The collaboration between Jony Ive and OpenAI imbues me with great optimism and excitement. If anyone can leverage generative AI to serve humanity, itās the star-studded cast Ive has assembled.
This comes just a day after Google's I/O, where they flexed Veo 3ās terrifying ability to generate lifelike video.
It took time for us to learn how to live with smartphones in a nondestructive, healthy way. I feel as though generative AI will be no different. Itāll likely go too far before we find reasonable boundaries and tools to mitigate the downsides.
Cassidy and I taking 'A' downtown for the first time on my birthday
The day after my birthday, āAā and I were sitting on the floor of the nursery late. (It was 8pm, which is considered late now.) I was using my leg in a V-shape to hold him upright, his head near my knee.
For some unexplained reason, he was fixated on me. I tried what I had been doing for weeks: making faces and sounds to get a reaction out of him.
The first few weeks of this was like performing a comedy routine to an audience of bricks. (Screaming bricks, specifically.) While āAā has become more expressive capable of eye contact over time, there still hasnāt been a clear ācall and responseā between him and I.
Preface: Last week, my wife (Cassidy) and I became parents! While I plan on writing more extensively about our time at the hospital, this series is intended to process stray thoughts and memories as they happen.
Here are a few notes from our first few days home with our son, who I refer to as āAā. (Perhaps we'll call the second and third āBā and āCā?)
The Pebble was my first smart watch. I purchased a the original model in jet black not long after release. I was in high school at the time, and I recall it drawing a bit of attention at the summer camp I worked at. Maybe it was my age, but I certainly felt dorky wearing it!
Now, in 2025, you wouldnāt glance twice.
I had really, really,really hoped that someone else would come along and build a Pebble replacement. But no one has. Soā¦ a small team and I are diving back into the world of hardware to bring Pebble back!
Iām thrilled itās making a comeback. A hackable, affordable e-ink watch? I donāt care how dorky it looks.
The emphasis is on sustainability. I want to keep making cool gadgets and keep Pebble going long into the future.
You think you understand love before kids. You don't. Every other relationship comes with implicit conditions. Partners choose each other daily. Parents love you deeply, but there's history. With your child? It's different. It's a love so fundamental it becomes part of your operating system.
Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesnāt see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.
Newspaper endorsements never made sense to me ā especially in a low-trust environment. Shouldn't a publication's aim be to build credibility with readers? I agree with Bezos: a failure to build trust will drive people further into social media and podcasts, where standards for news and journalism can be near-zero.
Sunday was Formula One day in Austin, Texas. The infrastructure to move 400k people to-and-from a suburban race track is enormous! Pictured is one of the (hundreds) of buses leaving, after dropping us off back at our parking lot on the north side of the city.
I'm not sure I love this image when squashed into a small rectangle on this site. It looks great when large.
Straight out-of-camera from the Fuji X100VI (because editing photos takes too long). Years into the advent of EVs, and the supercharging experience is still unparalleled.
After placing an order in February, and waiting many agonizing months, I got my hands on the Fujifilm X100VI ā perhaps the most coveted modern camera (and my first non-Nikon purchase).
This camera is essentially my child
One of the enticements of this camera (albeit minor), is its ability to shoot HEIF images out-of-camera, as opposed to standard JPEGs. HEIF is a modern image format (created in 2015), that provides better image compression. JPEG was created before I was born.
Iām a modern man, and a modern man demands modern image formats.
If everyone can see the whole, they wonāt ask why it was built a certain way. Theyāll see all the ways you built then backtracked, all the ways that didnāt work. And the same obviousness in your decision making thatās clear to you, will be clear and obvious to everyone else.
The graveyard of self-driving car projects is full, and for good reason. I think the technology must reach near-100% perfection before it can become a part of our day-to-day reality.
Friday (the 2nd) was launch day for Apple Vision Pro. Two days later, I found myself on a newly-installed L-shaped bench in the Apple Store, sitting next to Nick.
While Nick explained how the demo would work, a different employee silently placed a Vision Pro on wooden platter between us.
I love the cute little cover they put on the front
After a few rolls processed with this new film camera ā Iām learning things!
1. People love the look of film!
For me, this photo (of my wife) from our recent trip to Canyon Lake evokes a strong emotional response. I immediately feels like Iām looking at a fond yet distant past, in spite of this occurring just days ago.
A conversation with my Lyft driver, around 3:45am this morning, paraphrased:
Me: āYou out early or late?ā
Driver: āOh Iām out late. I get all the partygoers. Some people donāt like driving the partygoers, but Iām fine with it. Iām the drunk whisperer. 11,000 rides and only two times theyāve puked in my car.
My recent YouTube bender, Nick Carver, has sent me on a minor film-photography bout. Watching him scout, compose, and execute a single frame with surgical precision was kindling for me to start derping around with film. (Seriously ā this guy will take days, if not weeks going after a single photo!)
As with any addiction, I need to start small. So I bought a Kodak Ektar H35N. This is the first roll of film (Kodak Ultramax 400) I've ever developed on my own! (Excluding a few disposable cameras I had as a child ā but I didn't even know they used film.)
Almost everything around us is overflowing with history and story, including something as pedestrian as... a pedestrian bridge. I absolutely found myself enthralled in this piece by Tyler Vigen investigating how this oddly-placed piece of infrastructure came into existence!
About one month ago, on August 7th, we appended a new little guy to our life: a dachshund named Picasso! (His larger-than-life name makes us laugh.) This is the first time we (Cassidy and I) have been responsible for any living being on our own.
It's been fun to see our dynamic change as we gradually move from ācoupleā to āfamilyā. Heās not a child, of course ā but when a couple adds a dog to their life, is it appropriate to begin calling them a family? I don't know.
I agree with Thompson that productivity could be the most compelling use case for the device. A keyboard, mouse, and Apple Vision Pro could make a killer (and much more portable) workstation.
As Apple hones in on the deviceās purpose, I wouldn't be surprised to see a āworkstationā version of Apple Vision in the future ā with external compute for more power (similar to how the battery pack is external on the Vision Pro).
Just a few photos from the last week ā filtered to look more dramatic, of course. While filters may not do a good job of representing reality, they can do a good job representing how the moment felt.
Sunrise in the apartment, featuring a chair we overpaid for and drove 1.5 hours to pick-up. Don't get ripped off on Facebook Marketplace, folks.
After taking delivery of the car, my first hurdle was getting it to do anything. I opened the door (the handles are very prominent), sat in the driverās seat, andā¦ nothing happened. No screen showed any messages. The climate control didnāt turn on. The car seemed dead.
A new mural appeared on the east side of the city ā celebrating Austin FC's kickass 2022 season. (I did a double-take when I saw giant Driussi while driving on I-35!)
I captured a few (decent) photos. This is the best I could do without literally removing street signs. Full-res download links are under each image. Feel free to share/post them anywhere!
If anyone is aware of the original artist(s), or the story of how this came to be, I would love to know.
āOne time I was suspended from Lyft for taking drugs while driving. Can you believe that? It was aspirin! I was taking chewable aspirin gummies. I had the bottle right here in my cupholder.
A hazy, distant view of downtown Austin from the Pennybacker Bridge overlook. It almost looks like a little utopia from here ā but drive once on I-35 and you quickly realize it isnāt.
This was taken late morning, on September 23rd, 2022.
They are as old as 86 and as young as 18. At the front desk, they show driverās licenses, state IDs, and passports. They were born in Cicero, they were born in Ghana, they were born on a table in Cabrini-Green.
When you know these facts of historyāwhich many schools do not teachāyou understand what āindustrial civilizationā is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it. You understand that the electric generator, the automobile, the chemical plant, the cargo container ship, and the microprocessor are essential to our health and happiness.
Maybe Iāve been living in the stone ages, but up until yesterday Iāve used the brush tool in Adobe Lightroom to make selective edits to photos. Take this photo for example:
These are some really cool people, by the way
It was taken during golden hour ā lovely! But the sky feels a little gray. Normally I would whip out my brush tool and, like a caveman, begin a vain effort to select the sky by hand.
I wanted to share photos from one more hike at Glacier National Park (taken during a trip last September). Like the Highline Trail hike, we got an early start from Logan Pass (about an hourās drive from the park entrance).
Last September, some friends and I made the long-haul drive from Wisconsin to the far side of Glacier National Park. (The East side was closed due to COVID restrictions.) While thereās an album full of images, I wanted to share a few of my favorites from our hike on Highline Trail.
Highline Trail spans 15.2 miles round-trip, with a steep side trail that cost us an additional 2.4 miles (more on that later).
We started the journey around 6am at Logan Pass, where we were greeted with violent winds that nearly knocked us over.
Side note: The pit toilets at Logan Pass had a shared reservoir. Pressure changes in the reservoir (due to the wind) caused strong gusts of air to blast upwards from the toilet. It was a rather unpleasant experience for the user.
We started early on the trail, as common wisdom had it that the Logan Pass parking lot fills by 7am. (If you plan on hiking the full 17.6, youāll need to start this early anyway.)
The trail greets you with a ledge, as well as a thick cord to hang on (to make sure youāre awake, of course). Luckily, after this, the majority of the trail is smooth-sailing.
Iām always surprised by how much Iām able to suppress. The mind needs space to breath, let things rise to the surface, and be creative. Sometimes it needs freedom from podcasts, work, and endlessly scrolling feeds.
A few hours of shoveling a Wisconsin driveway does the trick! This was also an opportunity to test my iPhone miniās āNight Modeā photography. This is the road just outside our home:
From the homepage of Nova, a new code editor for macOS created by Panic:
If we're being honest, Mac apps are a bit of a lost art. There are great reasons to make cross-platform apps ā to start, they're cross-platform ā but it's just not who we are. Founded as a Mac software company in 1997, our joy at Panic comes from building things that feel truly, well, Mac-like. Long ago, we created Coda, an all-in-one Mac web editor that broke new ground. But when we started work on Nova, we looked at where the web was today, and where we needed to be. It was time for a fresh start.
These are people that care about craft. Iāve been using Nova for months, and Iām certain it will sit in my dock for years to come.
A few years back I wrote a small program to āpixel sortā, or rearrange the pixels of an image to create surreal distortions. This is a photo of a dancer, taken when I was in college:
Two of my favorite technology writers, now collaborating on a podcast with a fun constraint: each episode must be exactly 15 minutes long. (Something tells me this constraint is more for one of them than the other!)
Iām up late, and Iām making scrambled eggs because thatās what I have left in the fridge.
Hereās a foggy sunset in my neighborhood; this was on my way to the grocery store a few days back. Iāll need to go back in the morning.
Itās not as apocalyptic as it looks of course ā just apt timing for the photo. The following afternoon was sunny, with plenty of folk playing/walking/running in the park (with a safe distance between them).
āIn order for society to work, people have to act a certain way. Thereās a norm, thereās behavior we consider normal, you know? There are expectations.
āYou are young, so I expect something different from you than someone who is older. But you are educated, yes? Then I expect you to speak as an educated person in society.
āSomeone who is older, well, we expect wisdom from them.
I freaking love macOS. I joined the club when cat names were cool. My first Mac was a Mac mini rocking Mountain Lion.
Appleās WWDC19 revealed a glimpse into the future of building software for macOS. No longer will it be siloed with its own UI framework. Instead, apps can be composed with UIKit and SwiftUI, neither of which is Mac-only.
As someone that loves a good native Mac app, the future of the platform looks bright.
Before Apple opens the floodgates with the release of Catalina, I wanted to share my list of beloved Mac apps that are here and now.
I was sitting in a large open stairwell, with gaps beneath each stair that led to the lobby area below. I work as a leader at a childrenās summer camp, and right now weāre in what we call āsmall group timeā. Iām sitting in this stairwell with several other kids (think 8 to 11 years old) discussing what we learned today.
Clearly bored with the discussion, one kid decides to push objects through the opening in the stairs, sending them plummeting into the lobby below.
