• 😷 A fairly low-key week for the most part, as I was working as best as possible while getting over the cold I got last week.
• 🚀 Saturday I did make it out to our final staff meeting for Norwescon, where we close out this year’s convention with going over our “onions and roses”; the things that could have gone better, and the things that went well. After that was the post-convention social. Nice way to wrap up the week.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Finally got around to getting to the next book in my Hugo Best Novel reading project and finished Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin.

🎧 Listening

This week’s new album was Laibach’s just-released Musick, which I am very much enjoying. They’ve gone full-on electropop, while still being very Laibach, leaning into the “taking over the top goth-industrial seriousness to hilariously ridiculous extremes” aesthetic that they’re so good at. Definitely pushing my “perkygoth” buttons.

🔗 Linking

• The M2x2: A neat 3D-printed enclosure for a Mac Mini, designed to look like a classic LEGO computer brick.

• Alexander Hanff at That Privacy Guy: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.: “Google Chrome is reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.”

• Sergey Tkachenko at WinAero: Google Chrome Secretly Downloads Huge Local AI Models: Includes pointers for removing the 4 GB file, though you’ll need to figure out where to add the backslashes in the file path.

• Kai Kupferschmidt at Science: Reality Check: “[Hany] Farid, a specialist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, is one of the world’s leading experts in determining whether a photo or video has been manipulated. Since helping to found the field of digital forensics more than 20 years ago, he has kept pace with massive technological change.” Includes some good tips on using real-world geometry to spot some common errors in AI-generated images.

• whatcable: “macOS menu bar app that tells you, in plain English, what each USB-C cable plugged into your Mac can actually do.”

• Terry Godier: The Boring Internet: “Personal sites are coming back. RSS feeds are coming back. Webrings are coming back. Mastodon is, for all its quirks, a federated SMTP-shaped thing for short messages and not a platform in the old sense. Small internet radio stations still broadcast from servers with ugly URLs. Newsletters still arrive through SMTP. Software projects still publish changelogs through feeds. ¶ Communities still gather in places too small to be interesting to investors.”

Book 17 of 2026: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (2006 Hugo Best Novel)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: It seems I read this 13 years ago; oddly, I have no memory of that, though I rated it four stars back then. High-concept SF (the Earth is suddenly enclosed in a bubble where time passes at a drastically reduced rate as the rest of the universe goes on) that allows for exploration of how we (as a species and as individuals) cope with impending Armageddon, cosmic mysteries, and relationships with each other.

• ♿️ I spent all week in Spokane for the annual linked spring conferences for DSSC (Disability Support Services Council) and WAPED (Washington Association on Postsecondary Education and Disability), two disability in higher education groups I’m part of. Both conference were good, with a good mix of networking, support, and information; many of these are people I see regularly via Zoom and on listservs, and it’s always good to get a chance to connect in person.
• 😷 Unfortunately, it appears that I let my masking game slip at an inopportune point, and came home from the conference with a cold. So our weekend was a lot of rest, fluids, and trying to kick this out of my system.
• 🎂 Sunday was my birthday – I’ve successfully made it to 53! This was a pretty low-key birthday (in part due to the aforementioned cold, but also planned that way, as we knew I’d be coming off of a week of travel and conference), but it wasn’t a bad one. Lots of naps, some cake, and a few presents…including the Enterprise-D Lego set that’s been sitting in our basement since it arrived in December!

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Two books finished this week, the final two books in a TOS Star Trek trilogy that I started last week:

• Best Defense by David Mack
• Purgatory’s Key by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore

📺 Watching

While traveling, I watched the first three of the modern Planet of the Apes reboots. Now just need to find some time to watch the latest one.

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• War for the Planet of the Apes: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

🎧 Listening

I’ve been on a bit of a Front Line Assembly (and associated projects) kick this week, in part due to the release of the nine-disk Excursions 1992-1998 anthology, focusing on various FLA side projects (Noise Unit, Synæsthesia, Pro>Tech, Equinox, and Delerium).

🔗 Linking

• Joshua Solorzano at the Kent Reporter: Federal Way man’s Lego legacy includes model of Space Needle: “Hussey said his acme is the 14-foot-tall Lego Space Needle that now sits in the Space Needle gift shop in Seattle for visitors from around the globe to see.”

• Mike Carson: I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It: “…I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life. […] If two friends go a full year without tapping phones, the link between them softens. Not a punishment — a gentle nudge that real friendships are kept alive in person, not online. […] All of this is built around the simple idea that real friendships happen when you actually meet in person.” It’s an interesting idea, but I have more than a few quibbles with the assumption that I don’t have “real friendships” with the many, many people whom I have rarely, if ever, interacted with in person. Or that the friend I’ve had since third grade isn’t a “real” friend because we live 3,000 miles apart and don’t arrange for annual get togethers. It’s a interesting, but for me, somewhat flawed concept.

• Nataliya Gumenyuk at The Guardian: As a Ukrainian journalist, I’ve covered the US for 20 years. I find it increasingly shocking: “My country has been under occupation, dogged by corruption and war. Yet even I’ve been bewildered by the way the US seems to be fracturing.”

• Anil Dash: Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?: “If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why?” I remember so much of this history — I joined Flickr in September 2004 (here’s my first photo), when it was just seven months old (according to Wikipedia), and while never a “big name”, was around for all of that history. 22 years and 22,192 photos later, I’m glad Flickr’s still doing its thing.

• Jaron Schneider at PetaPixel: Adobe Has Run Out of Allies: “It is hard to imagine a more widely detested brand among its own users than Adobe. ¶ Adobe is alone, and it has only itself to blame. ¶ Those who once would have thrown themselves in front of oncoming fire to protect the software they loved — loved because of what it allowed them to do — will now do nothing but point and laugh as the company suffers.”

• Artemis II Photo Timeline: What it says on the tin. Great way to browse through the Artemis II mission.

• Tom Nardi at Hackaday: The GPS III Rollout is Almost Complete, But What Is It?: “Just last week, the tenth GPS III satellite was placed in orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Once it’s properly configured and operational, it will join its peers to form the first complete “block” of third-generation GPS satellites. Over the next decade, as many as 22 revised GPS III satellites are slated to take their position over the Earth, eventually replacing all of the aging satellites that billions of people currently rely on.”

Book 16 of 2026: Purgatory’s Key by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Good wrap up to this 50th anniversary trilogy. A bit of a bummer that one of the villains was so similar to one in the prior book (a woman so obsessed with a particular goal that she makes increasingly irrational and ill-considered decisions), but otherwise does a good job tying things up with the rest of the books. Overall, the trilogy does well in touching on a lot of TOS and incorporating hints of things to come.

Book 15 of 2026: Best Defense by David Mack.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: I enjoyed this middle book more than the opener, as the Romulans try to disrupt peace talks between the Federation and the Klingon Empire.

Well, it’s been a busy month. I kept meaning to come back to this “Weekly Notes” series and get caught up, and then there were more things to do, and here we are! So let’s just do a quick catch up.

• March 30–April 5: Norwescon week! I have a half-written post-con wrap-up in progress, but who knows if it will ever get finished, so I’ll just say that it was a really good year. Had a lot of fun with friends, DJ’d a good dance on Thursday, the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony on Friday went well, and my accessibility presentation on Saturday was lightly attended, but everyone who was there was very engaged and expressed how much they appreciated the information they got.

• April 6–12: A quiet week, somewhat intentionally so, as this was between Things Going On.

• April 13–19: A busy work week, with a weekend jaunt down to Vancouver, WA for a work conference for my wife, while I took a day to explore the Vancouver area and bounce down into the Portland area to visit my mom.

• April 20–26: Another busy work week, a lot of which was concerned with the sudden (if not entirely unexpected) delay of the ADA Title II update implementation deadline from this Friday the 24th to a year from now. It could have been a lot worse than a one-year delay, but there are a lot of us wondering what else is going to happen over the next year….

📸 Photos

Each of the following photos is linked to a larger photo album on Flickr. Click on through for more!

📚 Reading

I’ve finished four books over the past four weeks:

• Wet Visions edited by Cyn Mason; an anthology from 1988 of stories by Pacific Northwest authors that I discovered because it was regularly mentioned in old Norwescon program books.
• Identity Theft by Greg Cox; the most recently published Star Trek TOS novel.
• Usurpation by Sue Burke; the last of her Semiosis trilogy, which I’ve really enjoyed.
• Captain to Captain by Greg Cox; the first of a Star Trek TOS-era trilogy. I’m a bit behind on my book-a-week goal for the year, and diving into Trek books is generally a good way to get caught up.

📺 Watching

We’ve been enjoying History’s Greatest Mysteries from the History channel. It’s about 85% really interesting history, 10% crackpot conspiracy theories, and 5% “ALIENS!!!”

🎧 Listening

As usual, I recorded my set at Norwescon. If you’re looking for some background music to listen to during your day, you could (hopefully) do worse than this! Here’s my First Contact Galactic Gala, three and a half hours of music recorded live at Norwescon 48!

🔗 Linking

• Brigid Delaney at The Guardian: Expat influencers sold Dubai to the world and were paid to look the other way. Now the dream is crumbling: “The Maseratis are borrowed, the helicopters rented by the hour. But deep down Dubai is a lonely place, built by oppressed people.”

• Foz Meadows: Politics in SFF: Arguing With Andy Weir: “…just as baffled, angry transphobes can successfully use a variety of pronouns in everyday life without realizing that’s what they’re called, so too can authors like Andy Weir include politics and social commentary in their works without realizing that’s what they’ve done.”

• Catherynne M. Valente: Blood Money: The Anthropic Settlement: “They took the best work of my mind and used it to build the very thing that is actively ruining just about everything all the time. They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator. ¶ They took my heart and used it to replace me and everyone else.”

• Eric Eggert: Screen readers are not testing tools: “Screen readers show the symptoms of bad code, but not the actual problems. They are an indirect way to test.”

• Jonaki Mehta at NPR: These blind students say their college blocked their education. A new rule could help: “Digital accessibility is a major concern for students with blindness and other disabilities — an ever-changing landscape that often isn’t designed with disabilities in mind. ¶ Now, that could change: An update to regulations in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), set to take effect at the end of April, will require public institutions to meet new standards that dictate what accessibility should look like.”

• Ben Andrews at Digital Camera World: NASA chose an old DSLR as its primary Artemis II camera – here’s why: “There are plenty of premium cameras that could potentially work well for such a special task, but NASA has a long history of trusting Nikon for its photographic requirements, so it’s of little surprise NASA has again picked Nikon for Artemis II. What’s more surprising is the particular Nikon camera bodies you’ll find on board.”

• Sophie Hardach at the BBC: Wit, unker, git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy: “Tales of love and adventure from 1,000 years ago reveal a dazzling range of now-extinct English pronouns. They capture something unique about how people once thought about “two-ness”. But why did they die out in the first place?”

• Christopher Weber at the AP: From Early Nirvana To Phish, A Chicago Fan’s Secret Recordings Of 10,000 Shows Are Now Online: “Aadam Jacobs has secretly recorded over 10,000 local concerts since 1989. Now, they are cleaned up and ready to listen to for free online.”

• Clifford Winston at the New York Times: Where Did All the Affordable Cars Go?: “While politicians and economists scratch their heads at voters upset about affordability in a decent economy, they seem to somehow miss the fact that for most Americans, the purchase of a car has become a debt sentence.”

• Spencer Mortensen: Email address obfuscation: What works in 2026?: “Here are some of the best techniques for keeping email addresses hidden from spammers—along with the statistics on how likely they are to be broken.”

• Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism: AI Use Appears to Have a “Boiling Frog” Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns: “In a new study, researchers claim to provide the first causal evidence that leaning on AI to assist with ‘reasoning-intensive’ cognitive labor — mental tasks ranging from writing to studying to coding to simply brainstorming new ideas — can rapidly impair users’ intellectual ability and willingness to persist despite difficulty.”

• Colleen Gratzer: Can You Create Accessible PDFs in Affinity?: “I hope that Affinity will continue adding the basic and necessary accessibility features that designers need. But, sorry to say… Affinity just isn’t there yet as a full-on replacement to InDesign for accessibility work.”

• Oliver Schöndorfer: Dyslexia friendly fonts: Are they any good?: “TL;DR: So-called dyslexia friendly fonts perform worse than other typefaces, while conveying an either broken or playful aesthetic that might not fit to your project. As a rule of thumb, prefer more common typefaces with a looser spacing, open shapes, and distinct letters.”

• Emily M. Bender and Decca Muldowney: Why you should refuse to let your doctor record you: “So what’s the big deal with ‘AI’ charting? Here are nine reasons why we recommend refusing to consent to the use of scribing tools in healthcare settings.”

• Shri Khalpada at PerThirtySix: How The Heck Does Shazam Work?: “How audio fingerprinting and a connect-the-dots trick lets Shazam identify a song in seconds.”

• Newcastle University: Accessible conferences and events: “These guidelines that we have produced are intended as a checklist for use when planning and running an event. It might feel slightly daunting at first as you are having to rethink aspects of your approach to planning these events but please be reassured that doing something is better than nothing and any attempt to improve accessibility will be welcomed.”

• Chris Klimek at NPR: Before sci-fi was everywhere, this pioneering magazine championed ‘scientifiction’: “His portmanteau never quite made it into port. But Gernsback’s innovation of collecting previously-diffuse bits of literature ruminating on scientific discovery or technological advancement in one place proved to be an idea with staying power. The evidence is all around us, on all your streaming services and movie marquees, if not your bookshelves.”

• Michaeleen Doucleff at NPR: The surprising origin of 4 features that superglue kids — and adults — to screens: “During the trial in California, the attorney bringing the case accused Meta and Google of designing their apps to behave like ‘digital casinos.’ That’s an apt comparison, according to Schüll’s research, because major design elements of social media have surprising roots in the gambling industry.”

Book 14 of 2026: Captain to Captain by Greg Cox.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: The first of a trilogy, this is primarily centered on Number One (now more well known from Discovery and Stranger New Worlds) when she was earlier in her career, serving on the Enterprise under Captain April. It’s kind of amusing, as this was written just shortly before her appearances in the modern shows, so it’s definitely Majel Barrett’s version rather than Rebeca Romijn’s. The adventure is fairly standard, with the common-for-modern-novels callbacks and references; nothing groundbreaking so far, but not bad.

Book 13 of 2026: Usurpration by Sue Burke.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: The last book in a trilogy, and does a good job of wrapping things up…or at least coming to an end, as in-world, the story is far from done. I don’t remember how I discovered the first book in the series, I’m glad I did. A fascinating non-human intelligence, and lots of themes of empathy and caring.

Book 12 of 2026: Identity Theft by Greg Cox.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Not a bad adventure, and does a decent job of trying to rehabilitate the technology from one of TOS’s more ignominious episodes. However, having one of the primary alien races be essentially humanoid evolved deer, complete with being referred to as bucks and does, and described with their antlers and rubbery noses, meant that my mental image of the entire adventure was basically a Star Trek LARP at a furry convention. Kinda worked against really being able to immerse myself in the story.

Recorded live at Norwescon 48, it’s my Thursday night dance, the First Contact Galactic Gala! Three and a half hours (half an hour longer than scheduled; thanks to everyone who stuck around late!) of music for you to enjoy.

1. Dead Cat Bounce & the Noisy Freaks – Duel of the Fates (John Williams Remix)
2. Delta Heavy – Conquer the Galaxy
3. Bimbo Jones feat. Ida Corr – See You Later (DJ’s From Mars Extended)
4. BTS – Permission to Dance
5. “Weird Al” Yankovic – Perform This Way
6. Fnogg – Hello, Shut Up and Dance
7. George Lamond – Don’t Stop Believin’ (Radio Edit)
8. Blur – Girls and Boys (Ryan Riot)
9. Dead or Alive – You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) (Hot Tracks)
10. Real Life – Send Me an Angel (1989 Radio Edit)
11. Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
12. Technotronic – Pump Up the Jam
13. Prince and the Revolution – Raspberry Beret
14. OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) – If You Leave
15. Bastille – Pompeii
16. Saja Boys, Andrew Choi, Neckwav, Danny Chung, Kevin Woo, Samuil Lee & Kpop Demon Hunters Cast – Soda Pop
17. Lady Gaga – Abracadabra
18. Sam Smith & Kim Petras – Unholy (Disclosure)
19. Chappell Roan – Pink Pony Club
20. Robyn – Dancing on My Own
21. Kesha – Joyride (Extended)
22. Night Club – Die in the Disco
23. DJ Schmolli – Cooler Rock ‘n’ Roll
24. Pitbull – Fireball
25. Groboclone – Sandroll
26. Boney M – Rasputin
27. Charles Gray, Little Nell, Richard O’Brien, Patricia Quinn, Cast – The Time Warp
28. David Bowie – Magic Dance
29. Beastie Boys – Fight for Your Right
30. The Police – Synchronicity II
31. Kate Bush – Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)
32. The KLF feat. Tammy Wynette – Justified and Ancient (Stand by the Jams 12″)
33. The Art of Noise feat. Tom Jones – Kiss
34. Janelle Monáe – Make Me Feel
35. Lady Gaga & BLACKPINK – Sour Candy
36. DNCE – Cake by the Ocean
37. Huntrx, Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami & Kpop Demon Hunters Cast – Golden
38. The Timelords – Doctorin’ the Tardis
39. Andrew Van Vlear – Why Is the Rum Gone?
40. Kylie Minogue – Can’t Get You Out of My Head
41. Icona Pop feat. Charli XCX – I Love It
42. XG – Gala
43. John Summit – Go Back
44. Charli XCX – Speed Drive
45. Skrillex feat. Sirah – Bangarang
46. DJ Cummerbund – Jereloose
47. Blackbook – I Dance Alone
48. Lady Gaga – Garden of Eden
49. Allie X – Off with Her Tits
50. Alok – To the Moon (ZSS)
51. Age of Love – The Age of Love (Charlotte de Witte & Enrico Sangiuliano Edit)
52. Venus Hum – I Feel Love
53. Queens of Acid – Lick It
54. Dua Lipa – Dance the Night
55. DJ Lobsterdust – Stayin’ Hot
56. Robyn – Dopamine
57. Bryan Bowers – The Scotsman (PG Steam Beats)
58. Melodysheep – Go the F*** to Sleep