IT: Technology, Language, and Cultures - Lisa L. Spangenberg

Starter Pens Challenge Followup

Lisa Spangenberg — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 17:33:15 +0000

I started the challenge using a new Lamy ABC with a Lamy Blue cartridge, a new Pilot Kakuno demonstrater with an M nib and filled with Pilot Iroshuzuku Murasaki-Shikibo, and an eye-droppered Platinum Preppy Crystal 03 with Pilot Iroshizuku Momiji (Autumn Leaves). I dropped the Preppy on a tile floor two minutes after filling it. The body cracked. It’s a hairline crack I can feel but not see, but the crack is such that I don’t feel comfortable using it eye-droppered (it will be fine with a cartridge). I swapped the Preppy for a Crimson Platinum Prefounte M nib with Pilot Iroshizuku Momiji (Autumn Leaves). I’m still using all three pens, quite happily. I already knew I liked the Prefounte. I like it so much that I own two, the Crimson, and a Deep Sea, both with converters and M nibs. The Prefounte is essentially a Preppie with a brightly colored transparent body, with either a Fine or Medium nib. The body colors are vibrant and the pen is pleasurable to use. The converter has to be purchased separately, which is annoying given that the Prefounte otherwise requires Platinum’s proprietary cartridges. Both the Lamy ABC and the Pilot Kakuno were intended as school pens. The Kakuno has a smiley on the nib. The Pilot Kakuno has a smooth nib and writes well, but I find the hexagonal shape of the body and grip slightly awkward, verging on uncomfortable. I adjust to it, but the Kakuno, as much as I like the nib, is not a pen I’d pick for long form writing. I expected to like the Pilot Kakuno, and I do, but not nearly as much as I like the Lamy ABC. I bought the right-handed blue version of the pen. The Lamy ABC has a rubber slightly cushiony grip above the nib. It lacks the triangular grip of the Safari, and is quite comfortable, even for lengthy writing sessions. The nib A is a ”rounded“ nib Lamy designed especally for this pen, and is very smooth and easy to control. I like the feel of the wooden body, but the Lamy ABC is both short, and admittedly less than cool in its visual aesthetics. I’d suggest it as a great starter pen, but I know most adults would balk at the Lamy ABC’s appearance. Nevertheless, the Lamy ABC is going to be a regular in my pen rotation because it is so pleasurable to write with.

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Starter Pen Challenge

Lisa Spangenberg — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 20:20:20 +0000

I’m going to emulate Ana of The Well Appointed Desk and accept Derek of dwrdnet YouTube challenge to use only starter fountain pens for a week. Ana used Platinum Preppies and a Platinum Prefounte. You can read about Ana’s starter pens only week. I have a number of potential pens I could use, but I settled on a newly purchased Lamy ABC with a Lamy Blue cartridge, a new Pilot Kakuno demonstrater with an M nib and filled with Pilot Iroshuzuku Murasaki-Shikibo, and an eye-droppered Platinum Preppy 03 with Pilot Iroshizuku Momiji (Autumn Leaves). I’ll start using them next Monday, instead of my currently inked assortment. I dropped and cracked the Preppie, so I’m replacing it with thealmost identical Platinum Prefounte in Crimson, with Pilot Iroshozuku Momiji and an M nib.

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Apple’s Liquid Text

Lisa Spangenberg — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:02:59 +0000

Apple has released the Kraken macOS 26/Tahoe, as well as iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, all featuring Apples new UI style and design language, Liquid Text. I am not a fan. It honestly seems to be change for the sake of change. The use of gray for UI text and tic marks on sliders makes it very hard to see them. Yes, I have vision issues, but using Accessibility settings on previous UIs worked well for me. Not so with Liquid Text on the Mac. I’m not alone. Nor am I alone in thinking Apple rushed the Mac version. I think that’s because, as with the iPhone Air, Liquid Text on current hardware isn’t for the current hardware. It’s for something else as Craig Hockenberry notes.

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Apple Has Shot Itself in the Foot

Lisa Spangenberg — Wed, 07 May 2025 18:25:41 +0000

Regarding Judge Gonzalez Rodgers. United States District Court Northern District Of California Case No. 4:20-cv-05640-YGR EPIC GAMES, INC., v. Apple, Inc.: As Judge Gonzalez wrote: Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple (78). This latest strike against Apple is extaordinarily disheartening, This is not the Apple I used to love. This is not a company I want in my portfolio. As John Voohees writes, Apples is engaging in A Breach of Trust: Apple Held in Contempt Over App Store Rules. This is just the latest egregious fail on Apple’s part. See John Gruber’s Something is Rotten in Cupertino: At WWDC 2024 Apple used fake AI Siri demos, and ran ads claiming AI features for the iPhone 16 that they’ve admitted do not exist. Apple has subjected developers, who add enormous value to Apple’s hardware, to restrictive terms, including 30% tarriffs on sales, and a poorly run non-communicative app approval service, a service that restricts genuine developers and approves malicious apps. Software provides reasons for hardware to exist. By disallowing in-app purchases (external links) that do not go through Appe’s store (and lose 30% to Apple’s cut). Apple not only hurts its own developers (who are key to the success of Apple’s hardware), Apple makes it more difficult for its non-develper users to fully use software they own on Apple’s devices. For example, charging Kobo 30% for the privilege of an in-app purchase of a book, or Patreon creatives 30% of every membership, hurts authors and independent creatives. As Judge Gonzalez Rodgers makes clear, Apple, at every opportunity instead of obeying the court’s injunction regarding opening up the app store, doubled-down on anti-compettitive practices in the app store. In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the mostanticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly (2). Part of Apple’s strategy was to manufacture support for their across-the-board 30%, or eventually 27%. Judge Gonzalez notes that Mr. Roman, Vice President of Finance, lied under oath. The testimony of Mr. Roman, Vice President of Finance, was replete with misdirection and outright lies. He even went so far as to testify that Apple did not look at comparables to estimate the costs of alternative payment solutions that developers would need to procure to facilitate linked-out purchases. (May 2024 Tr. 266:22–267:11 (Roman).) (25). Q. It’s your testimony that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what — what fee it’s going to impose on linked purchases? A. That is correct. (May 2024 Tr. 202:12–18 (Roman).) Another lie under oath: contemporaneous business documents reveal that on the contrary, the main components of Apple’s plan, including the 27% (25–26). In designing the full-screen warning about going to an external site for a purchase, Apple deliberately made the warning as intimidating as possible. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” (Id. at .2.) From Mr. Onak’s perspective, of the “execs” on the project, Mr. Schiller was at the top. (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1340:4–6 (Onak).) One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the appname.” (CX-206.4.) To that, another responded “ooh – keep going.” (Id.) Again, Apple decided on the most anticompetitive option, that is, the “even worse” option of including the developer’s name rather than the app name (Primary and Overarching Finding No. 4). (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1343:23–1344:1 (Onak); CX-3.5.) (36–37) At the meeting, Mr. Cook “asked the team to revise the customer warning screen . . . to reference the fact that Apple’s privacy and security standards do not apply to purchases made on the web” (38). Cook was complicit in approvung the Apple tariff and in making the warinng intimidating. Neither of these actions are about serving or protecting users. Both are about serving Apple’s greed. Apple knows that users can be trusted to decide what they want to install; the Mac has allowed users to install software outside of Apple’s walled garden from the beginning. Apple does not deserve a cut because they are not adding value. Apple needs to compete openly and honestly, by offering better software, hardware, and services. A large part of Tim Cook’s job is to protect the brand. He has failed abysmally to protect the brand, and damaged the brand and Apple’s reputation. I no longer trust Apple under Tim Cook to do the right thing, for its users, its developers, or its stock owners,

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I do Not Like You Commercial AI LLM

Lisa Spangenberg — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 23:57:36 +0000

Current commercial LLMs (aka AIs) use bots or Web crawlers, to crawl and scrape or copy Web sites, to build their corpora. If data is accessible, they assume they can make local copies. One problem with the way LLMs obtain their data is that LLM bots frequently ignore robots.txt (en masse; c. f. Perplexity). Web Crawlers and Bots I used to run a large, venerable forum for writers. I was constantly blocking bots that recursively crawled the form, sometimes thousands at once. They ignored robots.txt. Blocking entire ranges of IP, or even entire ASNs would work or hours or sometimes days, but the bots would soon be back, with different User Agents and IPs. They consumed bandwith, and slowed the forum down. LLM crawlers were effectively not unlike a DDOS attack. By 2023 I was struggling to stop LLM crawlers from crawling my own Websites, first because they were consuming bandwidth, and secondly, because I discovered that LLMs were digital thieves. Intellectual Theft LLM bots crawling the web in search of content to re-use have ignored the convention behind robots.txt which instructs them not to crawl. In several cases the companies behind the crawlers have either left off the User Agent, or obfuscated it. They have also used different IPs other than the ones they publicly published in order to allow sites to block their crawlers. That means that efforts to block crawlers have been deliberately ignored. These LLMs have quite legitimately been described as plagiarism engines). The extent to which LLMs have incorporated works under copyright is appalling. In addition to ignoring robots.txt, many, commercial LLMs and AI-driven search engines do not credit their sources. My content was taken without my consent and incorporated in a context that does not respect my rights as a creator, and that includes removing my name and not providing a citation for my work. The absence of consent is a large part of my objection to commercial LLMs. LLM developers did not ask before usurping my work and that of many others, stealing data, stealing our writing and art, and using it to create derivative works. GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out One reason source citation is crucial is that not all sources are equal, or even legitimate. A crawler can’t distingush between fact or fiction, parody, or garbage presented as accurate, factual statements. This is one of the problems with the way the LLMs were trained, and their corpora were created. All inputs, all data from the Web, are treated as equally valid. It’s the equivalent of considering The National Enquirer and The Times of London as equivalent sources. It’s why increasingly LLMs, image generators, and AI chat agents spout racist, sexist, garbage. They were trained by ingesting huge amounts of crap. Student Plagiarism LLMs don’t invent anything. They take fragments, and, using a set of syntax rules and parsed text, they join fragments (sometimes very large fragments, up to and including paragraphs) derived from the texts they incorporated during their training. Like a student cribbing from the encyclopedia (or Wikipedia) the responses of LLMs are cobbled together from bits and pieces, much like an academic plagiarizer who takes a bit from this source and a bit from that, andhttps://lisaspangenberg.info/ai/index.html cites very few or even none of them. Recognizeable chunks of text, unaltered, can reappear in AI assisted writing or searches without any credit given to the writer. Some prompts I attempted with various text-based “AI” chat bots produced responses that included several unaltered sentences of my prose, without context or citation. What’s even worse, the responses sometimes included my quotations of other scholars, again, without context or citation, though I provided both in the original texts. When citations are provided, they are frequently wrong, or even entitely fictitious. One study found several AI-based search engines incorrectly cited sources in more than 60 percent of the queries. Citations are the currency of the Web, and the life-blood of scholarship. Without an accurate complete citation, we don’t know where the text is from, or where it’s been. I don’t use commercial AIs or LLMs, and I do not grant them permission to use, crawl, ingest, or cache my content.

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Kobo Libre Colour

Lisa Spangenberg — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 17:41:14 +0000

I bought a Kindle Paperwhite in 2017. I like my Kindle Paperwhite far more than I ever thought I would. The Paperwhite is lightweight, has a surprisingly readable screen, and has been hugely important since I have no acess to physical book stores or libraries. I’ve used my Kindle Paperwhite almost daily, and definitely got my money’s worth. But the Paperwhite’s battery, which once lasted for several days, even with heavy use, now lasts hours. I wanted to replace the Paperwhite with another dedicated reading device, but I wanted to avoid Amazon. I wanted eInk, though I still read a lot of academic/scholarly/non-fiction on my iPad Mini, I’m want at a better battery solutuin and thelow-light of eInk for most reading. I looked at several alternatives including the Barnes & Noble Nook, the relatively new Bookx, and various Kobo ereaders. I decided on the Kobo Libre 2. Unfortunately, when Kobo released the Kobo Libre Colour, the Libre 2 was immediateky discontinued. I bought a Kobo Libre Colour. The color of the Colour Libre is more accurately a faded tint rather than color. It strikes me as personally useless, even for highlighting or notes. Unfortunately the ability to see faded color book cover images, and highlight text with faded color relies on technology that makes the black text look faded too. The text of book pages is not as crisp as it is on non-color Kobo readers, or even as crisp as my 2017 Kindle Paperwhite. It’s readable, but not as readable as the Paperwhite. What I Like About The Kobo Libre Colour There things I like. I like the ability to use buttons on the edge of the Kobo Colour Libre to turn pages. The buttons are much easier and more respnsive for advancing or reversing book pages than swiping the screen — and you can invert the Kobo so you can use the buttons left-handedly. You can also swipe to turn the page. On some UI screens, you have to swipe; the buttons don’t affect scrolling on lists of book collections or other UI screens. The $219.00 Kobo Libre Colour features 32 gigs of storage, reasonable battery life, adjustable back lighting, and built-in support for Overdrive ebooks. More interestingly, the Kobo Libre Colour features direct access to Dropbox, and Google Drive — the only Kobo ereader that does. These aspects help compensate for the faded quality of the text. The Libre Colour supports for Kobo’s second generation stylus. It works fairly well for short notes, and doesn’t fell as slippery on the Kobo screen as the Apple Pencil does on an iPad. It’s not terrible but it’s not all that either. The “Notebooks” are still avery basic implementation; they work, but that’s about it. I wish I had seen Jason Snell’s review before I bought the Kobo Libre Colour; I do not reccommend it.

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My Computing History

Lisa Spangenberg — Mon, 13 May 2024 23:21:31 +0000

Robb Knight in My Computing Origin Story and Kev Quirk in My computing History have both written posts about their computing history as part of WeblogPoMo2024. I thought I’d write about mine. I didn’t have my own computer until I had used computers for several years. My older brother got a job working for Instant Software when I was in high school. He often brought Apple IIs, Exidy Sorcerors, TRS-80s (which for years I thought was called a Trash-80), and Commodore PETs and 64s home for the weekend. While I played around with BASIC, mostly creating clumsy but functioning if-then chains, I spent most of my time playing Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio, a text-based turn game with the goal of managing an Italian city-state c. 1400, with the goal of becoming a ruler. Instant Software produced versions of SantaParavia for several OSs. My first computer job was being paid 0.05 a line to enter the BASIC code and keyboard the code from a printout, converting certain stylistic features of another dialect of BASIC to the format used by a Timex Sinclair, one of the inexpensive ones with a really weird flat keyboard. That version of the game had actual graphics , of a sort, created by using a special graphic character set in the Timex Sinclair. I also played with a few different text editors/early word processor systems, like Apple Writer and Wordstar. Those early word processors exposed me to spellcheck. I’m dyslexic, and it mostly affects my spelling, so spellcheck is really useful. In graduate school in the 1980s, I managed to get access to the mainframe in the wee hours of the morning to work on my thesis. I can’t remember what the word processor was called; it reminded me of Wordstar, but it wasn’t Wordstar. There was a separate, associated program that would spellcheck your text. I would draft in longhand, create a clean copy, keyboard it on a mainframe terminal, run spellcheck, then print hard copy on a large-format dot-matrix printer. I used that printout to create a draft on my typewriter. I could only spell check a limited number of characters at a time; I think it was 2500, but I’m not sure. I was always several long-hand pages ahead of the print-out. In 1986 my brother bought me a Zenith PC with a 10 MB internal hard drive that ran DOS and WordPerfect 4.2. I used WordPerfect 4,2 and 5.0 and 5.1, and an outline program called, I think, PC Outline. I thoroughly appreciated how much easier they made writing papers. In 1987, I began working as an R.A. for a faculty member who was converting a book to a HyperCard stack. I was given a brief introduction to a Mac SE with a single floppy drive and an internal hard drive, which consisted mostly of learning to turn it on, open Microsoft Word 3.25, save files, and shut down. The faculty member then left for several weeks, and I was on my own keyboarding possible additions to the previous printed edition. A staff member, whose job included faculty support and was responsible for teaching me to use HyperCard, discovered me using the mouse backwards. He introduced to the Finder, email, Microsoft Word’s formatting and style tools, and eventually, create stacks and HyperTalk scripts with HyperCard. I took to the Mac with alacrity, encouraged by both HyperCard and Crystal Quest. Eventually, I worked at home on the HyperCard project on a borrowed Mac Plus with an external hard drive. By 1990 I was working for The Voyager Company, part time, on a variety of HyperCard ebooks and CD-Roms. I was used my spouse’s IIcx and a variety of Macs at Voyager. I bought my first Mac, a PowerBook 180, in 1992. Since then, I’ve set up and managed Macintosh labs, configured video editing workstations and keyboards, and even supported Windows users. I’ve owned a Wallstreet, an iBook G3 “Snow,” two MacBooks, and a 2018 Macbook Air. My first iPad was the first one (it still works!). I also have the third iPad with a Retina screen, and currently use an iPad 7, and a second generation iPad Mini. I’ve co-written or written several books about using iPads.

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22nd Anniversary of IT

Lisa Spangenberg — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 01:05:57 +0000

January 22, 2024 is the 22nd anniversary of this blog, originally focussed on instructionl technology in Humanities, because I was the IT coordinator for the Humanities at UCLA. I started blogging on Blogger, posting to my extant domain and Web site, then moved to the now defunct Radio Userland, then to MoveableType , then to self-hosted WordPress, where I’ve been since February of 2008. IT is actually my second blog; my first, started a day earlier on January 21, 2002, was Scéla, an addition (and replacement) for the site I created with BBEDit Lite and hosted on America Online’s Homestead in 1997. That initial site had a What’s New section on the top page. While I never stopped blogging once I started, I left Twitter and Facebook c. 2020, and abandoned Goodreads for my personal use some years earlier. As social media services and sites like Twitter and Facebook have enshittified, independent Web posting, micro blogging, RSS and Mastodon have rejuvenated the Web. There’s a new interest in personal sites, particularly digital gardens.

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Universally Available Queens Library Digital Library Card

Lisa Spangenberg — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 16:15:54 +0000

Many New York City public libraries offer a $50.00 / year digital library card to anyone in the world who wants to borrow digital resources. Those include ebooks and audio via Overdrive’s Libby app for iOS/Pad OS and Android, Web access, and Kindle and Kobo access, and support for Adobe’s reader app. It also includes some databases and periodicals, ebooks, audiobooks and video via Hoopla, and access to Kanopy streaming video (Hoopla and Kanopy have iOS/iPadOS and Android apps, and stream via Web browsers as well). You can stream (and download a limited number of MP3s) the rich music and spoken word collection of Freegal, among other digital resources. Here’s a link to Queens library’s digital library “eCard” page.

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HomePod mini software update will activate hidden sensor and Sound Recognition feature

Lisa Spangenberg — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 16:38:00 +0000

The existence of the sensor was noticed two years ago. Next week’s update should include: Apple has updated its website for the HomePod mini to advertise the temperature and humidity sensor for the first time. Previously, the company had not even acknowledged the existence of this sensor. Apple touts the temperature and humidity sensor as one of the ways the HomePod mini can serve as a “smart home hub” (9 to 5 Mac).

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