Yesterday, I drove to Champaign-Urbana for the Illinois men’s home basketball opener. Because I’m going to the CSO concert tonight, I stayed here overnight. When I started my car this morning, CarPlay connected to my phone and offered to give me directions home. Snort. | Continue reading
I stopped charting Apple’s quarterly results back in 2019 and don’t intend to return to it, but after seeing the recent posts at Six Colors and TidBITS, I thought I’d try out a new graph. | Continue reading
Before going out for a bike ride this morning, I checked the Weather app to see the speed and direction of the wind. On days with a decent wind, I prefer to ride out against the wind and come back with it. Here’s what the app showed: | Continue reading
I got some good replies on Mastodon after Saturday’s post. Longtime friend of the blog Nathan Grigg said he’s always assumed that GPS-measured lengths would be long because no matter how straight your path, the GPS error would make it zigzagged. Then wherami and thvedt pointed ou … | Continue reading
I did the Fall Color 5k Run and Walk at the Morton Arboretum this morning. I say “did” to downplay the fact that I don’t run races like this, I walk them. I got terrible shin splints 20+ years ago and haven’t run more than a few hundred meters at a time since then. But I do try t … | Continue reading
I’m still experimenting with ChatGPT and Claude as proofreaders for my blog posts. Because I’ve been writing more posts lately, I’ve been learning the good and the bad more rapidly than I would have expected when I started this. Time for a preliminary assessment. | Continue reading
I was looking at the NFC standings yesterday, particularly the NFC North, the Chicago Bears’ division. The hated Packers are at the top of the division with a 4-1-1 record and a winning percentage of .750. | Continue reading
A footnote in last night’s post mentioned that the Amazon links therein had been cleaned of cruft. Today, I’ll show the simple automated way I do that. | Continue reading
I was talking to a friend about pencils a few weeks ago. I noticed she had a Blackwing 602 and asked her about it. She told me she never got along with mechanical pencils. The leads break too easily and the erasers don’t last—once they’re worn and need to be adjusted outward, the … | Continue reading
Scientific American published a clock puzzle a couple of weeks ago that I finally got around to looking at today. It wasn’t hard, but I’m less interested in the solution than in a very small discrepancy I found. Finding discrepancies was a big part of my job, so it was nice to se … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I mentioned in a footnote that I have a script that takes a URL on the clipboard and makes a Markdown reference-style link in BBEdit. Actually, I have several link-making scripts for BBEdit. I’ve written about some of them already (including very long ago), but n … | Continue reading
I was talking with David Sparks and Stephen Hackett recently, and the conversation came around to fixing typos and other errors in our writing. I think the typos and poorly constructed sentences here at ANIAT have been reduced since I started having my Mac read my posts aloud to … | Continue reading
My older son and I have been playing a daily basketball trivia game. Here’s the question from yesterday with my answers handwritten on the sheet. | Continue reading
After building my iPhone screenshot framing system, I decided to tackle the problem of Mac screenshots. I’ve been using CleanShot X for a while, but the small annoyances that come with using it have been weighing on me, and it seemed like a good time to return to a system built e … | Continue reading
If you think I’ve written too much about Mathematica recently, don’t worry. This post discusses something in Mathematica that annoys me, but it isn’t really about Mathematica. It’s about how I eliminated that annoyance with Keyboard Maestro and how I should have done so long ago. | Continue reading
I ran across Mathematica’s NumberLinePlot function recently and wondered if I could use it to make dot plots. The answer was yes, but not directly. | Continue reading
A couple of years ago, after Major League Baseball announced they’d start using a pitch clock, I said I would write a post about the change in the duration of regular season games. I didn’t. My recent post about Apple’s Sports app and its misunderstanding of baseball standings re … | Continue reading
I watched this Numberphile video a few days ago and learned not only about Harshad numbers, which I’d never heard of before, but also some new things about defining functions in Mathematica. | Continue reading
Although I complained last year of the Sports app’s deficiencies, I’ve been giving it another try. I do like having the score of a favorite team continually updated in the Dynamic Island, but just this morning I learned of another problem. | Continue reading
This morning, as I was scrolling through Apple News, I came upon this article from the Wall Street Journal about how NFL teams are punting less than they used to. It included this terrible graph: | Continue reading
After getting my new iPhone 17 Pro last Friday, I decided I should update my system for framing iPhone screenshots. This should have meant just downloading new templates from the Apple Design Resources page and changing a filename in the Retrobatch workflow, but I decided to effe … | Continue reading
Alex Chan published a post today that struck me immediately as something I should s̸t̸e̸a̸l̸ adapt for my own use. It’s a bookmarklet that creates a URL linking to the selected text within a web page. The selected text is called a text fragment, and a link to it will typically ca … | Continue reading
As I often do, I thought it worthwhile to put up a quick post showing how I made the graphics in my previous post. The images were made in Mathematica, mainly through the Graphics3D command. The exception was the plot of 10,000 random points; that was done through ListPointPlot3D … | Continue reading
This morning, John D. Cook posted an article about generating uniformly distributed points over the interior of a triangle. He offered three options, one that failed to distribute the points uniformly and two that succeeded. I want to talk about the failure. | Continue reading
I was in Cedar Rapids Wednesday afternoon to see the final Louis Sullivan jewel box bank in Iowa. It was kind of disappointing but still had some nice details. | Continue reading
This morning I visited the Louis Sullivan jewel box bank in Grinnell, Iowa. Built in 1914, this one is known as the Merchant’s National Bank. | Continue reading
With the Labor Day weekend behind me, I drove from Minnesota down into Algona, Iowa, to see the first of three Louis Sullivan jewel box banks in the Hawkeye State. | Continue reading
Today’s Louis Sullivan jewel box bank is the National Farmers’ Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota. I stopped here on the way up to the Twin Cities, where I’ll be visiting my daughter and going to the Minnesota State Fair. | Continue reading
You may recall my post from earlier this summer about the Louis Sullivan jewel box banks and how ChatGPT gave me the wrong information about the best way to tour all of them. Today I started a trip that should hit five of the eight banks. Oh, I’m also doing some other stuff, like … | Continue reading
As I said back in June, one of my goals for my library search system (recently updated) was to be able to check on whether I already owned a book while in a used bookstore. I got to use it for that very purpose a couple of days ago, and it worked just as I hoped. | Continue reading
Last year, I complained about Apple’s way of calculating and presenting trends in the Health app. Today I’m going to complain about how it handles trends in the Fitness app. I like to spread my complaints around. | Continue reading
Something Kieran Healy wrote several years ago has stuck with me: If you want to measure change, you can’t change the measure. Kieran attributes that pithy bit of advice to Tom Smith of the General Social Survey, but my Google and Kagi searches always lead to Kieran. Regardless, … | Continue reading
After a couple of months of using my library search web page, I decided it needed a small upgrade, which I added today. It’s a new button that resets the search form. | Continue reading
I don’t want to give you the impression that I get all my blogging ideas from Jason Snell, but here’s the second one this week. It was inspired by his post this morning about using the new folder automation feature in macOS 26. After bookmarking the article so I can refer to it a … | Continue reading
Nobody comes here for Apple news, so I assume you’ve already heard that Apple has started activating the blood oxygen sensor on all Apple Watches with the sensor. Until today, watches sold in the United States after January 2024 had their sensors deactivated because of the Masimo … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, I published a post about a Shortcut I made to help me c̸h̸e̸a̸t̸ play the NY Times Connections game on my iPhone. It’s called “Play Connections,” and it takes a screenshot, crops it to just the game grid, and saves it to Photos. I then use the highlighter tool … | Continue reading
I was mentioned in the Snell Talk segment of yesterday’s episode of Upgrade. Jason was asked if he had a paddleboard, and he talked about how he’d like to have a kayak to go paddling in the bay near his home. The downside of owning a kayak is that you have to store and transport … | Continue reading
This Scientific American article (web | Apple News) about new hydrogel adhesives is interesting, but I have one small nit I need to pick with it. | Continue reading
As a companion piece to the post on the moment-area method, today we’ll go through another way to solve the differential equations of beam bending without doing any serious math. This is called the conjugate beam method, and it was developed by Harold Westergaard in this 1921 pap … | Continue reading
I started a new notebook last week and thought it worth writing another update on how I’m using it. | Continue reading
This morning, I checked the iPhone Health app to see how long I’ve been sleeping recently. I wanted to look at the past month but mistakenly tapped the 6M button instead of the M. This is what I saw: | Continue reading
My last few posts have involved the solution of differential equations. Structural engineers tend to avoid using the solution techniques taught in math class, partly because we’re not that good at math and partly because people who were good at math figured out ways for us to get … | Continue reading
In retirement, I’ve taken to going through old engineering textbooks to fill in holes that weren’t covered in my classes. These aren’t necessarily the assigned texts, but they’re books I heard about. Recently, I’ve started on Mathematical Methods in Engineering by Theodore von Ká … | Continue reading
Leon Cowle asked Claude Sonnet to solve the same beam bending problem that I recently asked ChatGPT to solve, and he sent me Claude’s answers. Like ChatGPT, Claude started off giving the correct answer, but fell down when trying to explain it. What surprised me was the difference … | Continue reading
A couple of years ago, I asked ChatGPT to solve two simple structural analysis problems. It failed pretty badly, especially on the second problem, where it wouldn’t fix its answer even after I told it what it was doing wrong. Earlier this week, I decided to give it another chance … | Continue reading
I mentioned on Mastodon how much I enjoyed Myke Hurley’s interview of John Gruber on the most recent episode of Cortex. One part that particularly resonated with me was when Gruber spoke of all the online bookmark managers he’s used over the years and how none of them have stuck. … | Continue reading
Bruce Ediger, who blogs at Information Camouflage, has been doing some interesting numerical experimentation recently; first in a post about estimating population size from a sample of serial numbers (you may have seen this Numberphile video on the same topic), and then a couple … | Continue reading
Last week, I was going to be out with my MacBook Pro all day, and I wanted to make sure it was fully charged. I had noticed that it was typically charging up only to about 80%, and I assumed that was because Sequoia was doing some clever battery-life-lengthening thing. I wanted t … | Continue reading