Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Radio Emissions

Qs and an A

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I for one would like to know what the heck this sign is about. The phrase “radio frequency emissions” is pretty tantalizing on its own. The preceding “all” is next level — like, versus what? Is there a different sign that stipulates a subset of signals? And what made this situation an “emergency”? Was something being disrupted? How were the offending emissions first noticed, identified, and triangulated? I would really like to know. (Also, my phone took this photo from about 25 feet away through a windshield, and the sign is barely the size of an 8 1/2” x 11” piece of paper, and this is only the top third of the sign. Kind of amazing.)

And I got an informative response via Threads.

Analysis of Structured Data

Eink or bust

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Got one of those little Xteink X4 epub ereaders. Fits in a shirt pocket. Flashed it, upon arrival, with the alternative firmware called CrossPoint Reader, which has a tidier interface and some useful features. (MIT Data Science book, by John D. Kelleher and Brendan Tierney, from Humble Bundle.) The X4 has no light or touchscreen or highlighting capability (though it does allow for screenshots), and that’s OK, and should a future version come with such things, I can turn this one into a TRMNL.

Scratch Pad: Light Duty

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ It’s not that I don’t enjoy period dramas. I just prefer when the period is in the future or the present.

▰ … and that’s it. Aside from some photos, also reproduced earlier here, I didn’t post anything else to social media. Just that one comment. It was, apparently, a busy week.

▰ I didn’t finish reading any novels, though I’m close to the end of several. I did finish reading four graphic novels: the second Absolute Batman (which I enjoyed a lot more than the first volume, as the characters are coming together), the first Absolute Flash, the first Absolute Martian Manhunter (which felt — and I mean this as a compliment — like Dash Shaw and Jason Little had a baby that Chris Bachalo helped raise), and an Image release titled Assorted Crisis Events, an anthology about temporal disruption that I dug a lot of. The ghost work of Paul Pope and Tom King hover over several of these.