The Framework 16 Laptop

I have been waiting about a year to receive my pre-ordered Framework 16 laptop. It is not cheap—mine cost about $3000. But it will hopefully allow me to update it in the future. It also has the largest complement of SSDs (6 TB) that I have seen, and has slots for 6 ports which are hot-swappable and (mostly) interchangeable. It also comes with the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS processor. While this is not the fastest processor available, it is fast enough, and very energy efficient.

Cell phones are now a necessity, and cash is dead

On a recent cruise around New Zealand, ending in Sydney, Australia, I finally realized that a cell phone is a necessity. 

Pixel8 Pro — Great phone, but has issues

The AI in this phone is stunning, especially for photos. The 3 50-megapixel cameras give great detail, and the motion of my shaky hands is removed. 

BUT, there are issues:

I love my new Lumix G9 II. I previously had a G8 and two OM-1s. I primarily bought this camera to do videos, and it is a lot easier to do them on the G9 II than on the OM1. First of all, it has people detection. OM Systems OM-1 can detect animals, but not people. This ruined my last video when violin bows rose up into the video of the conductor, and stole the focus away.

Here is a link to the 64 MB talk I gave to ORICLE on October 13, 2023

You may also watch it as I gave the talk to Friends of ORNL.

After I updated my Mac Studio, I had no Internet. I have a hard-wired Ethernet connection to my Xfinity Xfi Gateway, Instead, I got this strange Web page:

Of course, as usual, the Xfinity advice was totally wrong since there is no Xfi App. It has been retired in favor of the plain Xfinity app. It is impossible to use Xfinity internet without a cell phone!

Freestyle Libre 2 app is impossible to use on Android. Freestyle 3 (also) drains phone battery in a few hours.

I just got an Abbott Freestyle Libre 2 system to measure my blood sugar. It is nice to not have to do pin sticks, but the app makes my phone unusable. 

On my Mac Studio, all worked well on Ventura 13.2. My home directory was on a different disk in an OWC ThunderBay Flex8 enclosure.

1. After the Ventura 13.3 upgrade, I logged in and never get a desktop. I reinstalled Venture--no change. I made a new account on  another non-MacOS disk, and That did not work properly either. I was unable to log into iCloud (refused to accept UID/Pwd) and also said my keychain was wrong. Resetting the keychain did not help.

I subscribe to the New York Times (digitally). When using their RSS feed using News Explorer on my Mac, I get blocked as soon as I log in. After filling in their support form for two days, I tried using the NYT chat: