I'm inclined to yawn at the prospect of yet another weather service/app, but Forecast is making me giddy. It's a new offering from The Dark Sky Company, makers of the eponymous app that I rely upon to get 'hyperlocal' weather (i.e. to-the-minute notifications that it's about to rain over my house).

Like the Dark Sky app, Forecast is smooth, attractive, and a pleasure to use. It differs in that it builds and expands upon Dark Sky in profound ways: it promises seven-day global forecasts; offers historical weather conditions; delivers even slicker fluid animations; and adds multiple layers of weather information. There's also an API for developers. You have to check it out for yourself.

Forecast demonstrates just how polished and pleasant a web app can be. Add it to your home screen on your iOS device, and you'll swear it's a native app that you downloaded from the App Store.

I currently use Dark Sky and Garmin's My-Cast to get my weather on my iOS devices. On the Mac, I often geek out with WeatherSpark (which offers an amazing depth of information, but is lamentably Flash-based). Forecast may displace all of these services.

Last December, my wife came across an ad on Craigslist for free fieldstone. On a whim, I decided to haul it home to build a wall. As is so often the case with DIY, it was easier to concieve than to execute. I finished my small wall only a few days ago. It took me nearly four months.

The steps for building a dry wall are fairly straightforward. The essence of it: stake out the wall line; dig a trench about eight inches deep and a bit wider than the planned wall; fill the trench with crushed gravel to form a base that will minimize shifting from frost heaves and settling; then stack rocks. The basic rule of rock stacking is to place one stone over sections where two stones come together, and two stones over sections where there is one stone. Cap the top with heavy, nice-looking stone. The overall pattern should be stable, level, and visually appealing.

That last part is the kicker. In my case, I had to contend with a three foot downhill slope in the front of the house and a one foot incline on the part that curves around the odd looking conifer at the corner, which is called a Weeping Blue Atlas Cedar. A flat wall would have been challenging enough, but the sloping ground added much complexity.

My goal was to place the stones in a cascading fashion so that they conformed to the slope of the land. That entailed placing some rocks, stepping back for a wider view from various angles, deciding it wasn't quite right, tearing down parts that looked unnatural, choosing different rocks, then rebuilding the offending section. Then I'd build another small section and repeat the process. Over and over and over.  

I think the resulting wall looks nice, although I'm sure it would look nicer if a professional installed it. It might also be more structurally sound. Time will tell how well my amateur job holds up. I suspect I'll know in about a year. That length of time will test the wall against the stress of changing temperatures, weather, and frost. The great part about a dry stone wall, though, is that there is no mortar. I can always adjust it. I like to think of it as a rock garden in the shape of a wall. 

Sound like hyperbole? Read Bill McKibben's article on global warming in Rolling Stone, slowly. Follow up with a Q&A from BillMoyers.com. Decide for yourself. 

Wow. I haven't posted in quite a while. Been busy with other projects. Here's a little item that I drafted a long while back but never posted:

...the same way life found a way to use the self-replicating qualities of these polynucleotide molecules to the great benefit of life as a whole, there's no reason life won't use the self-replicating abilities of digital code, and that's what's happening.

Dyson's discussion about what's now driving the growth and evolution of the digital universe was, for me, unexpected. He said that the first great leap in our digital universe originated with Alan Turing (who would have been 100 this year), who is often cited as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. The next leap came from John Von Neumann, an unbelievably prolific mathematician who fathered, among other things, game theory. He also mathematically described the structure of self-replication before the structure of DNA was even discovered. So who will take the next big leap forward? Dyson says to expect someone working in advertising. Yes, advertising.

What's the driver today? You want one word? It's advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it's the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they're trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising. And it is interesting that Samuel Butler imagined all this in 1863, and then in his book Erewhon. And then 1901, before he died, he wrote a draft for "Erewhon Revisited." In there, he called out advertising, saying that advertising would be the driving force of these machines evolving and taking over the world. Even then at the close of 19th century England, he saw advertising as the way we would grant power to the machines.

Very few people are looking at this digital universe in an objective way. Danny Hillis is one of the few people who is. His comment, made exactly 30 years ago in 1982, was that "memory locations are just wires turned sideways in time". That's just so profound. That should be engraved on the wall. Because we don't realize that there is this very different universe that does not have the same physics as our universe. It's completely different physics. Yet, from the perspective of that universe, there is physics, and we have almost no physicists looking at it, as to what it's like. And if we want to understand the sort of organisms that would evolve in that totally different universe, you have to understand the physics of the world in which they are in.  It's like looking for life on another planet. Danny has that perspective. Most people say just, "well, a wire is a wire. It's not a memory location turned sideways in time." You have to have that sort of relativistic view of things.

At some point while pondering this paragraph, a Proust quote popped into my head: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes." This comes from 'In Search of Lost Time,' which helped to popularize the the idea of involuntary memory, often revealed in this Proustian tome through dreams. And that made me think, as a science fiction fan, of Phillip K. Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,' which somehow seemed apropros here. At any rate, here's a link to a good companion piece to this article, a TED presentation by Kevin Slavin: 'How algorithms shape our world.'

Cell Size and Scale visualization from the University of Utah, the Scale of the Universe visualization from Cary and Michael Huang, and the Universcale from Nikon.

A new entrant in the field called ChronoZoom ups the ante. You have to see it for yourself. It's a really impressive visualization (HTML5) tool that explores Big History. The people behind the project have lofty ambitions for the future and they're looking for users:

ChronoZoom Beta is ready for mass consumption and feedback, structured to scale up to petabytes of content, and architected for the future of personal computing.

Don't forget that Google's new privacy policy goes into effect on March 1. Policy changes will affect you if you use Google search while logged into a Google user account.

Here are the instructions from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on how to clear you browsing history. If you use multiple Google accounts, you'll want to delete browsing history for all of them. If you don't take these steps, all of your browsing history will be combined with and shared across all the other Google services you use. If you're not sure why this might be a concern, see this EFF post and this Slate article ... or search on it!

You might also consider trying out an alternative default search engine. Many people (me included) are now using DuckDuckGo. This search engine does not collect user data and emphasizes privacy. It's quite capable, although I do notice differences in terms of rankings and results compared to Google. That's not a bad thing, it's just different. 

If you're using Chrome, it's easy to change your default engine.  Look under 'Preferences' > 'Manage Search Engines.' It's relatively easy with Firefox, too. You'll find the option to manage search engines by choosing the dropdown arrow located in the browser's built-in search box. With Safari, it's a bit more complicated because the browser only offers Google, Bing, and Yahoo as default search engines. You can make DuckDuckGo your default, though, if you install the free Glims add-on. 

Handspring Visor Edge? I had the metallic silver model (and still do). It sports a blazing fast 33 MHz CPU and 8MB of RAM. I've kept it over the years because it still works ... and because I think it's a great design.  I especially loved the weight, shape, and feel of the little stylus.  That stylus happens to be metallic.

You see where I'm going here. Since the stylus is metal, all that I needed was some sort of conductive tip.

Here's what I came up with. It works great as long as any part of my hand is touching the metal pen (which is hard not to do). It looks nice (I wouldn't say it's beautiful, but I think it looks better than most homemade styli). It's compact and easy to tote around. And here's the best part: the tip offers far more accuracy and draws a thinner line than commercial or homemade conductive styli that I've tried or seen demonstrated.

Here's how I made it:

Here are the primary ingredients. Heavy-duty aluminum foil, tape (I used electrical tape, but you could use duct tape), and a rubber foot that I found in my shop.

About the rubber foot. This may be the hardest bit to find, but it's something you should be able to pick up at a hardware store (or, at least, you can find something similar). I cut off part of the foot as seen in the photo above, then drilled a hole into the rubber that would tightly fit the metal stylus. Other materials will also work. I made an earlier model with a cheap wood plug using the same method. It worked well, but isn't as flexible (meaning that you may have trouble with the wood cracking when you drill into it). Rubber works best. 

Now wrap the foil-wrapped rubber foot and stylus with a short piece of strong tape. Once you've done that, you're done. The blue shrink tubing you see here isn't really necessary. It's just for looks. I took a short segment of blue shrink tube, stretched it out with pliers so it would fit over the stylus, cover the tape, and partially cover the foil-wrapped foot. Then I applied heat to seal it all up. And here is the completed stylus, ready for action.

So that's all there is to it. It's a bit more involved than most of the DIY capacitive stylus tutorials you'll find on the web, but I think it's worth the effort. It works great. It looks nice. It's a great way to recycle a peice of old tech. I've been using it for a while and the aluminum is showing no signs of splitting. If it does split, it's a relatively simple matter to rip off the tip and make a new one. If you don't have an old Handspring Visor Edge in your closet and want to try this, would you believe that you can still buy a metal stylus? 

Adam Engst, publisher of the venerable TidBITS newsletter and website, offered up a four-part series today on using Gmail. He covers a lot of ground. Even long-time Gmail users are sure to learn something new from this thorough treatment. 

Orvis for $15 (for iPhone, iPad, Android). It includes videos on casting; a great fly database (with useful info such as where and when to use a fly, how to fish it, descriptions, and images), knot-tying instructions (with animations, videos, and written instructions; with knots filed by name or categorized by knots for particular tasks), fishing reports for popular areas by state, podcasts, and a glossary. And you can also shop the Orvis online store, if you're so inclined. I was a bit hesitant to put my faith in a relatively expensive app from a retailer, but it's solid.

Before you write this app off as too costly, consider this: Orvis is now offering a $10 coupon for those who buy the app to use in their online and retail stores. And right now, they're offering a special promotion for 20 of their most popular flies for $9.95 with free shipping (limit one per household). After applying the coupon code (accounting for taxes), you can get this solid set of flies, nymphs, and streamers for .60 cents. It's a steal, even if you already have a lot of flies. And they accept PayPal. 

I'm sensitive to the fact that this may sound like I'm a pitch man for Orvis, but this really is a good deal. And the app is a handy reference and teaching aid.

Caveat: I shouldn't get too excited about this offer yet. I'm still awaiting my $10 coupon code. According to Orvis, I should receive it by e-mail within 48 hours. In the off-chance that the fly bundle deal expires before then, I'm not too concerned. I need some tippet and a few other odds and ends.

You could make the argument that Orvis should give the app away in hopes of selling their wares through mobile devices. For my part, I really don't think I'll be buying anything from Orvis via my iPhone. As I've said, I'm planning to use this app as a mobile reference and instructional tool. I hesitated before I hit the 'purchase' button in iTunes, but then I considered the fact that I've plunked down far more than $15 for various fly fishing books. I've never been inclined to bring books with me when I go fishing, but I always have my iPhone. And unlike a book, this app includes videos, animations, and podcasts. And Orvis says the app will continue to be updated.* 

As for price of admission, I think it's also worth noting that the audience for such a specialized app is sure to be small, so I don't think it's unreasonable to charge $15 to get access to all of this content at one's fingertips.  I'll update this post once (if) I successfully land the fly bundle.

* Orvis also says that they're going to deliver in-app purchase modules in the future. It'll be interesting to see how may free updates are delivered, compared to paid upgrades. Would I pay for new training modules? Maybe. It would certainly be a lot cheaper than attending a fly fishing class or school.

IBM's Watson and the top two all-time Jeopardy! contestants. Tomorrow, the final episode will air. Since I don't have a television, I'm forced to see the results after-the-fact by browsing through news stories on the Internet.

Apparently, Watson won the round today. However, the machine missed the final question in what was seemingly an obvious answer. Therein lies the rub. What is obvious to the human brain is oblique to a machine dumbly crunching data, searching for patterns.

I wasn't very interested in this project until I watched the PBS NOVA episode, 'The Smartest Machine on Earth.' Watch it. What you'll see is how far the programmers behind this effort have come—by painstakingly tweaking and refining algorithms—in teaching a machine to rapidly interpret complex clues. The machine learns from its mistakes.

I could go on and on, speculating about what this portends for the future of Artificial Intelligence. But I won't. You can find that elsewhere. Suffice it to say that this is an impressive demonstration of where we are heading. I think Watson will win the contest.

I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that this effort (and like-minded endeavors) will soon transform our lives. We're heading towards a revolution in computer-based analysis and diagnosis. Soon, computers will capably answer complex, layered questions with unmatched speed and accuracy. Machines will be able to sift through vast pools of data to match, say, our singular health symptoms with a short list of likely causes and potential treatments—taking into account all of the most-recently published literature on the planet. Can your doctor do that?

Once machines master answering complex questions, what's the next step? I suppose we'll have to start teaching machines how to ask questions.