Our little bit of heaven is going to be on the local garden tour this year and Barb has been working hard to make it look nice. The one-minute video above was created with Apple Photos slideshow tool. For some reason I keep forgetting about this wonderful tool.
“The prediction comes from a survey of 15- to 39-year-old contemporary radio format partisans. The number of survey respondents who own an AM/FM radio outside their car fell from 48% in 2017 to 41% in 2018. Smart speaker ownership is posting an opposite trajectory from 14% in 2017 to 24% in 2018. Based on those rates, AM/FM radio ownership is projected to decline to 34% by 2020, while smart speakers are anticipated to rise to 41% by that year.”
“The survey also asked what audio services the respondents used. Across the ages of the survey participants, all posted the highest rates for on-demand audio, topped by ages 15-19 with 77%. YouTube was the second-most common, again with 15-19 year-olds leading consumption at 70%. Pandora had a mixed set of results, with ages 30-34 posting 38% use and ages 25-29 posting 37%, while ages 15-19 had 28%.”
I don’t know that I’ve had to do this (I don’t get a lot of calls and fewer voicemails) but nice to know it’s this easy.
“The beautiful steampunk mantel clocks and unique timepieces from KLOCKWERKS are all created by self-taught artist Roger Wood of Hamilton, Ontario. His clock-making process starts with perusing items at yard sales and flea markets to find great components to craft these beautiful and unique timepieces. Wood then uses other people’s discarded and unwanted items to find things that speak to him, things with a history. These items can be pretty much anything, from wheels and gears to musical instruments and feathers. Wood has assembled a massive collection of items, most of which is barely contained by the numerous drawers in his Hamilton, Ontario workshop.”
I’ve ordered one but it will be a few months before I get it. It got a mention in Digital Minimalism. Yeah, I could have got me one of those Jitterbug phones but I’m way too cool for that. This gizmo will work with my iPhone. Uses the same number.
“Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It’s the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world.” (Amazon)
I’ve been creeping in this direction for a while. Never on FB; deleted my Twitter account back in 2016; and said goodbye to Google+ last year. But my world is still noisier than I’d like and I got some good ideas from this book. Here’s a few excerpts:
“Philip Morris just wanted your lungs. The App Store wants your soul.”
“Checking your “likes” is the new smoking.” — Bill Maher
“(Smart phones are) slot machines in our pockets.”
“What’s the single biggest factor shaping our lives today?” (Our screens)
“We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.”
“The iPod provided for the first time the ability to be continuously distracted from your own mind.”
“You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.”
“A life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.”
“Assuming that you use Facebook, list the most important things it provides you—the particular activities that you would really miss if you were forced to stop using the service altogether. Now imagine that Facebook started charging you by the minute. How much time would you really need to spend in the typical week to keep up with your list of important Facebook activities?”
“I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along.”
“Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.”
George Kopp and his friend Jack Dodson produced this beautiful bit of video. Jack was controlling the drone and George edited the video. I like the overhead shot (no sweeping zooms) and kept thinking of pen and ink drawings as I watched this.
I’ve posted on this before it bears repeating. Barb’s visiting an old friend (Jeff Pylant) who took the selfie on the left in which his finger features prominently. Using the Repair Tool in Pixelmator (not Pixelmator Pro) it took less than 30 seconds to fix the image. Not a pro photographer fix but good enough.
“Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer’s use. Worse: it is a near-monopolist, dominating the word processing field. Its pervasive near-monopoly status has brainwashed software developers to such an extent that few can imagine a word processing tool that exists as anything other than as a shallow imitation of the Redmond Behemoth. But what exactly is wrong with it?”