Tab Clearing...

• Like a roving Flock: Garbage trucks in Texas with AI-powered cameras to scrutinize properties in passing and determine which homeowners should get fined.


• Clearview AI is testing an AI tool that would let cops unearth your life online: The forums you post on, who you chat with, where you comment, and what you say...


• Eight F-15s and an A-10 damaged when Iranian missile hits airbase in Jordan. The Eagles only took minor damage but the Warthog lost a wing.

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Flashback!

Jim Grey just posted about his experiences shooting an old (but new-to-him) Pentax ME 35mm SLR. He mentioned how small and light it is, and that's a fact. The Pentax ME and its successor, the ME Super, are so small and light that they were the main cameras we used when I worked at Sky-Shots back in '91.

Back before the days of RC drones and tiny high-res video cameras, this was the solution to get aerial photos up to two hundred feet from the ground.

Dangling from the bottom of the mini blimp was a film camera on a tilt-and-pan gimbal mount with a small CCTV camera affixed to the eyepiece and a servo to trip the shutter. A cable trailed from the blimp to the control console hung 'round the operator's neck on a padded yoke. The control panel had joysticks, a small black and white screen, and a shutter button.

This flyer was my first experiment in desktop publishing. I guess it was technically my first paid writing gig, too.

Here's 24 year old me with my boss's Pentax in my hands and my own Canon AE-1P over my shoulder, with a press pass doing photography at the 1992 First Union Grand Prix in Atlanta, watching some rookie cyclist named Lance Armstrong win his first big race.

It's about frickin' time.

I’m rarely in a Walmart and every time I am, I’m surprised anew by their archaic checkout. I mean, I literally used Apple Pay to buy an obsidian knife from the flint knapper in Pioneer Village at the Indiana State Fair the other day.

“What do you mean I gotta actually take my card out of my wallet and stick it in the machine with my hands like it’s 2015 up in here? I used my wristwatch to pay a guy in bib overalls for a stone knife last Wednesday, for heaven's sake!”

Resin-filled cholla hilt and gold sheen obsidian blade.

Well, Wally World is finally saying they're going to bring touchless payments, including Apple Pay, to their stores by the end of this year. Better late than never, I reckon.

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Tab Clearing...

• The state of the air war over Ukraine, four years on...


• The Rise of American Bushido


• Meta, belatedly and ineffectively, gets worried about creepers using its pervert glasses.

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Now it can be told...

The reason I was in Nebraska last month was for a product launch event for a new Leupold optic, the LCO Pro F2. The format of the event was a 1½ day class, followed a mini carbine match, during which I had the opportunity to put several hundred rounds downrange using the new dot.

Hornady hosted the event at the excellent Heartland Public Shooting Park just outside Grand Island.

Kyle Lamb instructed us media types in the use of the carbine...

...aided by Doug Koenig.

I'll expand further in print elsewhere, but in short, Leupold is gearing up to go hard into the high-end duty grade electro optics biz again, since they're one of a small handful of companies who can credibly play in that end of the pool.

Chris Cerino lighting up a target.

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Tab Clearing...

• Your favorite gadgets are getting way more expensive again. Thanks AI bubble!


• Cop caught on video stalking a woman by using a license plate reader.


• Waymo robotaxi delivers teen hooligans to the cops.

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Jerked by a Mechanical Turk

The latest iteration of the Neo domestic robot from startup manufacturer 1X has freakishly sensitive and mobile fingers. Very dextrous, pretty much the equivalent of human hands, capable of delicate chores like screwing in a light bulb, or... well, you know how people are.

Thing is, like most of these robots today, it's not entirely autonomous...

1X says the goal is full automation for Neo, but for now, the robot is partly teleoperated, as a Wall Street Journal video noted last year.

Some guy who works in a Singapore cubicle farm sits at the dinner table with a haunted, 1000yd stare.

“How was work today, honey?” asks his wife…

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Tab Clearing...

• If your laptop or phone is getting long in the tooth, the best time to upgrade is three months ago: How the AI boom is driving an inflationary surge in consumer electronic prices.


• The guys with the Roman statue PFPs don't know jack about the classics they claim to love.


• War Films and the Experience of War.

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Tab Clearing...

• Juanma has a really neat, lavishly illustrated, in-depth look at a car show in the Netherlands.


• Forget the "Great Man Theory of History" and instead consider the "Mediocre Man Theory of History".


• Funky vehicles in the presidential motorcade in China. Anti-drone vehicles? Some sort of SIGINT thing?

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There must be more to it than that...

Old tech is making a gradual comeback, and for a variety of reasons...

I am not the only one thinking about the upsides of inconvenience, it seems; there is even a term, frictionmaxxing, to describe the trend of people resisting the lulling ease of screens. On a Saturday morning when I do not have to help a friend move, I am in bed scrolling Instagram. One video features what appears to be an elder millennial saying that he wants the nineties back. He wants a VCR. He wants old-school arcade machines that you have to feed with quarters. He wants a Walkman and cassette tapes to put in said Walkman.

When you're in front of the arcade game, you are playing that game, when listening to the Walkman, you're listening to that album. When you're reading a dead tree book, you're reading that book. When you're photographing with a camera instead of a cell phone, that's all you're doing: taking pictures.

There's no channel surfing on those devices. You're in the moment, committed to that choice. There's intentionality to it.

Plus, the record company can't delete your cassette. Nobody can steal your log-in and personal data from a VHS player or a CD carousel. Broadcast television sends data in only one direction.

Did you ever stop to think just how much info you're handing over when visiting a website? You should.

All for the convenience of watching a movie or listening to a tune that may or may not be available if you want it again tomorrow.

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Nag, nag, nag...

The Apple Watch has a sleep monitor app which can keep track of your sleep patterns based on, I'm assuming, things like your heart rate and the amount of moving around you do.

Under normal circumstances this is kind of cool, but if you're having a stressful week, your watch will cheerfully add to it by chiming and haptically tapping you on the wrist over breakfast to inform you that "Your sleep score was poor last night".

Thanks, HAL, I was aware of that. I don't need to be chided by my watch before coffee.

Tab Clearing...

• Oops. It looks like half of all global seaborne sulphur shipments transit the Strait of Hormuz.


• Papyrus containing part of The Iliad found in tomb with Egyptian mummy.


• Meta to add facial recognition to its creeper glasses, to make being stalked even easier!

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Tab Clearing...

• High-resolution sonar images of the USS Monitor wreck.


• Russia's hacker unit known as Fancy Bear is behind the hacking of wi-fi routers.


• Panopticon-like surveillance isn't any better just because it's not the government doing it.

Tab Clearing...

• Massive explosion at Valero refinery in Texas.


• How Israel hijacked Iran's surveillance camera network and turned it into a targeting tool.


• What if Germany had stayed on the defensive in the west in 1914?

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #262...

At the range yesterday wrapping things up with the Daniel Defense H9 Compact for an upcoming review. It was plenty warm, but the sunny skies I was promised failed to materialize. Instead, there was a misting drizzle that made me glad that Marion County Fish & Game installed those shed roofs over the rear of the pistol bays.

If I'd still been using the old Shooting Chrony Beta, I would have had to trudge out into the wet after each ten-shot chronograph string, but the Garmin Xero C1 meant I could just load up three magazines with ten rounds each and sit there in the dry while making notes on each string. (The data on the screen there is from the Federal 135gr HydraShok Deep, FWIW.)

Of course, if the weather had been really vile, I could have used the Garmin indoors at Indy Arms Company, unlike the old chronograph.

Tab Clearing...

• An app that warns you when it thinks smart glasses are nearby.


• When you're finally over the effin' snow.


• Jim Grey encounters enshittification.

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Tab Clearing...

• I had somehow made it this far in life without ever stumbling across the etymology of "dungarees".


• Gallup organization ends nine decades of monthly presidential approval rating polling.


• Ring's expensive Super Bowl ad inadvertently woke a lot of Americans up to the realization that they'd paid to build an Orwellian surveillance network to spy on themselves.

Tab Clearing...

• How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life


• A British Sports Car in India...by Way of America


• Elon Musk Could 'Drink Piss Better Than Any Human in History,' Grok Says

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Not just no, but hell no.

A company called 1X is trying to get into the domestic robot business with a droid they're calling the NEO Home Robot. Neo is an elfin-looking anthropomorphic robot that goes for $20,000 and arrives at your home in a disturbingly egg-sac-like pod.

Thing is, like so many robotic devices, Neo's a Mechanical Turk. That's right, the autonomous robot in your house is, for most tasks, being tele-operated by a human being in god-knows-where. Don't worry, I'm sure they screen the operators rigorously.

Make sure you turn Neo off before you go to bed. Those robot hands look strong enough to throttle a person.

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Tab Clearing...

• I cannot believe people mistake this for deep thought.


• Electricity prices spiking?


• Every day reveals a new, creepier use for Meta glasses.

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