The best hour I’ve spent on YouTube this year: How Hoover Dam Works.

Honestly the most damning part of the Apple revelations are that Tim Cook was personally involved in figuring out the wording of the scare screen. Does he write the Notification Spam too?

We have a half dozen Kobo readers in our family, and the Kobo Libra 2 only comes in two colors, so you don’t always know whose is whose.

By default, the Kobo will show the cover of the book that you are reading, but you can override this by putting a PNG image into the folder .kobo/screensaver. The Libra 2 has a screen dimension of 1264 by 1680, so ideally you match this aspect ratio. You may need to modify some of the energy saving settings; I actually had to make sure that “show current read” and “show book covers full screen” were both set to On.

Then I had ChatGPT make a cartoonified image of each of us reading a book in some setting. Here is mine, which I told it to make “Lord of the Rings” themed. It is goofy but serves its purpose and makes me laugh.

I had a flight from Tokyo that departed on Tuesday and arrived on Monday, so of course I took advantage of the opportunity to stress test some apps. Resaonable handling by Day One (pictured). Very poor handling by Apple’s sleep tracking (not pictured because I don’t even understand where it went wrong).

Shinjuku Gyoen

Edo Castle ruins (Imperial Palace East Gardens)

Edo Castle ruins (Imperial Palace East Gardens)

Edo Castle ruins (Imperial Palace East Gardens)

Shibuya

Trump is sending people to the camps based largely on appearance and without any hearings or convictions. The best you can say is that he has “only” sent around 250, so far. I am strongly opposed.

I wasn’t expecting to be the target demographic for the iPhone 16e, but apparently I am because I just bought two of them.

The two oldest phones that my kids still used were an iPhone 14 Pro and an iPhone 12 Pro. Both of these belonged to me at some point, and now had made their way down the chain. The 14 Pro is still a very great phone, and the 12 Pro is okay. I planned to keep them in the rotation for at least another few years.

But since my kids don’t really use the Pro features, the 16e was a small step up in almost all dimensions, especially battery life, which is a big one for them. And with trade-ins and the fact that my kids get by fine with the base storage level, it was not that much money to upgrade.

Which brings me to the real selling point, which is that these were the last two Lightning devices in our house, and the 16e charges by USB-C.

California coastline near Willow Creek, south of Big Sur

A lime kiln for which Limekiln State Park is named, Big Sur, California

Limekiln Creek in Big Sur, California

Redwood forest in Limekiln State Park, Big Sur, California