pixel Watch 2 with Pixel 8 Pro pre-orders, so now I have one. 

My first experience with the watch was not encouraging. I jumped into setting it up without following Google's (rather perfunctory) instructions and got into an update that wouldn't complete. Finally, I decided to wait for my Pixel 8 Pro to arrive and start over from scratch. 

Setting it up by pairing with the Pixel 8 Pro worked much better and I was up and running within an hour. The watch did insist on being connected to the charger before it would continue, despite having almost 90 percent charge, and it also installed a system update that took a surprisingly long time to complete.

The watch is quite comfortable and most of the time I hardly notice I'm wearing it. I do wish Google had not used a proprietary design for the band as the ones I have for my Fitbit sense won't fit on it, and while we're on that subject, the watch has yet another proprietary charger that isn't even compatible with the original Pixel watch much less any standard wireless charger.

I was worried that the small size of the watch (41 mm. diameter) would make it hard for me to read the screen, but the Wear 4 OS lets me set a font size that I can (barely) read. I can also set a comfortable brightness level, which helps for readability.

I was able to easily connect the watch to my Fitbit app, although I was disappointed to see that I had to unregister the Fitbit Sense. I would have liked to have the option of easily switching between the two devices. In my limited use so far, it seems that the Pixel watch has more fitness tracking features than the Sense, but I only need the basics. 

Limited battery life was a complaint about the first Pixel watch. The new one is better but still not great. I have set my watch to not use the Always On display and keep the brightness level low indoors and after one day of use, I'm just above 50 percent battery level. The Fitbit Sense was usually good for between 4 and 5 days of use before it got down to the point where I had to charge it. 

There were also concerns about the durability of the first Pixel Watch. I will probably order a screen protector for it as the screen is not replaceable if it cracks. The watch itself is aluminum, which is probably durable enough though it might scratch more easily than stainless steel. 

I'm still exploring the features and apps. I like Wear OS compared to the OS on the Sense. However, given the small size of the watch, it's likely that I won't be using a lot of apps. 

I wouldn't have bought the Pixel Watch 2 if I'd had to pay full price for it, but I'm glad I got it as part of my phone purchase. 

Wired has just published a review of the watch and I agree with most of the writer's conclusions, so look at that if you want a more detailed take. 

Google Pixel 8 Pro First Impressions

I wasn't going to upgrade my Pixel 4a this year. Although I've had it for three years, it's served me well and is running without problems, other than a slightly degraded battery. But I found out in September that Google is no longer providing updates for this phone, so continuing to use it without security patches is not something I wanted  to risk.  

Given that I wanted to continue with a Pixel phone, my choices were the Pixel 7a or either the just announced Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro. After some thought and no little trepidation, I ordered a Pixel 8 Pro. It was more than twice what my Pixel 4a cost me, but by pre-ordering I got a Pixel Watch 2 at no extra cost (more on the watch in a post tomorrow). The deciding factors were that the new Pixels come with seven years of updates, and I really wanted a phone with multiple camera lenses. I did spend extra to get the model with 256 GB of storage. 

To my pleasant surprise, the phone arrived last Thursday, well ahead of the original shipping date of October 31. 

It's big, though still a comfortable fit in my hands. I ordered the Bay colour, which is very pretty, but now hidden by a Spigen case. Without a case, it's rather slippery, and I would strongly recommend using it with a case. The camera bar on the back is quite pronounced, which I assume is because of the 5x telephoto lens.

Getting the phone set up was straightforward and took about an hour. Most of my apps and settings came over from the Pixel 4a, although there were a few that I had to find my passwords for. Bluetooth pairings did not come across, so I have a few devices that I have to pair to the new phone.

I am seriously impressed with the camera. Pictures are sharp with accurate colour and good dynamic range. It isn't a sharp as my Fujifilm X-S10, but it is good enough that I don't feel the need to have a walkaround camera. Here's a picture of Frenchman's Bay taken with the ultra-wide lens straight out of the camera. 

Frenchman's Bay with Pixel 8 Pro ultra-wide lens

The Pro mode of the camera is a huge plus and I will be testing it more soon. Here's a quick grab shot taken through our car's window as we were waiting for a stop light. I was able to dial down the exposure to get a nearly perfect match to what I was seeing outside. The Pixel 4a would have drastically overexposed this shot.

Night shot with the camera's Pro mode

The screen is sharper than that on the Pixel 4a and can get quite a bit brighter, even in bright sunlight. By default, it comes with the resolution dialed down and I've left it at that, both because it uses less battery power and with my vision I probably wouldn't notice the difference.

I haven't found the larger size of the phone to be a problem, even with the addition of the Spigen case. It does (just) fit in the belt holster I was using, though it is a tight fit. Like most modern phones, the 3.5 mm. headphone jack is gone, so I've ordered a dongle so I can use wired headphones. (I don't usually use my Beats Studio 3 headphones when I go walking because I like to be able to hear cars coming when I'm walking on a street with no sidewalks). The extra screen real estate does make a difference when reading books or articles on the web. The phone isn't a lot wider than the Pixel 4a, but it is somewhat longer.

The under-screen fingerprint sensor works but I would have preferred having it on the back. I also have face unlock set up. It doesn't work well in dim light although it does work when I'm wearing my sunglass clip-ons.

Battery life is quite good, as I expected. I can get through a day and a half of normal use before getting down to the 25 percent range. I don't play many games or watch many videos on my phone, so your mileage may vary. The sound quality of the speakers is OK and comparable to my wife's Samsung, but don't expect a lot of bass. 

I still have several apps I need to get working (I really need to start using a password manager!) and there are some things I want to tweak, but getting the most frequently used features and apps set up was easier than I expected. This YouTube video has been very helpful and I've found some features I didn't know about. So far, my first impressions are highly positive.

Featured Links - October 16,2023

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

Geese on the bay

• September 2023 was Earth’s most extreme month for heat ever recorded. "Climate scientist James Hansen says the world may soon exceed the 1.5 degree Celsius warming threshold."
• AI Is 'Unwrapping' Burnt Scrolls From Herculaneum. "Mount Vesuvius buried Herculaneum in volcanic ash 2,000 years ago. Modern tech is revealing lost texts from the town."
• Being a Republican can kill you; living in the same state with too many of them can kill you too. "The Washington Post conducted a study trying to get to the bottom of why American life expectancy was shrinking. What they found was that red-state politics was killing people at an alarming rate. They studied three adjacent counties along Lake Erie: Ashtabula in red Ohio; Erie in purple Pennsylvania; and Chautauqua in blue New York. The 2020 death rate in the Ohio county was 650 per 100,000 people, compared to about 490 in Pennsylvania and 540 in New York."
• A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860). Browsing through this could be a real time sink. It might also be a good resource for authors looking for unusual words for their stories.
• It's time to standardize smartwatch charging. "Smartphones have finally fallen in line, and it's time for wearables to do the same." The article suggests watches should support the new Qi2 wireless charging standard, which makes a lot of sense. 
• Staying ahead of virus mutations. "New AI tool can predict viral variants, ID most dangerous, help make vaccines ‘future-proof’."
• The Whole of the Whole Earth Catalog Is Now Online. "The seminal DIY catalogs, journals, and magazines printed by the techno-hippie publishing house are finally available online in digital form, all for free." I had several issues of this back in the day and spent many hours browsing through it.

Photo of the Week - October 15, 2023

We are having a fairly warm autumn so far with comfortable daytime temperatures (for the Canadian version of comfortable) and no frost so far. I was surprised to see a late-blooming rose in our front yard and just had to share it's beauty. This was taken with my new Pixel 8 Pro in macro mode and I think it turned out quite well. 

Autumn rose

Saturday Sounds - Jay Linden - Ordinary Sunrise

This week's musical treat is Ordinary Sunrise, the third album from singer-songwriter Jay Linden. Disclosure: I've known Jay since I was in university and have enjoyed his music for many years.

From his bio on Bandcamp:

Jay Linden is a veteran musician, guitarist, singer and songwriter who has travelled a lot of road miles and eaten a lot of road dust and sunsets, many of which find their way into his songs. The songs are elegantly crafted, timeless, and grow on you like a soft frost grows on the grass of a winter's morning. 

All of this is true.  

The album was produced by Jay's brother, Colin Linden, who adds some tasteful guitar throughout.

You can purchase it for an extremely reasonable price as a digital download or order a CD from Bandcamp at the link above. It's also available on the usual digital music platforms. 

We're Toast 44

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. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Driftwood at Batchewana Bay

Heat Waves in the Ground Are Getting More Extreme—and Perilous. "The atmosphere is rapidly warming, but the soil is also prone to heat waves. Scientists are racing to understand the consequences."

Light pollution is disrupting the seasonal rhythms of plants and trees, lengthening pollen season in US cities. "City lights that blaze all night are profoundly disrupting urban plants’ phenology – shifting when their buds open in the spring and when their leaves change colors and drop in the fall. New research I coauthored shows how nighttime lights are lengthening the growing season in cities, which can affect everything from allergies to local economies."

We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization’s Collapse. "Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?"

Rising methane could be a sign that Earth’s climate is part-way through a ‘termination-level transition’. "Since 2006, the amount of heat-trapping methane in Earth’s atmosphere has been rising fast and, unlike the rise in carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane’s recent increase seems to be driven by biological emissions, not the burning of fossil fuels. This might just be ordinary variability – a result of natural climate cycles such as El Niño. Or it may signal that a great transition in Earth’s climate has begun."

Risks to Food Security Severely Underestimated. "345 million people facing acute food insecurity today."

New study definitively confirms gulf stream weakening. "The Gulf Stream transport of water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades, with 99% certainty that this weakening is more than expected from random chance, according to a new study."

Sadly, It's Not 'Just Another Summer.' We Must End the Fossil Fuel Industry. "My fellow human beings, we're in the process of losing basically everything, as the latest data demonstrates. September was more like your average July, The Washington Post wrote on Tuesday. All that we've been experiencing recently—the worsening fires, smoke, heat, floods, and collapsing ecosystems—is just the beginning. This is what experiencing the early stages of Earth's unraveling feels like. The immediate cause is the fossil fuel industry, and the overarching cause is extractive-colonial capitalism."

Mary Trump’s Horror Prediction if a Republican Wins 2024. "The niece of the former president joins The New Abnormal with a dire warning for Democrats if Republicans take the win in 2024."

COVID Virus Loads Peak Well After Symptoms Start

I know several people who have been sick recently, tested negative for COVID-19 when they started getting sick, and eventually recovered with the assumption that it wasn't COVID-19. If this study is correct, that may have been wrong as current variants seem to have a peak in viral load several days after the onset of symptoms.  

Of 348 newly-diagnosed SARS-CoV-2 PCR-positive individuals (65.5% women, median 39.2y), 317/348 (91.1%) had a history of vaccination, natural infection, or both. By both Ct value and antigen concentration measurements, median viral loads rose from the day of symptom onset and peaked on the fourth/fifth day. 

So if you get sick and test negative for COVID-19 at the onset, keep testing and take suitable precautions to protect others until at least the fourth day.  

Featured Links - October 10, 2023

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

Harmony Bay

• Microsoft’s font substitution for Aptos really sucks. "Microsoft’s alternatives for the new Aptos fonts range are very poor. In some cases, the substitions make no sense at all.  We’ve looked at what happens if a document with Aptos fonts is opened Office 2016 and earlier versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook."
• The Plain View. "The best virtual reality experience I’ve had this year was not with the $500 Quest 3 or the $3,500 Apple VisionPro, and it didn’t even require a headset. Sure, it cost $2.3 billion. But it came with a live soundtrack from an iconic rock band." Attending a concert at The Sphere is now on my bucket list.
• How to add Markdown support to Google Docs. "You have an alternative to keyboard shortcuts." Markdown continues its inexorable march to world domination. 
• Cats first finagled their way into human hearts and homes thousands of years ago – here’s how. If you are a cat person, you will find this article quite interesting.
• Disney+ censoring classic Disney cartoons to reflect modern sensibilities. This is just wrong.
• Adobe and Microsoft break some old files by removing PostScript font support. "PostScript Type 1 fonts are decades old, but apps supported them until recently." This could be a problem if you have old documents that you are trying to open.
• Terry Bisson’s History of the Future. "For more than two decades, one of pulp sci-fi’s masters has delivered headlines from a time line defined by the absurd." Bisson gets profiled in the New Yorker. See my blog post about his novel, Fire on the Mountain. 

Off for Canadian Thanksgiving

This coming Monday is Thanksgiving here in the Great Red and Orange North. I'll be taking the weekend off from blogging to help Nancy get the house straightened up for our big dinner on Monday.

Posts have been slow the last while because I've just been too busy. Things will hopefully settle down but I don't expect to be able to post daily until the end of the month. 

Here's a picture I took with my Pixel 4a (soon to be replaced by a Pixel 8 Pro) of Haviland Bay north of Sault Ste Marie. I do miss the north in the fall. 

Haviland Bay

 

The New Hot War

With the rise in world tensions between the West, Russia, and China, the phrase "the new Cold War" has been cropping up in the media. But trade, political, and military tensions aren't the most important conflict that's going on right now. What we are in should be titled "the new Hot War", as this article from Tim Bray's blog points out.

As it happens, industrializing countries first began to, in essence, make war on our world in the late eighteenth century, but had no idea they were doing so until deep into the twentieth century. These days, however, it should be anything but a secret that humanity is all too knowingly at war — and there’s nothing “cold” about it — with and on our very own world. Sadly enough, however, in the United States, the leading politicians of one of the two major political parties seem remarkably intent not just on refusing to recognize that reality, but on supporting the release of carbon into the atmosphere in ever more major ways. Its presidential candidates, especially Donald Trump (whose last presidential campaign was heavily financed by the fossil fuel industry) and the failing, flailing Ron DeSantis, are, in fact, remarkably eager to deny the reality of our present world. Worse yet, they seem hell-bent on encouraging the further development and use of coal, natural gas, and oil on a staggering scale, while shredding what regulations exist to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact, from the heart of Texas oil country, as the New York Times recently reported, DeSantis announced a plan he called “the freedom to fuel.” He promised “to remove subsidies for electric vehicles, take the U.S. out of global climate agreements — including the Paris accords — and cancel net-zero emission promises. He also vowed to increase American oil and natural gas production and ‘replace the phrase climate change with energy dominance’ in policy guidance.”

God help us if the Republicans form the next US administration. It will be them, Great Britain, and Alberta and Saskatchewan against the rest of the world. I know which side I'll be on.  

The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

The Terraformers is the third science fiction novel by Annalee Newitz. I've read both the previous novels (Autonomous and The Future of Another Timeline) and enjoyed them, and I enjoyed The Terraformers even more.

It's set about 60,000 years in the future (more on that later) in an era where there is star travel, intelligent robots, advanced genetic engineering, and ubiquitous networking. People live for hundreds or thousands of years and the term 'people' includes animal species like moose, naked mole rats, cats, and biologically engineered flying trains. Yet the plot of the book revolves around very current issues like preserving the environment and fighting rapacious development corporations. 

I'm not sure why Newitz set the book that far in the future. It pushed my willing suspension of disbelief past its limits as it could easily have been set much closer to our present. I finally decided that it didn't matter and ignored it as I was having too much fun. It's a book that made me feel like I was 12 and discovering science fiction for the first time, although my 12-year-old self probably would have had trouble dealing with the interspecies sex and LGBTQ+ characters. None of that gets in the way of the story, which moves along quickly and kept me interested right to the end. 

I expect to see The Terraformers on the ballots for next year's major science fiction  awards. 

 

Movie and TV Reviews - September 2023

Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in September.

Movies 

• Elemental: I didn't like this as much as Turning Red, which we watched last month. The animation was spectacular, and often quite trippy, but the story didn't click with me. But I'm hardly their target audience. (Disney+)
  

TV Shows

• Silent Witness (seaons 24-26): We are still watching and enjoying this show, though I did not like season 25 and the beginning of season 26 as much, because it turned into a political thriller instead of a police/forensic procedural, although the last episodes of season 26 were quite good. (Amazon Prime)
• Antiques Road Trip (season 23): Still watching and enjoying this. The trip though Wales was especially interesting.
• The Wheel of Time (seasaon 2): The second season of this show is much more interesting than the first season, now that the characters and background have been established. 
• Ashoka: I don't think this is the best of the Star Wars live action series so far, but it is revealing some interesting details about the Jedi.  (Disney+)
• Foundation (season 2): This show bears little relation to the Isaac Asimov series that inspired it. I didn't like the first season very much, but the second season has gotten off to a better start, though I'm still finding the storyline hard to follow.

Saturday Sounds - September 30, 2023

The Jefferson Airplane were the first band that I became a real fan of. Part of that was an adolescent crush on Grace Slick, part was a fascination with the San Francisco hippie scene, but mostly it was the propulsive, guitar-driven sound of the band and their wonderful harmonies. I was lucky enough to see them perform twice in Detroit in 1968 and 1968; I still consider their November 1969 performance at the East Towne Threater to be the best single rock performance I've seen. 

The Airplane disbanded before portable taping equipment and the taper movement became widespread, so there aren't many good audience recordings of their concerts. Some soundboards of varying quality circulate and this week's Saturday Sounds post is one of them, from a performance at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, CA, on May 19th, 1967. 

Considering the era, the recording is of decent quality. Unfortunately, there are several cuts (notably in White Rabbit and Somebody to Love), but from what I remember after more than 50 years, this recording is as close to what they sounded like live as any I've heard. The best part of the set is the jam that follows This Is My Life, starting about 45:00 followed by their first live performance of Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon. 

For better sound quality, both their performances at the Monterey Pop Festival later in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969 have been commercially released and are available for streaming.

Photo of the Week - October 1, 2023

Here's a house in our neighbourhood. The somewhat overgrown front yard makes me suspect that it may be soon sold and replaced by a soulless monster home, a fate that has befallen several properties on its street. The lighting and lack of variety in the scene's colours prompted me to use black and white for this shot. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with Fujinon 16-80 mm F4 at 34 mm., F5.6 at 1/340 second, ISO 320, TriX 400 filrm simulation

 

Featured Links - September 25, 2023

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

Frenchman's Bay 

• How to use Google News like an RSS reader. There are some useful tips in this article, although I wouldn't do as the article suggests and ditch my RSS feed reader.  
• Best LastPass Alternatives Of 2023. If you are still using LastPass, or not using a password manager at all, you should read this.
• Microsoft Sysinternals: The best Windows troubleshooting tools. "Microsoft Sysinternals provides the best tools you need to troubleshoot Windows systems." 
• 50 programs that fix Windows problems with just a few clicks. "All you need is the right software to quickly fix common Windows headaches. Here are 50 ultra-handy tools."
• The Long Goodbye. A long article about the final Dead and Company tour. Wish I could have seen them.
• When the Breakthrough G-Agonists Exceed Expectations. "The expanding GLP-1 family of drugs and their expanded potential use cases."
• The Summer That Reality Caught Up to Climate Fiction. "Once deemed outlandish and fitting for a dystopian novel, today's unfolding events challenge fiction writers to redefine their narratives."

Photo of the Week

I took the camera down to the bay earlier this week in hope of some bird pictures. There were a few swans, ducks,  and geese enjoying the calm, sunny morning.

Fujifilm X-S10 with Fujinon 16-80 mm F4 at 80 mm, F5.6, 1/2900 second, ISO 320, Astia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - September 23, 2023

This week's musical treat is a 1977 performance by Little Feat from the Rockpalast TV  show. The video quality is very good for 1977 (maybe upscaled?), the sound quality is good, and the performance first rate. As a bonus, the video includes a pre-show interview, a warmup song by Ry Cooder, and a song from the soundcheck. Enjoy.

Featured Links - September 18. 2023

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

Frenchman's Bay

The AI Detection Arms Race Is On. "And college students are developing the weapons, quickly building tools that identify AI-generated text—and tools to evade detection."

1987 Nuclear Mars Mission. "A crewed Mars mission requiring 5 Energia launches." They dreamed big. But the Soviet Union collapsed before they could become reality.

AI-Assisted Language Translation of Speaking, Including Mouth Movements. "HeyGen's Video Translate tool will convert videos of people speaking into videos of them speaking one of several different languages (incl. English, Spanish, Hindi, and French) with matching mouth movements." This is amazing but has disturbing implications. 

Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty. "A Nature survey reveals scientists’ reasons for leaving the social-media platform now known as X, and what they are doing to build and maintain a sense of community."

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix. "Alive and still quite vigorous considering its age." I was on USENET a lot up until about 2000 and wrote this article about it. I may revisit it if I can find a decent free server. 

Welcome to the Unapocalypse. "Where SciFi and Design intersect." New Substack from SF author and futurist, Karl Schroeder. 

A 350-Year-Old Theorem Can Explain The Quantum Properties Of Light. "Physicists have applied classical mechanics rules to light – with success."

Photo of the Week - September 17, 2023

This week's picture is of some swans and ducks on Frenchman's Bay on Friday morning. It was a lovely day, and I wish I'd brought my camera. This was taken with my Pixel 4a.

Birds on Frenchman's Bay

 

Saturday Sounds - Dave McMurray - Grateful Deadication 2

The Grateful Dead always had a love of and appreciation for jazz and they often played with jazz musicians, most notably Ornette Coleman and Branford Marsalis, so it's not surprising that jazz musicians have covered their music. Today's treat is Grateful Deadicated 2, an album by saxophonist Dave McMurray in which he covers nine Grateful Dead songs. 

It isn't the most out there jazz, but I like it. As you might expect from the title, there is a previous album of more Grateful Dead songs.

We're Toast 43

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. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Today's post is a departure from my normal format as it concentrates on a couple pf recent news items that do not bode well for our future.

First, a new paper in Science Advances titled Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Here's the abstract.

This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have slightly recovered. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries earlier identified as overstepped. As primary production drives Earth system biosphere functions, human appropriation of net primary production is proposed as a control variable for functional biosphere integrity. This boundary is also transgressed. Earth system modeling of different levels of the transgression of the climate and land system change boundaries illustrates that these anthropogenic impacts on Earth system must be considered in a systemic context.

This is a graphic from the article.

The State of Earth's Boundaries

The paper has received quite a bit of notice in the general press. There's a good summary in The Guardian. Here's a quote from that article.

Their assessment found that six out of nine “planetary boundaries” had been broken because of human-caused pollution and destruction of the natural world. The planetary boundaries are the limits of key global systems – such as climate, water and wildlife diversity – beyond which their ability to maintain a healthy planet is in danger of failing.

The broken boundaries mean the systems have been driven far from the safe and stable state that existed from the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, to the start of the industrial revolution. The whole of modern civilisation arose in this time period, called the Holocene.

The assessment was the first of all nine planetary boundaries and represented the “first scientific health check for the entire planet”, the researchers said. Six boundaries have been passed and two are judged to be close to being broken: air pollution and ocean acidification. The one boundary that is not threatened is atmospheric ozone, after action to phase out destructive chemicals in recent decades led to the ozone hole shrinking.

The scientists said the “most worrying” finding was that all four of the biological boundaries, which cover the living world, were at, or close to, the highest risk level. The living world is particularly vital to the Earth as it provides resilience by compensating for some physical changes, for example, trees absorbing carbon dioxide pollution.

Today, the Eye on the Storm blog on the Yale Climate Connections site reports that August 2023 was the hottest August on record and this year is likely to be the warmest year on record. 

According to an analysis by Climate Central, 3.9 billion people across the world suffered extreme temperatures made at least three times more likely by climate change for over 30 days during the June-August period; 1.5 billion people experienced extreme temperatures at this level for all 92 days of the June-August period. About 98% of the global population was exposed to extreme heat made at least two times more likely by human-caused global warming during this period.

Meanwhile, in the province of Ontario, it's business as usual as the government buries a report on the effects on climate change on the province for eight months. 

A new report commissioned by Premier Doug Ford's government warns that climate change poses high risks to Ontario, with impacts on everything from food production to infrastructure to businesses. 

The report – called the Provincial Climate Change Impact Assessment – projects a soaring number of days with extreme heat across Ontario, as well as increases in flooding and more frequent wildfires. 

Presented to the government in January but only posted publicly in late August, the government did not issue a news release about the report. It follows a summer where Ontarians faced at times extreme heat, heavy rainstorms and unprecedented wildfire smoke.    

Finally, again in Ontario, the government appears to be doubling down on its plans to develop portions of the greenbelt which were set aside years ago to discourage urban sprawl and protect the environment. 

Ford’s government has so far stonewalled on the auditor general’s key recommendation that the removal of the lands from the Greenbelt be “reconsidered.”

In fact, the government seems to be moving in the opposite direction. It is pressuring developers to accelerate construction on the removed lands.

New Housing Minister Paul Calandra is now advancing a wholesale review of the Greenbelt plan. That seems to include consideration of the possibility of further land removals, if not a complete reconsideration of the Greenbelt as a whole.

 

 

 

Microsoft Word and Adjective Order

Despite having worked for more than 30 years as a technical writer, I have to admit that I've never come across the concept of adjective order. That's probably because technical documentation doesn't use many adjectives and certainly not long strings of them. 

English grammar does have an established order for adjectives: Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Colour, Origin, Material, and Purpose. So we write "the big brown cat" instead of "the brown big cat". 

I had never come across the rule for adjective order until I read this article from Office Watch about Microsoft Word and the problem that its grammar checker has with adjectives. Word will suggest the correct order for three adjectives, for example, but if you string together six of them, you are out of luck. 

I don't see this as a big problem as I don't usually write long strings of adjectives, even outside of technical documentation. But it is something to be aware of if you are using Word for something like marketing copy. 

A Disinformation Campaign About the Maui Wildfires

The wildfires that devastated the town of Lahaina and other locations on Maui were likely caused by high winds and electric power lines, a bad combination that's caused fires in many other locations. But that's not stopping bad actors from circulating  conspiracy theories about the fires. 

NewsGuard says it traced the conspiracy theory back to a post on the Chinese platform called 163.com in early August. From there, the accounts reportedly jumped platforms and made their way to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and around 10 other sites by mid-August. By September, the posts appeared on over a dozen platforms with posts attempting to target users from a wide variety of countries. Some of the shady accounts interacted with each other to boost their content and used the hashtag #meteorologicalweapon to amplify the falsehoods. Many of the posts appeared to have replies and likes generated by bot accounts trying to make it appear as if humans were organically interacting with them.

In an email to Gizmodo, Meta confirmed the accounts shared by NewsGuard were part of a disinformation operation called Spamouflage that originated in China. That campaign, which dates back to 2019, was linked to another trove of inauthentic Facebook accounts and pages detected recently highlighted by Meta researchers. Meta said the accounts mentioned in the NewsGuard report were unsuccessful in their attempts to reach real audiences on Facebook.

Can Large Language Models Reason?

I am bothered by the common use of the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) to refer to Large Language Model (LLM) products like ChatGPT. It's clear that they are good at predicting text, but people are equating that with thinking, and that's clearly wrong.

Here's a good article by Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe institute that looks at the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in detail. It's one of the better articles on the subject that I've seen recently.  

What should we believe about the reasoning abilities of today’s large language models?  As the headlines above illustrate, there’s a debate raging over whether these enormous pre-trained neural networks have achieved humanlike reasoning abilities, or whether their skills are in fact “a mirage.”

Reasoning is a central aspect of human intelligence, and robust domain-independent reasoning abilities have long been a key goal for AI systems. While large language models (LLMs) are not explicitly trained to reason, they have exhibited “emergent” behaviors that sometimes look like reasoning. But are these behaviors actually driven by true abstract reasoning abilities, or by some other less robust and generalizable mechanism—for example, by memorizing their training data and later matching patterns in a given problem to those found in training data? 

Why does this matter? If robust general-purpose reasoning abilities have emerged in LLMs, this bolsters the claim that such systems are an important step on the way to trustworthy general intelligence.  On the other hand, if LLMs rely primarily on memorization and pattern-matching rather than true reasoning, then they will not be generalizable—we can’t trust them to perform well on “out of distribution” tasks, those that are not sufficiently similar to tasks they’ve seen in the training data. 

Featured Links - September 11, 2023

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

Eroded tree by the lakeshore

The Energia-Buran Archive. More than 1000 photos of the Soviet Union's heavy-lift rocket and orbiter. 

The End Will Come For The Cult of MAGA. "The next generation isn’t buying it." Let's hope that's true.

Fish doorbells! Historic sandwiches! "50 of the weirdest, most wonderful corners of the web – picked by an expert." 

If Corporations Bore the True Cost of Their Emissions, They’d Owe Trillions. "And that doesn’t even include “downstream” carbon spewing." Corporations are getting a free ride by not having to include the environmental impact of both the production of their products and their eventual disposal.

Coercion versus Care. "It’s irrational and costly, and spreading everywhere, this 4:1 or 5:1 ratio of coercion to care. Witness the recent decision of a US school district to replace libraries with ‘discipline centers’, or the UK Tory politician Robert Jenrick’s purely sadistic instruction for a child refugee centre to paint over the cartoons on the wall. Or indeed, the appetite of the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, to target £8 billion in ‘fraud’, when £20-30 billion of welfare that people need and deserve goes unpaid each year because its systems are so user-hostile."

'Rich Men North Of Richmond' Singer Rips GOP Candidates After Song Is Played At Debate. "Oliver Anthony, whose song 'Rich Men North of Richmond' became a conservative rallying cry, clarified that he wrote the hit song 'about the people on that stage' for the GOP presidential debate."

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more. "Turn off chip detection, bypass need for a Microsoft account, change how Explorer works."

Photo of the Week - September 10, 2023

Here's a late blooming rose from our front yard. I took with with my Pixel 4a and used Portrait mode to blur the background. I rather like the effect. The colour is quite accurate.

Late blooming rose

Saturday Sounds - Phish - August 26, 2023 - Saratoga Springs

This week's musical treat is from Phish, one of my favourite bands. They recently played for two nights at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in Saratoga Springs, NY. The concerts were webcast as part of a Flood Relief Benefit and you can still watch them on YouTube. 

The show from the 26th features slide guitar ace Derek Trucks joining in on several songs in the second set for some truly excellent guitar jams. Enjoy. 

You can watch the concert from the 25th here. 

The Water Crisis

Although it]s editorial stance sometimes make me cringe, the New York Times continues to publish deeply researched (and sometimes deeply disturbing) articles that require deep pockets and a large pool of journalists. The latest looks at what the times is calling "the water crisis" – the increasing depletion and pollution of groundwater in the United States. (paywall-free link)

From their Climate Forward newsletter:

One of the startling things about the climate crisis is just how quickly we’ve brought it upon ourselves. In a relatively short period of time — just 150 years or so — humans have dramatically heated up the planet, ushering in the Anthropocene.

A similarly rapid transformation is taking place beneath our feet. The aquifers that supply 90 percent of America’s water systems are being damaged and depleted by industrial farms and urbanization. Reserves of groundwater that took eons to form are drying up in a matter of years. Cities and farms are running short on water. And experts say it could take centuries or millenniums for some of these aquifers to replenish themselves, if they recover at all.

Over the past several months, The Times analyzed water levels at tens of thousands of sites and arrived at a dire conclusion: Almost half of the sites have seen significant declines over the past 40 years, and last year was the worst yet.

In the first part of a new series on the water crisis, my colleagues Mira Rojanasakul, Christopher Flavelle, Blacki Migliozzi and Eli Murray took a sweeping look at the depletion of groundwater across the country. They found corn yields plummeting in parts of Kansas, drinking water running short in Long Island and cities unable to grow in Arizona.

Fair warning: reading this article may cause sleepless nights. 

Some Useful VLC Tips

I've been using VLC as my main media player for many years. It's interface isn't the friendliest, but it will play virtually anything you throw at it. 

As this article shows, it also has a lot of features buried in the menus and dialogs, most of which I didn't know about despite being a frequent user of the program. Among the more useful ones:

• Download videos from YouTube (or pretty much anywhere else)
• Convert videos to any format
• Play internet radio and podcasts

 

New Fonts in Microsoft Office

If you subscribe to Microsoft 365 you will see that Microsoft has added some new default fonts and themes. The Aptos font family replaces Calibri. Aptos has several variations, including a narrow (compressed) font, a serif version, and a monospaced font as well as several different weights. There are also new Office themes with some changes to colours. 

This article from the Ask Woody Newsletter has a good explanation of how to use the new fonts, where you can find them, and which versions of Office include them. 

I don't see a lot of difference between the standard Aptos font and Calibri, but it is good to have the extra variants and font weights. 

2023 Dragon Award Winners

The winners of the 2023 Dragon Awards were announced at Dragoncon in Atlanta on September 3rd. 

These are the winners of the various awards for Best Novel.

Best Science Fiction Novel: The Icarus Plot by Timothy Zahn

Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal): Witch King by Martha Wells

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

Best Alternate History Novel: Lost In Time by A.G. Riddle

Best Horror Novel: A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

I have not read any of them (I've not read much of anything this year), but the A. G. Riddle novel sounds interesting. 

 

Off for the Weekend and More

I'm a little behind on this. I thought I had published it but it never showed up. 

So here it is now, better late than never.

It's Labour Day weekend up here in the still green Great White North, so I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. 

Also, posts on this blog may be quite sparse over the next month or more. We just sold my late mother-in-law's house, and there's a lot to do before closing. If I see something especially interesting, I may do a quick post about it, but I won't be trying to keep to my usual schedule.

In the meantime, here's a picture of Colin Linden and the Rotting Matadors, who we saw perform last weekend and enjoyed immensely. 

Colin Linden and the Rotting Matadors

Movie and TV Reviews - August 2023

 Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in August.

Movies

• Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3: I liked the first movie a lot, the second one not as much, and this one not very much at all. (Disney+)
• Without Remorse: A standard thriller, part of Jack Ryan's origin story in Tom Clancy's universe. I watched it a week ago and I can hardly remember anything about it. (Amazon Prime)
• Turning Red: From Pixar, a story about a teenage girl in Toronto who turns into a giant red Panda when she gets angry or emotional. This got dissed by certain elements of the net culture for no good reason. The animation is up to Pixar's usual high standards, the story OK for what it is, and we enjoyed it. Bonus points for being set in Toronto and not hiding it. (Disney+)

TV Shows

• Good Omens (season 1): This was a rewatch in preparation for watching season 2. I enjoyed it quite a bit more the second time around, and honestly, I could watch it again (although I really should get around to reading the book first). (Amazon Prime)
• Good Omens (season 2): This season was enjoyable but somewhat unfocused compared. The plot didn't have the urgency of the first season and I found my attention flagging. David Tennant was particularly good.  (Amazon Prime)
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season 2). The second half of the season was much better than the first half or the first season though the last episode was unfortunate. (Crave)
• Silent Witness (seasons 22-23): We're continuing with this show, which may remind you of CSI, although it's much better. (BritBox)
• Antiques Road Trip (season 22): Continuing on with this too. (PBS)
• Endeavour (season 8): This is a prequel to Inspector Morse and Inspector Lewis, set in Oxford, that notorious den of iniquity. The lead characters in this one are especially good. (PBS)
• Ashoka (season 1): So far, we've only seen the first two episodes, but we like what we've seen. It reminds me of the first Star Wars movies, but more there's more of a steam punk influence. (Disney+)