Musings

Went to the mall on a (kinda) emergency mission. The mall still feels like a dangerous space to me. I don’t trust that darned Covid, even the versions floating around these days.

No new devices, or even one device came home with us. Just a cable and a plug that will enable me to charge my phone while in the car. My phone is cranky, and requires lotsa power to charge (unlike my spouse’s, the same model bought at the same time). Once we figured that out, or the Apple Geniuses did, and now we have a new cigarette lighter plug and a new cable; it’s a combo that my phone respects.

What a fancy Apple store.

Posted at 9:07 PM | Comments Off on Talked to a Genius or two

We spent this morning doing errands, which is the same as accomplishing goals beyond the normal daily activities. First, I found cable connectivity, as the saying goes, in spades.

At the next stop, we found crumpets. Real, 3-D, “golden brown” crumpets.

Later, I legged it outdoors to recover from all the morning’s indoor activities and found bucket work underway. I snapped this and kept moving. [Yes, it was raining; not an impediment to my walk.]

Posted at 7:03 PM | Comments Off on “Favorite spread”

Silverbell. Can’t figure out which one.

Neighbor’s “old car.” I grew up with a neighbor down the road who had many old cars, but they were much older than this one; his were Model T’s and that era.

Posted at 6:54 PM | Comments Off on New and old

I ran upstairs to go out on the balcony to get a shot of the moon without glass or reflections marring nature. Upward bound, I turned the phone on and tilted it in readiness to make a fine horizontal shot. I opened the door and stepped out turning and raising my phone, framed the photo and clicked.

And the phone, in all its Tim-Apple wisdom, activated the flash. And, no surprise, the image was smudgy crap.

I quickly turned the flash off and tilted the phone up to get the elusive moon through the cloud cover. My luck was gone gone gone. With the moon. As you can see.

Posted at 9:39 PM | Comments Off on Tech “love”

Every once in a while I try what I think of as a short vertical pano. It is a vertical pano, and I don’t shoot for very long (ie, the span is brief—it’s chunky not elongated). Here’s one that’s cropped to the aspect ratio that fits this space (16:9).

I think in some cases the distortion in a cropped short vertical pano is “better” (meaning, somehow more aesthetic) than a “regular” shot. With my current iPhone lenses.

Posted at 9:28 PM | Comments Off on Does this make sense

I encountered this machine today, fortunately in a display case not my ophthalmologist’s office. I was so enthralled by its elegant form that I didn’t even look for a label to determine what it was designed to do.

Posted at 8:38 PM | Comments Off on Eyes have it

I’m still wading through the qubit article I mentioned on the 24th. I have a modest understanding of the difference between a bit and a qubit, but I do not grasp how the entanglement property of qubits can be truly useful, so I’ll keep reading.

The qubit article is “The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer” by Stephen Witt, dated 12 December (in the 19 December issue), in The New Yorker magazine.

Photo of moss on the the roof of the structure in the Japanese garden at the BotGarden in 2015. We had a day this sunny today.

Posted at 8:59 PM | Comments Off on Matter of perspective?

Turns out the shady side of our house protected yesterday’s snowfall into the afternoon today; however, today’s temps reached the upper 50’s for long enough that, pfft, most of the dusting is now only moisture.

Lemme just point out that our lot’s dark side is in no way like the dark side of the moon. No way. None.

Posted at 9:11 PM | Comments Off on Fine point

In honor of this cold, voila!, the Cut Bank, Montana, penguin…on a sunny day with no snow, ice, or freezing temps. [Photo from our archive.]

Learned the term qubit today. Not a cubit. A portmanteau of quantum and bit. Instead of being binary, either one or zero, a qubit can be one or zero or both. I fail to understand how that can work, so it’s a good thing that better minds than mine are working with the darned qubits. Somehow, a qubit can also hold two bits. Now my brain is fractured.

Posted at 7:58 PM | Comments Off on Eve pondering

I’m mystified how my iPad, my ancient iPad and night-time reading device (black background, very light siena letters), which spends all its time (except when I rarely download new reading material) in Airport mode, manages to find out when there are software updates available.

My hypothesis is that Airport mode is not a total lockdown, despite indications to the contrary.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Minor device mystery