Got heat exhaustion / heat stroke a few times in 2025. One way to mitigate further heat damage is to keep track of early heat exhaustion symptoms. In my own personal experience, one reliable indicator is an elevated pulse.

For awhile I measured my pulse manually and got really good at it. The problem was by the time I thought to check my pulse, heat exhaustion was already setting in. So I bought a smart watch, the least obtrusive one that I could find. Happened to be a $150 Vivosmart 5 which looks sort of like a Fitbit clone.

(I’d include a photo here and a few later in the post, but my best camera is my laptop’s grainy 720p camera as my glass sandwich phone ceased being useful as a phone or coaster.)

But for a smart watch it isn’t very smart.

I spend time out in the field doing random stuff, under cars, up trees, biking, whatever. Often my hands are full and I want to check the time. A quick twist of the wrist turns the screen on, but when driving or holding something, it’s not easy to achieve the motion that the firmware responds to. Instead I have to drop what I’m doing, free my other hand, press the wake button on the watch face, just to read the time.

It gets better because when I plug the watch in, the charging notification blocks the time readout. Thus I can’t use the watch as a watch when it’s charging, a limitation experienced weekly.

Next, if I’m outdoors at night, I’m invariably using red light. The smart watch has white or blue LEDs. The light on the inside for measuring the pulse is insanely bright too. Sorry to my camp neighbors because I’m sure I’ve dazzled them by flicking my wrist when unzipping a tent or opening a vehicle door.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the pulse feature, but I disable all the other features. But it has more silly limitations. Can’t set the time without pairing with a phone. Can’t follow daylight savings or timezone changes without pairing with a phone. I’ve broken two phones in less than a year. The fragile glass sandwiches that don’t even sit flat, so doesn’t even revert to a decent coaster when it completely stops working! Even with phone sync off and all these features disabled, the watch needs tending to on a weekly basis. It’ll nag me a few times about low battery and other silly things. (Just stop working when it’s out of juice, I don’t need to be pestered about it!)

And yet there’s more silliness.

The original proprietary cable failed. BestBuy and other brick-n-mortar stores don’t stock anything but the latest smart watch charging cables. So the watch sat. I waited for a special delivery from Amazon get lost, then found again, and finally I was able to charge the watch. That is until I lost that cable. Then it sat again, and I found it a month later. Haven’t lost it since but anything is possible.

And the particularly stupid part is one GARMIN CONNECT isn’t merely useful for configuration. You need app in order to set the damn time.

Oh, right, and yes there is even more. If one uses the other functions on the smart watch, it won’t revert back to the time-reading screen until you interact with it again. This means using the timer/stopwatch/alarm is actually more effort & takes longer than using it on a phone or laptop computer.

From my perspective, the smart watch that I have is very dumb, dumber than my sub-$20 Casio F91w that I wish I could revert back to.

This is an Emacs carnival post for 2026.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make a substantial cumulative impact on computing satisfaction.

I’ve set up both my terminal emulator and graphical Emacs with added line spacing. Absolute bliss. It’s like a quiet, undisturbed pond at dusk. Less busy, less rough.

Seeing is believing. On the left is with (setq-default line-spacing .15) as found in my configuration.org, the right is the default (nil).

For terminal emulation within Emacs, I occasionally use vterm and ansi-term. Both of these Emacs-based terminal emulators respect the above line-spacing variable.

For the rest of the time, I use Alacritty with the following in my alacritty.toml:

[font.offset]
y = 4
[font.glyph_offset]
y = 2

Once more, seeing is believing. Left is using the above font offsets, the right is standard line spacing.

Try increasing your line spacing. It might make your computing experience less adversarial and more humanist. Try it! 😸

ChatGPT is full of shit and that’s okay.

I wish I had something profound to say, but it wasn’t a big deal. It did take nine drafts, a hardware failure with multiple SSD swaps, and five thousand words to work out how to say “🤷 no biggie”.

When I began using ChatGPT I recognized it could become unavailable like any other internet service does. Outages happen, corporate priorities transmogrify, enshittification happens. As a personal rule, I try to structure my computing and lifestyle around intermittent internet access.

When ChatGPT was unavailable, the biggest inconvenience was time. I couldn’t vibecode a weather app to supplant Accuweather’s app which hangs every time I open it. But I can now, since the challenge has concluded.

There was a more expensive loss, though; I spent over 60 hours in real time working out how to help a homeless person effectively. The weather app could wait. Helping someone in crisis couldn’t. I made a lot of phone calls, reached out to several organizations that couldn’t meaningfully help, and became extremely discouraged.

I felt helpless, unable to render assistance, and cried about it. I spoke to a friend who works for a homeless nonprofit. He told me to install the Wisconsin 211 app or call the 211 phone number. That single piece of advice resolved the immediate resource problem. It took way too long, and ChatGPT likely would have told me to call 211 from the get-go.

There were a dozen or so shower thoughts which I wanted to ask ChatGPT about, such as why ice packs exist if water bottles work better and are much cheaper, where the bodywork drainage plugs are on a particular auto, survey my vitamin intake for potential deficiencies, or perform in-depth research about a couple of topics to unearth a corpus of papers to review.

Sometimes I retrospect on certain experiences with ChatGPT — it acts like a sounding board. Often, I have to correct it. Its value comes from playing with ideas and questioning assumptions, not from being correct. I would be worried if it was always right. Same goes for most people I talk to. If one is always right, one probably has a difficult time accepting that one can be wrong.

ChatGPT is often full of shit and that’s totally okay. I find it is a tool that accomplishes the 80% of what I actually want. Then I can focus on the 20% that is nontrivial, benefits from a human touch, or is costly to get wrong.

I use the tool, set it down, get on with my day.