The Miniphone Ultra, or “mpu”, is essentially just a case for the Apple Watch Ultra (versions 1, 2 or 3) that turns it into a miniature, minimalist smartphone. “There’s a guy I’ve been talking to who bought [an mpu] a while back,” says Jelley. “He told me that he’s had his phone shut away in his desk for two weeks. Nowadays, that’s kind of wild.”
OPERATIONS: wiping a bunch of stuff off my boards today READING:THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I am almost back to normal – just a cough and a sore throat for the most part, which means everyone else was right when they told me this mange going around lasts three weeks or so.
I have just been informed that a new coffee shop has opened, around the corner from me. When Uber came to town last month, I considered using it to get to Leigh, where Little Fin Roastery is, and then I caught the mange. And then Uber pulled out of town, apparently because they didn’t want to meet the council’s standards on private car hire. I am not Uber’s biggest fan, but huge chunks of my area are poorly served by public transport and I’m not walking for an hour and a half just to get a decent cup of coffee. And my deli of choice doesn’t do coffee! So I’m going to walk up to the new place in an hour and see if it will serve as a morning office. And once my chest is cleared and my voice comes back, I’ll be using the deli as my afternoon office for half the week, drinking £10 glasses of fancy wine and telling myself I am getting a great deal of thinking done and I have begun the great leap forwards.
AI is prompting investors to reassess every business model under the sun (vaguely reminded of that tech news website that clearly used a random headline generator into which they plugged the tech buzzword of the moment, which is how you got the headline “Can IoT Help With Bicycles?” There’s also a sense of people thinking they can see a huge hammer in the distance, even though it’s mostly made of smoke, and assuming everything around them looks like a nail. I saw a story, I think on World Of Reel, about a guy who’d been given 30k to make an AI film and was trying to crowdsource an idea for what film to make on social media)
OPERATIONS: I have a huge consulting job to nail down and a prose serial project to solve and it all needs to be done this week. And I’m out on Saturday night, so I need to land the newsletter before then, too. I am copy-typing out of a notebook for the next hour. STATUS: I really need to stop buying clothes and I really need to stop looking at the watches at Sputnik1957. READING: READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
…first prize went to the Wineflask, in which the almost centenarian Cratinus defended his own drinking with the line, ‘You’ll never fashion anything clever by drinking water!’
LISTENING:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
OPERATIONS: still zero energy, so today is for scriptment – that version of scripting where you just slap down dialogue and vague directions and then go back when you feel human to convert it up into full script. STATUS: two steps from the boneyard READING:A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Still gripped by plague. The weather outside is dismal and has been for days – the garden has become an intractable bog and I have new plants sitting in buckets of water, waiting for the possibility of me having two days without rain and the ability to move without coughing or otherwise dripping.
OPERATIONS: work is for people not drowning in their own fluids STATUS: ded. Less than 7hrs sleep. Inbox 150. Connecting the Retro Nano to the phone and doing podcasts all day. READING:SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
1236pm and I still haven’t eaten, so I have failed at the day already. Remarkably little of interest on the RSS today. The dollar continues to crash against the pound, and of course I have a payment in transit right now. I fully intended to go out for coffee this morning but it was cold and I had things to do early on – including trying to fix the fact that my newsletter header image is somehow vanishing in Beehiiv after years of working perfectly.
You ever have one of those days where you just know from the get that nothing is going to go well? Happy Monday.
TODAY:
A list of some of the current smart glasses options. I still wonder if glasses aren’t a dead end. In The Economist today, I read: “HSBC, a bank, estimates there are 15m users of smart glasses worldwide; Apple, which reports its latest quarterly earnings this week, is thought to have sold 250m iPhones last year alone.”
The film version of PROJECT HAIL MARY is going to be two hours and forty-six minutes long! I actually liked the book, but I’m going to be curious to see if Drew Goddard addressed the underlying autistic note in and the apparent asexuality of the protagonist.
And an IG carousel of bookshops in London, a few of which I know personally, some of which I’ve never heard off, so I’m off to look at websites:
OPERATIONS: scripts, foreword, prose series development, outline, newsletter template fixing, running out of month very very fast now STATUS: made a venison goulash from scratch last night that turned out very well. Secret weapon:
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I found a weird little object online – a USB reader for floppy discs. I still have a few boxes of floppy discs from way back when that I didn’t throw out. There’s a fair chance they’re all as corrupted and rotted as shit now, but I picked up said weird little object and I’m going to see if any of those disks are recoverable. Chances are they have a lot of old Marvel, DC and Wildstorm stuff on, and while it’s not crucial to have copies of those old scripts, and they would be painful to look at, I feel like it would be kind of nice to possess them again. I’ve had so many hard drive and storage issues over the years, so many lost scripts and documents and emails, that I’ve gotten used to considering it all volatile and ephemeral and have learned not to be upset at losing things and to let go of things. To be able to recover just a handful of old pieces would have its pleasures.
In retrospect, I should have printed off literally everything and gotten filing cabinets and, I dunno, a full library system or a zettelkasten index or something, and stayed analogue. I have this memory of a bit in the old MAX HEADROOM show where Blank Reg tries to sell a cyberpunk kid a book on the grounds that it’s a “non-volatile storage medium.” Oh, bugger me, the clip’s on YouTube-
TODAY:
Former Bank of England analyst insists UK must plan for a financial crisis in the event that the US government announces the discovery of alien life: “UAP disclosure is likely to induce ontological shock and provoke psychological responses with material consequences … There might be extreme price volatility in financial markets due to catastrophising or euphoria, and a collapse in confidence if market participants feel uncertain on how to price assets using any of the familiar methods.”
Humans returned to the British Isles after the last Ice Age 500 years earlier than we thought, largely down to the balmy climate of southern England, where I live
The 9th Rob Marshall book. I have a great fondness for these less than cosy Scottish crime novels. This one seems to be in the nature of a put pilot for a new series, so it’s probably not the one to start with.
OPERATIONS: script, foreword, prose series development, outline, newsletter STATUS: what is this outside world you speak of READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) LISTENING:Night Tracks LAST WATCHED: GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I blew off everything last night: made harissa lamb shanks with truffled mashed potato, then a jar of cold ginger tea, then a jar of blood orange orangeade. But it turns out I still can’t make hummus.
TODAY:
Here in the UK, Ofcom is “investigating” X over sexual deepfakes, which could lead to a fine of 10% of X’s global revenue, while Musk is appearing in public with Pete Hegseth, signalling a return to the Trump administration fold.
Erich von Daniken died. At least one generation will remember his weird books being on the shelves of every charity shop in the world.
OPERATIONS: Today is scripting and figuring out my schedule for the next few weeks, because I am appallingly behind and need to sort myself out. STATUS: My near vision has been slowly deteriorating over the last five years or so, and I’ve been needing very strong light to read some print. Herself saw me struggling to read a small-print label yesterday, and handed me a pair of her +2 reading glasses that were laying around, as an experiment. And suddenly holy shit. Mortifying. I held on to the glasses and spent an hour reading THE NOMA GUIDE TO FERMENTATION without needing a powerful reading light. I’m 58 next month and have just ordered my first pair of reading glasses. I am mortified, to be honest. READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) and THE NOMA GUIDE TO FERMENTATION (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
If you didn’t yet get today’s newsletter, it seems the Beehiiv service is on a bit of a slowdown – as I write this, 75 minutes after the scheduler sent it out, it’s still only 68% delivered. if you didn’t get yours, it’s here:
I am at the time of writing still waiting for the system to send it to ME.
TODAY:
Neuromorphic computers. “A. field that applies principles of neuroscience to computing systems to mimic the brain’s function and structure.” Very good at partial differential equations, it turns out, which are good for fluid dynamics, weather patterning, structural stress mechanics. But here’s the good bit, buried at the bottom:
The researchers believe that neuromorphic computing could help bridge the gap between neuroscience and applied mathematics, offering new insights into how the brain processes information.
“Diseases of the brain could be diseases of computation,” Aimone said. “But we don’t have a solid grasp on how the brain performs computations yet.”
If their hunch is correct, neuromorphic computing could offer clues to better understand and treat neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The dark matter bones of a failed galaxy. That was worth waking up for.
Now, an international team of researchers claims to have used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to discover an entirely new type of celestial object: dubbed “Cloud-9,” it’s a “starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud,” per the European Space Agency. The lack of stars caught the team by surprise, indicating Cloud-9 was a “fossil leftover” — what ScienceAlert memorably termed the “dark-matter bones of a failed galaxy.”
OPERATIONS: Not sure what today is yet. I have a lot of competing thoughts and I’m waiting for them to settle a bit. While also knowing in the back of my head that I have to go shopping and clear the kitchen! But I’m thinking I need to get back into a project I started developing last year, because I know the artist is waiting for the pitch document… STATUS: the temperature outside is starting a slow climb again, so I can shrug out of the heavy layers in a little while and dress less like a Dark Ages snow-cave hermit. READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) LISTENING: New Music Show
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I asked for the Snowsky Echo Mini DAP (digital audio player) for Xmas. I got the Snowsky Retro Nano DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) instead, because it turns out those two devices look exactly the fucking same in pictures.
A DAC improves and amplifies digital music and allows it to be pumped through wired headphones. You can Bluetooth it to a networked device or USB it for a hard connection to a computer or anything with a USB-C hole.
My office speakers are actually an ancient Altec Lansing inMotion portable set that is no longer made. They connect to the computer through the computer’s headphone jack. I Bluetoothed the Retro Nano to my phone and plugged the speakers into the Retro Nano’s headphone jack. Suddenly all the podcasts trapped on my phone sound better.
There’s an app that goes with it called FiiOMusic, which can set equalisers – I’m on iPhone, so the app can only reach what’s in iTunes. I experimented with “Breath Of Odin” by Julian Cope, and on the “classical” setting it picks out all kinds of sound detail that is otherwise barely there just playing the mp3.
I was a little frustrated that I didn’t get the mp3 player – the sound is great on the cheap player I picked up last year but the UI is awkward – but I am finding uses for the DAC and I suspect I will uncover more. The thing comes with a lanyard, so you can hang it around your neck, plug earbuds or 4.4mm IEMs into it, Bluetooth it to your phone and then walk away from your phone and just listen. Which has an appeal to me these days.
