Now that Spotify’s family plan costs $20/month I don’t have much incentive not to switch to YouTube Music, which comes with the YouTube Premium I’m already paying for. I’m also giving the Tidal 30-day trial a shot, but that would be $22/month for a family plan.


⌨️ A quick MS Word tip: Press control + shift + F9 to remove all hyperlinks in a selection of text. You may need to include the Fn or equivalent key if you're a keyboard nerd using several layers.

This is handy for work because while I'm writing briefs I like to keep the citations hyperlinked for easy reference/collaboration/discussion, but when it's time to file, those links usually go bye bye .


Oliver & Company, 1988

Watched on Saturday June 1, 2024.


Alito's intellectual honesty

I’m in a weird headspace about the Supreme Court’s right wing wearing their partiality on their sleeves. I’m supposed to be mad about it, like lots of liberals. But I think it’s a kind of honesty and, in its hubris, exposes the vulnerabilities of the right’s more longterm jurisprudential projects.


TenBlueLinks.org shows you how to make Google’s old school, AI-free search filter, called, and this is true, Google Web, the default.

I’m not a fan of Chrome on iOS, or anywhere really, so I added the &udm=14 suffix to the Google action I use in Drafts and shared it to the Drafts directory.


🪶 This is only my opinion, but it is one I strongly hold: Tom Bombadil is equal parts omnipotence and ADHD.


Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire, 2024

Watched on Tuesday May 14, 2024.


My Neighbor Totoro, 1988 - ★★★★★ (contains spoilers)

This review may contain spoilers.

We watched this with the kids for Mother’s Day and they loved it. We were worried some of the characters would look scary to their Disney sensibilities, and at first they probably did, but the kids acclimated quickly and fell in love with Totoro. I can’t wait to watch more Miyazaki with them.


🔗 Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors

Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz report at The New York Times that:

The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.

Apple can’t be serious here. My earliest IFTTT recipes made Siri look antiquated. Siri has been, to put it as politely as Siri deserves, trash for years. The user experience of the earliest Echo Auto was head and shoulders above Siri. If you need a reminder set, Siri will work more often than not. But that’s been its only viable use case since release.

Apple has been marketing off of machine learning since 2018 and probably earlier, so it’s just bonkers that they didn’t decide to scrap Siri at least that long ago and turn their machine learning resources toward something better.


🔗 Does the Statute of Limitations Ever Apply in Legal Malpractice?

Hey look, my employer has a blog about the kind of work I do, and I wrote a thing for it.


I wore transitions (™️?) lenses for a year and half in my late thirties and no one close to me loved me enough to punch me in the face and force me to replace them. I’m not saying I don’t take responsibility, or that I’m not loved at all, just maybe not enough.


😠 Google’s connected speakers and hubs are actually useful (unlike Alexa and Siri…), but it’s really hard when you’re super angry about something and have to mumble “Hey Google …” through gritted teeth. Just let us change the wake phrase.

(Yes I know some devices/command combinations don’t require a wake phrase but who has time to learn which)


🔗 Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book | Books | The Guardian

I’m not quoting from the review or her memoir because Noem is deplorable, and because, somehow, it’s worse than the headline suggests.

When people tell you who they are, believe them.


💙 About to watch the long Bluey episode with the family… will update afterward…


😠 If your iPhone on iOS 17 becomes unresponsive, be warned:

You may lose that day’s photos if you decide to force a reboot before getting them off the phone.

This happened to me today. I lost three photos of my son being cuter than any other son in the world.


🔗 Some legal malpractice cases are bogus, and many are defensible. But some are, well, not, which is apparently how State Bar Court Judge Yvette D. Roland in California viewed the misconduct proceedings against John Eastman, the now-disbarred architect of the 2020 fake electors nonsense. (PDF)


🔗 Manton Reece - An update on the pricing update

Micro.blog is such a great value. Like omg.lol, Micro.blog is a positive community built by people who didn’t see exactly what they wanted on the web, so they decided to make it.


Bilby, 2018 - ★★★★

This short is, indeed, extremely cute. But it's also impressively executed in terms of the writing and the animation.

Parenting pro-tip: Shorts like this one are good to keep handy for when you need to extinguish a tantrum without starting a longer watching session.


👑 That feeling when you've been reading The Hobbit to your kids and your four-year-old daughter insists, and I mean INSISTS, that the friend she made recently at dance class, whose name she had trouble remembering until just now, is named Thorin


🔗 QuickLink Opener – FlohGro

I do something similar (even in name), with quicklinks.lol, but Floh Gro’s solution using an action in Drafts for iOS is faster, and private.