Colours of Toscana

May the API bless you, Threads humans

Perugia’s People Movers

My local laundromat in Passignano is closed on Sundays so I journeyed over to Perugia, Umbria, for my clothes washing today, caught a glance of something that looked like a monorail, turned out it was a MiniMetro, a “family of cable propelled automated people mover systems”

Quoting Wikipedia:

Perugia People Mover: In Perugia, a 3,027-meter (9,931 ft; 1.881 mi) stretch with seven stations opened in February 2008 to relieve the inner city of car traffic. It consists of more than 25 vehicles of 5 m (16 ft 4+7⁄8 in) each, with a capacity of 25 passengers and a speed of up to 25 kilometers (16 mi) per hour. The interval between successive vehicles is around 1.5 minutes. In 2013, the system carried 10,000 passengers per day.

Scopello // Sicilia

Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage​, in 1981:

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

John Gruber:

Fortunately, because Apple is delaying Apple Intelligence and these other new features in the EU, all of the thriving EU-based smartphone and OS makers can jump in and compete on merit now, without Apple the gatekeeping bully in their way. As Vestager reiterates throughout the interview, competition is the European Commission’s north star.

Posted from the EU.

AI, wasted on us old people

You’ve got to be careful when you pull this card, so many in tech pull it too quickly, but you’ve got to reserve the Steve Jobs Card for times when it matters.

I can’t stop thinking about AI - artificial intelligence, not Apple Intelligence - and the original 1984 Mac.

Steve Jobs, age 29, in Playboy magazine (the articles, not the pictures):

It’s often the same with any new, revolutionary thing. People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things. It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.

A lot of the people talking about AI today are olds - like me. I’ve been driving around Italy this week hearing my favourite podcasters, and reading my favourite writers, wax lyrical about artificial intelligence, Apple Intelligence, generative AI, large language models, and the like with fear and loathing. Age changes us but it feels similar to my childhood, predominately the early 90s where “olds” were fearful and against the incoming technological change whilst I was so eager to play, toy, and learn.

I think about the earliest stories I’ve read of the 1984 Macintosh being shown to olds but it was the kids that really got it.

Andy Hertzfeld writes about Steve Jobs delivering a Mac to Mick Jagger the weekend before the computer launched:

Fortunately, Mick’s twelve year old daughter Jade had followed Mick into the room, and her eyes lit up when she saw MacPaint. Bill began to teach her how to use it, and pretty soon she was happily mousing away, fascinated by what she could do with MacPaint. Even though Mick drifted off to another room, the Apple contingent stayed with Jade for another half hour or so, showing off the Macintosh and answering her questions, and ended up leaving the machine with her, since she couldn’t seem to part with it.

And then there’s the story from a day or two earlier of Steve Jobs taking a Mac to Sean Lennon’s 9th birthday party where Walter Cronkite, Andy Warhol, and Yoko Ono were in attendance. John Lennon’s son took to the computer right away, but Andy Warhol was enamoured by the machine.

Warhol wrote in his diary that night, “I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.”

Me too, Andy. Me too. I just try every day to be one of those people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life.

When you’re watching Instagram Reels before the Zoom meeting begins and the AI Zoom Meeting Summary takes it as fact

Pentax has made a portrait-orientation, made for sharing on modern social media, analog film camera in the new Pentax 17.

DPReview:

The Pentax 17 has a 25mm F3.5 lens which works out at 37mm equivalent, and derives its name from the horizontal width of the 17 x 25mm frames it captures. The company says the vertical format makes it similar to images shot by smartphones.

What a time to be alive.

That was $9.95 I’ll never get back.

(Stolen from Basic Apple Guy on Threads)

Jamstack websites terrify me.

I feel technology often takes a backward step as it advances.

I used to make the most powerful small business, single use case, applications in Microsoft Access for businesses. To do the same today is so much harder. It’s the same with websites. Jamstack is exponentially more complex than Wordpress and its PHP brethren.

Our Imaginary Brother Only Watches PBS by Eileen Donovan-Kranz

What happened next made sense only to my mother: She created an eighth child, a three-year-old she named Joe.

Thanks for the link, Scotty.

In the spirit of Zuckerberg renaming Facebook in honour of what’s coming up, please no longer call me Josh. Only refer to me as my new personal brand identity in honour of the next big thing: Sleep.

Everyone has their different social media celebrities they get excited about meeting. Today I meet mine.

12 years ago I shared this infographic about the data being transferred around then. Here’s the 2024 version on my daily letter.

Little pleasures in life is your laptop remembering the password and automatically connecting to the wifi at your cheap Rome airport hotel

Yes, hello, is this Qatar Airways? I’d like to collect my prize money.

Qatar things

When I make photos I like I share them, and because of the way the world is today (i.e everyone has a camera, algorithms rule the world, photos don’t get as much airtime as videos, plus no-one knows who I am) most people never see my photos, so I upload them to Unsplash and Pexels.

Something I find super interesting is how even on those two sites the per-photo statistics vary so wildly.

The Sunday night commute to work 📍 Beachcomber Island, Fiji