The Sun Has Just Set

Icon for iPhone automation app

I was looking around on my iPhone’s Shortcuts app to see if it would do anything fun. The app has three sections, shortcuts, automation and gallery. I’ve been exploring the automation section. My iPhone’s automation controls let me select an event to trigger a sequence of actions when the event happens.

Last year, I created an event to keep low power mode even if the battery is fully charged. The trigger that I identified is “When Low power Mode is turned off.” I made that trigger cause a “Set Low Power Mode” action to toggle it back on.

When the phone charges to 80%, it normally turns low power mode off. That would activate the trigger for my automation. The automation rule would then execute the action and turn low power mode back on. I could see this on the display: the battery would change color indicating full power and then quickly change back to the low power color. (The trigger and action don’t fight with each other; it doesn’t cause flipflopping between the low power/normal power states.)

After a few days, I disabled the rule because I didn’t like some of the effects of low power. For example, not downloading in the background. It was a fun idea, but not very useful for me. However, it was an introduction to the possibilities.

This week, I created a new event using a trigger in the “Time of Day” section. One option is a trigger on Sunrise or Sunset. I selected the option to “run immediately” at the moment of sunset. I could also select a time interval relative to sunset such as 15 minutes before or 2 hours after.

In setting up actions, I picked the “Speak Text” option, setting it to say “The sun has just set.” (How clever!) I decided to have a second action for the music app play a song. I would have picked “The Sunset” from the Moody Blues album “Days of Future Passed” but I don’t have that on my phone. I found “Sunshine” by Matisyahu which was just as good as anything else.

The triggered time doesn’t match what the astronomy data site https://heavens-above.com gives for the time of sunset at my location. It is 5 minutes early. It might be because heavens-above defines sunset as the sun being 0.8° below the horizon to account for the refraction of sunlight in the atmosphere. If the iPhone is using 0°, it could explain the discrepancy. I couldn’t find online the definition of sunset used by the iPhone.

For Ramadan or the Baha’i 19 day fast, it would be nice to have clarity on how sunset is defined. Similar events could help plan daily prayers planned around the sun’s position.

It’s fun to hear the time of sunset announced.

Round robin

two parallel arrows pointing in opposite directions

As my grandparents moved on through their lives, some important friends joined them in a round robin correspondence. They had a cycle of friends who each contributed a letter to the circuit. When a group of letters arrived, after reading their friends’ messages, they removed their own and replaced it with a new bulletin and forwarded the messages on to the next person in the list.

I don’t know when the project started, but I imagine it beginning with friends from church or their careers who wanted to keep in touch as their lives progressed. Rather than leaving the people behind, they kept their community going with their communiques.

When I was collecting stamps, I found the Cover Collectors Circuit Club. An originator would pick a list of members around the world. The list would specify its own one-shot round robin so that members would forward an original postal cover to the next person in the list.

Another correspondence project is Postcrossing which enables you to send postcards to someone randomly selected from around the world. In compensation, members receive postcards from a similarly selected person from another nation.

Bill and Madelyn’s round robin project is from a different era when people were starting to disperse but still chose to keep a community going. It might be the start of my family’s legacy of building a larger community than one of parents, siblings and children. The investment needed to support a relationship can’t really be sustained by tools designed for profit motives that debase the connection possible with real contacts and sincere support. Do I really want to hear from a synthetic pen pal?

Society’s connective tissue is built out of stories shared from one person to another. When it is dangerous to tell stories, the legacy of a round robin collection of friends is torn apart. I try to keep hearing new stories. Perhaps I should start telling stories as well.

A Scanner Darkly (Philip K. Dick, 1977/Richard Linklater, 2006)

a film reel

In the promotional trailers for Constantine, I saw one for the movie A Scanner Darkly which was directed by Richard Linklater. It was animated and visually fascinating because it was made via rotoscoping. In other words, the artists who made the film started with regular footage and transformed it into animation by redrawing each frame. The style of the film was striking and its trailer made me want to see it. According to material on the DVD, each character had a detailed style sheet for their animated design. The transformation was a time-consuming process.

After watching the film, I wanted to read the book. I was surprised that, although I needed to get the film via Interlibrary Loan, the book was in my local library. Philip K. Dick wrote several other stories that became movies including Blade Runner and Minority Report. I’ve seen both of those and they also have striking ideas of strange futures. The film begins, “7 years from now”, putting it into the context of something that could happen at any time.

Keanu Reeves was the protagonist Fred/Robert Arctor and Robert Downey Jr. played the character James Barris. Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder and Rory Cochrane also appeared as important characters in the film.

I liked Barris’s performance. He had a paranoid, muttering voice that recalled a drugged-out character who was trying to be impressive while not having much important to say. Fred was a police officer and simultaneously the friend of Barris, Robert Arctor.

The story centers around a powerful drug, Substance D. The police are trying to find the source of the synthetic. The drug is also known colloquially as death and wavering between life and death is a theme. As Fred, his police employers monitor its effects on him. The medical officers tell him that it is causing interference between the hemispheres of his brain. As the story progresses, he becomes more and more confused until he goes to a drug treatment facility that specializes in Substance D.

The book and movie follow each other pretty closely. Although the film presents the Los Angeles of the story as a surveillance state with the police monitoring public spaces, the novel has surveillance of a much smaller scale, of just several targeted houses.

One science fiction element in the story is the scramble suit. The officer wearing it continually changes their appearance to disguise who they are. The goal is to protect the identity of the officer when appearing for public presentations or with other officers. When Reeves’ character is with Barris and the others, he is not wearing the suit; at work, the full body suit makes him almost invisible.

In a sense, the book and film are weak because transition between the majority of the story and their conclusion is abrupt and the story could be summarized with just a couple of sentences, spoiling the events of the rest of the them before they reach their sudden resolution. It is a forward pointing story making you imagine what happens next.

I read the book after seeing the movie. I noticed that I didn’t visualize the characters in the book as the actors and I didn’t hear their voices as they spoke in the book. Perhaps the animation style of the story made the actors’ personal appearance less attached to the story.

The book and movie had a strong emotional ending. A coda follows with an author’s note memorializing friends of the author who had died or suffered severe consequences of drug use.

The E-xterminator

My dear laser printer finally seemed beyond repair. It had been sporting this label for years and I saved the label when I took the printer to the local solid waste district.

Perhaps what I was thinking with the sign was that I could use the printer to find bugs and eliminate them. It must have done its job well because I singlehandedly went through two or three toner cartridges with it. The black and white original design was made with an early version of Microsoft WordArt. Another inspiration for the message was the Terminator films.

By the end, the automatic feed wasn’t working so that I had to manually feed the paper into it. Also, the drum had some spots on it so that it left a few black spots on the prints.

It was a Brother HL-5240. The printer was released in 2005 and I still used it in 2024. Perhaps it could have kept going if I would have done some extra maintenance?

It was a real workhorse and got plenty of use out of it.

Review? Allegory? Commentary?

3 clouds of imagination

Film reviews explain and summarize the contents of creative expression. The results of an influential director’s efforts include a potent message. A film can donate an original idea to a culture’s growing lexicon. A review takes those ideas and puts them in a broader context. Film analysis is its own style of literature.

Film reviews not derived from a separate work would stand on their own. Rather than describing a released movie, it presents ideas from an imaginary film. It offers the film as an allegory or commentary while actually containing only the reviewer’s ideas.

A clever review can couch an important idea in a compact form. The review framework deflects the responsibility for the ideas to an imagined director. Generally, a review is neutral conduit for an idea. However, the text may adopt the review vehicle and make it a discussion about a controversial topic.

A successful review of a potential movie might be more palatable to our modern 5-minute attention span than a 3-hour cinematic masterpiece. Some essays might succeed as an analysis of potential films. An ingenious review could contain its own powerful message.

Constantine (2005)

a blood colored movie reel

Recently I saw an image of Keanu Reeves holding a dark gray cat with unnaturally long canine teeth. I went looking for the photograph online and found a video of the cat scene from the movie Constantine. Having collected Keanu movies in the past, I was intrigued.

The movie starts with three dramatic, seemingly unrelated, events. A man in Mexico finds an powerful spear (knife) that gave him supernatural powers. He walks in front of a speeding car and the car is destroyed and he walks away. John Constantine, Reeves’ character, arrives when a demon-possessed woman has flied up to the ceiling of the room. Constantine knows what to do and gets the demon dispatched with an intense performance. Finally, a woman in a hospital walks to the edge of the building and jumps, falling through a glass roof into a large swimming pool. All three events launch the movie with anxious urgency. That woman and her twin sister are played by Rachel Weisz.

The movie has a lot of demonology cliches like holy water burning demons and protective amulets. The people who are allies of the demons are half-breeds that are daunting antagonists and are able to survive extreme violence. Massed insects and a cross-shaped gold gun also show up. Although there is a divine rule that the demons and angels can’t enter this world directly, that rule is fraying and is at risk of annulment, hence the need for John Constantine intervention.

The visuals of Hell are striking. The demons in Hell have strange heads. One feature of Hell is the blistering hot wind and apocalyptic remnants of cars and buildings. The opening credits show the Hell environment as its wind erodes the production studios’ logos. Constantine travels to Hell with the aid of that cat and a pan of water.

The knife seems important since it is mentioned in the opening titles and the knife bearer is followed on his trip to LA. The purpose of trip is to construct a deadline for the urgent activities of Constantine. Once he brings the MacGuffin to its destination, he is unneeded and vanishes.

As a horror film, it was ok. Constantine was so confident in his abilities that I had little doubt of his success. Despite fighting terminal lung cancer, cigarettes come with him everywhere. His addiction is revealed when he sets one aside at the first exorcism and picks it up once he is done with his duties there. His cancer and impending death is the cause for Constantine’s desperate search for redemption.

It isn’t a great movie. Perhaps if I was more versed in the horror genre, I would appreciate it more. I looked at The Numbers and the movie was financially successful, with a worldwide box office of $221 million on a budget of $75 million. I think I’m committed now to watching more horror movies to find the ones with the best cats.

Have you heard from John Connor?

John Connor is a character from the Terminator series of movies. My thought is that he is embedded into LLMs and can provide support when asked.

What messages can he make for these fraught times?

I asked an LLM what Connor might have told the fledgling Resistance. Connor suggested to have a focus on survival, unity, and the strategic disruption of the other’s operations.

A Call to Unity and Survival

“Our future seems bleak, but we are not alone. Every life among us is priceless, and together, our resolve becomes a power that cannot be defeated.”

Emphasize Stealth and Secrecy

“They see us through the networks we once relied on. Limit digital footprints. Operate in the shadows.”

Continually Adapt

“We must be resourceful: turn their technology, directives and demands against them. Use every trick we can find to overcome their power.”

Focused Resistance

“Address their essential operations. Restricting how they build and move resources undermines their momentum. Focus on key points of vulnerability. When their processes struggle, their ability to impose control diminishes.”

Foster Intelligence and Information Sharing

“Knowledge is our best weapon. Share what you learn about them—strengths, weaknesses, and tactics.”

Train and Empower Every Survivor

“Everyone can fight back, regardless of age or background. We stand stronger when all are prepared.”

Inspire Hope and Resilience

“We fight not just to survive, but to protect what makes us human—our families, our memories, our future.”

The LLM reported this summary of Connor’s initial announcements. It said unity and hope can push back and resist their domination. It said strength lies in adaptability, decentralized operations and the indomitable human spirit that no machine can truly replicate.

The Wild Robot (2024)

a reel of film

A helpful robot needs to have a purpose. Roz wakes up on the shore of an island with no one to ask for her help.

The beautiful graphics of The Wild Robot are appealing. Even in the trailers, the art design elements of the film are evident. The story shows Roz developing in her relationship with the island’s wildlife. Her initial attempts to be useful end up catastrophically and cause all of the animals to fear her. Eventually Roz learns how to communicate with the animals and they interact with less conflict.

The corporation which sent the robot presents a utopian vision of life in the future. They have shiny mockups of robots and corporate cities in their marketing materials. They resemble futuristic designs by Disney from the 60s. They offer perfect robots to do everyone’s work and liberate citizens. It was interesting the how the Universal Dynamics marketing videos in The Wild Robot have a similar cadence and tone to the corporate messages from Buy n Large in the animated film Wall-E.

When the city was disrupted by “contamination” by wildlife, the robots react violently. They override their purpose of enhancing the city and start damaging it to defend their (presented as) idyllic synthetic environment.

There are some pointed moments in the film such as the scenes that show the Golden Gate Bridge. The explanation for an extreme winter is also left unstated. The wildlife on the island seems to be healthy and Roz helps them thrive. The baby opossums are pretty funny when they meet Roz.

The movie is unusual in that the title screen occurred at the end of the film. The openings of DreamWorks films show the studio’s logo of a boy fishing off the crescent moon. Here, the animation leading up to that logo included vignettes alluding to other DreamWorks films before resolving to the logo.

The Wild Robot is very violent. When it is amongst anthropomorphized animals, it doesn’t seem to hit as hard. However, the interactions with Universal Dynamics always devolve to extreme violence, causing explosions and fires, firing guns at the animals with one animal’s death all but shown in an especially intense moment of conflict. Roz is defiant in her relationship to Universal Dynamics and titles herself a Wild Robot when they try to retrieve her. It’s always a source of tension when she uses the module to help them retrieve her.

The Wild Robot is definitely a movie worth watching.

The Green Pentagon: No Loaded Firearms

a green regular pentagon

Can the 2nd amendment distinguish between unloaded firearms and loaded firearms?

In the past, firearms were only loaded immediately before being used; the technology for firearms in the 18th century had few pre-loaded firearms in public. Having a policy affecting loaded firearms differently than loaded firearms just might pass muster as consistent with past firearm practices.

Displaying this green pentagonal sign would alert people that a building or event does not allow loaded firearms. Regular pentagons are not symbols for any other purpose and the green color symbolizes a focus on life.

To use these signs would not need any new legislation. Going to a place displaying the green pent with a loaded gun would be a form trespass (and in many places, felony trespass). Trespass laws are pretty straightforward. Bringing something to a place where you are not permitted to have it is trespass. However, legislation could codify the sign’s meaning.

These signs could be self-enforcing. A person carrying a loaded firearm generally won’t want to have an unpleasant interaction about it. If the signs were widespread, there shouldn’t be a paradoxical response where it would promote the opposite behavior. Firing a gun at the sign would quickly lose novelty. Open carry would be deprecated by people without guns.

This seems like a way of hacking the 2nd amendment to reduce the presence of dangerous loaded guns in public spaces. It would be a way of offering a new policy and starting a new conversation about the meaning of American gun violence.

Wearing a green pentagon is a way of taking a stand.

Action item: PayPal’s privacy statement update

face saying oh no

PayPal is updating its privacy statement with a troubling change next month. PayPal updates its policies so often that it’s hard to keep up. This time they intend to begin sharing information about your shopping history, which is a substantial change.

The service wants to “help improve your shopping experience” by sharing information with merchants. If you live in a state with weak privacy laws (most of them1), you must opt out to prevent that. The U.S. summary of upcoming PayPal policies is at https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/upcoming-policies-full?locale.x=en_US. Past policy updates are kept here https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/archive-policies-full.

To opt out before November 27, 2024, after logging in, select the settings gear near the log out link in the upper right. Then select the tab “Data and Privacy.” About half-way down select the section “Personalize Shopping.” Within that category is a checkbox “Personalize shopping.” If you toggle it off, you will prevent them from sharing your confidential data.

The November 2024 date is when the policy statement takes effect, but you can opt out at any time. The summary text says that they’ll start sharing the data in summer 2025 but the actual privacy statement doesn’t mention 2025. I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from that.

If you want to limit the spread of your shopping history between vendors, go toggle the setting off. If you’re comfortable with another feature eroding your privacy, you don’t need to do anything.

  1. Only California, North Dakota and Vermont are opt-in. ↩︎