Weekender #120: Birbs, Bluesky and Indy

• Birb watch: Amazingly, baby myna is still hanging around, much to the chagrin of Handsome and Matey myna (parents). The duo is constantly flying at baby myna, and sometimes will attack them. Nothing seems to be scaring baby away, and they seem intent on learning Handsome and Matey’s tactics of getting us to come to the door and give them food.

• Audubon has created a guide to a very important topic that is near and dear to my heart called “When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’?”

• I finally made time to do a short write-up about installing a VESA mount on my wife’s iMac 5K external display. I skipped showing the details of gutting the display and installing the driver card since I already wrote about it earlier.

  • I did a few things differently when converting her iMac to an external display. I used a different driver board, the R1811, and added the ability to power off the driver board by using the built-in power button on the iMac.

• A long-time online friend sent me an invite code to Bluesky. I’m @kimonostereo.bsky.social if you’d like to follow me there. As usual, most of my posts are syndicated to Mastodon, Bluesky and soon to be discontinued on Twitter from my micro.blog feed.

This week’s Link List

Machine Learning

• The Verge did a deep dive into how people are really using AI (and what they’re afraid of). Polling 2000 people to see how they’re using “AI”, the article covers who’s using it and asks a lot of great questions of the participants. If you’re short on time, the beautifully done infographics will give you a lot of information quickly.

Design

• CallToInspiration is a collection of UI/UX screenshots that someone put into categories. I suppose it could be used for inspiring your next project.

Fediverse

• As Reddit burns itself down, I found another alternative called Squabbles which seems to be a cross between Reddit and Twitter. An interesting way of merging the two types of communities into one platform.

• Lemmymap gives an overview of the alternative, federated Reddit alternative.

• Darius Kazemi has created a simple Twitter archiver that makes the archive public and searchable.

Software and hardware

• Tom Verbeure shares how to take a $25 thin client and use it as a MacOS Time Machine appliance.

• Saurabh shared a list of really cool advanced macOS command-line tools. I didn’t know about networkQuality, but now I do! Hacker News had a bunch more in the comments.

Miscellaneous

• I love my Ricoh GR III camera, and I doubly love when folks create 3D printable accessories for it. Over on the r/ricohGR sub-reddit, user PartiallyFrozen posted their free 3D printable grip. Here’s the direct link to project.

Media consumption

• Audra and I went to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and it’s probably my favorite of all of the Indy movies. I had a few niggles about some areas of the story, but overall I felt like this took the character into new territory in an entertaining way.

• At Anime Expo this weekend, Netflix announced that the animated series of Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto manga will debut on October 26. See the official teaser on YouTube. They also announced the animated series of Ryōko Kui’sDelicious in Dungeon (Dungeon Meshi) manga will stream worldwide in January 2024. See the official teaser on YouTube.

• Kottke featured a collection of links featuring behind-the-scenes footage from Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. It was really fun to watch how they used miniatures and all of the work that goes into choosing the locations and building the sets.

• Audra introduced me to Natural Habitats animated shorts a while back on Instagram. She shared that they posted an hour of cozy lo-fi bats to study to in the vein of lo-fi girl on their YouTube channel, so that’s what I’ve had on repeat all week.