56 Mondays

Leaving Lisbon with 56 Mondays left on the payroll. www.topgold.ie/56-monday…

In case you're thinking about moving to Ireland

So you’re thinking about decamping to Ireland as the heat inside American political circles starts increasing. You can’t expect to be like me in the mid-90s and drive off the ferry with your car as a non-EU citizen going to work in an American field office. And if you don’t have a …

Proud Dad Time

Currently in our little cabin watching a dog sleep while I prep some instavideo shots. Then I went out to see my daughter’s first solo music performance. Proud dad.

Beatlemania vs The Swifties

With the Eras Tour set to spend three days in Dublin, I asked Perplexity if Taylor Swift has more impact than The Beatles. This question “has sparked intense debate among music fans and industry observers. This comparison between two iconic acts from different eras highlights the evolving …

Tough Landscape for Joe Biden

I’m from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where plenty of Trump signs and MAGA bumper sticks dot the landscape. Biden isn’t winning over enough voters in the battleground states and things look bleak for him in Pennsylvania. As Patrick Healy explains in the New York Times, “In the …

Cycling to Lunch

Cycling to lunch youtu.be/vgBXL051f… because I need wind in my hair after I’ve hunched over my laptop for more than two hours straight. There is nothing on a screen that is good as a breeze passing through my cycling helmet. Scrolling through screens is nothing like cycling around town. …

Thinking on Street Corners

One of the finest aspects of Ireland in summer is you can find interesting places outside where you can think. Like on a street corner in Dalkey, Ireland. It doesn’t get dark until after 10PM in June in Ireland.

Inspired by Art

I enjoy art when it communicates across generations. The above photo of two young girls mounting their chairs to listen to a recording during Manifesta showed my one of those inspirational moments in 2004. Twenty years later, on the grounds of Raheen House in Clonmel, I listened to another artist …

Stop Attacking Google

Like Paul Bassett Davies says, “Stop attacking Google for occasional inaccuracies. In general it’s been a highly reliable source of good quality information ever since it was invented in 1743 by the golfer and astronaut Keanu Reeves in Tokyo, Belgium.” I asked Bing Image Creator to …

Watching Severe Air Turbulence

I used to fly four engine jets through areas of turbulence on trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights. It always amazed me when the sky was clear but the air was moderately turbulent. Over the years I started watching for more than five degrees of change in the outside air temperature or more than …

My Next Laptop Just Appeared with Satya Nadella on Stage

My next Surface Laptop won’t have a model number but it will have a NPU inside. The laptop will need an NPU because it does so many clever things since the hardware is designed to run AI natively. The new silicon inside is capable of more than 40 trillion operations per second. The promo …

Calcium on the school run

Thinking I should start a channel called “school run” especially for morning revelations.

Measuring people through my camera roll

I’ve in-laws who don’t like having their voices recorded for posterity. And they resist any sort of casual snap unless it’s a family event. Because I’ve at least one image of each in-law for the past 15 years, I can see how people can shrink as they get older. Hopefully their …

Googlebots Crawl Microblog

I didn’t expect to earn any Google Juice from my microblog but plausible.io/topgold.m… shows me the little topgold.micro.blog has footprints visible in Russia, the UK, and the USA. It appears visitors from Twitter are masked as “direct” because I’ve clicked on tweets …

First Lab Session for AI Workgroup

I’m reviewing working notes at publish.obsidian.md/transform… left behind by a group of trainees from the Tipperary County Council who spent more than five hours on keyboards while completing hands-on tasks with AI. We used several GPTs from OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity.ai, and …

Red Book Preface #audiomo

I am thinking about carving out time for the social audio project called Audiomo. It runs every June with the Light Touch of Ernmander. I think I will figure out whether I can do the Audiomo challenge without ever leaving my 5yo Samsung handset. So I took a photo of a red notebook that has 229 pages …

Why Faster Upload Speeds?

Wondering why my home wifi upload speeds are nearly twice as fast as the download speeds. I have gigbit fibre to the home. We don’t get fibre speeds over WiFi but that’s alright.

Throwback to my trans-Atlantic days

I have a daily throwback album and that means I can see things from the 80s like the seats I used to occupy while flying free across the Atlantic.

Making a Personal Chatbot

From field historian John Tierney I learned about a GPT-powered chatbot that learned from texts about daily itineraries, thoughts, and conversations with others. This customised LLM learns about political stances, meal preferences, and common stories. A simple voice cloning software lets the chatbot …

Let it sit

Thanks to Suw aka [Chocolate and Vodka](What to do when your mind is blank — Chocolate and Vodka), my creative block is sorted. Her advice: Let a draft sit overnight I try to never let my newsletter wait until the day it’s due, unless I’m already very clear on what I’m going to be writing. So when …

Hard Work Hardly Not

I heard my grandfather use the phrase “work comes first” and he lived life that way. Grandpa Goldbach prioritized working life over other aspects of life, such as leisure time, family, and personal interests. However, this is not the view of his great grandchildren. Some key points about …

Thinking about erecting a solar fence

I’m following a discussion on a Facebook Group that pits a local community against a solar farmer. Because of the way Perplexity.ai works, I’m being fed information about how solar fences can generate energy. The energy can flow to batteries or inverters. Here are the key points: Solar …

Need a Factory Reset

Starting the second “return to factory settings” in my 5yo Samsung phone. The drain on the battery is exceptionally deep. There’s often a two second lag between touching an item and getting a response. But first, I’ll complete a little audit.

I Didn't See the Other Aircraft

DURING MY 3000 FLYING HOURS I vividly remember two occasions when we were cleared to land on a runway that was occupied by another aircraft or by a vehicle. In both cases, I didn’t see the conflict but a crew member sitting in the jump seat pointed out the conflict. Knowing this, I believe the …

Big Fan of Mem.ai and soon it's reading email threads

In the mid-90s, I was so happy with a flat-text indexing service called AskSam. I’d install the software from a set of floppies and it would keep track of all sorts of notes I had scattered across my laptop. Today, I still have a scattergun approach to information and I’m using a much …