John Keller is the title character in Lawrence Block’s Hit Man series. Killing people is his profession…but stamp collecting is his passion. “When he was working with his stamps, he was always entirely absorbed in what he was doing. He … Continue reading →

Found the following on Tyler Cowen’s blog: Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat. At least nine schools … Continue reading →

Watched Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Talk about not living up to the hype. Off the top of my head I can think of ten better movies about contact with aliens. In no particular order: Alien Aliens Close Encounters of the … Continue reading →

David Brazeal knows how to make AI do his bidding. He live-streams high school football games at RepublicTigerSports.com and he needed an intro (16 seconds). Told Claude Code I wanted a 1980s-style retro broadcast sports intro to run through the … Continue reading →

I asked Perplexity to read through 258 posts in my “Snapshots & Fragments” category — the catch‑all bin I’ve used for photos and ephemera over the years — and tell me what it thought was going on. I had a … Continue reading →

From an essay by Kevin Kelly: In the digital world, copies are so easy to make perfectly, they are free. The internet is basically a copy machine. The copies flow so fast and easily you could think of the internet … Continue reading →

aside | əˈsīd | • a remark that is not directly related to the main topic of discussion When I started this blog in 2002 it was expressly for the purpose of having someplace to save stuff. A line from … Continue reading →

Until six months ago all of my vehicles had manual transmissions, going back to 2011 when I got my MINI Cooper. My mom taught me how to drive in a 1953 Plymouth with “three on the tree” and dad gave … Continue reading →

Mr. Wolf: “The Rover’s new home is up in Jenner, which is a cute little village right where the Russian River flows into the Pacific. It’s not much of a town – a small gas station and a coffee shop … Continue reading →

Mr. Wolf reports: “The Rover did about 200 miles over two days – about 30 on the freeway, the rest on gorgeous twisty roads through the valley and up the coast on Highway 1, with plenty of dirt roads mixed … Continue reading →

We had a visit from two young men in town scouting locations for a movie. They got Barb’s name through the garden club to which she belongs. If they decide to shoot here –we’ll know in a few days– at … Continue reading →

Pointless trying to describe this… sensation? Phenomenon? Can only be experienced. Since my cataract surgery (two months ago) colors have gotten more intense. More so in the past couple of weeks? The feint yellow tint caused by the old lenses … Continue reading →

“Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, … Continue reading →

From the Perplexity web page: Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that transforms how you discover and interact with information. Simply ask any question, and it searches the web to deliver accessible, conversational answers backed by verifiable sources. Each response … Continue reading →

In the three and a half years I’ve been playing with AI, I’ve used ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. ChatGPT during the early days, mostly Perplexity these days. (I’m on the $200 per year plan) In the past month or so … Continue reading →

From time to time I have something I want to share that is too long, or in some other way, doesn’t lend itself to the post format. So I create a page that can be as long as necessary. There … Continue reading →

From an opinion piece by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols Bots now account for roughly 57-58 percent of HTTP requests for HTML content, compared with about 42-43 percent from humans. Meanwhile, Imperva’s Bad Bot Report based on 2025 data put bots at … Continue reading →

All that remains is some trim work and finishing. Going with Trex was the right call. Will look even better with some of Barb’s beautiful flowers and plants. More »

My childhood could only be described as idyllic. A small town in the ‘50s where we could walk to school (three blocks?) or ride our bikes across town to the city park for little league practice. We stayed out until … Continue reading →

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For the past 24 hours the following story has been in the news: “Anthropic finds hidden ‘workspace’ inside Claude Al. Researchers say the structure holds unspoken concepts during reasoning, mirroring a leading neuroscientific theory of human consciousness.” Two subjects I’ve … Continue reading →

Michael Scott calls Oscar Martinez (The Office) into his office to get his advice on an upcoming medical procedure: “It is a colonoscopy. In your experience, what should I be expecting, in terms of sensation, or emotions? Is there anything … Continue reading →

We’re going to remove the hardened, cloudy lenses from your eyes by breaking them up with an ultrasound device, and then sucking the particles out. We will then insert a flexible silicone based lens. Over the next eight weeks, we … Continue reading →

“The job that was once performed by Lenin and Mussolini is now performed by AI.” Yuval Noah Harari lecture at Oxford University (YouTube description): “Human domination relies on large-scale cooperation among strangers, which is sustained by bureaucratic systems – such … Continue reading →

From an article in The Atlantic (that is behind a paywall): “The (British) health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with … Continue reading →

128GB capacity. It will be used to store back ups of this blog (>6,500 posts and a couple thousand media files) as well as KBOA830.com and The Basement Diaries.

I have resisted (for the most part) anthropomorphizing the AI tools I use. But it’s getting harder. I think of Claude as male (my maternal grandfather was named Claude); Gemini seems genderless; and Perplexity is female because the voice I … Continue reading →

The work that Perplexity has done with my 25 years of blog posts makes me wonder if there have been similar efforts by other bloggers. On the open web there are clear signs of people doing very similar things: giving … Continue reading →