🎵 I’ve looked at [young people having bad hair cuts] from both sides now… 🎵

My grandmother Mary Nantes (“Nanny”) died in 2018 at the age of 98. Her last name is now my middle name (Nantes). Yesterday, CBC Radio on PEI aired some archived interviews with her about life in the 1930s and 1940s.

It’s nice to hear her voice again, and interesting to hear how she and her nine siblings would write letters to Santa Clause, and burn them in the wood stove (so they’d go up the chimney – makes perfect sense).

Those of us in Canada are getting a two-month ‘tax holiday’ on selected items. The complete list of items includes “Jigsaw puzzles, for all ages.”

I didn’t have Jigsaw-puzzle-tax-holiday on my bingo card for this year.

This feels more like a stunt than a policy, and I expect it will be generally perceived as a stunt. That said, I don’t discount the impact of the savings on those who need it most.

Also, my thoughts go out to everyone working on a point-of-sale system trying to get these updates addressed in time, and to those making the difficult edge-case decisions (do they use jigsaws to make 3-d puzzles?).

My mockup for a pumpkin-with-USB-C-port wasn’t as impactful as I had anticipated.

Nilay Patel’s scathing endorsement for Kamala Harris for president at the tech news site The Verge is the first editorial endorsement I’ve read that sounds like it is of my generation. He opens with:

“Donald Trump is a dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can even recognize the existentially threatening collective action problems facing our nation, let alone actually solve them.”

He also uses USB-C to help explain collective action requiring government intervention.

These early images from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope are enough to give me cosmic vertigo.

Proposal: A new national holiday where we all take some time to clean up our list of Interac e-Transfer recipients.

You probably aren’t going to do more business with that person from Facebook Marketplace who sold you a pair of kids snow-pants and claimed they lived “in town”, but took 25 minutes to get to their house.

This post is only for the one person searching for this issue – it’s probably not for you:

I’ve got an issue that started recently (possibly when updating my M1 MacBook Pro to macOS 15 (Sequoia).

The issue only happens with this particular combination of hardware/software: SM57 into my UB802 Behringer mixer, into my CalDigit TS3, dock into Zoom videoconferencing software.

With this combination, I get an odd stereo effect that sounds like (and I think is) the same mono signal slightly out of time in the left vs. right stereo channels.

• If I use the same mic/dock into any other audio app, it sounds fine.
• If I use any other mic, or even the same mic/mixer into the headphone jack on the MacBook, it sounds fine.

Today, I discovered a “fix”: The issue only appears if I pan the left/right mix on my mixer to the center. If I pan hard left or hard right, it sounds fine (even though it all gets mixed down to mono). Since it’s a mono signal from the mic (I guess getting split into stereo in the mixer), it sounds identical in Zoom regardless of the panning.

I don’t know if the ‘fault’ lies with Zoom, CalDigit, or macOS.

When I was growing up, when I or one of my four siblings was sick and there was a risk of vomit, someone would be sent to fetch the “Blue Bucket”.

Even if the bucket wasn’t blue, or wasn’t an actual bucket, it was still the Blue Bucket.

What color was your blue bucket?