Monthly Archives: August 2024

Burning Man So Far

Asides

This is my 9th Burning Man; I started coming in 2013. It’s incredible how much it has changed and evolved in that time. I love seeing all the technology and engineering advances every year. In my time it has gone from more fire and flashlights to LEDs with rainbow and color everywhere.

I drove in on Sunday, my first time driving in. Logistically, it’s been smooth so far regarding access to power and water, and of course, I set up a Starlink. ☺️ It’s also been a Goldilocks year with the weather and wind.

I swear this will be my last Burn with Micro-USB, which I consider my personal nemesis. Ultimate Ears has finally upgraded their Booms to USB-C (thank you Hanneke!) but Micro USB came back to bite me unexpectedly this year.

Burning Man is heaven for photographers; the dust makes everything look dramatic. I wanted to return to my “PhotoMatt” roots and shoot this year, so I resurrected back my big camera, a Nikon D5, and I’ve gotten some incredible shots. Burning Man has a principle of Radical Self Reliance, which I tried to practice, but the XQD reader I brought isn’t working. The D5 has a USB port you can connect to, but it’s the one I consider the most cursed of all USB ports: Micro USB B Data.

No one likes that connector.

People often ask me what Burning Man is like, it’s hard to answer because it’s very much “choose your own adventure.” People can and do have radically different experiences. For me, this year has had highlights that included seeing the most amazing whirling dervish with live music, talking to people coding visualizations on art pieces, and doing dishes! This year I’m camping with Maxa and my work shifts are with the kitchen team. Maxa is legendary for the love and care they put into food, so it’s been amazing to see the effort that goes into making meals for 100+ people three times a day in extreme conditions. As you can imagine, this generates a lot of dishes and I’ve made it a personal goal to be the best dishwasher ever, scrubbing every nook and cranny while trying to conserve water.

If I can get a cable or card reader to download photos, I’ll post them on my Tumblr, so keep an eye out for updates.

People Wanted

Automattic

There’s an apocryphal story about Ernest Shackleton putting an ad in the newspaper that read:

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

If you’ve read the book Endurance by Alfred Lansing, you know how that went. Pretty legendary. One of my most treasured possessions is actually a copy of Ernest Shackleton’s Heart of the Antarctic book signed by every member of the shore party and Shackleton.

You may have heard the news that we’re going to migrate Tumblr onto WordPress. Automattic has put up a similar page calling for talented engineers of any gender who want to join the voyage.

Best Cities

Meta

When we had some calm seas while I was on the Drumfire, with my schedule unusually clear and Starlink humming, I found myself writing Python with Claude to export and analyze all of my Swarm check-in activity. I have 14,021 check-ins. So now on my about page it lists the ~70 countries I’ve been to and the top 200 cities I’ve spent time in. But it made me think a lot about what my favorite cities are, so here are my top ten current faves, in no particular order:

  • Paris
  • Tokyo
  • Sydney
  • Florence
  • New York
  • San Francisco
  • Stockholm
  • Singapore
  • London
  • Houston

Any of these I would be happy to live in. Honorable mentions but didn’t make the cut: Austin, Jackson, Seattle, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Montreal, Vienna, Reykjavik.

I would be remiss if I didn’t use this as an opportunity to highlight Paul Graham’s great essay on Cities and Ambition.

Anbernic, Sol, and Daylight

Tech

I’m always trying out new things. First, something fun: my friend Jesse gifted me a very cool Gameboy-like device called the Anbernic RG35XX, at ~$46. It has almost every game you remember, like if you got all the cartridges at Toys R Us or checked them out at Blockbuster. Having something without Wi-Fi, notifications, etc., is nice to relax. Very fun. I’m also keeping my eye on Palmer Luckey’s new ModRetro.

Second, I give to you the Sol E-reader, $399, basically glasses with a Kindle built-in, and a remote you hold in your hand for turning pages. The website is slick, even the packaging and design was nice, but the product is not. Do not buy this. It’s really not pleasant to use. The resolution was so low and the typography so bad it felt like reading on a TI-89 calculator.

Third, I’ve been really enjoying the DC-1 Daylight Computer, $729, which is like if a Kindle mixed with an iPad in the best possible way. This feels like an actually new platform, in that I find myself imagining new ways and places (like outdoors) I’d want to spend time with it. It runs Android, so you can have any app on it, even code on it. This video gives a good sense of the device and its founder Anjan Katta:

I could see Daylight being fantastic for kids as well; it just feels less “toxic” than the hyper-display world in which smartphones have us trapped. Audrey invested back in 2022 and it’s awesome to see how this turned out, it’s so rare that hardware makes it to this stage. I’ve shifted a lot of my nighttime consumption and play over to the Daylight; it’s so fun to play chess or read an article. It has surpassed the Kindle as my favorite reading device. And it looks good everywhere:

I used the Daylight a lot on the recent Sydney to Hamilton Island ~1,000 mile transport I did with the Drumfire crew and my friend Herman/John, which was part of my “learning to sail” goal for this year.

We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas. We can share and sort our knowledge and behavior. We can communicate and come together in an instant. We also have new ethics and attitudes that spring from this new organization and change society in ways we cannot yet see, with openness, generosity, collaboration, efficiency. We are using the internet’s connective tissue to leap over borders—whether they surround countries or companies or demographics. We are reorganizing society. This is Google’s—and Facebook’s and craigslist’s—new world order.

— Jeff Jarvis in the book What Would Google Do? Published 2009.

Interesting to revisit as they float trial balloons on breaking Google up (terrible idea) or other antitrust enforcement.