I’m David Gewirtz. Welcome to this week’s Advanced Geekery newsletter. It’s been an exciting week. Let’s dive in.
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Here’s a quick recap of the articles I published in the last week on ZDNET.
Is your really old iPhone still worth anything or just e-waste? How to tell: I found my old iPhone 4 in a drawer and wondered: Does it work? Is it worth anything? What should I do with it? I went looking for answers.
How to use ChatGPT Work - and my top 10 tips for getting started with agentic AI: Curious about ChatGPT Work? Here’s how the agentic AI handles research, files, and multistep projects, plus its risks and limits.
Anthropic’s Claude and Cowork will share memories about you now - unless you opt out: Anthropic is merging Claude chat and Cowork memory, raising privacy questions about what AI remembers and whether or not it’s worth the tradeoff.
The Fab Lab’s electrical infrastructure has been testing my patience. There are enough circuits in the room, but the consumer UPSs have been wheezing and crashing when my 3D printers are in use. Why is a challenging electrician-y question that that will answered in an upcoming video. But it particularly sucks when you’re in the middle a big print and the things designed to keep you from losing big prints are causing you to lose big prints. Never fear, help has arrived.
The good news is that the problem is about to go away, courtesy of Jackery. I’m in the process of unpacking and setting up four of these monsters, which should make my electrical issues a thing of the past.
Stay tuned. This video will be a good one.
Moving on, let’s queue up some interesting YouTube videos for your entertainment and edification.
Someone decided that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home needed a modern, re-cut trailer. It’s really quite good.
And now for something completely different. About 40 seconds in, this train “engine” isn’t what you’d think.
In honor of Dolly Parton, the King’s Guard plays the 9 to 5 theme song outside Buckingham Palace.
With all the 3D printers and other assorted gadgets that come through the house, I’m always finding myself fixing something or another. Many (most) of these items use metric screws and bolts.
My local hardware store folks, when confronted with me asking for something like an M2 or M6 bolt, look at me like I’m fully from Mars. The word “metric” seems to give them the actual shakes. All that is to say a late afternoon emergency run for an M5x16 rarely results in even the slightest bit of satisfaction. It’s like they’re thinking, “We’ve seen him before and he seemed like a nice guy, but now he wants metric.”
Up until now, I’ve been relying on my Tardis-like junk draw to yield compatible fasteners (and some gooey substance all along the side of an old drill bit). But now, I have a kit. This box of bundled bolts contains most of the more common M sizes and lengths. Now, all I have to do is push down that almost overwhelming urge to take it to the local hardware store for a surely unwelcome session of Show-n-Tell.
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And now, some good stuff from around the Internet, well worth checking out.
Apparently, a shocking number of Gen Z shut-ins report zero face-to-face human interactions per day.
Remember Columbia House? Gizmodo deconstructs how it survived this long.
ZDNET’s always-awesome Adrian Kingsley-Hughes says you’re using 3M’s Command Strips all wrong.
I’d like to regularly spotlight a reader project or two here. Your project doesn’t have to be a big Kickstarter launch. If you’ve built something cool, it has some pretty pictures, and you’re proud of it, I might be able to share it here.
If you have a photogenic reader project, send an email to me at david@zatz.com with the subject “READER PROJECT,” a few pictures, and a short one-paragraph description. If you have a social media link or a link to the project, include that, too.
Available on all your favorite streaming services.
Both House of the Head and Choices Are Voices T-shirts are now on the merch store.
I’ve got a lot happening all over the web. Here are links to my various stuff:
House of the Head: home for my published music
ZATZ Labs: where I host my published software projects
Feel free to dig around, visit, and say hey!
Substack supports comments, so feel free to leave some. I promise to read them. Just, please, let’s keep our personal politics out of any discussion.
That should do it for this week. This newsletter is really starting to pick up subscribers. Please help it out by sharing links on all your socials.
Have a great week!