Tag: <span>technology</span>

Tag: technology

I started texting my partner to ask if he could “pick up some stuff,” but autocomplete assumed that the word stuff was supposed to be “snakes.”

What I find disturbing about this is that Google utilizes user data to make predictive text more accurate, and that there is apparently enough recorded user behavior to make “snakes” seem like a viable completion for that sentence.

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An unexpected benefit of the Dvorak keyboard:

I have a hardwired Dvorak keyboard at work, and I guess sometimes when I’m not in, people will come in and ask if they can use the spare computer for a minute, only to go "Uh, what?" and give up.

So thanks, Dvorak, for saving me from greasy finger germs.

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Solar Pomodoro watch

A Casio Tough Solar Watch
A nice detail: timer mode shows the time of day in a little bar at the bottom of the face.

I always used to wish my digital watches had a Pomodoro timer function. I even considered writing to Timex at one point to request this, but I’m a lazy bag of social anxiety, so that didn’t happen.

My new Casio watch has an awesome, unadvertised Pomodoro function that lets you stack and repeat multiple timers. I bought this only because the metal band of my old watch gave me massive patches of red itchy bumps, and apparently I would rather exacerbate them than go without a watch for a few days. This one was $20 and solar-powered, and I was surprised to stumble on a feature I’d wanted in a watch for so long.

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The camera ate my color

Perception and memory interest me.

I took the first photo at the community garden where my partner has a plot, and it looks much duller than I remembered. This became even more obvious when I sliced off the top to use for my website’s header.

Part of the blame for that falls to my digital camera, which does poorly with low light and action, and is also skittish around children and wolves.

Part of it has to do with my own perception. How can a flat picture on a screen compare to standing on a hill at the onset of a cool spring night, the air rich with plant smells? I’m sure the sum total of impressions from my other senses influenced my memory.

I punched up the color in this picture three times. While the first picture is the one I took, and the third one matches my memory, the second one might be closer to reality. The fourth one isn’t quite hyperreal, but it looks more like an idealized, imagined sunset.

Even though number two is probably most accurate, three is more truthful in a way. It still can’t capture the energy of being alive with cold wind in your face, but the extra vibrancy conveys a bit more of the energy I remember.

They say that cameras don’t lie. But that depends.  Do you count a lie of omission as a lie?

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