1. The Colossal article on Sara Flores, who is an artist that makes very beautiful and geometric art. I reminds me a lot of the plotter art that I love. I have several other tabs, including a piece of hers at the de Young. I hope it’s on display.
   
2. Nick Carr’s absolutely smashing photos of inside a decommissioned nuclear power plant on Long Island. This is a deep post, with so much deepness in its depths. It’s too deep, tbh. I want more of this. I used to follow his ScoutingNY blog back in the day. Glad to see that Nick is still posting, sometimes.
   

   

3. The last one is a writeup of making a virtual reel-to-reel tape player. It does play; you can click it and it makes a great clicky sound and it plays the indicated piece. Dunstan Orchard is a designer professionally, and his wife is a field-recordist. It’s just so crisp and sharp, and these old tools are nostalgic and clicky. Fun!
   

Have a great Fourth of July weekend!

1. Watering plants during the day, particularly the leaves, will not burn them. There has been a lot of word play on the definition of the word “burn” for this one, but no, water will not cause a fire, and nor will it scorch the leaves. Water away, water with abandon, but wait, water is precious here in California and there are smarter ways to do it, so water with care.
2. All carbonated water is fake manufactured. I was profoundly disappointed to learn recently that my favorite beverage, fizzy water (aka sparkling), is a lie. I’m not sure where I acquired this fact, probably from the label on the bottle, but there is apparently very little natural water that is actually bubbly and bottled just is it comes out of the ground with the bubbles still in it and sent to us all over the world. Sometimes, not even the water is real. I still like do drink it though.¹
3. There is no convention for the symbolism of statue horse foot placement. I had asked “are there eras when the arrangement of the horse feet meant one thing but then changed to mean something else centuries later?” But it turns out there really isn’t a convention at all. I had not anchored much of my world view to this fact so it went out with a whatever and I’ll try (not very hard) to remember this so the next time it comes up in a decade or two I can do something about it. It may have even come up before and been knocked down a decade or more ago. I don’t remember, to be honest.

Some of these myths are harmless (carbonated water) or really harmless (horse statues? seriously?). Like Sherlock Holmes said, “Now that I do know it, I shall do my best to forget it.” Knowing about watering your plants can have a practical impact. I wish parsing which facts where facts and which were bogus was easier. Our brains just don’t seem to distinguish well between them. They’re all just ideas it believes about the world to the brain. Beliefs are funny things.

The new field recorder (iOS) app Fields by Audiothing looks like a step up from Kymatica’s AudioShare. I’ll let you know how it turns out, with samples. Of course, you can always just use the built in voice memos app, that’s good too!

Open tabs

There are only a couple of tabs open in my browser that are worth mentioning.

1. Researchers discovered that we humans prefer to walk to the left, period full-stop. Man, I love it when some new physics is discovered.
2. I have a couple of photographers open Brendon Burton and John Thomson (via KDO). I’m intrigued by both, but for different reasons.

Ideas

I had a couple of random ideas this week.

1. What is the source of the infrasonic rumble? You may or may not know that I have a hobby of making field recordings, especially long playing ones. This one, from Quicksilver-Almaden park, is especially boring (which is ideal), and if I remember correctly I tried to mitigate the low frequencies with a high-pass filter, yet the lowest frequencies are still there. At the time I recorded that one, I thought it was “just San Jose” off in the distance. But in the Butano posts, I mention that there is a noticeable low frequency “rumble in the distance”. Maybe it’s two different sources, waves crashing on the coast for one and city noise for the other. I do not know.

   ]]>Tags: #rss-club #dispatches #learning

   Hello once again RSS Clubbers, and welcome email subscribers! This week I am sharing a few open questions that I have pondered lately. Please enjoy this week’s grab bag, another peek behind the curtain.

   1. What is the source of the infrasonic rumble? You may or may not know that I have a hobby of making field recordings, especially long playing ones. This one, from Quicksilver-Almaden park, is especially boring (which is ideal), and if I remember correctly I tried to mitigate the low frequencies with a high-pass filter, yet the lowest frequencies are still there. At the time I recorded that one, I thought it was “just San Jose” off in the distance. But in the Butano posts, I mention that there is a noticeable low frequency “rumble in the distance”. Maybe it’s two different sources, waves crashing on the coast for one and city noise for the other. I do not know.

   2. Does Virginia Woolf always use so many new-to-me words? Is this unique to her or is it a historical remove thing (i.e. has the common vocabulary diverged in the ~100 years between me-the-reader and her-the-author)? Last week I read The Death of the Moth. Jeff pointed out that there were quite a few unusual words. I had noticed this in the reading and simply moved on, but it is worth pondering a bit more. In the first paragraph alone, I counted four unfamiliar words: benignant¹, share², down³, and vociferation⁴. There are only five paragraphs in the whole piece. Is this normal? I love it!⁵ I should read more Woolf to find out. Luckily there are two other essays in my edition of The Norton Reader, so I can get some signal with minimal effort or investment.

   3. Is the fork the most likely object in the dishwasher to hurt you? The only time I have been injured while unloading the dishwasher was by jamming a fork under my fingernail because I didn’t see its edge-on appearance. Like Abbott’s Triangles,⁶ forks disappear when viewed from certain directions. Knives are another leading candidate for injury-causers, even butter and table knives can cut you. But, forks go up and knives go down in the dishwasher’s silverware rack thing, so knives are in the safe direction. I was not being as careful as usual that day; it hurt! How common is this injury? Is something else more likely to send you searching for a bandaid, and we just don’t put that thing in out dishwasher? Who keeps this sort of statistics?

   4. I observe that traffic seems to slow down significantly on Fridays and Sundays. Is traffic really slower on those days? Everyone sure takes their time around the SFBA when getting from point A to point B, especially on the freeways. On the other hand, it’s probably just me, I’m the one still in a hurry, just 5% more than everyone else. Do you see this in your neck of the woods? What’s the reason, what is driving this phenomenon?

   

   ---

   1. Two things: I am linking to Websters 1913 dictionary because a) it’s a good dictionary, b) it’s public domain, c) the website doesn’t have ads, d) it’s got an easy to remember url websters1913.com, and e) it’s contemporary to Woolf. Second, I was able to guess approximately the meanings of some of these words from context or familiarity with alternate suffixes on the same root,⁷ others I had to puzzle out, and yet more I simply moved on and triangulated back to them later in the piece. I think it was good for my brain. ↩︎

   2. I had always interpreted “plough share” to mean something about a portion of land. And to mean the blade of the plough. Woolf uses “share” here bare, without directly referring to the plough. That’s plow in Americanish, I think. I interpretted Woolf’s usage to mean that second one, but it could also mean the row that has been freshly cut by the plough. ↩︎

   3. The phrase Woolf uses is “…and the down beyond…”. Does she mean the hills on the other side of the fields? Does she mean the “way out there beyond the land I can see before me”? I’m pretty sure the former, maybe it was a common usage in rural England. Because the imagery in the paragraph surrounding this is very diverse and vivid I was even considering feathers for a moment. I settled on hills, like how Tolkien uses it. ↩︎

   4. This is obviously just a different suffix on “vociferous”. Yet I had never seen it before. Neither had Jeff. ↩︎

   5. I am a dictionary nerd. I have, like, so many dang dictionaries. ↩︎

   6. I am unsure of the political correctness / cancelled status / et cetera of the Flatland book. It is a satire written in the 1800s. I neither vouch for or against it, it is a historical document that has some interesting geometrical analogies and thought experiments. That is all. ↩︎

   7. Such as: benignant is obviously related to benign, and vociferation is obviously related to vociferous. But I am getting ahead of myself and possibly you too. ↩︎

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/new-foods/Thu, 28 May 2026 19:47:37 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/new-foods/Yesterday I noticed a pattern, or trend, or well, something. My first “new foods” in the last year. They’re not all actually new foods, only one was that.

   First up: cottage cheese. I added this into my diet last fall. I made it palatable by adding grapes, cinnamon, maple syrup, or strawberry jam. Eventually I decided it was fine and not a struggle to consume and I could just add a minimum of maple syrup. If I had to, I would eat it plain. Kinda boring, but whatever.

   ]]>Tags: #food #dispatches

   Yesterday I noticed a pattern, or trend, or well, something. My first “new foods” in the last year. They’re not all actually new foods, only one was that.

   First up: cottage cheese. I added this into my diet last fall. I made it palatable by adding grapes, cinnamon, maple syrup, or strawberry jam. Eventually I decided it was fine and not a struggle to consume and I could just add a minimum of maple syrup. If I had to, I would eat it plain. Kinda boring, but whatever.

   The second one, the truly novel one, was caviar. I forget which kind it was, err, kinds because there were several. I didn’t seek this out, an opportunity presented itself a couple of months ago, and I was with good people who weren’t going to judge or pressure so I took a chance on it. Honestly, this one had been overhyped, it was really a non-event. Neither good nor bad, just an additional flavor to add to things, I guess. Confession: it was only a little and it was, ahem, they were not the strongest types. I had them with some steak, I had them by themselves, I had them on those little pancakes (blinis) and sour cream and chives or shallots. All the usual ways, or so I am told. I would do it again, but I’m not chomping at the bit for it. I wonder how much of the appeal of caviar is it as a food and how much of it is a symbolic eating money.

   I’ve saved the best for last, and it’s a personal one, because it’s one I feel even more strongly, more viscerally. I did, anyway. Yesterday I got some salad at work, and after sitting down to eat I found a food that has been on my verboten list for basically my whole life. There, amongst the romaine lettuce and semi-dried corn kernels, tucked in there and semi-hidden, there was a slice of hard boiled egg. I have found that eggs can be eaten one way and one way only: scrambled. I did manage to survive a bowl of hard boiled egg soup (I swear it was but I can’t find a picture); I may not have eaten a lot, but I didn’t eat none either. And there was another time, in the mid-to-late nineties when a little old French grandma in Chambéry prepared a sunnyside up egg in a ceramic crock dish with bacon and served it to me and I had to eat it or be rude and, frankly it was basically perfect and I still remember how that egg and bacon tastes today but when I see any other sunnyside up egg cooked like that it just doesn’t look to be up to the standard and I don’t know what magic she did but these other eggs just don’t have it. Anyway, yesterday, when confronted by this particular devil food, I found that it had little power over me. I could eat that. So I proceeded to eat other parts of my meal as normal and checked in a minute or two later to see if I had found my sense of revulsion, but I had not. I circled back again and decided that maybe today is the day. And it was, yesterday was the day. I would eat another sixth of a hard boiled egg again sometime if the opportunity presents itself. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, I’m not seeking these other egg preparations out.

   So, what is going on here? I mean, the cottage cheese is for the gainz, for the protein, for the gym. And the caviar was just a random fluke. Coulda happened to anybody. But the hard boiled egg? I wasn’t looking for that one. Yesterday, with that egg, I was alone. I could have kept to the same old habits and not eaten that and not told anyone and no one would know. Either way, eaten it or not eaten it, no one needs to know this.

   What is next, seafood? I don’t think I’m ready for that.

   

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/machines/Wed, 27 May 2026 20:31:49 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/machines/<p>The neighbors are having work done. Their driveway is gone and so is most of their front yard. I&rsquo;m pleasantly surprised at how relatively quiet the machines have been. But there is only so much that can be done about busting up cement thirty feet away. So, there was some shaking and rattling and banging of the blocks as they fell into the back of a dump truck parked and idling in front of, well, almost my house. So, mostly quiet.</p>Tags: #moods #dispatches #attention · *duration:24h

   The neighbors are having work done. Their driveway is gone and so is most of their front yard. I’m pleasantly surprised at how relatively quiet the machines have been. But there is only so much that can be done about busting up cement thirty feet away. So, there was some shaking and rattling and banging of the blocks as they fell into the back of a dump truck parked and idling in front of, well, almost my house. So, mostly quiet.

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/acid/Tue, 26 May 2026 20:19:15 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/acid/

   I was out for a run when I spotted this one at the end of the trail where I turn around to double back and where the water goes underground and out to who-knows-where¹ so I made a quick audio note to myself to commit to coming back out here with a tripod and my real camera and taking a picture of it before it gets painted over by the city infra folks. This is that picture. The thing about this graffito is that it’s possibly the most intricate one I’ve seen in my neighborhood. There are some up the way, by the 87/85 interchange that change a lot, are a lot bigger, and are possibly more “art.” But along this canal, I’ve not seen anything this ambitious before. It was a little harder to get to than I expected; the gate I had slipped through last time has been tightened up a bit, so I had to climb over it this time. Just thought I’d share something I noticed this weekend.

   ]]>Tags: #photos #attention #dispatches #art

   

   I was out for a run when I spotted this one at the end of the trail where I turn around to double back and where the water goes underground and out to who-knows-where¹ so I made a quick audio note to myself to commit to coming back out here with a tripod and my real camera and taking a picture of it before it gets painted over by the city infra folks. This is that picture. The thing about this graffito is that it’s possibly the most intricate one I’ve seen in my neighborhood. There are some up the way, by the 87/85 interchange that change a lot, are a lot bigger, and are possibly more “art.” But along this canal, I’ve not seen anything this ambitious before. It was a little harder to get to than I expected; the gate I had slipped through last time has been tightened up a bit, so I had to climb over it this time. Just thought I’d share something I noticed this weekend.

   ---

   1. It goes to a lake (park) nearby. I looked it up. ↩︎

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/brunch/Sun, 24 May 2026 17:06:51 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/brunch/My plate is sliding away from me across the table. The pressure needed to coax shredded cabbage onto my fork is simply too great for the frictionless surface of this glossy white tabletop. The cabbage isn’t cooperating. No, that’s unfair. What’s not cooperating is the fork: it’s too small for the job. It’s a beautiful object, this fork. But as a tool for moving food from plate to mouth, it’s clearly inferior to the task. I give up my frustrated attempts at eating and glance around the room. The space is beautiful: black leather chairs, white tabletops above bright gold uprights, white cuboid room, very high ceilings, black trim, large tall windows, and dark gauzy curtains.
   ]]>Tags: #dispatches #food

   My plate is sliding away from me across the table. The pressure needed to coax shredded cabbage onto my fork is simply too great for the frictionless surface of this glossy white tabletop. The cabbage isn’t cooperating. No, that’s unfair. What’s not cooperating is the fork: it’s too small for the job. It’s a beautiful object, this fork. But as a tool for moving food from plate to mouth, it’s clearly inferior to the task. I give up my frustrated attempts at eating and glance around the room. The space is beautiful: black leather chairs, white tabletops above bright gold uprights, white cuboid room, very high ceilings, black trim, large tall windows, and dark gauzy curtains.

   Ron asks the young waitress if it used to be a bank; the architectural details give it away. He wonders if the robots are where the vault used to be.¹ She doesn’t know, looks anxious and puzzled by these questions. Apparently she’s never been asked before.

   Everything in the space is beautiful. Instagram worthy. The point.

   The crepe tacos look marvelous, are perfectly plated, and have all the right ingredients. They’re not actually a hand food anymore; I watch the catastrophe unfold in real time. These are fork-and-knife tacos. Ron’s burger and fries come in boxes, fresh from the burger bot, but there is no plate with the kit. My plate is still sliding all over the place. Both Linden and Jeff’s bánh mìs, like the tacos, have been elevated. This poses severe difficulties with some foods, and bánh mìs are one. They are already engineered to perfection: the bread is just right, the type of filling and amount are precisely calibrated, and they’re wrapped to go. Giant wooden restaurant sandwich spikes will not compensate for these mechanical challenges, no matter how good the constituent parts taste. And everything tastes great when we can get it into our mouths.

   And another thing: the almost bare cubic space has a be-shaded DJ working his laptop station from the corner. There is, as usual, the ordinary restaurant din, which is already a challenge if sound isn’t carefully managed. The DJ is just pumping this reverberant space with so much more noise. There’s nothing in here to absorb it but us. The music is fine, maybe even good. I can’t tell. The problem is just too much of it. We are really struggling to hear each other, hear the staff. Sometimes hearing our own thoughts is difficult.

   Like I said, the food tastes great, everything is fresh, prepared and served with care. And it’s all so beautiful to behold. Just wish I could eat here.

   

   ---

   1. Well that sentence was weird as hell to write. Yelp has a video if you want to see. ↩︎

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/small-bloggers/Sat, 23 May 2026 19:29:08 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/small-bloggers/I found out yesterday that Jeff’s mom has a blog, has had a blog for 7 21 years! And Jeff wanted to connect me and mine to her and hers. This morning I got the personal intro by email, and it was just so charming and great. Both Jeff’s intro and Cathy’s reply. A connection is already connecting. It’s better to read blogs of people you know in real life, even if they’re a step removed. It jumpstarts the peek behind the curtain that sometimes takes years to see. Those little details that aren’t the main subject or theme of the long running blog.
   ]]>Tags: #dispatches #blogging

   I found out yesterday that Jeff’s mom has a blog, has had a blog for 7 21 years! And Jeff wanted to connect me and mine to her and hers. This morning I got the personal intro by email, and it was just so charming and great. Both Jeff’s intro and Cathy’s reply. A connection is already connecting. It’s better to read blogs of people you know in real life, even if they’re a step removed. It jumpstarts the peek behind the curtain that sometimes takes years to see. Those little details that aren’t the main subject or theme of the long running blog.

   Cathy’s blog is all personal updates, poetry, and pictures. So it’ll be interesting to see what turns up from the other side of the curtain. What I really like though is all of those pictures.¹ Check it out at cathysblog.org.

   How did we get here? Last night over dinner preparations Jeff and I were talking about how great small blogging is for the readers, particularly those of us using RSS readers. The posts show up, they are not too frequent, the thing is posted because the author cared enough to write it or wanted to share it. They’re in chronological order and the burden of keeping up is only as bad as your own lack of curation; you can catch up after a short gap. Small blogs are visibly not a side hustle of some kind. There’s none of that SEO nonsense. If I’ve been following someone for years and years, I’ve seen those rare glimpses of the real life happening behind the screen. It builds a genuine connection, I care about their struggles, and am glad that they persist at posting. I can see more of the whole person. Jeff and I both agreed about this. It’s just better that way, more genuine.

   The other way of running things is fine too. Running a blog like a business is just not the same thing at all. I hope we keep blogging, despite what’s being said these days about AI and Google Zero and all that. I just don’t see how the value of connecting with others can be strip mined by the LLMs and somehow captured into them. Maybe for those run-like-a-business blogs, where they are trying to sell something. But for the small bloggers that are putting out their experiences and thoughts, the value is the connection between them and the individual readers. The value lives in the people that are participating. It’s the exchange, even if it’s mostly one way, there is a connection there.² I’m looking for more of that and maybe even some bidirectional exchange.³⁴

   ---

   1. I’ve mentioned before how much I like blogs that have pictures. It will surely come up again. ↩︎

   2. It’s kind of like how Coke wants people to drink more Coke, but everyone just wants water. Water is the best. Coke is a business, looking to exchange your money for some water with extra steps, some of them not so great. I just want water most of the time, which is a direct connection to the good stuff. And water is mostly almost free, as long as we keep it that way. Well, the analogy isn’t perfected yet. ↩︎

   3. I did add all the comments backend stuff for someone besides myself, right? ↩︎

   4. These are just general small blogger sentiments. I’m not looking at anyone in particular. Really. ↩︎

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/video-games/Fri, 22 May 2026 17:13:30 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/video-games/It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another snapshot grab bag of random stuff. Today’s theme is what I have played, what I am playing, and what I am excited to play next. I don’t play as much as I used to, but a guy can still dream.

   If you’ve got some ideas for me, why not send me a comment?

   Currently

   Abiotic Factor - Currently long playing this one with a friend on Thursday nights. There is a lot of great and nostalgic “WTF video games?” moments and I love it.

   ]]>Tags: #rss-club #video-games #dispatches

   It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another snapshot grab bag of random stuff. Today’s theme is what I have played, what I am playing, and what I am excited to play next. I don’t play as much as I used to, but a guy can still dream.

   If you’ve got some ideas for me, why not send me a comment?

   Currently

   Abiotic Factor - Currently long playing this one with a friend on Thursday nights. There is a lot of great and nostalgic “WTF video games?” moments and I love it.

   Kingdom Come Deliverance (I and II) - I picked it up after watching Any Austin’s tour of uninteresting places. I haven’t made it out of the starting village yet, there is quite a lot of tedium it seems. But it looks like it could be a great hiking simulator!

   Completed

   Lego Voyagers - I’m glad I played through this one even though it was short. There was so much delight in the puzzles and random things that happen. So silly!

   Future

   Orbitals (yt¹) - Spotted this one a while ago. I’m a sucker for cell shaded sh*t. And it’s co-op too. Probably alternate it with AB² if it turns out to be that much fun.

   CALX (yt) - Just saw this this week. Another one with cell shading, and it looks like an extension of Sable, as others have noted. I hope it’s not janky!

   Edith Finch - Recent recommendation. I remember it from when it looked interesting at the time, but I was quite busy with things. I’m always happy to play older games.

   ---

   1. I prefer something more durable, like Wikipedia to link to for these references, but a couple of these don’t have a Wikipedia page, so I used YouTube as the durable source. ↩︎

   2. That’s Abiotic Factor. ↩︎

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/moths/Wed, 20 May 2026 20:03:52 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/moths/There are almost no similes in Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” To be precise, there is one asimile¹ and two similes. That is not very many similes. These few similes all point into the frame, not out. None of them speak directly to the reader to explain anything that has just been described in the piece. At no point is that done. All the similes deepen the reader’s picture of the characters in the story.
   ]]>Tags: #writing #learning #dispatches

   There are almost no similes in Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” To be precise, there is one asimile¹ and two similes. That is not very many similes. These few similes all point into the frame, not out. None of them speak directly to the reader to explain anything that has just been described in the piece. At no point is that done. All the similes deepen the reader’s picture of the characters in the story.

   

   So that’s what I learned. To get to that I had to first read the piece for the content, read the story. I did not expect to feel so much for a bug that had died over 80 years ago.² It is exceptionally well written. I am not bothered at all that I read it approximately three times.

   I read it to try and learn something about the craft of writing. The part that I am working on right now is what I call “sketches”. My drafts tend to drift into talking to the reader about what I am trying to say. It breaks the spell. My copy of the Norton Reader puts them in the rhetorical genre called Describing.

   Woolf’s very short piece, just two facing pages, is a moving observation of herself, but universal, in the mode of description.

   ---

   1. An asimile is something I just made up. It’s short for anti-simile. A simile is of the form “x is like y”, ergo an asimile is of the form “x is not like y.” ↩︎

   2. I’m assuming here that Woolf wrote the piece in 1940 or ‘41, shortly before it was published. Also shortly before she died. I have no idea if that’s true, or if the piece is about a moth that died around the time that she wrote it and not 20 years earlier. Or if it’s even about any one particular moth that she witnessed passing at all. ↩︎

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/grab-bag-vol-2/Fri, 15 May 2026 16:04:35 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/grab-bag-vol-2/Hello RSS Clubbers! It’s Friday again so that means I’m sharing some kind of snapshot. This week I’ll take a quick tour through my open tabs and share a few worth sharing.

   

   1. Faig Ahmed - I got to see one Ahmed’s pieces at the de Young a couple of weeks ago (above) and I thought it was pretty cool. I think this one made the internet rounds a couple of years ago, probably around 2020. This Is Colossal has some more pieces, now on display in Venice.
   2. The Neighborhoods - Kingsbridge - Just the latest installment of Rob Stephenson’s awesome work on documenting every neighborhood in NYC. Interesting details (text) throughout and you get to see what a place looks like in the ample photos. You should subscribe!
   3. Wyoming’s Nuclear Renaissance - An article I am reading about developments in the nuclear industry. I urge caution as we make progress.
   4. Kottke’s Rolodex is a(bout to be a) feed reader - Jason shared a new feature on his blog a while ago, I’m just catching up. Maybe I should become a paying subscriber so I can comment and discuss.

   Have a great weekend!

   ]]>Tags: #dispatches #links #rss-club

   Hello RSS Clubbers! It’s Friday again so that means I’m sharing some kind of snapshot. This week I’ll take a quick tour through my open tabs and share a few worth sharing.

   

   1. Faig Ahmed - I got to see one Ahmed’s pieces at the de Young a couple of weeks ago (above) and I thought it was pretty cool. I think this one made the internet rounds a couple of years ago, probably around 2020. This Is Colossal has some more pieces, now on display in Venice.
   2. The Neighborhoods - Kingsbridge - Just the latest installment of Rob Stephenson’s awesome work on documenting every neighborhood in NYC. Interesting details (text) throughout and you get to see what a place looks like in the ample photos. You should subscribe!
   3. Wyoming’s Nuclear Renaissance - An article I am reading about developments in the nuclear industry. I urge caution as we make progress.
   4. Kottke’s Rolodex is a(bout to be a) feed reader - Jason shared a new feature on his blog a while ago, I’m just catching up. Maybe I should become a paying subscriber so I can comment and discuss.

   Have a great weekend!

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/grab-bag-vol-1/Mon, 04 May 2026 20:06:31 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/grab-bag-vol-1/Welcome to the first real volume of RSS Club! It’s just some random things.
   1. Ali and I are watching Néro the Assassin which is kind of fun. It’s French, but you can’t watch it in French, only in English audio and all the other languages closed caption. Or, well, I didn’t check all the other languages, just the French which is only closed captions. It’s only available in English audio. Fun fact: they did AI assisted mouth dubbing which fine, I guess. It’s a little uncanny. I’d rather watch it in French with subtitles. It’s pretty bad actually, if you stare at it.
   2. Leg day today was especially intense. Probably because I was late; I think I mis-noted the time of the appointment. Or it was just the scheduled workout since it’s basically the same thing Ali did last week.
   3. I was hoping to find some good photos of the interior user interfaces, buttons, labels, switches, that kind of thing from the Artemis II capsule. No such luck yet. There is a massive new trove on the GAE, 12k pictures (via Kottke, which I guess was via Damn Interesting and via PetaPixel before that, phew!). But I haven’t found any yet of the switches. Let me know if you do. This one is pretty cool, and so it this one, but you can’t see the controls or labels very well. No luck on the time ordered page either (via pxlnv).
   4. I recently switched to FeedBin after a couple of years of using MiniFlux after a couple of years of using the local fetcher in ReadKit. The vintage ip address range is supposed to have better luck at fetching some feeds that have been perpetually rejected. Yes, I do have some old feeds that I have carried over several times since the good old days of Google Reader. I think they’re that old. I don’t really know. Anyway, nothing is as good as that, and no, big-G, you can never bring it back, I wouldn’t trust it. I bumped into this service on the tour through alternatives; I haven’t really been able to figure out why they’re making a pitch to businesses for a feed reader, or something.
   ]]>Tags: #rss-club #dispatches #ai

   Welcome to the first real volume of RSS Club! It’s just some random things.

   1. Ali and I are watching Néro the Assassin which is kind of fun. It’s French, but you can’t watch it in French, only in English audio and all the other languages closed caption. Or, well, I didn’t check all the other languages, just the French which is only closed captions. It’s only available in English audio. Fun fact: they did AI assisted mouth dubbing which fine, I guess. It’s a little uncanny. I’d rather watch it in French with subtitles. It’s pretty bad actually, if you stare at it.
   2. Leg day today was especially intense. Probably because I was late; I think I mis-noted the time of the appointment. Or it was just the scheduled workout since it’s basically the same thing Ali did last week.
   3. I was hoping to find some good photos of the interior user interfaces, buttons, labels, switches, that kind of thing from the Artemis II capsule. No such luck yet. There is a massive new trove on the GAE, 12k pictures (via Kottke, which I guess was via Damn Interesting and via PetaPixel before that, phew!). But I haven’t found any yet of the switches. Let me know if you do. This one is pretty cool, and so it this one, but you can’t see the controls or labels very well. No luck on the time ordered page either (via pxlnv).
   4. I recently switched to FeedBin after a couple of years of using MiniFlux after a couple of years of using the local fetcher in ReadKit. The vintage ip address range is supposed to have better luck at fetching some feeds that have been perpetually rejected. Yes, I do have some old feeds that I have carried over several times since the good old days of Google Reader. I think they’re that old. I don’t really know. Anyway, nothing is as good as that, and no, big-G, you can never bring it back, I wouldn’t trust it. I bumped into this service on the tour through alternatives; I haven’t really been able to figure out why they’re making a pitch to businesses for a feed reader, or something.
   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/madera/Sun, 03 May 2026 20:31:21 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/madera/This place is a hotel restaurant at the end of Menlo Park on Sand Hill road, past SLAC but before 280. Could it be the local spot for the ultra wealthy that live in the hills past the freeway, up in La Honda or wherever? Hotel restaurant is sometimes a bad word, but this one used to be the spot back in the day. I’m unclear which day that was. It wasn’t yet built when the dot com boom was on. The other tech boom has been a sort of continuous series mini-booms and busts all happening in parallel. The AI boom is on right now, but so is the AI employment bust. It’s all very confusing and stressful.
   ]]>Tags: #dispatches #food #places

   This place is a hotel restaurant at the end of Menlo Park on Sand Hill road, past SLAC but before 280. Could it be the local spot for the ultra wealthy that live in the hills past the freeway, up in La Honda or wherever? Hotel restaurant is sometimes a bad word, but this one used to be the spot back in the day. I’m unclear which day that was. It wasn’t yet built when the dot com boom was on. The other tech boom has been a sort of continuous series mini-booms and busts all happening in parallel. The AI boom is on right now, but so is the AI employment bust. It’s all very confusing and stressful.

   But at Madera there is no stress. It is a place that has the right amount of space between the tables, is not too bright or too dim, is quiet for conversation and your own voices are absorbed into the special air they use so your party doesn’t disturb any other party, or vice versa. I don’t know how they do it, but I wish more restaurants would stage this way. Not all, of course, but being able to hear each other is a nice experience.

   I haven’t yet mentioned the view. How do I capture this, because it is not a postcard view. I would assume that the spectacular feature is the marine layer clouds falling over the crest of the hills, something that happens quite often and is always a delight. Well, it wasn’t on today. Perhaps Madera was saving a little for bigger guests. We just got a normal cloud layer, even diffuse light on the green oaks and ridge lines and a bit of freeway poking around one corner behind the pool. It is a view that I enjoy and I am pleased to have been seated near the large windows and facing them so I could look out and savor those hills and ridges and trees, even if they didn’t include any spectacular falling clouds in evening light. Maybe next time, maybe I can be on the lookout. We were there for brunch.

   I am glad to say that the food was every bit as carefully selected and prepared as the atmosphere. Lemons were bright, greens were perfectly crisp and fresh, vegetables each a piece of art, and all the entrees were just so. This is dependable quality, reliable luxury. The people back there preparing this stuff are perfectionists and notice the details and address them. They probably use tweezers. They are craftsmen- people, crafts-people, and highly skilled technicians of food. An overseer is directing this orchestra, the menu was very coherent, none of the dishes were present only to fill a hole. I can see why it’s not the spot right now, but also, please, for the hope of letting us keep some nice things, do not throw out this gem. Everything was delicious and perfect and to me worth every penny. I would go again anytime I wanted that experience. It ranks with Dio Deka, another house of perfected food that I have experienced lately. I cannot imagine ever being disappointed by either. Nor would I go there to be surprised or wowed or shown something new. You go to a place like this because you know exactly what you are going to get and it is going to be as perfect as possible because all imperfections have been either edited out or that thing is just not possible to serve right now so it will not be offered. The gluten-free Lemon and Ricotta pancakes were absolutely worth every bite and they are also among the least “California” dishes on the menu. The avocado toast was a work of art, a living still life, right down to the jammy egg on top. The artichoke hummus was so amazing that I couldn’t resist the drop of oil that had fallen on the table because the lemon infused-ness was that good. The mixed vegetables looked like something out of a painting and the green goddess dressing was bright and tangy and frankly a small revelation that such things are still made with such attention and care in today’s world.

   I haven’t mentioned the staff. They were excellent. And invisible. There to do their job, all elegantly poised and perfectly dressed and immaculate. Frankly a bit of the Edwardian house staff about them, a little upstairs/downstairs in the air. I’m not sure how that would have arrived here on the western end of the world, but I swear I felt it. Must have come with the clientele. It did take a few minutes longer than we thought it should to get some extra slices of bread for the remaining hummus. I assume they needed to bake and slice it and butter it at just the right temperature and the baker was refusing to rush the cooling period, that bread would be perfecto when it reached the table or there would be blood on the kitchen floor. That we even asked for it probably betrayed that we’re not that clientele. Who knows.

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/palo-alto/Sat, 02 May 2026 20:19:10 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/palo-alto/I haven’t been on University Ave in possibly eight, maybe nine, years. Not since before the pandemic. It’s changed. It’s the same.

   There are rich people. I mean really rich people. There are normal folks. There are homeless and beggars and buskers and panhandlers. There are people that are probably high, but who can really say. Maybe they’re just high on life. Or they don’t feel like wearing a shirt. What I am saying is that the people watching is good.

   ]]>Tags: #dispatches #photos #walking #places

   I haven’t been on University Ave in possibly eight, maybe nine, years. Not since before the pandemic. It’s changed. It’s the same.

   There are rich people. I mean really rich people. There are normal folks. There are homeless and beggars and buskers and panhandlers. There are people that are probably high, but who can really say. Maybe they’re just high on life. Or they don’t feel like wearing a shirt. What I am saying is that the people watching is good.

   

   The CVS in Palo Alto has timed safes and doesn’t stock promethazine with Codeine anymore. At The RealReal, the security guard has to press a button to unlock and open the door for every customer. To let them in. And to let them out. Maybe the streets of Palo Alto are just like that now.

   We walked down University Ave and got a juice at Joe’s. Mostly just to use the bathroom, but also to get a juice. The accent pink is an off-Pepto. That’s a weird choice for a cafe.

   We walked back up and contemplated moving our cars. The signs seemed to say we didn’t need to, but they were a lot of words. Jeff told the story of the signs around the Smithsonian. How they were easily misunderstood by tourists, and lots of cars are towed every day at 3pm. He’d been lucky and seen the line of tow trucks on their daily mission. Palo Alto doesn’t seem like that kind of place, but I don’t know. We left the cars where they were. They were there when we came back later.

   We kept walking up, looking for our dinner, and passed another Joe’s. A different Joe’s. I’m sure of it. Seems odd to put two Joe & The Juice bars within a couple of blocks of each other. Maybe a questionable pink isn’t their only problem. Maybe I’m hungry. Then again, I’ve seen the Starbucks diagonally across the intersection from each other. So, again, I don’t know.

   

   Beeple has been by recently. That’s cool, I’m curious. It’s an ad. Coulda been some secret and cool art piece. You can go to his retrospective show, if that’s your thing.

   You know what the standout at dinner was? The elevator. Darkest elevator I’ve been in. The best mood lighting I’ve ever seen. Who could resist it? Goes between two floors, a short trip, and has a disconcerting jolt when it goes down. Unaccountable how it got there, got in this restaurant. The chicken was quite good too. But that elevator. Probably worth a detour if you are into it.

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/art-of-the-americas/Fri, 01 May 2026 17:48:40 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/art-of-the-americas/I liked the Arts of the Americas exhibit of older and new indigenous work. The extractive colonialism moved me; I didn’t take any pictures. It felt disrespectful. I don’t know how well the museum addressed this.

   The Teotihuacan mural pieces from the elite’s compound were cool, but they had been brutally hammered out of the wall. They were literal fragments. Dated to the 3rd-8th century, I guess, found in situ centuries later by some European or a looter seeking sellable wares. Like a rich person said “I want” and pointed and it was taken. No regard for the surrounding stuff.

   ]]>Tags: #art #dispatches

   I liked the Arts of the Americas exhibit of older and new indigenous work. The extractive colonialism moved me; I didn’t take any pictures. It felt disrespectful. I don’t know how well the museum addressed this.

   The Teotihuacan mural pieces from the elite’s compound were cool, but they had been brutally hammered out of the wall. They were literal fragments. Dated to the 3rd-8th century, I guess, found in situ centuries later by some European or a looter seeking sellable wares. Like a rich person said “I want” and pointed and it was taken. No regard for the surrounding stuff.

   I have no idea if that’s how it happened. The museum didn’t have any provenance written there that I saw. No story of how these beautiful things got here and when, or if, respect re-entered the story. They were in a somber room, darkened and set off; the museum manipulating the viewers emotions, or legit care, I don’t know.

   ]]>https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/power-cut/Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:53:44 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/power-cut/The power went out for a few hours yesterday afternoon.¹ The alerts said that a “third party” had caused damage to the equipment. I find it strange that a power outage isn’t an unwelcome interruption, it’s a moment of enforced respite from a relentless wfh grind. In our neighborhood the cell service is a poor substitute when the power goes out. I don’t know if this is a universal experience as everyone switches from their wifi to LTE or 5G. Another neighbor complained that their AT&T cell service was not helpful either. We have Verizon. It meant that from 2 pm to 5 pm both Ali and I couldn’t work. We sat on the porch to get a better signal and felt the first drops of rain from the promised storm and played mobile games while updating colleagues that we were out of commission for a while. When that was done, we read books printed on actual paper. The rain never really started, at least not until hours later. A few drops fell now and then as the clouds thickened and the light dimmed. It got harder to read. I moved to a chair by the window to see better. By 4:30, I had decided a nap would be a good use of my time. Just before 5 the power came back on, the dishwasher resumed from where it had left off, and the refrigerator began again to make its soothing whirring sounds.² This “third party” had given my wife and I a break from busy and stressful days. We were bored, read a book, and had a quick nap.
   ]]>Tags: #dispatches #unplug #wfh

   The power went out for a few hours yesterday afternoon.¹ The alerts said that a “third party” had caused damage to the equipment. I find it strange that a power outage isn’t an unwelcome interruption, it’s a moment of enforced respite from a relentless wfh grind. In our neighborhood the cell service is a poor substitute when the power goes out. I don’t know if this is a universal experience as everyone switches from their wifi to LTE or 5G. Another neighbor complained that their AT&T cell service was not helpful either. We have Verizon. It meant that from 2 pm to 5 pm both Ali and I couldn’t work. We sat on the porch to get a better signal and felt the first drops of rain from the promised storm and played mobile games while updating colleagues that we were out of commission for a while. When that was done, we read books printed on actual paper. The rain never really started, at least not until hours later. A few drops fell now and then as the clouds thickened and the light dimmed. It got harder to read. I moved to a chair by the window to see better. By 4:30, I had decided a nap would be a good use of my time. Just before 5 the power came back on, the dishwasher resumed from where it had left off, and the refrigerator began again to make its soothing whirring sounds.² This “third party” had given my wife and I a break from busy and stressful days. We were bored, read a book, and had a quick nap.

   ---

   1. This was a couple of weeks ago, on the 20th of April. ↩︎

   2. Soothing to me, grating to Ali. ↩︎

   ]]>