Been using WhatsApp on my phone, mostly to group chat with family, and for voice calls when we travel overseas (which isn’t very often). WhatsApp is owned by the Evil Facebook Empire and is changing their policies. WhatsApp will now share your data with Facebook. So I’m deleting it. Looks like the Signal App is pretty good and respects privacy.
Author: Steven Guccione
The New Year 2021
Took a walk down South Congress, cleaning up the electronics on the mower, made a nice fire in the fire pit, made some Perry’s Pork Chop Ramen. Snowy day today. Probably the most snow I have ever seen in Austin.
Strict absentee voting limits proposed after record Georgia turnout
Hard to believe this is the discussion in Georgia today.
Strict absentee voting limits proposed after record Georgia turnout
Word of the Day
From my Italian word of the day:
Italian Word of the Day: Vigliacco (coward)
74 of Our Favorite Facts for 2020
From the NYT.
Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant
This document is about a decade old now and seems almost prophetic. Very techie oriented but maybe worth a read if you are interested in the internals of Amazon, Google and the like. (And no, I’m not the “stevey” in the title).
Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant
2020 According to Google
From @ontologify on Twitter.
Too Much Solar Power Isn’t Enough
I have been thinking about solar panels and even battery storage lately. It ends up being a complicated game of costs and paybacks. This is odd because we don’t do this with other technologies. It bet my computer sits idle 99% of the time. Of course, that would not have been acceptable when computers were scarce.
My air conditioner has a similar problem. I only use it in the summer. Yet, nobody bemoans all that lost cooling potential sitting around idle all winter. We just accept a certain low level of efficiency.
With solar panels getting so cheap it occurs to me that maybe we just need more of them. Same with batteries. I suppose the real problem is that there is an alternative and comparisons are easy. Yet somewhere in the food chain, as solar prices keep plummeting, the notion of efficiency should go away, like it does for many technologies. Found and article in Quartz that talks about this.
