What do you do when you have hundreds upon hundreds of tiny Instax instant photos? For the longest time, I didn't know. I just collected them in a box.

Initially I wanted to have a wall covered in them. The idea was that I could create slats where the photos could be trapped by temporarily flexing them a bit. Then I could easily pull them out and change them whenever I wanted. But I never found a good way to create the slats. So I moved on to clips. When that didn't work, I moved on to gravity holders. When that didn't work, I gave up.

Then I thought I would buy photo albums.

I bought a few samples, but didn't like any of them because they were all either too expensive to be feasible... too cheap to look good... or too badly constructed to last.

Then one day I found these little books that looked like they would be a fun option to display all my photos. I liked the idea that it was a quick flip-through and I could pile them in a tray on my coffee table...

They aren't perfect though. Because the Instax photos are much thicker than a piece of paper, the books bulge out quite a bit...

So not perfect.

But the best option I've found. For now.

Maybe one of these days I'll come across a better one.

Decades ago, I was a kinda-sometimes programmer. Mostly for personal use in a programming languages called Pascal (followed by Modula-2, C++, Objective-C, Perl, Java, and Rust).

Along the way I picked up a few tools which made programming easier. Editors, outliners, re-compilers, and the rest. One thing that I didn't pick up was learning RegEx (or "regex" if you're boring).

Shorthand for Regular Expressions, this is a tool which allows you to search for text in interesting and helpful ways... then act on what you find. And I don't know why I never looked at it. I had certainly heard of it, but ignored it for forever.

Until I couldn't.

This week I have been working on a difficult work project when I finally ran into a wall. I needed to alter hundreds of occurrences of text which was ever-changing. I had no idea how to do it. I assumed there would be a tool that allowed wildcard functions. And there are some. But none of them could do what I needed to do, and I resigned myself to manually changing everything.

And all of a sudden I remembered RegEx.

The reason I couldn't find a tool which did what I needed was because it had already been invented in the 1950's.

Twenty minutes later, and I had learned what I needed to learn and had completed a task which would have taken hours.

My biggest regret in life is that I didn't learn how to learn RegEx earlier than I did.

I honestly wasn't going to write more than two posts about Pride Month. It was going to be one post at the beginning, wishing all my friends in the LGBTQ+ community a Happy Pride... then another at the end, summarizing the genre movies I watched for the month. That's it.

But holy crap are people up their asses this year.

So much faux persecution, hate, and bullshit.

And though this excellent piece by Dan McClellan is about baseball, you can apply it to many, many, other scenarios...

And then there's this nonsense...

Serious question... do these assholes even READ the Bible?

Because the meaning of the rainbow for Christians is right there in the Book of Genesis: "I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant..." — Genesis 9:13-15

Rainbows are widely interpreted to be a sign from God that his judgement over the earth has passed and he won't destroy the world with a flood again. Kinda the opposite of a "weapon."

And, oh yeah... THE PRIDE FLAG IS NOT A LITERAL FUCKING RAINBOW!!!

It was intentionally made as its own symbol, with each color representing LGBTQ+ values. Six colors instead of seven. And originally it had 9 or something. The LGBTQ+ community is not "stealing God's rainbow" which is categorically absurd. When Hawaii put a rainbow on their license plates, did they steal it from God? Give me a fucking break.

I swear these assholes spend more time thinking about gay stuff than any gay person I know.

Which is not surprising given the rate that most of them turn out to be closeted homosexuals, and this is just an attempt to divert attention away from them.

Misdirection always works!

Until it doesn't.

It's the inhumanity for me.

Every fucking day it's the same thing. People advocating harm towards people who are just trying to live their lives in peace and find a corner of happiness to cling to in this sick, sad, violent world.

And I'm not just talking on a global scale (though that's obviously a huge problem), but with everyday life. The small inhumanities which pile up to make life feel unbearably cruel.

A man on a road trip with his two little girls stops to let them use the bathroom. Obviously he doesn't want to take TWO LITTLE GIRLS INTO THE MEN'S RESTROOM, so he made sure nobody was in the ladies' restroom and helped his daughters there.

Enter a fucking asshole with his inhumanity.

Instead of trying to offer up even a fucking OUNCE of compassion for a father trying to take care of his kids and wait TWO FUCKING MINUTES for these girls to wash their hands... he calls the cops...

And then the asshole woman with this asshole decides to chime in. Which I do not understand at all. You would think that a woman would be understanding that this guy was trying to keep his daughters safe by not taking them into the men's restroom and applaud him for being such a great dad... but NOOOOOOOO! Instead she stands by while this asshole terrorizes these two kids.

Not everywhere has a "Family Restroom" available. And in those cases, parents just have to do the best they can.

And it's the job of the rest of us to lend a hand.

How fucking difficult would it have been for this asshole woman to say "No problem, we can wait a minute" and be a fucking human being?

Apparently insurmountably difficult.

And I don't even fucking know how to react. The obvious answer is to be a little angry and a lot sad. But I choose to cling to the fact that the manager of the QuikTrip, Melissa, was a fucking legend for getting in-between the asshole and these frightened kids, trying to help as best she can...

Give her a fucking parade.

And then, erect a statue of this Father of the Year somewhere, who somehow managed to remain calm, cool, and collected during a very difficult situation because he didn't want to upset his kids more than they already were as some asshole was yelling at them...

Yelling at little girls in the restroom. This is where we're at.

Happy Father's Day on Sunday to this man. He deserves it.

   
I am so tired, y'all.

   
• News of the Week! I did not see this coming!

I'm not going pretend that the original Romy & Michele's High School Reunion was genius fare... but it was entertaining and did have many quotable moments that have infiltrated meme culture. With this being my favorite...

I have said that line in many an inappropriate situation, and, to people who recognize it, that's solid gold, baby!

   
• Reading is Fundamental! Gawd DAMN that read is cold...

But she deserves it, because that's an incredibly shitty take to have. What a piece of shit... wanting people to be bullied.

   
• Taste the Rainbow! I stopped by the local bagel shop that I never knew existed until until yesterday. I asked for a toasted plain bagel with cream cheese. The young woman behind the counter said "Our plain bagels are rainbow this month, is that okay?" — What I wanted to say: "OKAY?? WHY, M'LADY, I AM THRILLED TO FIND A BUSINESS HERE IN REDNECKISTAN BEING INCLUSIVE BY CELEBRATING OUR FELLOW HUMANS IN THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY FOR PRIDE MONTH! BRAVO TO YOU! GIVE ME ONE HUNDRED OF YOUR FINEST RAINBOW BAGELS SO I MIGHT DISTRIBUTE THEM ACROSS THE LAND OF OUR FAIR CITY! THIS IS MORE THAN MERELY 'OKAY'... THIS IS PHENOMENAL! GOOD ON YOU!" — What I actually said: "That would be perfect, thanks."

Icing on the cake? This is a darn good bagel... especially for here, which is nowhere near New York City.

   
• Vegas, Baby! Yeah. No. I'm done with Vegas. Especially since I don't have work there anymore. Couldn't care less if I ever go back because of bullshit that's detailed here...

"Resort fees" were the beginning of the end for me. Deceptive practices with no purpose except to deceive. Everything else is just garbage on top of garbage.

   
• 1%! Dang. We really fucked up, didn't we? As a society, I mean...

But now we've got trillionaires and shit.

   
• Woke Sky? Is there anything more cringe than somebody attempting to unleash a beat-down, but fumbles it so badly that they only end up beating themselves?

It's so painfully obvious that he really, really thought he was doing something with that tweet. It's word salad that incorporates buzzwords he knows his base hates... regardless of whether it makes a lick of sense. WOKE! NON-BINARY! Ha ha! GOTHCA! Jesus. How fucking embarrassing.

   
• I Lie Because I Don't Care! Fuck this asshole. I understand that when you have nothing to support your bigotry, your lies are all you got, but forgive me if I don't give a crap. Your bullshit fantasies endangers people. It whips up hate against people who have done NOTHING to you. Not that you care. You don't care who your lies hurt... as long as it's people you don't like...

It would be different if her audience would take two seconds to verify that what she's saying is true... but we all know they won't. She feeds the narrative they want to believe, and it doesn't matter if it's true or not.

   
And that's a wrap on bullets. Until next week, then!

As I mentioned a few posts back, I ended up ordering a new Nerf gun. My intent was to shoot darts for the cats to chase. I thought it would be something fun for them.

So I take it out of the package, and shoot a dart from my kitchen... expecting that it will end up in the dining room, which is not so far away. Instead the dart flies the entire length of my home and smacks into the rear window. I was more than a little shocked. Isn't this a kid's toy? How many people have lost an eye because they didn't gauge the amount of force those darts get shot.

But anyway... I never picked up the two darts I fired (it had to be two because I wanted to verify that the first dart wasn't a fluke). And Jake noticed...

So maybe the Nerf gun will end up entertaining the cats anyway.

But carefully.

When I was in Miami Beach a few weeks ago, I couldn't help but think back to the time I took my mom for a visit. I wanted to stay in a nice place, so I booked a room in the legendary Fontainebleau hotel. When we arrived, I was met by a woman who took me to a desk for check-in. The first words out of her mouth after welcoming us were "And what are you wanting from your Fontainebleau experience this visit?" This puzzled me, so I answered with "Um... a place to sleep while I'm showing my mom around one of my favorite cities?" Which got me an instant look of disdain. She put us in a room that was under a patio room so we could listen to chairs scraping above us all morning. It was a shitty experience, and there was nothing "five star" about my stay. I would have had a far better time staying at a number of hotels which were half the price.

Back when I was traveling to Vegas a few times a year when I was volunteering with a charity, I saw that a new Fontainebleau property was being built in the city. Every time I visited, it looked further along until it just kinda... stopped.

I never knew what happened. I just assumed that financing was paused or whatever. On my last trip to Sin City before the pandemic hit, the property was no closer to opening and my guess was it had been abandoned. The actual story was a little more complicated than that, which I found out when this video popped up in my feed...

The place finally opened at the tail-end of 2023.

But has apparently had a tough go of it. Las Vegas has lapsed into a massive disappointment where prices have skyrocketed as the experience has cratered. Especially when it comes to food and drink because in addition to being incredibly expensive, meals are small portions with poor quality even at celebrated restaurants. Drinks are watered-down. Add on those fucking "resort fees" which mandatorily charge you for bullshit that should be included with the room price, and I'm very glad I don't have to go there 2 or 3 times a year. Because even though I wasn't paying for my visits, I would still be mad to see charity money being wasted like this. Assuming that the charity would still be going to Vegas given how the city has calmed down considerably, and most of the reasons I was working there have evaporated.

Odds are that eventually I would have been put up at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas.

Which has me wondering if they're still asking people "And what are you wanting from your Fontainebleau experience this visit?" Because I know exactly how I'd answer this time... "I am wanting a clean, comfortable, QUIET room where it might be possible to sleep in after a very long night." Which you'd think would be a given in Las Vegas, but likely not at the Fontainebleau hotel, where you can assume nothing.

I have yet to run across a word that offends me. Words are, after all, just words. Sure there's ways of stringing words together which can be offensive, but overall I cannot be bothered.

And because of the way I don't process words as "bad," I have a tough time understanding the pearl-clutching that can ensue when somebody hears a word they don't like. I mean, certainly you don't want to say bad words in front of young children who don't have the mental capacity to mimic such words in inappropriate places, but adults can choose to ignore things quite easily.

Today I ran across this clip from the movie Office Romance on Netflix which reminded me of a situation several years ago...

I was in Chicago meeting with some work colleagues at a bar down the street. A friend from the UK was in town, so I invited him along. At some point in the evening, my friend and I were telling stories about each other to my co-workers, when he started his next story with "Let me tell you about this cunt right here!" My co-workers laughed, but two women at the table next to ours did not. They were both upset, but one of the women was completely enraged. My friend apologized and said he forgot that word was viewed differently here, but that did nothing to appease the angry women who took their drinks and walked to another table across the bar.

"What a cunt!" my friend said, as everybody bust out laughing.

A part of me was wondering if we would get asked to leave because the women complained. But, if they did complain, it fell on deaf ears because we were there for another couple hours.

The next day at work I found out from one of my coworkers that the angriest woman did complain about us. But the bartender, who was a woman, just said "Okay" and that was the end of it.

I mentioned it to my British friend a couple nights later before I headed home.

His thoughts on the bartender? "Now THAT'S a cunt!"

Since I'm a member of the Apple Developer Program thanks to interface design projects I was involved with years ago, I went ahead and installed the developer beta of iOS 27 on my iPhone (but not on any of my Macs, because I value my sanity).

The first thing I did... the very first thing... was to run to the settings and change the "Liquid Glass" interface to maximum opaqueness. Still not as good as a solid color, but the frosted appearance is a heck of a lot easier to read than what we previously had. I remain utterly dumbfounded that Apple, a pioneer in computer graphical interfaces, shipped something this fucking bad. Maybe it's because I have old, fucked-up eyes, but "Liquid Glass" is an abhorrent step backwards that is now tolerable. Kinda.

The next thing I did was say "Hey Siri... when is my next flight?" because I was psyched at the thought of Siri not being a brain-dead pile of shit for once. BUT NOPE!

Turns out that "New Siri" isn't on by default. I had to turn it on. At which point it said that I've been added to the waitlist. Which is to say that Siri will continue to be dumb as a box of fucking rocks for the foreseeable future...

That this extremely basic question requires "New Siri" in order to be answered is beyond the pale. Android has been able to do this mundane shit for years! But it gets worse. On my way home from work today, I asked Siri when the last day of school is. Siri blanked out. Realizing that Siri doesn't know where my fucking location is despite it being set up to know that, I re-asked the question but included my city and state. "I can search the internet when you're done driving" (or whatever). Infuriated, I asked why they have to wait for me to stop driving to search the internet. "I can search the internet for that when you're not in the car." I mean, holy fucking shit is Siri a complete waste of time! Apple has BILLIONS of dollars. They couldn't have spent a small fraction of that to make a capable voice assistant? I guess not. Which is why they're licensing technology from Google, of all places.

Something that threw me into shock was a massive decrease in battery life. I usually end the day with around 70% battery left. Less if I ended up playing games or taking a bunch of photos. But suffice to say that anything less than 50% is exceedingly rare for me. But after installing iOS 27? I am lucky to end my day with 10%. Now, this is a developer beta, so you would expect that there's extra stuff running to track bugs and monitor ho things are working. But this much battery life? Doubtful. If I had to guess, it's the indexing which is taking up most of the battery power...

If that's the case, Apple could do themselves a big favor and add that message to the indexing message.

One of the more intriguing new features (and one of the few things AI seems made for doing well) is to help you create shortcuts. I had no idea how smart the system would be, and just asked for a shortcut idea off the top of my head...

I was not expecting much. So you can imagine my total shock when I actually got exactly what I asked for...

Now, see, this right here is where I want my AI. This is fantastic! I will have to play with it further to see what it's limits are, but this is a game changer.

One of the new features I was interested in is the ability to see better 3D representations in Apple Maps. I love playing armchair traveler to places I have never been (and places I've been, for that matter) so the idea of it all was intriguing. Not that I expected my small city to get a fancier 3D representation... but I was expecting Seattle to have far better 3D. But nope. Everything is just as wonky as it has been. I guess it's going to take time to reach anything outside of San Francisco and New York...

When it comes to HomeKit HomeShit, my expectations are always in the basement. This is hands-down Apple's biggest reoccurring failure. It hasn't worked properly since Day One, and they've made zero attempts at improving it. I am having the same problems now that I've always had. And one of the biggest problems is my Automations disappearing at random. No reason for it... they just vanish. For example, I have a sensor on my garage door which turns the light on when triggered. The Automation for this disappeared a week ago. I also have an Automation which turns some lights on at night. This Automation didn't disappear a week ago, but a part of it did. My neon light all of a sudden stopped turning on, but all the other lights were operating normally. It's frustrating, because going back and fixing all this shit is time-consuming.

Well guess what? The night after installing iOS 27 Developer Beta, my neon started turning on with the other lights again! The garage is still fucked, but one thing that was broken seems to have healed itself. Heaven knows for how long, but it is offering a little bit of encouragement. As I suspected, my older Nest cameras are not compatible with any of the new camera improvements in HomeKit. Typical.

One thing which hasn't been touched is that the Mail unread message count badge is still fucked. If messages get deleted without being read on a different device, the iPhone displays the deleted messages as unread messages with the app icon badge. I honestly have no fucking clue why this can't be fixed. It's fucking embarrassing that this is still a problem in the Year of Our Lord 2026.

And now we come to Photos...

Even though we're talking about a mobile phone, 75% of what I do on my iPhone is take photos. Camera improvements are the only reason I buy new models of iPhone, because I don't care about anything else. The reason I didn't upgrade to the 17 Pro Max is because the camera was almost the same.

This time Apple added a bunch of AI tools to Photos and the result is a mixed bag. Let's walk through some of the things I tried.

The "extend" tool is remarkable. Better than the AI tools in Adobe Photoshop. What I think is going on is that the Google Gemini engine searches the internet to identify what's in your photo, then generates an extension around your image based on what it figures out. Take for example this photo I took in Italy...

I zoom out to extend it...

And vióla! A stunning job of adding the missing information around your photo...

I pulled back on this photo of me, which I selected because of the pattern on my shirt. I thought that might prove to be a challenge, but it did a remarkable job getting that sorted...

   
The new reframe tool works, to a very limited degree of "turning" but the results are a bit odd. There's some uncanny valley going on. This photo of my mom eating in Rome looks okay, but it screws up the angle in a way that feels bizarre. Especially in the eyes. The rotation wasn't very much, but she appears to be looking in an entirely different direction?

   
The next photo I tried got flagged as some kind of safety violation because it had a bare ass in it. Or so I'm guessing...

I have a lot more playing around to do with the Photos app before I can fully understand how it's going to benefit me. And I remain conflicted over the fact that Google's AI models were created based on untold numbers of photographers who weren't compensated for their work. Yes, these are my photos being changed, but the abilities being offered were partly stolen.

I understand that Apple's Image Playground app has been updated, but since there's absolutely no question that it's based on theft of photographers and artists, I won't be messing with it.

There's probably some other improvements that I'm missing, but these are the ones I was wanting to explore. The only thing left that I truly care about is New Siri, because I'm dying to see if Apple finally... FINALLY... has a voice assistant that isn't totally fucking stupid. I'll look at that when (and if) it's ever loaded on my iPhone.

A boy can dream, can't he?