The iPhone Air looks interesting. Considering that the camera upgrades is my #1 reason to upgrade to newer phone models, and my recent thinking around buying a lightweight camera instead of using my iPhone around, I see a case for getting the iPhone Air instead of Pro and use it as a forcing function to use my camera more. I usually upgrade most years and was thinking of skipping this year, but maybe who knows 🙂
Macro
Nice line at voting center to vote for Gerry Conolly’s replacement. James Warkinshaw is widely expected to win this major democratic county but I will say that the number of people picking up the green republican sample ballot was concerning. Of course they all trended old, white and nearly dead. Yesterday when I took out doggo for a walk, an old gentleman and wife who live at the far end corner of our community who always been big fans of the doggo and pet him a lot, put up a republican candidate sign on their lawn. Fucking nazis I muttered under breath and I swear I will not be friendly to them anymore. They can rot in their sweet little garden. Tested negative for covid and flu this morning. Yay. Finally it’s behind us I hope and I am immune for a while before I get my vaccines!
I can’t feel but sad that all these theatrics around Trump/Epstein could’ve very well happened during Biden years too. Now it’s just range entertainment for everyone coz what’s gonna change? All of this could’ve been released regularly in Biden era also, except they chose not to do it. Now suddenly democrats are like oh ho we have spine now and we care about these victims. Like fuck off already. We know.
I don’t have problem eating food with my hands, in fact it’s my preferred approach even with rice and dal or other stuff. But at home. In public settings like workplaces or restaurants or friends’s houses or generally anywhere outside comfort of my 4 walls fork and spoon is the way. So when I see a bunch of desi at work eating their rice-sambhar or pulaos with their hands in the break room I am sorry I find it weird and displaying lack of etiquette. Look there is no way you’d eat naan without your hands anywhere so I am not a nut about such things, but there really are some foods you should not be eating with your hands anywhere in public I am sorry.
🍿 Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) – ★★★☆☆
Better than Dead Reckoning but still so exhausting. If only they had merged both parts into one movie and let greed not come in their way it would have been a terrific send off to Ethan Hunt. Instead they took 5 star material and split it across across two movies and none of them hit the mark.
One of the funniest sci-fi tropes is that in future it’s always “empire” against people. Whether it’s Dune, Star Wars, foundation what have you – it’s always some sort of monarchy and people rising up to it. Everyone is also dressed in robes and lehengas galore or costumes that stick to every inch of skin. This is why watching The Expanse was so much fun and it was not about some evil empire boring shit. It felt realistic even if it was sci-fi. It’s also why I find most Star Wars and foundation mostly boring now. Dune is an exception cos of the movies not the books themselves!
Looking at the way tech CEOs are bending over backwards to tickle orange balls, I have absolutely no doubt that they will go 10x farther than they did in 2024 election to skew any election going forward. At this point I won’t be surprised if even Apple and Google both release a special edition phone because they’ve become that cheap.
Feels like Atlassian bought Arc because CEO is a big fan. I honestly feel like browser wars are mostly dead. Does it even matter anymore? your default OS browser is likely good enough and in some cases extremely good (Safari for example!). Every time I try a new browser I keep coming back to Safari. Chrome is the only other browser I will use mostly because something doesn’t work on Safari.
Sad news coming out of Lisbon and the Gloria funicular disaster. We saw this one a few weeks ago in Lisbon, but in general looking at how each of these trams were packed like sardines to the brim we decided against doing any tram at all. This disaster was a matter of time in making, not if. They really need to do a better job at people management in these trams. Just because you can pack it to the brim doesn’t mean you should!
Our sprinkler system stopped working right after deck work started. I already had a feeling that when the contractors fixed the deck they probably cut some wires hence our sprinkler system was not working. The app said water was on while there was no motor running or water coming out of the system. I called our regular sprinkler guy to come over and in 5 minutes he was like yep, they cut the power. Thankfully the power was connected via a rain sensor so all he had to do was bypass the rain sensor and it was working again. He then proceeds to tell us we have two rain sensors that previous owners installed and basically the whoever put it in fleeced our old owners. The rachio controller along with the app are basically rain sensors and there is no need of an external rain sensor to ‘sense’ rain. And we have two of ’em. He then went ahead and cleaned up all the wiring, disconnected the sensors and cleaned up the panel. All of this for 50$! I am sure if I had called irrigation “specialists” this would have been a hundreds of dollars repair. Moral of story – once you find a good handyman/electrician/plumber, do NOT let them go!