Until my older sister got a Nintendo DS, the only gaming devices we had were those cheap handheld ones that had a single game on it—Sudoku, a baseball simulator—and the similarly-cheap Plug and Play TV game consoles that typically comprised a joystick, a button or two, and composite video cables. They required batteries. They were slow. I loved them.
Continue reading “Plug and Play TV Consoles”ASCIImoji
If you grew up around the plain-text internet and pre-smartphone texting, you may be aware of the distinction between emoticons and emojis. The latter are separate unicode characters that are increasingly-detailed artistic renderings of various faces and items, like a Ferris wheel: 🎡. The former are clever constructions of non-emoji characters, which provide some intangible level of whimsy and cleverness that never fails to delight.1Thanks to Doug Merritt for pointing out that my original sentence here—that these were all actually made of ASCII characters—was incorrect. Many require Unicode in their current constructions, but really the fun part is that they give the feeling of plain text more so than the tiny image that is an emoji can do.
Consider this shrug: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Or someone flipping a table in frustration: (ノ ゜Д゜)ノ ︵ ┻━┻
If you enjoy this and want to add some flair to your writing, consider the wonderful ASCIImoji site. It has a near-complete table of these emoticons from which you can copy, a Chrome extension, and a .plist file you can import to macOS to create text replacement shortcuts which subsequently sync to your iPhone if desired.
Every time I see one of these, or recognize an opportunity to use one myself, I find myself grinning. It’s a simple joy of playing on a computer, and I’m glad I finally got these replacements working.
(•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)
- 1Thanks to Doug Merritt for pointing out that my original sentence here—that these were all actually made of ASCII characters—was incorrect. Many require Unicode in their current constructions, but really the fun part is that they give the feeling of plain text more so than the tiny image that is an emoji can do.
The Mouse and the Motorcycle
Last week I was talking with Erin on our way to a coffee shop, and I had a sudden memory of a movie where a mouse needed to scurry about to find medicine to save a young boy who had quite a dastardly fever. Naturally I thought it was a Stuart Little movie, somewhere along the series, but that didn’t feel quite right.
Luckily, the subreddit /r/TipOfMyTongue had me covered, when someone asked about this exact movie two years ago. It’s called The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and has a runtime of only 42 minutes. I haven’t rewatched it quite yet, but I was delighted to find the answer.
After finding this via a Google search, “movie with mouse needing to find fever medicine reddit”, I decided to check whether any of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini could come up with an answer. They all failed in similar ways, though Gemini ended up being helpful despite not finding the correct answer.
I wrote the same prompt to all three of them: “I’m thinking of a movie where a mouse needs to find fever medicine to save a boy who is sick in bed.”
Claude suggested The Rescuers Down Under, and invented a scene that didn’t exist to match my description. When I told it about its error, and clarified that the movie I wanted was not animated, it suggested Mousehunt, which it did mention has no scene specifically matching what I wrote in.
Gemini initally suggested The Rescuers, with more complete information including scenes that plausibly match the kind of scene I was describing but without the specifics. “There’s a scene where Bernard needs to find a specific item (a diamond) to bribe a cat guard. This might be getting mixed up with the medicine element you remember.” I thought that was clever. When I followed up, it didn’t give any other movies. Instead, it gave me suggestions for what search terms I could try, and specifically mentioned using either the Tip of My Tongue subreddit, or the IMDB forums. That’s a decent failure experience.
ChatGPT was the worst at this. It confidently stated “The movie you’re referring to is The Secret of NIMH.” While the other two assistants gave wiggle room in their answers, ChatGPT assumed it was correct. Its second guess was one called The Witches, in which a boy gets turned into a mouse.
I found this illuminating. These assistants are getting better, and I’m becoming more willing to use them, but they still have blindspots and should be considered, at best, a jumping-off point.
But also, The Mouse and the Motorcycle is killer based on my memory of it from twenty years ago.
Tony Wan at EdSurge, on AI Writing by Students
A short article that mirrors my thinking rather well. In particular:
Each little metacognitive act of constructing a sentence, though, reflects valuable thinking. Knowing how to use conjunctions, for instance — the ifs, buts and therefores — is an important exercise in logical reasoning. How much should we outsource that to AI? Too much, and the writing experience may feel like a fill-in-the-blank exercise like MadLibs.
Settling on Firefox
I’ve bounced between browsers over the years. Chrome or Chromium were my default for many years while I ran Linux, with a few small dalliances with Chrome-powered alternatives like Brave. I tried Safari when I switched to a MacBook and used it for months. I then hopped on the Arc Browser bandwagon, which introduced me to features that I now consider essential. That experience wouldn’t last forever.
Continue reading “Settling on Firefox”Playball for Terminal
I came across the javascript terminal app Playball. It’s fun and slick, and I’m enjoying using it. It gives you a way to view MLB Gameday data from the terminal, and it’s beautifully done.
When you first run the app after installing it via npm, you are greeted with the day’s schedule, and the box scores of any games.
Keyboard navigation hints are shown at the bottom of the window at all times, so you can easily look at scores from previous days, or check out the schedule in the future. You can jump back to the current day at any point. Navigating any screen can be done with either the arrow keys or vim keybindings.
Standings are available as well, following the same format you would see in the MLB app.
The gameday stream is excellent. It provides a complete boxscore up top, a left pane containing information about the at-bat, and a right pane with all play-by-play information. All of the colors can be configured to your liking, and I’m particularly a fan of the occupied bases diagram.
After watching a Snazzy Labs video about terminal apps, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using the terminal more. I lost that part of my computing life when I switched to macOS, but it’s delightful to reenter the fold.
Playball is a fun project that is actually useful because it takes away all the cruft and clutter of a web app, stripping it down to present the core information in a highly readable way with no loss of functionality. Give it a shot.
Student Monitoring, Safety, and Privacy
In my weekly perusal of education newsletters, I came across a Time magazine article about new attempts to bring AI and machine learning to monitoring student behavior on school devices. While the article focuses on student mental health—suicide prevention in particular—I looked into the companies mentioned therein and discovered that the scope of monitoring efforts is broad and deep. It is a fascinating and discomforting topic, with each company working on a different aspect of student safety with rhetoric to match.
Continue reading “Student Monitoring, Safety, and Privacy”Vision Pro Part 2: Inside Looking Out
I’ve completed my Apple Vision Pro demo in what felt like record time—seventeen minutes, when everything I’ve heard referenced half an hour—and I can firmly place myself in the camp of people who simultaneously very interested in a Meta Quest 3 right now, and excited about the next several versions of Vision Pro.
Continue reading “Vision Pro Part 2: Inside Looking Out”