Summer bounty
It's the start of a beautiful summer in the Pacific Northwest. We are having some glorious summer days; Rainier cherries are in the market; there are festivals and events every week; the crab season is open or soon-to-open, depending on your location. And my topics are scattered like the bounty of the season.
Summer Tools
I know it is kind of cheating, but I love our Masterbuilt electric smoker. So easy to maintain the temperature. The Bluetooth and Wi-Fi features are garbage; they have never worked consistently for me. There is a cheaper model without Wi-Fi, and I would opt for that.
One of our rescues is a dachshund mix, and she is trouble, constantly looking for an opportunity to wander. The latest Fi collar has been great — it's much smaller than the older models, which were just too bulky for a 10-pound dog. The latest is much smaller and sleeker.
Software Tools
When you “buy” an app these days, the economic drain is just starting. A constant barrage of ads in the app interface. Upsells and in-app purchases. An unending stream of subscription payments. And every app quickly expands into becoming a platform, a marketplace, a community, with all kinds of interface and feature clutter. It is all a little wearing.
Back when I started using PCs, Beagle Bros was a developer of Apple ][ utilities, and I loved these folks. Nicely crafted tools. Single-purpose tools. Tools that you bought and owned forever. Oh, and a little quirky, but I loved the personality. I think the first tool I purchased from them was DOS BOSS, back in the days when software came in zip-lock bags.
Anyway, a post from Bill Bliss pointed me toward Mark Lucovsky’s kitchen companion app, TIBLS. Super helpful, very focused, with no subscription or service dependency.
And it goes squarely at recipes — no category has been more polluted on the web by commercial concerns, most recipe sites are unusable at this point.
Well done.
Tipping points
A friend said to me this week, “It’s deeply disheartening to witness the rapid collapse of the energy, automotive, and education industries in real time.“ Some of the things we are both reading:
- Michael Dunne on the competitive crisis in the US auto industry. “America can embark on an all-out push to rebuild world-class manufacturing and supply chains, or our carmakers can hide behind tariffs, continue making gas-powered trucks and S.U.V.s and fade into irrelevance.”
- American Energy Policy Cannot Afford to Be This Dumb. “While China builds the economy of the future, Trump’s agenda combines the energy policy of the 1980s with the trade policy of the 1880s.”
- Energy Consumption: Could The Computer Outpace The HVAC? Moore’s law comes for every industry — either through disruption, or through dominating consumption. The energy industry will be driven by tech industry issues.
We need a large-scale shift in brains and energy towards making hard things, and making them well. A shift in education, in industry, in finance, in society. I am inspired by some of my software colleagues who have moved on to Stoke Space — we need more people to refocus their sights in this way.
Elsewhere in tipping points, Ted Gioia on the massive cultural disruption that is at work around us — Ted is worth subscribing to.
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