Getting there

It’s Sunday morning. Today’s word is insouciance.

Tax season will start late this year. But it still ends on April 15th.

Lucas Matney considers the near-future for augmented reality. He says there are only a few minor problems that need to be overcome before it catches on: 1 – the hardware isn’t ready, 2 – the platforms aren’t ready, 3 – developers aren’t ready and 4 – users don’t want it yet.

Baby boomers are forsaking the mall for Amazon.

I prefer black and white photography. I started out taking pictures with Tri-X and lately I’ve been fooling around with some of the Leica monochrome only sensors. There’s something special about black and white. With that stage set, here are the 2020 winners of an international black and white photography contest. Check out all the categories. Landscape, portrait and street are particularly impressive.

And it’s daylight in America. Or at least it is in Utqiagvik – finally.

To argue in the alternative

Today is Saturday. Happy birthday to the first governor of Massachusetts.

Here’s all the latest SPAC news. (What’s a SPAC, you might ask?)

Houston police officer Tam Dinh Pham said that he absolutely wasn’t in the Capitol during the insurrection. When confronted with his own photos and videos showing him inside the building he admitted that he had in fact gone in. But not to riot. He only wanted to see the historical paintings. Yeah, paintings. That’s the ticket.

Instragram food shooters have had to settle for takeout during the pandemic. Boston Magazine’s Scott Kearnan comes to the rescue with tips for taking photos of soggy snacks.

A lot of people got into Bitcoin for the first time recently and are surprised that it corrected so soon. Apparently they haven’t been paying attention. When to trade? The answer is in the stars.

And Larry King is dead. That’s a surprise. I didn’t know he was still alive.

In the arena

Friday. It’s been on my mind and now it’s here.

Google cancels an internet balloon project and the cheesy headlines write themselves: Moonshot comes down to earth. Trial balloon crashes. Alphabet lets the air out of Internet in the sky project. Big idea goes over like a lead balloon. Etc. Etc. it’s what you would have expected for a project named Loon. Oh, the humanity.

Some of the current mayoral candidates are good at pointing out problems and criticizing others but not so great at coming up with solutions to solve those problems. Andrea Campbell is not in this category. She tells Nik DeCosta-Klipa what she would do about one of the toughest issues in the city today and one that’s close to home for her.

The trees won. Road safety on Melnea Cass Boulevard lost.

If you’re in the market for a new Mac laptop you may want to wait until at least the end of the year. Lots of new stuff in the pipeline, says Mark Gurman. But no Face ID or cellular. That’s probably another year out, he says.

And in closing out with another cliched headline, this highly charged New York Times story on electric eels is, well, shocking.

No small job

Today is Thursday. I can live with that.

The political environment is now officially boring. Hopefully that means less doom scrolling.

Katie Trojano does a taxonomy of potential mayoral candidates. The list just keeps on growing. Meanwhile, Kim Janey prepares to get down to the hard work of actually being (interim) mayor. “I am confident I will be able to do what’s needed to get our residents vaccinated, safely get our children back to school, and help our businesses start to grow so we can achieve an equitable economic recovery for all of Boston.”

If you want to recruit competent coders try hiding the job announcement in the code. Pretty clever.

Inauguration fashions were on display yesterday but Bernie Sanders’ ensemble inspired the most memes. This is my favorite.

And poor Joe Exotic had high hopes for a Trump pardon. It never came. That’s pretty much the last four years in a nutshell.

Rear view mirror

Today is Wednesday. Inauguration Day.

Mina Corpuz has me thinking of pizza. But not just any kind of pizza.

Trump told his supporters to “have a good life,” before getting aboard Air Force One for a flight to Florida. The outgoing president won’t be attending Biden’s inauguration, although he did write him a note. Trump leaves a strong stock market, for what that’s worth. But he also leaves a foreign policy in disarray, surging unemployment, a massive deficit, a dysfunctional federal government, an uncontrolled pandemic, a battered and divisive civic environment and a nation teetering on the verge of civil war. Quite a record. But this country is resilient. Hopefully things will get better now.

Boston’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade is cancelled for the second year in a row.

Joe Biden has a Peloton bike and some people are worried that hackers could use it to spy on presidential workouts.

And the Zune is dead. Long live the Zune.