Today was a computer spring cleaning day. This is where I go through the computers and clean out cruft, update apps, do all the additional software updates needed, and check for basic maintenance stuff. I finally updated the OS on the headless Mac Mini server from Sierra to Monterey (which is the last version that little dude from 2014 can support). It’s still running strong, no issues at all. To go with the updates I wanted to change the wallpaper, I recently saw these Ultramarine Haze wallpapers from Basic Apple Guy and am a big fan. No banding in the gradient; great colors.

I also saw this app, Supercharge, pop up on my radar this week. Some cool things here. The shortcut for “close visible notifications” being the one thing I see that I really wish Apple build into the operating system. I already use Keyboard Maestro to do this. I assign keyboard shortcuts to click the right spots on the screen to close notifications and click the “reply” option on messages. It’s super helpful when one comes in and I’m in the middle of typing to just hit Control-ESC to close it, or Command-ESC to quick reply to a message. Why these don’t have system wide shortcuts is beyond me. Of course that would mean needing to traverse the jungle of pain that is the Settings app. But, I digress.

Maxwell Zeff, writing for TechCrunch:

It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.”

Parker Ortolani:

OpenAI dropped an all-new image generation system for ChatGPT today and man is it good. One of the biggest problems with artificially generated images has been the inability to generate accurate text within them. There have historically been problems with inaccurate characters, spelling, or even complete graphical errors. Today’s update to image generation with GPT-4o fixes these. You can now generate charts, signs, logos, word marks, text graphics, pretty much anything you can think of with ease. It nails spelling, seems to set type well, and generally abides by your instructions.

The latest update from OpenAI does a speed run through all the company’s greatest hits. It’s impressive. And it’s morally and legally, at best, in a gray area. The Ghibli stylized images all over social media lack art, lack soul, but are a technically impressive achievement. The kind of thing you’d use as a forum avatar but never hang on your wall. A novelty.

A few years back Hannah commissioned a hand drawn piece of art of her, me, and the cats for a present. It’s framed and in my office on a shelf I can see from my desk. It brings me joy every time I look over and see our old condo and the time, attention, and care that went into the creation of it. Not just from the artist, but from Hannah in working with the artist to craft something very much us.

I tossed some images to GPT and it generated a Ghibli version of us. It wasn’t bad. It butchered the Funkos that were in the background pretty badly. But it lacked character. And I didn’t like how it rendered my body. I then asked it to create something in the style of Bill Watterson. That it balked at. Told me it couldn’t do it. Why it would take instructions to copy/steal from Ghibli but not the famed Calvin and Hobbes artist, is … odd? But at the end of the day it’s an LLM, and if you can describe it without using the magic words it’ll still give you want you want:

Again, not bad. Kinda fun? A passing resemblance to the style. But it feels more like a paint by numbers template used by a caricaturist with less style. And it lacks any of the punch, the actual artistic flourish and genius of Bill Watterson’s art.

And the Funkos are still hilariously rendered.

I saw Simon Willison (one of my favorite blogs writing about AI) recently added a new “notes” feature to his website. He credits Molly White’s micro notes feed as inspiration. As someone who also recently added a similar feature to my blog, I gotta say, I really would love to see this trend continue to spread. It’s been fun and freeing to have a place to post little random one-offs again without the baggage of social media.

Here’s the Python script I wrote that calculates how many words and articles I’ve written on this website. I run this at the end of the year, change the dates, and use it for my yearly stats posts. No idea if it’s of any interest to anyone, but if you run a WordPress blog it should be pretty plug-in-play by changing the URL, author ID, and dates.

I think I started naming my computers sometime in high school. If memory serves it was probably something I picked up from my computer networking friends.1 I think it started with Linux servers but has carried over to my desktops and laptops.

Even today my servers have names (Chorus is Melody, the Forum is Overture, the headless Mac Mini in the closet is Harmony).

And my personal computers are named as well. However, it was only in the last, I dunno, ten years or so, that I also started giving them custom icons to go with their names. I heard John Siracusa talk about this on a podcast at some point and I realized I had not actually changed my hard drive icon in years. I remember doing it on Classic Mac OS and one of my earliest computer memories was making my 3.5 floppy disc have a custom Bart Simpson icon. And I change quite a few of my dock icons2 to be, to me, more aesthetically pleasing and similar.

Now I not only change the name of the computer, I also change the hard drive icon.

My desktop, the big beefy boy that he is, is named Optimus:

And the sleek black laptop is named The Batmobile:

The IconFactory has a lot of awesome icons.3 And so does Louie Mantia.

It’s fun. I recommend it.

This morning, I tried listening to the re-record of one of Anberlin’s classic albums, Never Take Friendship Personal, and I do not have positive thoughts:

This sounds like the YouTube covers of songs that I find pretty obnoxious. Like the cover of this album should just be a dude with a beard making a weird face with a yellow font saying “what if Matty Mullins sang for Anberlin?!!”

All the life has been stripped out of these and replaced with vocals that have had every inch of personality mechanically pulled from them. Anberlin’s a top 20 most played band for me and I’m glad they can continue making money I guess, but I really kinda just hate everything about this one? Like … stand on your new music? Between this and the deleting or replying to fans with rude comments on Instagram has really soured me on this era of the band.

However, this whole re-record thing did lead to something positive. I’ve been complaining for years about the online master of the original album on all streaming services. It’s extremely low volume and washed out. Today I saw a comment that the weird three-album-compilation thing Tooth and Nail put on streaming services actually has the better, proper, master. I went to Apple Music to check it out, and holy hell, they’re right! And because Apple Music still lets you change metadata on the Mac app (please never take this away Apple), this means it was very easy to swap this version out in my library. Finally.

Highly recommend. This is the definitive version of this album to me.

I realized that I hadn’t updated my “recommended blogs” page in a while and as I (try to) move away from social media that means I’ve been adding even more to my RSS reader on a regular basis. Since these days more and more people are writing newsletters instead of blogs (bring back the blogs!), Jason Snell has a good reminder on the various ways you can pipe these newsletters directly into your RSS reader. I use NewsBlur as the backend for RSS (which also has an email address you can signup for newsletters with) and then for most of these I need to use ReadKit’s “reader” mode and the result is a newsletter perfectly rendered in the app.

Note: No need to be fancy, you can subscribe to my newsletter directly with RSS. (And this blog too.)

I’m sitting here on the edge of 42.

And, you know what’s really fucking with me?

It’s that I’m about to be two people that can drink. I’m about to be two twenty-one-year-olds. That feels, and oh, some days I can feel it, like two lifetimes. I look back at that first twenty-one-year-old and barely recognize him. I see the outline of me. But it’s a faint dotted outline I can only make out if I squint. I was rash, cocky, impetuous, often cruel to others, and, I can now admit, cruel to myself. I had a chip on my shoulder, and I felt I needed to prove everyone who doubted me wrong. I craved external validation. I craved attention. I craved love but didn’t know how to ask for it. Didn’t know how to give it. And for all my teenage talk of wanting to live without regrets, I have a lot.

As I look at the second twenty-one year old I see progress. I see where I’ve learned to slow down — where I’ve tried to live with more intention and thoughtfulness and have tried to learn from my past mistakes. In a weird way, I think about how I’m best known for what I did before I turned thirty, and yet I don’t feel like I became me until the last ten years. And I hope I’m still changing. Still growing. Still putting in the work to try and be someone that I, fate willing, can look back on in another twenty-one years with admiration. If I do this journey again, I’ll be 63. I’ll be, maybe, close to retirement. Looking at time in chunks like this is freaking me out a little.

I reminisce on everything I went through to get to that first twenty-first birthday. All of school. Heartbreak. Bad decisions. A few good decisions. And this second fragment feels like a blur. More heartbreak. More bad decisions. More good decisions. Weddings. Funerals. Life.

But through it all, I do think I discovered myself. Or, maybe better put, I found who I am today, and I know how to be happy with that person. And each day, I wake up, and I accept the change, seek the growth, and … try to move forward with a little more grace than the day before.

Becoming two twenty-one-year-olds means I know now that I don’t have it all figured out. Hell, I don’t think I ever will. But I’m okay with that. I’ve made peace with the fact that life is a constant draft—an endless rewrite where I’ll never get every sentence perfect, but I can at least try to make the next one a little better than the last.

And maybe that’s the best we can do.

Maybe that’s the secret to all of it.

Not to chase some perfect version of ourselves, but to keep evolving, to keep showing up, and to keep writing the story as best we can.

While going through the process of moving away from social media and using my blog more, I realized there was a lot of me on Instagram that I wanted to make sure I archived. Specifically I’ve been really enjoying my “monthly memory” posts each month as sort of a visual “diary” of my month. And there are hundreds of posts about my vinyl collection and memories of my almost 13-year long relationship with Hannah. I didn’t want to just abandon those. So I’ve brought them over to my blog.

I used Instagram’s export feature to get the files. Then wrote a script to convert their weird export to something I could easily import, and back date, all of the posts. I had to first put everything in the same year/month/date folder structure I use for my photo blog and then convert the post to the right format so it would display here just like all the others. Even after extensive testing there was a bit of nerves running it on the live site as it ingested over 1,000 Instagram posts going back over a decade. But, it worked. And now my photo blog has all my history. I also grabbed all of my weekly wall “story” posts going back to when I started doing them from my new office. I will continue to cross post some stuff to Instagram, but, most of my writing/photos/status updates will be here, on my blog.

A while back someone messaged me on Instagram and said they found an old CD of Blink-182’s Big Stink 4 performance at Portland Meadows in Portland, Oregon from back in August of 1999. They asked if I wanted it. I said sure! So they sent me one big MP3 file.

I cut it up and did some slight editing to try and clean it up a little bit. It’s still pretty rough, but for a live recording from 1999 I’ve definitely heard worse. (“What’s My Age Again?” has some pretty bad feedback at two spots I couldn’t fix.)