infrastructure
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Time to Why
What he says Jamie Burke: Why the Intention Economy might finally be near. He predicts what I predicted (in the book above), with a DLT (distributed ledger technology) spin. Note that credit for the original portrait used in the piece should go to Peter Adams and his Faces of Open Source project. What I said My Big Continue reading
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Else wares
Not enough water Hotels on the south rim of the Grand Canyon are closed indefinitely. Naturally The most downloaded country song is by an AI. Or Not Says here the AI bubble will burst. Geoffrey Hinton, Big AI’s Cassandra, says otherwise. Continue reading
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On the Continuing End of OTA TV, Part 2
This is Part 2 of a post that began with a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, but really wasn’t about that. It was about the grave situation in which over-the-air (OTA) TV finds itself. Here is Part 1. Even people who don’t like leftish comedy should admit that Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue after he returned to the air Continue reading
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Speaking as a Great Lakes Megacitizen
In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis notes that the city at the center of a circle containing the largest population within a one-day drive is Dayton, Ohio. You can kinda see that in the map above, which I discovered through Brilliant Maps. They got it from the highly precient Defining US Continue reading
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Monday, 16 June 2025
Trying on times. I like shoes I can slip on, because bending over to use my crooked arthritic fingers as shoe horns is painful. So is tying laces. (Oddly, typing on a keyboard isn’t painful, so that’s a counted blessing.) The shoes I’m wearing now are beat-up Sketchers that I bought at Nordstrom for about Continue reading
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Remembranes
Is there a word for failing to fail? Here's a Hmm: What if Flickr Fails? is getting a sudden burst of readers fourteen years after Flickr didn't fail. Also, according to my blog's stats, this post has had eleven reads. Cool is forever. Dig: New Livestream Brings Microfiche Digitization to Life for Democracy’s Library. Watch it happen live. Particulars: Continue reading
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Pasts and Futures
The Airbus 390 is gigantic. Like a cruise ship for the sky. Except, I gather, it’s not real. Pope Francis dies on Easter Monday. For a sense of what Francis embodied and meant, I recommend Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. I’m in the midst of listening to Rauch on Russ Roberts’ Continue reading
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Tools
And just one for New Jersey! iLoveFood says the best pizza in Indiana is Mother Bear’s here in Bloomington. Problem: it isn’t. Osteria Rago’s is better. Not that MB’s is bad. It’s good. Just not better than Osteria’s. I’m also betting there must be a better pizza than both somewhere in Indianapolis. iLoveFood also names top Continue reading
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Fire and Rain
Twenty-fifth in the News Commons series Southern California has two seasons: Fire and Rain. Rain didn’t begin this year until a few days after Fire ended apocalyptically, incinerating much of Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Now Rain is here, with the occasional atmospheric river flowing across the faces of hills and mountains whose beards were just Continue reading
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And Now the #HughesFire
Twenty-fourth in the News Commons series Eigth on the #LAfires 7:35 am January 23, 2024—It’s morning now. The Hughes Fire is 17% contained but no longer interesting. The Sepulveda Fire broke out last night along the 405 freeway. It stopped at forty acres, and doesn’t matter much now. Here’s the path of one fire helicopter Continue reading
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Aviation vs. Fire
3:22pm—Hats off to Miles Archer for the links below, one of which goes here— —showing all the aircraft and their paths at once. You can start here at https://globe.adsbexchange.com/, which is kind of your slate that’s blank except for live aircraft over the Palisades Fire: Meanwhile all the media are reporting one home loss, in Continue reading
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What goes in these structured wiring cabinets?
I need to install gear in these two structured wiring cabinets in the garage of the new house we are finishing. I don’t know exactly what to put in them and seek advice. The installed cables are: Blue CAT-6a Ethernet cables go to outlets (RJ-45 jacks) in four rooms. Internet will come from the city’s Continue reading
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When Radio Delivers
Helene was Western North Carolina‘s Katrina—especially for the counties surrounding Asheville: Buncombe, Mitchell, Henderson, McDowell, Rutherford, Haywood, Yancey, Burke, and some adjacent ones in North Carolina and Tennessee. As with Katrina, the issue wasn’t wind. It was flooding, especially along creeks and rivers. Most notably destructive were the Swannanoa River and French Broad River, which Continue reading
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The Personal Internet
—is not this: By now we take it for granted. To live your digital life on the Internet, you need accounts. Lots of them. Everything on the Internet that requires an account has a lock on you—for their convenience. They don’t know any other way. That’s because all the services we use in the online Continue reading
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World Wide Whiteboard
Before there were search engines, there were directories. The biggest and best-known was Yahoo. On the first graphical browser (Mosaic), it looked like this: The directory idea made sense because the Web is laid out like the directory in your computer. There is a “domain” with a “location” or a “site,” containing something after the Continue reading
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What symbolizes infrastructure best?
I love studying infrastructure. I read about it (hi, Brett), shoot pictures of it, and write about it. Though not enough of the latter. That’s why I’ve started to post again at Trunk Line, my infrastructure blog. A post there earlier today was about “dig safe” markings (aka digsafe and dig-safe). I ran it in Continue reading
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All home now
From 2007 until about a month ago, I wrote on three blogs that lived at blogs.harvard.edu. There was my personal blog (this one here, which I started after retiring my original blog), ProjectVRM‘s blog (also its home page), and Trunkline, a blog about infrastructure that was started by Christian Sandvig when he and I were Continue reading
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A look at broadcast history happening
When I was a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, AM was the ruling form of radio, and its transmitters were beyond obvious, taking the form of towers hundreds of feet high, sometimes in collections arranged to produce signals favoring some directions over others. These were landmarks out on the edges of town, or Continue reading
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Moving on
I started this blog in August 2007 after the host for my original blog went away. (That blog has been preserved, however. Find it at http://weblog.searls.com.) At the time I was told something like “Hey, Harvard has been around since 1636, so your blog will last a long time here.” Well, the duration will be Continue reading