Dan Allen

Happy 50th to @apple - hard to believe how far it has come. I went to High School with Jobs, Woz, Bill Fernandez, & Chris Espinosa at Homestead and look at things now! Here is to 50 more great years!

It appears that my Internet provider CenturyLink (Lumen AS209) implements BGP properly. (See isbgpsafeyet.com)

The Internet provider CABLE ONE (AS11492) appears to implement BGP properly. (See isbgpsafeyet.com)

Imagine if the United States had swallowed the Al Gore-style climate gospel back in the day... You don't really have to imagine it. Because there's a natural experiment that took place and that alternative future that the US dodged actually exists. It's called the United Kingdom. I seem to remember there was a sneering attitude from coastal liberal elites hooked on TED talks when Sarah Palin came on the scene and said "drill baby drill." They laughed and dismissed the idea of ramping up domestic fossil fuel production as backward and environmentally reckless. If it was up to them, they would have shut down fracking, choked off new drilling, slapped massive restrictions on oil and gas development, and chased the fantasy of rapid "green" transition at all costs. Instead America did the opposite. The result? UK households today pay 2X more than US households do for energy and their industrial electricity prices are among the highest in Europe. Sure they've lowered emissions (technically they just outsourced it) but at the cost of creating a massive structural economic disadvantage. Energy is the foundational input for everything - steel, chemicals, fertilizers, aluminum, cement, refining. When your electricity and gas bills are 2–6× higher, you just can't even compete. So you end up closing plants, offshoring jobs, and watching your industrial base slowly bleed out. So yeah, the UK's current predicament is exactly where the US would be in if the Green Lobby, Dems and Hollywood suckers had their way: energy-poor, import-dependent, economically hobbled, and geopolitically neutered. The worst part is it's completely ideological. The UK could have had more homegrown energy supply to buffer prices and keep revenue flowing, but Ed Miliband refuses to exploit the UK's own shale or North Sea potential aggressively. Decline really is a choice. Americans should be glad their leaders refused to make it.

@NWSPocatello Something is wrong. We live just east of Idaho Falls and your map legend of red indicates 18", but we got a half an inch. What I am reading wrong?

This image estimates the amount of snow that fell Wednesday and Thursday #idwx

@thomasareed Thanks for your interesting and helpful posts over the years.

I've exited from tech and am doing guided tours in and around Yellowstone. backroadsbear.com Thanks to everyone for some great years! This will be my last post here. 🐬

This is probably the best answer I've ever heard to the question, "Why did God create evil?" A professor at the university asked his students the following question: “Everything that exists was created by God?” One student bravely answered: “Yes, it was created by God.” The professor asked : “If God created everything, then God created evil, since it exists. And according to the principle that our deeds define ourselves, then God is evil.” The student became silent after hearing such an answer. The professor was very pleased with himself. He boasted to students for proving once again that faith in God is a myth. Another student raised his hand and said: “Can I ask you a question, professor?” "Of course," replied the professor. “Professor, is cold a thing?” “What kind of question is this? Of course it exists. Have you ever been cold?” Students laughed at the young man's question. The young man answered: “Actually, sir, cold doesn't exist. According to the laws of physics, what we consider cold is actually the absence of heat. A person or object can be studied on whether it has or transmits energy. Absolute zero (-460 degrees Fahrenheit) is a complete absence of heat. All matter becomes inert and unable to react at this temperature. Cold does not exist. We created this word to describe what we feel in the absence of heat.” The student continued: “Professor, does darkness exist?” “Of course it exists.” said the professor. “You're wrong again, sir. Darkness also does not exist. Darkness is actually the absence of light. We can study the light but not the darkness. We can use Newton's prism to spread white light across multiple colors and explore the different wavelengths of each color. You can't measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into the world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you tell how dark a certain space is? You measure how much light is presented. Isn't it so? Darkness is a term man uses to describe what happens in the absence of light.” In the end, the young man asked the professor: “Sir, does evil exist?” This time it was uncertain, the professor answered: “Of course, as I said before. We see him every day. Cruelty, numerous crimes and violence throughout the world. These examples are nothing but a manifestation of evil.” To this, the student answered: “Evil does not exist, sir, or at least it does not exist for itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is like darkness and cold—a man-made word to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is not faith or love, which exist as light and warmth. Evil is the result of the absence of Divine love in the human heart. It’s the kind of cold that comes when there is no heat, or the kind of darkness that comes when there’s no light.” 🙏🏻❤️🙏🏻

@kevinpurcell @ColbyBadhwar Wow you really know a lot about armament! I have been learning a lot from your war-related observations.

@ColbyBadhwar Nah, their ALBMs have small warheads and are not bunker busters. They are great for DEAD on AD systems or soft targets. You can see the holes in the sat images. These are from bunker busters. GBU-28 from F-15 (good for 6m concrete) or GBU-39 or MPR-500 (good for 4m concrete)

"The strike required relatively few aircraft, but they were armed with long-range and highly accurate munitions. Two hours and five minutes after the jets took off [...] the long-range missiles struck the compound." Sounds like Israel killed Khamenei with Air Launched Ballistic Missiles.

@ridge @MKBHD The Ridge backpack has no dimensions listed on its web page, no capacity in liters, no weight. This could be improved.

Le 2 mars 1969, le #Concorde 001 effectuait son 1er vol d'essai ! Reconnaissable à son nez pointu et sa silhouette élancée, le Concorde a marqué l’histoire par sa vitesse : il était capable de voler à +2 fois la vitesse du son, permettant de traverser l’Atlantique en à peine 3h.

I used to marvel at new tech and now I'm just over it. This encapsulates how I feel about any new app or tech device these days.

In April 1985, high above the Irish Sea, photographer Adrian Meredith captured what has since become one of the most legendary images in aviation history. From the back seat of a Royal Air Force Panavia Tornado, Meredith photographed the *Concorde* at an altitude of around 50,000 feet, racing across the sky at Mach 2. The opportunity was fleeting—the Tornado, powerful as it was, could only stay alongside the supersonic airliner for a few minutes before falling behind. Within this narrow window of less than four minutes, Meredith managed to frame and capture an image that revealed Concorde in its full glory. The photograph itself is striking, not only because it shows the sleek, delta-winged jet in motion, but because it places it in a context rarely seen— the curvature of the Earth visible in the background, a view usually reserved for astronauts. The clarity of the shot conveys both the elegance of Concorde’s design and the immense challenge of supersonic flight. It was not merely a picture of a plane, but of a technological marvel at its absolute peak, suspended in an almost otherworldly setting where art and engineering seemed to merge seamlessly. Nearly two decades later, when Concorde was retired in 2003, the image took on even greater meaning. It now stands as a symbol of a bygone age, when commercial aviation dared to dream beyond the limits of speed and altitude. Meredith’s photograph preserves that dream, a frozen moment in time when the future seemed to arrive early, soaring faster than the speed of sound above the clouds. It remains both a celebration of human ingenuity and a nostalgic reminder of an era that has yet to return. © Aviation Historia #archaeohistories

So Apple began the week with an iPhone 17e and an iPad Air M4.

Reality is crashing New York’s utopian green-energy party For years, New York has promised aggressive emissions cuts at little cost. Now, reality is crashing the party, and the state has been caught out in that fib. Faced with a court-imposed deadline earlier this month, New York concedes that its green goals would pose “costs consumers simply cannot bear.” From my latest newsletter: us5.campaign-archive.com/?u=40608ac9388… Sign up: us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=40…

Really the best feature of Mac OS X since Snow Leopard is the Notes app. However, would it be too much to ask to have Notes sync with iCloud on launch, and then again on quit? On Macs, syncing always is lagging behind iPhones.

I bought a new Mac Studio so that I could ensure it would work with Mac OS X Sequoia rather than Tahoe. What a great piece of hardware. Apple's hardware is nearly perfect, whilst its software was nearly perfect (back around Snow Leopard 10.6). It has gone downhill ever since.

We continue to have a warm winter here in Idaho Falls. Weirdly, it is so windy that it feels very cold, even though it is in the 40s. It should, however, be 20°F, not 40°F.

Apple: stop trying to ram a horrible release down my throat! Stop it with all of the upgrade reminders. I know about Tahoe, have used it, and do not want to use it until your fix the Music player's song view where a horizontal scroll bar is mid-screen. Unbelievable.

I have reverted from Mac OS X Tahoe back to Sequoia on multiple Macs now. Tahoe's brain-dead Music player is an abomination to UI design. Jobs would be appalled. Come on Apple: function over form!!!

BBC admits it made a yet another biased mistake. They always go one way. On the basis of a new report by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the article said parts of the Great Barrier Reef had "suffered the largest annual decline in coral cover since records began nearly 40 years ago". A reader complained that, taken along with the headline, this conveyed a misleading impression because the article omitted the information that, in the year 2023-24 coral coverage had been at a record high, and that in the current year it had been the fourth-highest on record. The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the BBC's editorial standards of accuracy.