Events

St. Boniface Cemetery, Chicago:

So the masthead is blue now. Any thoughts? Parker and I managed to go for a one-hour, five-kilometer walk earlier today, as hoped. So my lazy Sunday hasn't been entirely lazy. But just on principle, I think the rest of the day will involve a nap and some time at a local bar with a book.

I forgot that I picked up my FitBit a year ago this week. So how am I doing since 24 October 2014? 4.76 million steps (13,000 per day) 4,081 km (11 km per day) 4,557 floors (12 per day) By FitBit's reckoning, that puts me somewhere around the 90th percentile of FitBit users worldwide. It also means I've walked the entire length of Japan and climbed enough stairs to reach the normal cruising altitude of a commercial jet. And Parker and I are about to get more steps in just a few minutes.

Politico has a long-form article describing Evanston's efforts to rid its downtown of cars: With stops for Chicago Transit Authority buses and its “L” rail line, Metra suburban rail’s Union Pacific North line and the Pace suburban bus, Evanston always had great transit bones. For much of its history it had also been a relatively prosperous North Shore city, its growth initially spurred by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, as Chicagoans fled its chaotic density, and in the 20th century, its share of...

This post has a personal and a technical significance. Personally: exactly 10,000 days ago, I was graduated from high school, at about this time of day. Technically: The new blog engine let me pre-post this several days ahead, something the old blog engine thought it could do but never quite succeeded. That is all.

My new LG G4 phone has one hell of a camera: That's what came out of the phone, unedited (except for location tagging). The phone can save photos in raw .dng format, which Adobe Lightroom reads just fine. This enables full editing control and zero data loss, among other things. Pretty cool.

Hurricane Patricia, which will slam into the Mexican coastal villages of San Patricio and Barra de Navidad in just a few hours, is the strongest hurricane ever observed: Packing 200 mph winds, the U.S. National Hurricane Center described Patricia as the "strongest hurricane on record" in the Atlantic and eastern North Pacific Basins. At 8 a.m. ET, Patricia was about 230 km southwest of Manzanillo, and about 340 km south of Cabo Corrientes. Hurricane warnings stretched from San Blas to Punta San Telmo...

Not that it should surprise anyone, but brewing giants like InBev and MillerCoors aren't buying craft brewers to distribute them more widely. Just the opposite: [T]he Department of Justice and regulators in California were investigating whether InBev, which makes Budweiser and Bud Light, was buying up beer wholesalers to curb sales of craft beers in bars and grocery stores. “When a big brewery buys an independently-owned distributor they would evaluate each one of those brands and not keep all of them,”...

Via Schneier, a report that FitBit trackers could, in theory, spread malware to users' computers: The athletic-achievement-accumulating wearables are wide open on their Bluetooth ports, according to research by Fortinet. The attack is quick, and can spread to other computers to which an infected FitBit connects. Attacks over Bluetooth require an attacker hacker to be within metres of a target device. This malware can be delivered 10 seconds after devices connect, making even fleeting proximity a...

The Tribune waxes rhapsodic about the season that was: Let's take stock of all that before we start with the wait-till-next-year business. Let's celebrate this year. It was awesome. It was unexpected. It was thrilling. It was a gift to the city of Chicago from a team of overachievers, including four standout rookie starters. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Cubs all-time postseason home run leader Kyle Schwarber, age 22. Rookie of the year candidate Kris Bryant, 23. Cardinal-killer Jorge Soler, 23. And...