Hello friends, it’s me, the human writer who technically owns this site and theoretically writes material for it. We all know AIs are now doing a lot of the writing in this world, and I have certainly been using AI a lot to do chores like “write me a blog post” and “build me a beaver simulator.” I will even admit that several of my last written posts on this site have been “assisted” by AI tools that probably deserve more credit, but so far I’ve held off on using AI to make generative edits to my photos. And that issue has brought me back to my keyboard, which I am actually typing on with my own human fingers and not letting some AI do the work. My photos are all hand-crafted by me, but does that still make sense in our age of AI wonders? Did it ever make sense? Let’s take a deep dive.
Like a lot of folks, I’ve been using AI to speed up everyday tasks at work and at home, but I’ve been looking for a good excuse to sit down, vibe code, and deploy a full interactive app entirely from scratch.
Recently, I read a fascinating Quanta Magazine article about the Busy Beaver problem—a theoretical computer science puzzle that quickly escalates from simple logic into numbers that literally break the boundaries of modern mathematics. I realized this was the perfect project. I wanted to actually visualize and play this like a game, and AI could help me build the sandbox.
It’s a fully functional Turing machine simulator right in your browser. You write the rules, and the little beaver 🦫 runs up and down the tape executing them. Try to leave as many 1s on the board as possible before the program halts, or load up one of the historical champion machines to see how quickly things spiral out of control.
I own several Garmin devices, including an older Oregon 600 that I have used for years for hiking and biking. When I first got it, I also purchased an SD card to expand its anemic internal storage. I then downloaded a nice selection of maps from GPSFileDepot and OpenStreetMap. This worked well for a while, and then one day I did some data cleanup and the Garmin started ignoring the card entirely when loading maps. The weird thing is the card would work just fine with the GPS connected to my Mac via a USB cable, but the Garmin itself wouldn’t acknowledge it. I honestly don’t recall exactly what I did, but I did something that broke the SD card entirely.
I’ve done so much tinkering to fix this problem. I tried multiple other SD cards, uninstalled maps, reinstalled maps, formatted cards, manually copied maps, and more. It just would not work. After a lot of tinkering, I gave up and just made due with the internal storage for managing my maps. Every few years I would try again, only to get frustrated and move on. But this year I stumbled across the solution and finally struck pay dirt!
If you’re having a problem getting your Garmin to read an SD card, this may help you. First, make sure you review Garmin’s help for when an SD card is not detected. If this advice still doesn’t resolve your problem, then keep reading.
Take a look at my recent post from Stockholm. Did you notice anything unusual about the colors, or did it look like a regular evening photo with a rich blue sky and warm city lights? Of course color is wildly subjective, so there’s no way to know for sure how you see the photo, but hopefully it looked “normal” to you. Why this sudden interest in colors, you ask? It’s because I did something different with my Stockholm photo – something new. I posted it using a modern color space, breaking free from a convention that’s been dictating digital colors since 1996. Keep reading to find out what that means.
Just 8 years ago, Google launched Google+ – a bold yet quixotic social network that was Google’s answer to Facebook. By 2011 standards it was an admirable attempt at creating something different and new, especially with clever features like organizing your contacts into “Circles” for easier control over sharing with different groups of people. But Facebook’s network effects were just too strong, and Google+ never really stood a chance. Now, in just a few days, it will be shutdown forever.
Just 8 years ago, Google launched 
