I had been a T-Mobile customer for many years and was generally pleased with my service until I got an e-mail stating that they were changing my plan and adding $6 a month to my bill. This led me to consider alternatives.

Consumer Reports reviewed cell carriers and ranked US Mobile as best, because you could get a SIM for each of the three major carriers (T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon), and switch between as reception varied for about 1/3 of the cost. Sounded like a good deal. What could go wrong since I could still use T-Mobile?

I praised Antigravity to a friend, and he asked Grok about it:

I have been using Google's Antigravity to write desktop (windows and MacOS) applications that are much better and more polished than I could have created myself. But I did have to do lots of testing and refinement interactively. Please checkout my store at

https://jamesrome.com

Antigravity (AG) is Google's developer workspace that lets AI create programs on various platforms. 

I got an email trying to get me to subscribe to spotfix (https://www.doboard.com/spotfix):

It seemed like an interesting idea, so I asked Gemini (Flash Extended) to create a Drupal 11 module that would do this.

It took me about 30 minutes to enter all of the following code, but it worked the first time I tried it!

I have been slowly starting to use AI on my Mac Studio. Since I am embedded in the Google ecosystem, my AI of choice is Gemini.

I spent most of last weekend taking a Zoom course called C135 Generative AI Mastermind INTL. It opened my eyes to see what could be done using AI. Their bottom line was that it is vital to create a structured requirements document to get good results. This week I decided to try and do something difficult. I tried this using Bolt (recommended in the course, but ran out of tokens, so I tried it using Gemini (I had a Pro subscription).

I now have a Google Pixel 10 Pro Ultra Watch and a Google Watch 4. I also have diabetes, and use the Abbott Freestyle Libre 3+ sensor to continually monitor my blood sugar. Unfortunately, the new Libre and older Libre 3 Android apps drain my phone battery in just 9 hours, even when I am not using the phone actively! This is unacceptable. 

I just went on a two-week river trip from Budapest to Amsterdam and left my $3500 camera behind in favor of my phone. I am glad it did, and exceeded most of my expectations.

Luckily, I purchased a KraftGeek Magnetic camera grip and 5000mAh charger to use with the Pixel 10. It has a very handy button that activates the shutter too.

Why did I get this phone?

I used to use Samsung phones, but switched to Pixels when the Pixel 8 came out. Despite the Pixel 10 CPU (and especially the GPU) being slower than those in Samsungs, they are plenty fast enough for everything I do; but I do not play video games. 

For many, many years now, OpenSUSE would not install Parallels Tools in LEAP virtual machines.

I have been trying LEAP 16 beta in Parallels on my Mac Studio, and after Parallels' update to version Version 20.3.1 (55959), I was suddenly surprised to see a black triangle asking me to update Parallel's tools, and to my surprise, it worked! There are some things to know about the process that I will explain here.