Dirt coffee cups, AI drawings from doodles, plus five great online resources and more!
I got to guest on TWiT with host Leo Laporte and fellow guests Nate Lanxon and Paris Martineau! We talked about all things Elon Musk, the enshittification of Twitter, Zoom calls for Parrots, AI, Chromebooks, Facebook, ARM, Tesla, Google, Sundar Pichai, YouTube TV, Imgur, Apple and more!!
Subscribe to TWiT and join the club already!
I'm staying at a pricey Airbnb in a fashionable district of Mexico City, working at the dining room table. Directly in front of me is a glass vase with a green ribbon around the top. The window is open and the blind mostly closed.
A sudden gust of wind pushed the blind, knocked over the vase, which started rolling toward the left edge of the cabinet. I shot out of my chair and lunged for the vase, in the process kicking my MacBook Pro cable with so much force it not only came out on the MacBook end, but the power brick end as well, ending up in a pile against the far wall.
My MacBook is actually perched somewhat precariously on a cardboard box, and could have been easily knocked off without MagSafe.
Well, I caught the vase as it was halfway to the floor. And my MacBook Pro didn't even move. Thank you, Apple, for listening to the people and bringing back the MagSafe feature!
One of the many complaints about remote work is that it's killing cities. Without all those suburban residents enduring soul-crushing commutes into the city every day to work in soul-crushing offices, cities are impoverished because empty office spaces neither bring in tax revenue nor support city businesses during the day.
Except they've got it backwards. By converting empty office space to housing for remote workers, they could massively increase tax revenue and business activity.
Here's my case for why remote work is the solution to the decline of cities.
This magnificent, spacious, friendly spot does it all: Las Barbacoas de Mexico slow-cook meat underground, they ferment underground, they grill, roast and bake. Super delicious place that you should not miss if you visit Oaxaca! (Full disclosure: It's owned by the Ruiz siblings, including Chef Alex Ruiz, who are friends. It's still fricken great.)
Portozuelo's Camping Under the Moon event with Chef Alex Ruiz and guest Chef Rodrigo Martinez involved this spectacular fire-roasted goat. This was slow cooking over the fire for hours before being chopped up and fulfilling its destiny to be part of some of the most delicious tacos ever. (That's the one and only Chef Alex applying herbs.)
This is a variation on a super popular snack here in Oaxaca. Normally, they just combine roasted peanuts and roasted grasshoppers, plus chili and other flavorings. This one, served at Los Barbacoas de Mexico, also has roasted agave larvae -- also known as agave worms or picudo del agave.
Amira and I attended Portozuelo's first-ever Camping Under the Moon event with Chef Alex Ruiz and guest Chef Rodrigo Martinez. Alex brought in a young mezcal maker to set up a coal-fired still and distill mezcal on the spot. (First, he sealed the parts of the still with corn flour.) He infused it with lavender and rosemary, and it was delicious. We drank it all night and then had more for breakfast. This is, after all, Oaxaca.
Seated from left to right, Chef Rodrigo Martinez, food super-influencer Salt Hank, the greatest cook in the world, Amira Elgan, me, the King of Oaxaca, Chef Alex Ruiz, some guy and, finally, Jesus Ruiz, who (along with the other Ruiz siblings) owns the amazing restaurant we're eating at and some other restaurants in Oaxaca.
The restaurant is an amazing new barbeque place called Las Barbacoas de Mexico where they slow-cook meat under ground.
Corn, cheese and hand-made salsa. I could eat these ingredients every day.
(I’m in the Oaxaca Valley at our friend’s organic farm and restaurant, called Portozuelo.)
This video is made from images created with Midjourney, animated by Kaiber.AI with an autobiographical poem written by GPT-4 and narrated by a voice made with Eleven Labs AI. The poem is conspicuously apt, meaningful and seems self-aware. (It's not, but humans won't be able to override their intuition that such AI is sentient and conscious.)
Holy week? More like holy shit!
The wait inside the airport gates looked like a couple hours. Fortunately we know of this spot some locals use that’s unauthorized but much quicker.
Another treat from Reina’s kitchen: ayote en miel. It’s squash slow cooked with water, panela, cinnamon and cloves.
Amazon just opened up a free, nationwide, low-power, wide-area network called Sidewalk. It's optimized for IoT devices. It’s great at securely and privately sending small quantities of data impressively long distances. It reaches 90% of the US population.
Some devices can connect as far away as several miles.
Here's a piece I wrote for Computerworld tell you everything you need to know about Amazon Sidewalk.
He said these are Brazilian coconut trees.
A mountain near El Salvador's capital, called Los Planes de Renderos is famous for eco parks, cool temperatures and, above all, top-shelf pupusa joints. Lining the roadways one can find dozens or possibly hundreds of pupusa restaurants, dives, street vendors and others. I call it "Pupusa Mountain."
Our current favorite is called Pupusaria Elisa. It directly faces another place called Pupusaria Isabel. (A few other restaurants sit in the same facility.) As you can see, Elisa is packed and Isabel is empty. We always find it like this. Last night, all tables were taken at Elisa, and all tables were available at Isabel. Quality counts, I guess.
Marinated in pineapple juice for a couple days.
We're spending a few days on the beach with friends and family. Not a vacation for me -- just another Thursday.
Ever heard of an icaco, or (in English), coco plum or paradise plum? It's a tropical fruit that grows on trees as close as 30 feet from the ocean. The closer to the water, the sweeter the fruit.
The tree is native to the tropical parts of the Americas, especially the Caribbean.
People eat them raw, cooked or made into jam.
The seed of the icaco is 21% oil, and some people burn them for light.
You can buy great pupusas in El Salvador -- great curtido (cabbage-based vinegar-flavored stuff) and sauce are harder to come by. But home-made is the best.
My wife's cousin, Reina, made riguas for breakfast, which I had never tried before. (The rigua in this picture is the long, oval item, part of this complete breakfast that also includes a tamal, cheese and red silk beans.) They're delicious!
Riguas are one of the many foods unique to El Salvador that were retained in the diet from indigenous cooking.
They're made with rough-ground fresh corn cooked in banana leaves.
You can have this pre-Spanish item with nothing on top, or topped with foods brought by the Spanish: sugar, butter, sour cream or curds.
I found my beach.
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I'm enjoying a nice bowl of Atol Shuco (also spelled "Atol Chuco," and "Atol Shuko") at my beach hotel in the Southeastern-most corner of El Salvador. Shuco is one of the indigenous staples that Salvadorans never stopped eating. It's a massively nutritious dish for two reasons: 1) it's made with "black corn" that's made black by large quantities of polyphenols, so it's highly antioxidant-packed; and 2) it's fermented, so it's loaded with probiotics for healthy gut flora.
For my breakfast, it's got ground roasted aihuashte (also called "aiguashte" or "pepitoria") on top, made from the ground seed (pepitas) of a Salvadoran pumpkin-like squash, which is common when taken for breakfast. Shuco is also eaten with beans and white "pan francés" (basically a white-bread roll) if you have it at night.
People here make it at home. Rural Salvadorans eat it on their way to or from work, purchased from a street vendor.
Before OpenAI, the company behind both ChatGPT and DALL-E, the sustained panic centered around deepfake videos, produced by generative adversarial networks (GANs). Everybody feared that deepfake videos would become the ultimate tool for spreading disinformation. Deepfakes, we were told, could produce “evidence” that political leaders, for example, said or did things they never said or did.
Deepfake fears haven’t been realized yet. The tech isn’t convincing enough. (And, once they are convincing, I fear the bigger threat will be that people caught on video will plausibly deny the truth by falsely claiming the real video is a deepfake.)
But this week a new panic set in. Rumors circulated about the imminent indictment and arrest of former president Donald Trump (rumors started by Trump himself in a Truth Social post that falsely claimed he’d be arrested Tuesday).
Read the rest on my Substack.