After exploring the city during Austin Trip 2025: Day One, we decided to venture a bit further from the center. Jen and I crossed the bridge to grab a coffee at Desnudo Coffee. The coffee is served from a cozy camping trailer right next to the bridge, so we didn’t have to travel far. Back at the hotel, we woke up the kids and had a delicious breakfast together before hitting the road. Our next stop was the Austin Nature & Science Center. It’s a small place designed for younger kids, but it had some cool animals and beautiful grounds, including a pond filled with lily pads.

Next up was a quick lunch at Modern Market. I had a yummy banh mi sandwich, which was a lighter lunch compared to our burger bar adventure the previous day. Once we were all fueled up, we headed to Barton Springs Pool. One of the parking lots was under construction, so it took a while to find a spot, but we were lucky enough to get one close to the entrance. Inside the park, I was amazed by the size of the pool. It’s about 1000 feet long and up to 150 feet wide! Due to construction, we had to walk around the pool to change into our swimsuits, but we eventually made our way onto the hillside under the trees. The water is always around 70 degrees because it’s a spring-fed pool. We spent the afternoon swimming and relaxing under the big trees. We also had a few fun moments watching a family of ducks with about eight ducklings swimming around and wandering on the sidewalk next to the pool.

A few hours later, we headed back to the hotel, changed, and then strolled to the SoCo shopping district. The day before, we had already had burgers and Mexican food, so we were trying to decide what to have for dinner. As we climbed the hill, the enticing aroma of pizza filled the air, and I knew exactly what we were in for. Home Slice Pizza was buzzing with activity, and we had heard great things about it. We ordered a few slices and enjoyed them on the patio. After dinner, we explored the area a bit more before indulging in some delicious dessert at Jeni’s Ice Cream. Jennifer and I had tried it in Chicago a few years back, and it was even better than I remembered. They offer such unique flavors that are simply mouthwatering.

Finished reading: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Found this while listening to Imaginary Worlds Podcast 248: African Sci-Fi Looks to a Future Climate and it was such a fantastic story.📚

Finished reading: Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures–The Complete Phase 1 by Daniel José Older 📚

Ten years after my first visit to Austin for ApacheCon, we decided to return for a school vacation trip. We flew out of Boston early Saturday afternoon, with a quick layover in Atlanta. We landed in Austin around 9pm and checked into the Embassy Suites hotel on Congress Street.

On Sunday morning, we woke up and enjoyed the hotel’s free breakfast buffet before heading out to explore downtown Austin. Our first stop was Houndstooth Coffee, and it was delicious! We continued up Congress Street and checked out the grounds of the state capitol. There are several different areas and monuments to visit.

Next, we went to an outdoor park at the northern end of a greenway with lots of cool walkways and an interesting river running through it.

We meandered back towards the hotel and stopped at the Museum of the Weird. It was a small museum, but it had some strange and interesting items on display, like shrunken heads, wax sculptures, and even the Iceman!

The kids were starting to grumble about food, so we headed back to Congress street and grabbed some burgers at Burger Bar. The burgers were great and gave us the energy boost we needed for the next part of our adventure. Jennifer had found a book store she wanted to check out in the West End of the city, so we went to the riverfront and followed the trails along the water. It was a long and hot walk, but we finally made it to Book People - the biggest bookstore in Texas! It was nice and cool inside with all sorts of cool sections to explore.

Across the street was a shop that makes rolled ice cream, Frozen Rolls Creamery. We had never tried rolled ice cream before, and it was so much fun to watch them make it. It was getting late in the afternoon and we were all beat, so we walked back to the hotel through the pedestrian bridge. The weather was sunny all day, and we managed to cover a lot of downtown Austin.

After resting in the hotel for a couple of hours, we decided it was the perfect night to watch the bats emerge from under the Congress street bridge. We ordered burritos from Free Birds World Burritos, picked them up, and then sat in the park next to the bridge to wait for the emergence. We arrived about an hour before sunset, and the park quickly filled up with people. A few minutes after sunset, the bats started flying out from under the bridge over the park. They kept flying for at least another half an hour before it was too dark to see them easily. We did go up onto the bridge and looked down, which made it a bit easier to see them. It was still a bit early, so we wandered downtown in search of some sweets and found Yummi Joy for some candy.

Finished reading: Dust by Hugh Howey 📚

Here are the books I finished reading in 2024. Lots of Star Wars. 2025 is the last year of the High Republic series 😕

Decided to go back and document my Wordle misses. Thankfully I message my mother-in-law with my results so it was easy to track down some of these,.

Finished White Lotus Season 2. It was another great season although it always makes me anxious watching all the bad behavior.

Finally got around to playing Journey. Installed it on Vision Pro connected a controller and set my environment to White Sands. The game was fantastic and is such a work of art.

Last week, I updated my MacBook Pro to macOS Sequoia 15.2, which introduced the new Image Playground app. I immediately began creating images of people from my extensive photo library of over 100,000 images. The intuitive interface guides you through the process of crafting an image.

In the initial step, you select a person from the “People” section of your photo library. However, the list isn’t sorted, which can be a bit challenging to find a specific individual. Once you’ve chosen a person, you’ll be presented with various options. I found that the initial image generated for the selected person is quite satisfactory until you explore the other suggestions. At that point, none of the options seem quite right. After selecting one that resonates with you, you can start building the final image by adding prompts.

By this stage, you’ve seen numerous variations of the person, and none of them appear quite right. However, eventually, you’ll find something you’re happy with. After completing the image and hitting “Done,” it’s added to the main window of the app.

It’s only at this point that you realize how strikingly similar the new images are to the people. It must be some form of human brain image recognition that enhances the image’s recognition when placed alongside dissimilar images. The more you revisit the image, the more it resembles the person.

Overall, it was a delightful evening spent creating images of various individuals. While I’m not sure it’ll become a regular activity, I could see myself occasionally revisiting the app to observe the improvements in the models.

Finished reading: Aurora by David Koepp 📚

Just finished watching Season 1 of The Penguin. It was a well paced dark show with a solid ending.

Finished reading: Star Wars: The High Republic: Tears of the Nameless by George Mann 📚

Guess what? Portsmouth has a new Chik-fil-a, but it’s super busy, so I opted for Dave’s Hot Chicken instead. Can you believe how many people were there? Maybe they were craving chicken just like me!

I noticed dripping water near the furnace in basement and looked up to see a rusting component with water dripping. We called plumbers for help but nobody responded, but after a call with my father in-law it sounded like we could replace it ourselves. So yesterday we found one at our local Lowe’s and Kaleb and I installed it. The hardest part was getting the old one out of there because the bolts were so rusted.

Just finished up two new seasons on Apple TV+, Slow Horses and Bad Monkey. Slow Horses is still great although I felt it was missing something from previous seasons. Bad Monkey was a fun ride and I loved all of the characters, well except for Eve of course.

The new iPhone Mirroring app in Sequoia is great. When can we get it in VisionOS?

I can’t wait until they bring iPhone Screen Mirroring to Vision Pro.

Second softball game of the season for me and the team’s first win. HR, 2B, 1B, 2BB, 4 runs scored. Final score 22-10 in 6 innings.

I took a solo trip up north today and climbed East Osceola. I was at the lot by 7:30 and back at the car by 11. It was steep with boulders for the last third but I made it. The rain started just as I got back to the car.

I downloaded the first VisionOS 2 beta and even though there aren’t dramatic changes, the little quality of life improvements like re-arranging home screen icons and new hand gestures for the home screen are great. The ability to change any photo into a Spatial photo is magical.

Finished reading: Star Wars: The High Republic: Escape from Valo by Daniel José Older 📚

If you are setting up an Apple Watch for the first time, here are some tips for getting the most out of your watch

Navigation

The Apple Watch has two buttons, the Digital Crown and the Side Button. It also supports other swiping and long press gestures.

• Digital Crown
  • Pressing the Digital Crown will show the App View.
    
  • Turning the Digital Crown while you are looking at the time will show you some action tiles and eventually show the list of apps.
• Side Button
  • Pressing the Side Button will show Control Center.
    
  • Double clicking on the Side Button will show Apple Pay.
• Swiping down from the top of the screen will show Notification Center
• Watch Face Edit View is launched by long pressing on the watch face
  • Scroll the digital crown to switch to a different watch face
  • Click Edit to make changes to a watch face

Recommended Changes

Out of the box a lot of the settings Apple has chosen are great, but there are a few adjustments I make for a better experience.

1. Turn on Silent Mode so it won’t make sounds via Control Center
2. Try out the Find my Phone functionality also in control center, the icon is a phone with sound waves coming out of it
3. The Watch app on the iPhone makes it really easy to configure the settings on your watch and also to manage your watch faces
4. Set up Apple Pay on your watch because it is way easier than having to take your phone out
5. Enable Bold Text in Settings > Display & Brightness for better readability of text
6. Turn on Prominent Haptics in Settings > Sounds & Haptics, this will give you a bigger vibration when prior to the normal vibration
7. Update the Siri settings, I like to have “Hey Siri” and Raise to Speak disabled, but leave it on for pressing the Digital Crown
8. Change the App view to List View, by pressing the digital crown and scrolling to the bottom of the view and pressing List View OR via Settings > App View
9. Disable reminders for the Mindfulness app so it won’t ask how you are doing twice a day
10. Disable reminders for the Handwashing app so you won’t get notified every time you wash your hands for less than 20 seconds
11. Disable “Start Workout Reminder” in Workout app settings, this means you won’t be prompted if you are just walking around and I think it might also save a little battery life too.

The Apple Music Top 100 Albums is super cool and makes me want to discover new music, unfortunately you can’t view the entire list inside Apple Music and have to use the website to view the complete list. After you sign in the music plays in the web browser instead of the Apple Music app. 👎👎

Amazing views of the Aurora Borealis from my own backyard last night.