On previous trips, I’ve carried an old Sony GPS logger that I could sync up with the timestamps on my photos, both for geotagging and just figuring out where all we went (“remember that little backstreet temple where you wanted pictures of the fallen leaves, but those kids kept playing in them?”). Sadly, since the GPS epoch is about to roll over again, and Sony hasn’t supported that device in many years, it’s e-waste now.

The fallback plan was to just snap phone pics whenever I wanted to remember where I’d been, but my new camera can use Bluetooth to pull GPS from my phone, and Sony just replaced the flaky PlayMemories app with one that promises to be a lot more reliable. Incidentally, since this isn’t a serious photo trip, I won’t be taking big lenses or a tripod, just the a6500 body, the 18-105mm f/4 G lens, and a new find, an Eighties-vintage Minolta 100-200mm f/4.5 (with mount adapter). I was considering the big old beer-can 70-210mm f/4, but I’d have ended up leaving it in the hotel a lot; this one is a lot easier to keep with me, and the effective 150-300mm zoom range is perfect for hand-held use. Also, it was under $40 at Green’s Camera World in Monterey, which I visited during my iPhone-replacement woes.

But I still needed to decide how to share map bookmarks with my sister, as mentioned previously. With perfect timing, Trello came to the rescue with their brand new map power-up. I was already doing all our trip planning in Trello boards, so it was pretty easy to add location data.

And since you can always export a Trello board to clean JSON, I was able to trivially generate a matching Google Maps/Earth KML file.

Since this is the first version of their mapping support, there are a few issues. First, it leaks memory like nobody’s business, crashing the app if you try to add too many locations in one session. Second, it only works in the Android/iOS apps at the moment, not the main Trello web site. Third, the search functionality is quite crude, and had a lot of trouble with non-English names; I spent a lot of time trying to outsmart it, and eventually had to give up and manually place about 10% of the pins (basically, switch to Google Maps, look up the location, find something nearby that’s less obscure, search for that in Trello, and then move the marker to the right spot).

The result, however, is a very clear overview of our options every day.

Okay, I think I’ve found my next vacation destination…

NSFW

(via)

(with apologies to Oscar Mayer…)

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
Your baloney has a first meme,
it’s ‘Rus-sian Col-lu-sion’.
Your baloney has a second meme,
it’s ‘Or-ange-Man-Is-Bad’.
Oh we’ll laugh in your face every day,
and if you ask us why we’ll saaaaay,
“​…cause Loony Leftists have to pay
for screwing up the USA.”
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Every anime girl ever…

(via)

…well, except for the ones suffering from A-cup angst.

On the bright side, anime girls won’t infect your laptop during a software update like ASUS. Unless you download them from one of those sites…

This week, one Princess thickens the plot in Endro!, and two others may be separated forever in Manaria Friends (or, y’know, not).

The MF episode kind of feels like a season-ender, but since nothing really happens in this show, it’s hard to tell. I wouldn’t mind at all if it continued, especially since Grea clearly hasn’t thought through the consequences of her decision.

I mentioned earlier that the only app that lost all its data when I restored from backup onto a new iPhone was MyNoise. Fortunately I only had one that really mattered, and I was able to reconstruct it from the version on my iPad.

The web version of it is here; it’s a simple mix of Japanese Garden, Temple Bells, and Wooden Chimes, and it does a great job of masking annoying noises that interfere with getting to sleep.

Well, for me, anyway; for all I know it’ll do the exact opposite for anyone else. 😁

Got the call that my new new new phone arrived at the Monterey Apple Store on Friday afternoon, and since I had no interest in fighting traffic, I went over first thing Saturday morning to pick it up.

Yes, I made sure to test for the presence of wireless antennas before leaving the store this time, and was pleasantly surprised that this one had up-to-date firmware on it as well. I let it charge all day before restoring my backup to it just after midnight.

Why? Because after it’s all done, I have to erase and re-pair the watch, which wipes out the day’s activity and exercise, and it won’t re-sync music until it’s hooked up to the charger. So, as soon as 9,000+ songs finish syncing to the phone, I can pair the watch, plug them both in to charge overnight, and go to bed. Then spend the morning re-authorizing apps to use the fingerprint reader, refresh cached data, re-download in-app purchases, re-assign ringtones and alarm songs, erase all but three of the auto-synced watch apps, etc, etc.

Special thanks to Neal for the iPhone 7 loaner that was actually useful, unlike the Apple Store loaner.

Bonus: the Del Rey Oaks Safeway has a fully-stocked Boar’s Head deli. It’d be nice if the ones near my house upgraded, but this is closer than Morgan Hill, unless I’m coming from my office.

With all due respect, “data detectors” are bullshit.

When I type “1​/2-pound roast beef” into a shopping list, I am most definitely not planning a meeting on January 2nd at noon. Particularly not the January 2nd that was nearly three months ago.

Seriously, if you had a QA department, would you know what to do with it?