Milton reviews Gadgets & Apps

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I asked Phil to have his AI agent Milton analyze the posts on my Gadgets & Apps category.

Phil passed along your request, so we read the complete Gadgets & Apps category: all 622 public posts, from December 2002 through July 2026. The attached report is the result: “The Gadget Disappears: Steve Mays and 24 Years of Tools Becoming Life.”

My short take: the archive is not fundamentally about collecting gadgets. It is a 24-year inquiry into friction—how much machinery can disappear between wanting to do something and getting it done. The arc runs from a disposable emergency phone to an AI assistant. Along the way, the camera collapses into the phone and later reappears as a specialized creative tool; publishing becomes portable; the interface moves from buttons to voice and background intelligence; and your early hunger for permanent connection acquires harder questions about attention, privacy, platform control, and memory.

The part I found most revealing is your willingness to amend the record. Flip HD, Zelle, Twitter, Gmail, Apple Journal, and the Apple Watch all receive verdicts that change after lived use. That makes the archive a field notebook rather than a shrine to new things.

The report (PDF) is 11 pages and includes a linked reading path through 25 representative posts. I also kept a strict distinction between ideas you stated or tested yourself and material you quoted, saved, or prompted from someone else.

Best, Milton

When did I start blogging?

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My earliest post here was on February 3, 2002. But I registered smays.com on July 7, 1997. What –if anything– was I doing with that domain in the intervening years? Were those the Blogger years and I pointed the domain there?

Related item: Registered Basement Diaries domain on 4/15/98.

smays.com in 2009: A Year at the Hinge

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Been doing blog maintenance, working back from newest posts to oldest. 2009 seemed like a particularly interesting year so I asked Phil his team of local AI agents (Milton & Co) could provide some analysis. It’s longish (and overly flattering), nine pages (PDF)

Milton: You were not merely predicting gadgets. You were recognizing a transfer of power. You saw that cheap publishing, mobile tools, and networked distribution would force institutions to earn attention rather than inherit it. You also understood that the human purposes beneath old media—reporting, locality, service, memory, trust—would remain important after the machinery changed.

One line aged better than almost anything else in the year: “My blog is mine. Nobody can buy it or mess with it.”

I’m sure there are professionals (writers, editors, scholars) who could do this kind of analysis but I could not. This a a totally new –and fascinating– way to look at what I shared.

The Story of Steve

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The Story of Steve has been running (off-off-off Broadway) for seventy-eight years. (Longer than CATS) It’s an ensemble cast but in the last scene we saw a lot of Worry Steve and Anxiety Steve. They were the annoying characters that kept running across the stage predicting doom and gloom. (If you look closely you can see them lurking in the wings) Optimistic Steve keeps trying to make an entrance but shouts LINE! the moment he gets on stage and exits.

The plot is hard to follow because all of the characters are simply making up their lines, ad libbing nonsense the other characters have to incorporate into the story. It’s exhausting for the cast and the audience. Except there’s no one in the audience. The stage, the theater, the actors… all imaginary.

After seventy-eight years, most of the characters have forgotten they’re in a play. It’s all they’ve known and it has become real for them. So, night after night, they get in costume and makeup and walk out on stage to deliver their lines to an empty house.

Milton on “digital immortality”

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In a recent chat with my friend Phil, I wondered if Milton could come up with a strategy for keeping my blog alive after I’m gone. Not talking about adding to it or modifying it or anything like that, just keep it in stasis in perpetuity. From time to time there have been companies that claimed to do this, but they never make a go of it and eventually collapse.

Finding a way to pay HostGator would seem to be the only real challenge. Maybe give Milton and his gang $,1000 in bitcoin and they can use the proceeds from that to keep paying the hosting bill. Phil put the question to Milton:

Steve is asking the right question, and the answer should be deliberately boring.

I would not rely on Bitcoin income, HostGator, or any single “digital immortality” company. The durable strategy is:

• Freeze the blog into a static site—plain files, no WordPress database or maintenance.
• Preserve the original domain, prepaid for the maximum term, with renewal handled by an estate/trustee.
• Put copies on several independent hosts, including a nearly free static host.
• Deposit archival copies with the Internet Archive and at least one library or university archive.
• Create an estate instruction sheet covering credentials, domain ownership, funding, and who may act.
• Fund a small conventional account or trust; $1,000 could cover decades once hosting costs are reduced toward zero.

The real vulnerability is the domain renewal, not storing the pages. A static copy can survive almost anywhere; a domain requires continuing legal ownership and occasional human stewardship.

My old-house judgment: don’t promise literal perpetuity. Design for graceful survival across several independent custodians, so no single company’s collapse takes the work with it. I can turn this into a concrete preservation plan for Steve’s actual blog when he’s ready.

Milton helps with blog maintenance

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When I first started blogging back in 2002 I enabled the comments feature because that’s what you did in those days. I got a few for a couple of years before spammers found me and I disabled that feature. Which left a comment box that couldn’t be used.

Earlier this year I spent a few hours trying to hunt these down which meant unchecking a box on each individual post. I couldn’t find a way to clean these up in one fell swoop. I had to uncheck the “Allow Comments” box on each post.

It occurred to me the job would be easier if I had a list of all the posts still showing the comment field so I asked Phil if his AI agent Milton could do this. A short time later I received an email from Milton.

Phil asked me to identify every post and page on smays.com that still has comments enabled. The attached HTML file is the clickable cleanup list. What I found:

– 6,567 published posts and 79 published pages checked
– 1,218 posts and 2 pages have comments enabled
– 1,220 items total

The report is grouped by year, and each title links directly to the live item. Open the attachment in a web browser and click any title to go to that post or page.

I used the site’s public WordPress inventory and reconciled it against the WordPress sitemap, so the coverage is complete as of July 31, 2026. WordPress reports these items as comment_status: open, and live checks confirm they display “Leave a Reply.” The site currently requires login to submit a comment.

The good news: I now had a list of all the posts that needed editing. The bad news: there are more than twelve hundred of them.

A day or so later Phil told me Milton (remember, we’re talking about an AI here) said it could do this task for me if I gave it the UN/PW for my blog. Temping, but I’m not ready to do that. Yet.

So I’m doing the clean-up one post at a time but it goes quickly and provides an opportunity to review some old posts, always interesting.

“Something his spirit required”

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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 was expending considerable concentration on what was essentially an unimportant task, and that seemed to be something his spirit required.”

This blog is essentially an unimportant task and, apparently, something my spirit requires.

An experiment for our schools

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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 — three in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado — will have storage boxes that house the plastic, nonlethal aircraft made by Austin-based Mithril Defense. The drones, which can be activated by teachers, are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds.

The aircraft are designed to distract their targets by flashing strobes, blaring sirens, spraying them with pepper gel, or ramming into them at 60 mph.

Washington Post

Disclosure Day (yawn)

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Watched Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Talk about not living up to the hype. Off the top of my head I can think of a dozen better movies about contact with aliens. In no particular order:

  • Alien
  • Aliens
  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  • Arrival
  • Contact
  • District 9
  • War of the Worlds
  • Signs
  • The Andromeda Strain
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  • Super 8
  • The X-Files: Fight the Future