Scratch Pad: Timing, AudioMoth, Foghorns

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I used to do this on Saturday mornings over coffee, but it recently became clear to me that that timing is counterproductive, since I aim to take weekends off social media — thus, doing this chore on Saturday morning meant pulling up social media on Saturday morning, which is not what I want to be doing. So, now I’m collating late Friday afternoon, and then posting on Saturday morning. As for social media, these days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. 

▰ A privacy filibuster: Based on the appearance of “” in automated transcriptions of human speech, the best current way to keep AI/ML from comprehending a conversation is for an additional person to speak continuously at the same time in a way the others can just ignore.

▰ My phone is set to a voice (South African, according to fruit company linguists). When I decline to reply to a text message, it says “OK,” which always sounds like it’s in on some unspoken meaning I’ve thus telegraphed. It sounds like what it means is “OK, you cheeky monkey.”

Also, I realize that the word “telegraph” has itself long since transformed from an actual form of direct communication to a synonym for suggesting something indirectly.

▰ This is aimed an no one in particular: there’s rarely reason to follow-up about an album you’ve asked me to write about, and much as I try for it not to affect me, after three or four emails, the correspondence does begin to negatively impact the likelihood of what you’re asking.

▰ Between June 23 and August 4 I used the AudioMoth for 14 overnight recordings of five to six hours each night (half indoors, half out), yielding over 26 gigabytes of sound, on just three AA batteries. And far as I can tell, the batteries still have about half a charge. Amazing.

▰ This is incredibly obvious, but only today during guitar class did it occur to me that when I move chords in a major scale up and down the fretboard, each string is in its own mode. (I can be a slow learner.)

▰ Moved to Obsidian.md from IA Writer for markdown and general note-taking. So far it’s nice: elegant, solid, customizable. (Side note: I love that a 1994 decision to use .md as Moldova’s top-level domain led to it being a favorite of medical professionals and coders.)

▰ Summer in San Francisco is foghorn mating season