Category: Google

living in stupid times

whbeebe

Apple’s map app, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18.3.1. The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico as of early this afternoon. But not for much longer.

Google’s web map, via Vivaldi, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18.3.1. The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. So what happens when I use Proto VPN to go outside the US, to some other country? Let’s go to Australia and try this again.

My VPN connection is up, and the access point is St. Lucie, Queensland, Australia, as shown by this simple test using Weather Underground. Now let’s try Google’s web map again.

We see the original Gulf of Mexico, with Gulf of America in parenthesis. That means we really can’t get around this stupidity, can we? What about the Apple map app? That’s interesting. First of all as I was writing this post it appears that my Apple map app cache reloaded, so that it started to show Gulf of America. Even if I tried to view it again through VPN, it still showed it. And then I accidentally zoomed out somewhat on the Apple map, and this is what I saw next.

Zoom in just a little tighter and Gulf of America appears. Zoom out like this and it’s back to Gulf of Mexico. And I think this is a feature, not a bug. Unlike Google, who will always show Gulf of America no mater where you are in the world, Apple seems to be a little more clever in how they’re showing this. I can’t really use VPN to fake out Apple maps because it’s using my location information to serve up the map data for my location. Which is that big blue dot over Florida.

I wish that big blue dot where somewhere else in the world right now.

my little linux computer

whbeebe

I have a Lenovo IP Flex 5 Chromebook with a real processor (an Intel i3), 8 GiB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. I picked it up at my local Costco back in 2020 for $400. Over time I came to realize that this specific machine was the precursor to the Google+ machines with real compute power. As a consequence of its advanced features this machine is now running the Chrome browser split from the operating system so that the updates to both aren’t in lockstep anymore. That means the Chrome browser on my Chromebook is now following the regular PC browser, because my Chromebook is for all practical purposes a full personal computer. And that underlying operating system is — wait for it — Linux. How do I know this? Because I have a virtual machine with Debian 12.6 running in it.

As you can read on the screen capture above I’ve got a Debian 12.6 VM running under crosvm (Chrome OS VM). What’s very interesting is that the Linux kernel is 6.6.30, but Debian 12.6 is supposedly released with Linux kernel 6.1. I suspect that the kernel in my version of Debian is 6.6 because that’s the version running on my Chromebook. And that’s another surprise, because the version of the Linux kernel underpinning Android is 4-dot-something, or maybe 5-dot-something with the latest Android release. But it damn sure isn’t the same version as the kernel in Chrome OS.

The Linux purists will look askance at what Google has done with Linux to make it work in a Chromebook and refuse to concede that this Chromebook is indeed a Linux success. I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of Chromebooks have been built and sold since Chromebooks first started shipping in June 2011, but the only personal computer with a Linux kernel that has shipped more has been Android, which can be counted in the billions. This is yet another example of the overwhelming power of open source. But I digress…

This little machine keeps ticking along. It has ten years of support, which means I can depend on updates out to at least 2030, six years from now. As I noted in my last post, I should live so long. This little machine is so flexible, capable of satisfying all-around needs such as writing and web surfing for most folks, to tinkering with a Linux shell for tinkerers like me. The only thing it won’t do is play a AAA game that demands a multiple-thousand dollar rig capable of consuming enough power to keep a middle-class home powered and lit up. And I don’t care.

What I am waiting on with considerable trepidation is if I’ll get any of that Google AI goop that Chrome Plus Chromebooks are now supposed to support in the coming months and years. Frankly I dread the slathering of this AI bullshit all over everything, and I’m now looking for ways to beat it back and keep it from gumming up the works on everything I own and use. *sigh*