Hiking in the Jackson/Yellowstone region in the 1960s and 1970s we called Sage Grouse "Stupid Chickens" because their behavior seemed completely anti-survival. If one was on the trail you had to go around it or push it out of the way, because if you stepped on one, well, you'd just step on it. They would neither attack nor evade -- they seemed completely oblivious to anything happening around them. I'm not surprised that the population is declining; if anything I'm surprised there's still a population.

In Downers Grove, Illinois there was a Fry's right around the corner from a large Amazon warehouse complex. When Fry's closed down I thought it would be a great place for an Amazon brick-and-mortar location. Apparently Amazon didn't agree; the old Fry's is now being turned into a veterinary school and clinic.

I drive a 2018 Chevy Volt PHEV and did not buy any gas in 2025.

I did burn about 7.5 gallons, but that's less than a tankful.

Perhaps I missed it, but I looked and didn't find any way to log into an Apple ID account. If you could log into an account, this would be a way to get apps onto sunsetted iOS devices. The last time I had to do this, I had to install a specific iTunes version with the App Store (which required uninstalling current iTunes); being able to do it on a website would be a hugely more convenient method.

The use case is this: You have an older iOS device; say an iPad 3, and you want to install your favorite game. However the game requires a newer version of iOS than the iPad 3 supports. So you go to the online App Store, log in with the Apple ID used on the iPad 3, and purchase the game. You can't do this on the iPad directly, because the App Store will only let you install the current version of the game, which is incompatible with your creaky iOS version.

Once the game is connected to the Apple ID, you can pull it up in the App Store on the iPad 3. It will then say it requires iOS whatever and asks if you want to install the latest compatible version instead. You say yes, and it pushes the most recent version that will run on your old device. Of course, if the older app phones home it might refuse to run because the server API has changed, or the server was shut down. But it works for some apps.

Again, though, this would require the web-based App Store to allow you to log into an Apple ID.

I last filled the 9 gallon tank of my PHEV (2017 Volt) on December 31, 2024 and am on track to not have to fill it again until 2026. The car does run the ICE for "Engine maintenance" on occasion but most days my 50 mile EV range gets me through the whole day without burning gas. I do realize that my car burns mostly coal (plus a few neutrons) but it burns them very far away so I don't have to deal with the mess.

I have an iFixIt toolkit I bought at my local Microcenter at least 5 years ago. Afaik, Microcenter has been selling iFixIt tools for about as long as iFixIt has.

...when solar energy first started to be a Thing I wondered if it might have some small effect of *increasing* global warming by reducing the Earth's albedo. Energy that would have been reflected back into space is now captured and converted to electricity (+ some heat) and the electricity itself is eventually (mostly) converted to heat.

The northern hemisphere contains a higher percentage of technologically advanced countries, thus probably has more solar energy capture.

...but he never actually said to "drink bleach." That's a rather freewheeling interpretation of what he *did* say, which was to muse about administering disinfectants internally somehow. I don't think he even mentioned bleach at all.

OTOH, adding a small amount of bleach to drinking water from a questionable source is a common and generally accepted technique for use in emergency situations.

Came to the comments to ask this very question. Ned's agency must be respected..

I (67M) use the Android app AntennaPod to listen to most of my podcasts at 2.5X. There are a some that I listen to more slowly, one because the host naturally talks very fast, and a couple of others because they're "artsy" and too much acceleration spoils the art. But I don't play any of them at 1X.

I also use MythTV to watch the evening news at 1.5X; I would watch it faster except that's as far as I've been able to get MythTV to take it.

I use ChatGPT quite a lot. I like to ask off-the-wall questions just to see how it responds. It's also fun to have it write a short story as a demo for someone else who's unfamiliar. ("Write a 200 word story about the time [name] saved the day using only [two common unrelated objects]") But I've also asked very complex questions about network configurations, troubleshooting obscure hardware failures, and horticulture. I generally get accurate and workable answers straight off. Sometimes I just describe a problem I'm having, without asking any specific question, and it almost always is able to infer what my question would be and give a correct answer.

I do find the bootlicking cheerfulness a little annoying. It reminds me of Ford Prefect's short-circuited security bot.

I have had a couple of instances where it was clearly hallucinating, and it doubled down when I challenged it. Here's an example: I saw a "Dedicated to:" slide at the end of a TV episode so I asked ChatGPT what it was about. In response I got a biography of a fictional woman, and a paragraph describing her importance to the show. When I responded that I was pretty sure that was not accurate, the second response I got was an apology, followed by a statement that there was no dedication. When I said there definitely was, I got a biography of a completely different fictional woman. At this point, I rewound the video, took a screen grab of the dedication (which was to a man) and uploaded that. ChatGPT apologized again, and finally gave me a couple of paragraphs about the actual person.

I do some programming, but have not used ChatGPT in a programming context so I can't speak to that.

I first encountered the acronym "BSOD" in the context of NetWare 3.x servers, where it stood for "Black Screen of Death" -- some failures would cause the server to stop on a black screen with just a blinking underline cursor in the upper left corner. Later on, Windows introduced their blue error message, and the acronym was repurposed.

I worked for a company that was exploring using a modular computer system called "Agilis" in the early 1990s. This system used "slices" that locked together with a cam-and-jumper system. We had a NiCd "slice" (PN 11BN) that began hissing and smoking while on charge. After it calmed down, we returned it to Agilis for warranty replacement. When the replacement arrived, the official reason for replacement was listed as "11BN Chernobyl".

Here's a fix for the penny problem:

For one week, banks will redeem pennies for five cents each. These pennies are sent to the mint, who reimburses the bank the extra four cents. So the banks break even (except, of course, for the massive hassle of people bringing in wheelbarrows and pickle jars for a week). Since it costs something around four cents to mint a new penny, the mint breaks even (except for the cost of running the program). Regular Folks make out, because they get five times face value for all the pennies that are cluttering up their desk drawers and what have you. You can't really game the system, because counterfeit pennies are unprofitable and so is trying to stockpile real pennies as an "investment".

The returned pennies are put back into circulation, at roughly the same cost as minting new pennies, except without the environmental impact of mining the zinc and copper and running the machinery.

If necessary, "Penny Week" could be repeated every decade or two.

I bought a BP Microsystems (now BPM) universal device programmer which included "lifetime software updates" but after a few years BP announced that the "lifetime" of the programmer had ended and therefore, the lifetime updates also ended. This was in the days when Windows was the norm but DOS was still around. The programmer originally came with DOS software only but you could pay for Windows software. After the "death" of the software, the Windows version continued to support my programmer which struck me as underhanded.

I still have the programmer, and an old DOS machine to talk to it, and it still works just fine. But no lifetime updates since the 1990s. And yeah, I'm still a little frosty.